Fundamentally, is America no longer a reliable ally should I should should other countries just look at US now and say, hey, they're a transactional country.

We're going to have to do no matter what.

We just cannot trust America anymore.

One hundred percent.

I mean Trump basically says it himself that you know, he's pursuing in America first policy, and so other countries are, you know, kind of at the at the whim of the President of the United States, who will do whatever he thinks is in his advantage or the advantage of his country.

And so yeah, one hundred percent.

I don't think, I mean, other countries are not necessarily going to rush to abandon us because they still need American support, but I think they're realizing that this is not something they can count on for the long term.

This is black Man Spy.

Hi.

I'm Malcolm Nance, and this is black Man's Spy.

My guest today is Max boot He is a historian and biographer, best selling author, and foreign policy analyst.

He is Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and as a weekly columnist in The Washington Post.

His best selling biography of Ronald Reagan.

Reagan his Life and Legend, was named one of the ten best books of twenty twenty four by The New York Times.

Let's welcome Max Boot to black Man Spy, Max Book.

Welcome to black Man's Spy, the podcast where every once in a while I get to speak to real experts, and I view you as one of the top experts in the United States.

The Council on Foreign Relations certainly does.

And I hope that your studied opinions that we discussed today are certainly taken to heart by other parts of government, because mine certainly aren't.

So thank you for coming.

Well, it's a pleasure to be on here and speak with you.

Expert to expert.

Oh well, this will be fascinating.

And our last podcast we had Sue Gordon, who is Deputy Director of National Office in National Intelligence, director of National Geospatial Intelligence, and for some bizarre, strange reasons, she put in her resume twenty seven years at the CIA, like it was some little aside that she had done there, and it was great having, you know, a real intelligence expert to discuss the issues of the day.

However, this is geopolitical, it's one thing to have people from our community milling about and talking like we talk about when we're near the popcorn machine down in the cafeteria of our intelligence agencies.

But all of the issues that stem in the United States today are geopolitical and emphasis on political.

So you or a scholar and an author who wrote a book about Ronald Reagan, and Ronald Reagan full disclosure, was the first person I ever voted for in the election.

I think it was nineteen to eighty election.

But can you explain to my audience just exactly why the Republican Party has gone?

I wouldn't say far from Ronald Reagan has completely repudiated everything Ronald Reagan stood for, from the free markets to strong on defense.

It's a great question to which there's no easy answer.

I mean, I think there are strands of continuity between the Reagan administration and the Trump administration.

I mean, for example, Reagan loved to cut tax as an appoint conservative judges, and I think his record on racial issues was not a good one.

But obviously, as you point out, there are also a lot of discontinuities, and I would argue more discontinuities than continuities, including the fact, you know, just recently, Trump gott in high dudgeon because Ontario ran this ad pointing out that Reagan was a free trader.

He was not a tariff man.

He was a free trade guy.

And you know, Trump was very peeved to have that pointed out.

But it's the truth.

Because Reagan was part of the Greatest Generation.

He was in college in nineteen thirty when the Smooth Holly tariff was passed, which exacerbated the Great Depression, and so he knew firsthand the cost of tariffs and protectionism.

And although he occasionally made compromises with Congress, he was very much a believer in free trade justice.

He was very much a believer in immigration.

The irony is that in nineteen eighty, one of Reagan's campaigns slogan's was making America Great Again, which obviously sounds familiar.

But if you ask Ronald Reagan what made America great, he would probably tell you it was immigration, because you know, we've been able to track talented people from all over the world to to come to the US.

And Reagan set in motion the process which led to the signing of NAFTA, which Trump called the worst trade deal ever because Reagan's vision was ultimately to remove all barriers to the flow of goods and people between Mexico, the US, and Canada, and that is obviously a very different vision from Trump.

And of course one of Reagan's signature achievements was to sign the nineteen eighty six Simpson Missoli Act, which legalized millions of undocumented immigrants, what Trump would call an amnesty law for illegal aliens.

So, you know, a lot of differences, and you know, the question you raise is how did we get from there to here?

I think it's been a long process which we've seen play out not only in the US but in many Western countries, not in Canada, interestingly enough, but in a lot of European countries, with the rise of the nationalist populist right, which has eclipsed traditional conservative movements, whether it's the Tory Party in the UK or the report Publican Party in the US.

Now we haven't literally seen a third party in the US.

What we've seen is a trump is takeover of the Republican Party such that a lot of us who used to be Republicans no longer feel comfortable being part of that party, and the few traditional Republicans who are left are very much a fringe minority, while Trump pursues this protectionist, xenophobic agenda which very much resonates with the magabase.

