Transcript of Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Does Trump Want Peace?

Read the full transcript of a conversation between Judge Andrew Napolitano and Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on Judging Freedom Podcast titled “Does Trump Want Peace?” premiered March 25, 2025.

TRANSCRIPT:

Introduction

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, welcome here and thank you very much for your time. Does this group, the Houthis, pose any threat to the national security of the United States?

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, no, no major threat. They do attack shipping lines in the Red Sea region. They are, by their declaration, aligned with the resistance in Palestine. And they’ve been attacking ships. Is this a major security threat to the United States? No, of course not.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: And what is a…

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: The ostensible reason for the attack, I think was said, if I heard correctly, and I am halfway around the world in China right now, but was to warn the Iranians. So this was another proxy of a proxy war. So it’s a group in the White House deciding let’s bomb some people to send a message. This was not about fundamental US national security.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: And is there any military benefit to the United States by doing this? I assume none.

The Middle East Conflict

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: I think the key for me is very basic. We’ve discussed it repeatedly. The war in the Middle East will continue. It will spread. It’s in Gaza. It’s in the West Bank, it’s in Lebanon, it’s in Syria, it’s in Yemen. It will spread as long as there is no resolution of the terrible injustice in Palestine.

The whole idea is that Israel illegally and unjustly and murderously occupies Palestinian land. It leads to resistance. In response to the resistance, Netanyahu declares war on basically the entire Middle East and most of the rest of the world these days, including, I should mention, American universities.

So he’s at war because anybody, any force, any group that opposes Israel’s brutality in Palestine is then an object of the Israeli war machine.

The sad part is we are the Israeli war machine. Israel runs the US Government, runs the White House, runs that group that was intercepted or caught in communication by the Atlantic magazine reporter. They’re run by Israel, they’re serving Israel. They’re doing this for Israel.

And that means that the United States is in war in places it shouldn’t be in. No, we should not be in war in Yemen, for heaven’s sake. We shouldn’t be in war in Syria, in Libya, in Lebanon. We’re in war in all of these places. We have a group in amateur hour in the White House deciding where to bomb. But they’re doing it for Israel’s behest, not for American interest or American security. It’s absolutely amazing. They basically said so in the discussion.

I think there’s another thing I would say about all of this. We are not only in amateur hour, not only is it Israel Hour non-stop, just everything for what the Israeli government wants, but it’s as if we have essentially one person rule. Congress is upset about the security breach. Well, that’s understandable. But they’re not upset about the fact that the President declares war when that is a constitutional responsibility of Congress.

They’re not upset when the President sets our tax rates personally by decree, because tariffs are taxes. And the U.S. constitution says that’s the responsibility of the U.S. Congress. But Congress doesn’t care. We have one person rule right now, whether it’s war, whether it’s the economy, and it’s a bit of an amateur hour.

The Leaked Conversation

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: According to the transcript of this conversation, the texting conversation, a texting thread that went on for a while, that was leaked to the editor of the Atlantic, the Secretary of Defense said, “No one knows who the Houthis are. Don’t worry about it, just say Biden failed and Iran funded it.” Well, this is not a strategy of the Secretary of Defense. This is a PR strategy, which is basically propaganda.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Our whole government…

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: It did sound like a high schoolish conversation at that point.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: It was. And they were saying, should we bomb them? No. I vote yes. I vote no. It’s like locker room talk, like a bunch of kids getting together about war. No declaration of war, no explanation to the public whatsoever. No explanation to the public about the breach of security, but no explanation to the public more fundamentally about war. And Congress, again, dead, useless, absolutely not interested in doing anything about their actual job.

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JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: You’re right. But not only is Congress dead, but portions of the executive branch, the leadership of which is very close to the people who participated in this texting group that should be investigating this, probably won’t. I speak of the Department of Justice and the FBI, which have no semblance of independence any longer.

Remember the young man from New England, from Cape Cod. We talked about this extensively. Jack Teixeira. He’s sitting in a federal prison for 20 years for having disseminated in his chat group information far less vital, far less immediate, far less lethal than what was revealed by these people to the editor of the Atlantic. And when asked to explain how this happened, here’s what the Secretary of Defense said.