But it's quite different from the way that Ronald Reagan campaigned for office.

And I think one of the biggest differences is, to put it bluntly, Reagan was a uniter.

Trump is a divider.

I mean, it would have never occurred to Reagan to castigate Democrats as radical left, Democrats as vermin as enemies of the people, all this verbiage that Trump uses.

Reagan always looked at Democrats or talked about Democrats as being well intentioned, if perhaps misguided, people who disagree with them on policy, but that he could strike deals with, He could work with Democrats like Tip O'Neil to get things done.

And it was because Reagan believed in unifying people that he won forty nine out of fifty states in nineteen eighty four, which now surreal, but that's he he actually pulled out off or as you know, Trump is basically the only president in modern history he has never been above fifty percent above fifty percent in polling and right now is around forty percent.

So you know, Trump is reaping what he sews with his very divisive, negative approach to governance, very different from Reagan's more unifying and uplifting vision.

Yeah, but it worked, and he's in power.

He's been in powered twice.

By using this, this thematic of split the American public, elevate the you know, the racial differences in the United States fundamentally and physically attack people who are coming into the United States as immigrants.

Now, a component of this that I wonder is that is it because Ronald Reagan is not a boomer.

Ronald Reagan is a boomer parent, right, He's a person who at the same time born the same era as my mother and my father late twenties, early thirties, and had the lived experience of World War Two, understanding that that was a unifying, nationally unifying time.

Even if you hated Roosevelt and you know, and you know booed eleanor Roosevelt on her tours and had a difference of opinion, Let's be honest, they were smarter in the post World War two era by going to school with the GI Bill and having this nationalistic unifying theme which also led into the Cold War.

I find that a lot of the people who are my age, our age and slightly older.

Who are the children who are real boomers are the ones who drive the It's almost like a repudiation of everything they're it slid for and they want to be something different.

Reagan certainly is not Richie rich, right.

He had lived on a ranch, he could ride a horse, He had a lot of staff who were Latino.

Donald Trump is not.

He lived in an ivory tower.

Do you think these two eras of experience are what's leading to where we are today.

Well, there's a lot to unpack there.

I mean, Reagan was born in nineteen eleven and he had a very impoverished childhood.

You know, he was not born with a you know, with a golden spoon as Donald Trump was.

Reagan's family was very poor, so they always lived, you know, one step away from eviction.

And in the nineteen thirties, Ronald Reagan's dad, Jack Reagan, actually lost his job.

He was unemployed like so many other people were, and he was really saved by one of the Roosevelt New Deal programs.

And Reagan was a very avid New Dealer, a staunch supporter of FDR, voted for him four times listened to the fireside addresses and really in bib but I think his model of presidential leadership from FDR of offering hope and optimism in dark times, trying to unite people behind a shared goal.

And even though Reagan moved to the right after World War Two and went from this very liberal New Dealer to this very conservative Republican, he kept a lot of the same views when it came to things like free trade, internationalism, support for NATO, the US leadership role in the world.

Because there was really kind of a consensus among the greatest generation that we America was dragged into two world wars and we didn't want to be dragged into World War three.

And so after nineteen forty five, there was a consensus on you know, excluding the extremes of the left and right, to say, we have to build up this post war architecture of alliances of free trade to make sure that we're not responding to another war in the future.

And that approach was tremendously successful.

We never did have World War three.

Instead, what we saw was was the greatest expansion of freedom, democracy, and prosperity in human history, largely driven by the American leadership role in Europe and East Asia.

Whereas you know, Trump, as you mentioned, is from a different generation.

He did not live through World War Two, and so he seems to heart back to a repudiated minority view in the nineteen thirties, which was the America First Movement of Charles Weinberg, which believed in isolationism, which blamed US allies for Hitler in the Japanese aggression, and you know, celebrated tariffs and all these other things that I think we've moved away from.

But now, you know, Trump wants to for whatever reason, he wants to roll back history.

And it's not clear to me why because I wouldn't say it's not necessarily a generational thing, because I don't feel like most people Trump's generation agree with him.

But it wasn't even the case that most people in the Republican Party agreed with him.

But now he's kind of taken over the party and has been to two as well.

Yeah, it should be noted that the American First Movement was deeply tied with the German American Bund for the Nazi Americans, right, who you cannot convince me that one year ago, one year and one month ago that when Ronald I'm sorry, when Donald Trump held his rally at Madison Square Garden in the exact same fashion of the American Nazi Bund, you know, the American Bound, that he was not hearkening to these things.