International Perception

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: From the beginning, overwhelmingly, according to Pepe Escobar, who came to us yesterday, live from Sana, destroy residential neighborhoods and kill civilians in Yemen, probably as a favor to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: You know, I’m in Asia meeting a lot of leaders. Basically, nobody can believe what’s happening in the United States right now. Nobody can believe what passes for government, for process, for analysis, for description, for systemization.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: All right, Professor Sachs is on an island off the coast of China, and we’re waiting for his Internet to reconnect. He was commenting on his perception as he talks to foreign leaders.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: There we go.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: We back, Jeff.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, sorry about that.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: You were telling us how foreign leaders are finding it difficult to believe what’s happening in the United States today. Not only the public policy of the government, but the procedure by which those policies are sought.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: There is shock and amazement at the complete lack of order in every aspect of events. Yes, the Secretary of Defense may try to laugh things off. He may try to use whatever spin he wants on something very serious. But people outside are watching this who are very serious, and they’ve never seen anything like this.

Concerns About War with Iran

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Do you think that the United States of America is preparing… The Trump administration is preparing for war against Iran?

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: It very well may be. You know, to my great dismay, they seem to have thrown everything in with Netanyahu yet again. This would not be unique to this administration. Our government is run by the Israeli government when it comes to policy in the Middle East. And it seems that nothing has changed. Everything that this group does and says is in response to Israel’s dictates and demands. So at this point, nothing would surprise me.

There was a glimmer, a moment when it seemed that Donald Trump was going to assert American foreign policy that now really has been absent, at least for the last two weeks. Israel brazenly blew off an agreed ceasefire, started mass murder again in Gaza, started mass murder in Syria. The US has started killing civilians in Yemen, clearly at Israel’s behest to throw warnings to Iran. What was an opening, a repeated opening by the Iranians for negotiations was met by brazenness by this group in the last couple of weeks. And the Iranians said, well, okay, there can’t be negotiations then.

It’s alarming, absolutely alarming. The United States does not run its foreign policy in the Middle East. And we are now, I put it at 29 years of continuous war led by, caused by the mayhem of the Israeli leadership of Mr. Netanyahu, who’s the world’s worst and most dangerous politician. And this is what we continue to have now, day by day.

So the answer to your question, could we be at war with Iran? Yes, absolutely. You saw how haphazard all of this process is. Maybe they’ll flip a coin next time. Maybe they’ll invite in a few other reporters and find out. In the meantime, they’re destroying our universities also. Exactly on the same orders coming from Israel. It’s really amazing. Not allowed to say anything about this stuff. And if a student tries to say anything about any of this, well, they’ll whisk them off, put them in prison, send them away, deport them, turn them away from the borders.

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Again, not even a semblance of the due process that has existed for hundreds of years in the British legal system, which became the basis of the American legal system. These most basic processes are being gutted before our eyes in these very days. And again, coming from orders from Israel. It’s unbelievable.

Academic Freedom Under Threat

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: When you were an undergraduate at Harvard and I was an undergraduate at Princeton, we didn’t fear for an instant that the government would come after us because of our free speech, no matter how critical we were of the government or critical we were of other students. Now, and ground zero is where you work, Columbia University. Now, college administrations are afraid to allow the free exchange of ideas for fear that they will lose federal funding.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: And instead of challenging, our students are in hiding right now. Students are being dragged off the campuses. Students can’t go visit their families because they’ll be ejected if they come home, no matter what their status is. There’s no legal process involved in any of this.

All we have is a government that says it’s in the foreign policy interest. And that is supposed to be dispositive in the United States of America, which once upon a time viewed itself as not having a king and having a rule of law. And even when Britain had a king, the king was subject to legal constraint for, by the way, the last 810 years since the Magna Carta. We’re in much less shape than that right now.

Global Implications

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Going back to the President, he seems to be in a hurry to try to resolve the Ukraine mess. President Putin manifests his typical and well established level of patience. One wonders if anything that he and Trump and Putin might agree to would be materially disrupted by events in Gaza or the United States military engaging in events in Iran. What is the Kremlin going to do? Sit back and do nothing if B52s show up over Tehran?

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, of course, Iran and Russia have a security agreement. They sign that on January 17, 2025. So just days before the Trump administration came into office. This is a very serious matter. Iran is part of the BRICS countries, meaning that it is also in a close relationship with China, with India, with Brazil, with South Africa, with countries that in total constitute about half the world’s population.

This is not a game, except for Netanyahu, and it’s very serious. I don’t know whether they understand the ramifications of what they’re doing. This free shooting, these demands coming from Israel that they salute and follow. I don’t know if they understand.

The Human Cost of Gaza Conflict

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Over the weekend, the Gazan Health Ministry announced the burial of the 50,000th resident. Now, that is a low number because there obviously are a lot of dead bodies that haven’t been discovered and may never be discovered because of the level of devastation. But that number doesn’t seem to shock anymore. That number did not reverberate around the world with outrage.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, I’m not sure I would say that it didn’t reverberate around the world, but not inside the United States. All over the world, there is complete dismay. Israel is destroying itself, destroying its position in the world. There is absolute disgust and disdain for what Israel is doing. It’s mass murder celebrated on TikTok regularly.

And it’s hundreds of thousands dead because what is the 50,000 is people pulled from the rubble, as you say. There are also many, many thousands not pulled from the rubble. But in addition to that, there are people who have died in mass numbers because they don’t even have anesthetics. They don’t have health care because Israel systematically destroyed the hospitals and the clinics. They don’t have food, they don’t have shelter, they don’t have water, they don’t have sanitation because it was the explicit aim of Israel, not hidden, but stated repeatedly, to make Gaza unlivable for the 2 million people there.

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And the idea remains that they will either be killed or they will be ethnically cleansed. And this is still the implicit threat that this group in the White House is making to Egypt and to Jordan. You better take these people because remember, they work for Netanyahu. So this is… They work for the Israel lobby. So this is absolute mass murder. And it continues.

But believe me, all over the world, it is known, it is seen. I’ve never seen the world more united in the cause of the basic rights of the Palestinian people. The United States stands alone in blocking peace. Alone, of course, I put Israel, they’re the main author of this. But then the United States is basically alone, as we’ve talked about. Yes, the US can round up the vote of Micronesia and Nauru. Maybe Papua New Guinea on a good day, maybe Paraguay. That’s it.

You have 180 plus countries in the world. You have all of the BRICS nations, the major countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia. You have the 57 countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. You have all of the Arab League. You have countries all over the world saying, make peace, have two states, stop the slaughter, stop the illegality.

They’re watching what’s happening. They see that the United States, which professed once upon a time, to have values, we even called them Western values. What a travesty. They see that the United States is complicit in this mass murder, and they see how flippant it’s done. Because believe me, what just happened in the last day, no matter what our Secretary of Defense tries to brush off, is news everywhere in the world. It was discussed all day in East Asia, I can tell you for sure.

And people see how out of control this process is right now. So none of this is hidden. None of this is hidden from view. It’s just that we talk to ourselves in the United States, but the rest of the world’s watching what’s happening.

Trump’s Peace Aspirations

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Donald Trump has boasted that his greatest achievement will be to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Is Donald Trump a man of peace?

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: I don’t know if he understands what is happening. I don’t know if he understands who’s running the show. I think he is trying to make peace in Ukraine and I very much support that. But what is happening in the Middle East is the opposite of that.

I hope that he gets a grip and understands that this is so far from America’s interests. This devastation, this complicity in mass murder, this diplomatic isolation, this terrorism inside American society. On behalf of the Israel lobby, I’m still hoping that somehow he’ll figure this out.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, thank you very much. Thanks for accommodating our schedule. I know it’s the middle of the night where you are. We deeply appreciate, even when these topics are unpleasant to discuss, you bring me.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Great to be with you.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Thank you very much. We’ll see you again.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Thank you. All the best. Thanks so much.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Sure. And coming up later today at 2:00, Max Blumenthal on all of this. At 3:00, Karen Kwiatkowski on all of this. Tomorrow, Wednesday at noon, the inimitable George Galloway on all of this, Justin Paltano for Judging Freedom.