I think that there's a cadre of people in there who understand the imagery and the subtility of that era and thinks that as they're dividing America that they need to get if they can get three percent of you know, white racist Nazis, they'll go for it.

Maybe it's never been spoken, but I know for a fact Ronald Reagan certainly wouldn't have been courting the KGB vote in the United States.

No, I mean adgrecating the abandonment of US allies.

Right, Ronald Reagan would not be sitting down with somebody like Nick Fuenttz again because Reagan, I mean, I don't want to romanticize Reagan.

His record on race was not great.

He opposed to a rights legislation, but he was he had no time for anti Semitism, and he was very affected by He saw some of the first films from US troops liberating concentration camps near the end of World War Two, and he kept a copy of that because he wanted to make sure he could show it to his children and anybody else who doubted that the horrors of the Holocaust occurred.

And now you have a Republican Party which is flirting with some of these white supremacist, neo Nazi elements like Nick Quentes on others, and it's it doesn't it's not very logical because at the same time, the Republican Party is one hundred and ten percent behind Israel.

So there's a lot of stuff going on there.

But you know, clearly a lot of hate bongers have infiltrated the Republican Party.

And you know, when you have a president of the United States who is engaging in blatant bigotry against immigrants, against people of color, it's very hard to draw the line and say, you know, what kind of bigotry is okay, but another kind is not.

And so that's why you see folks like Tucker Carlson and Nick Quintes and others who are an increasingly powerful force on the right.

Is but one of the core components of this is this embrace of white nationalism.

You know, and I tell people they say, oh, you're a black guy.

You see race in everything?

Yeah, I do, because in my world, coming from the intelligence community, I have to factor in language, culture, prejudices, history, and and precedence in how policies have been affected before.

If this were Edia means Uganda, or if this were you know, the Hutu's government about to massacre all the Tutsis, I'd be advising air strikes at this point.

But we have this embrace of white nationalism.

Is it all just a factor of them feeling like that the you know, the demographics are shifting against them, or is this a real you know, somebody you know read the Rise and Fall in Nazi Germany by Shearer and thought that it was actually an owner's manual, not a not something to be avoided.

I mean, has someone clearly ideologically taken the wrong lessons from history and thought, hey, I can move to power and in sure power forever from there.

Just one other thing that the thousand year right didn't last a thousand years, so again another bad lesson.

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't.

I mean, I wouldn't draw too many direct parallels between Nazi Germany and what we see today.

I mean Nazi Germany was kind of, you know, uniquely evil, and I don't think we want to trivialize that evil by comparing it to what's going on in the world today.

But and I also don't think that there is any for there's any I don't think there's any kind of long term MAGA blueprint, blueprint for power.

I think it's too improvisational and at hoc for that.

But there is no question I think that the MAGA movement feeds off of racial and economic anxiety, and it's very hard to disentangle those two things.

Obviously, you know, there's been a lot of economic stagnation in the US for the middle class and lower for many years.

There's vast income disparity, and there's also been you know, a massive impact on manufacturing and and you know, a lot of entrenched employment which has gone away because of in part because of globalization, but also because of technological change.

And we're seeing that accelerate now with AI spreading across the country.

So all of that has unsettled a lot of people.

And again, this is not a uniquely American phenomenon.

We're seeing the same thing in Europe.

You're seeing the same thing in other countries where there's a lot of you know, economic anxiety, there's a lot of which is mixed up with anxiety about changing demographics and the fact that the United States is on a path to become a majority minority country, the fact that we've had pretty large scale, you know, both legal and undocumented immigration in recent years.

So I think a lot of people you can see how economic anxiety translates into ape goating immigrants or people of color, and unfortunately, I think you see the Maga movement kind of catering to that agenda.

I think, but I think that the weakness of the Maga movement, of all these populist movements is they're great at dialing into popular anger, but they don't really have solutions.

What they're proposing is really not going to solve anybody's problems.

And you're seeing, for example, you know, I think the biggest reason Trump one was because of the inflation that we had under Joe Biden.

Largely not Biden's fault, this was a global phenomenon after COVID, but it happened, and it really helped to shred his popularity in the popularity was administration.

But what has Trump done to address inflation.

He's you know, imposed these tariffs which have actually increased grocery prices.

And now but latedly, Trump is realizing, oh wait a second, people are not happy to see the price of eggs go up, the price of beef go up, the price of banana, the coffee, it's that to go up.

So Trump is suddenly offering exemptions from tariffs for a lot of these food items, thereby conceding that, yes, his tariffs do raise prices for America.

And so, you know, at best, he's undoing some of the damage that he's caused, but it's certainly not solving any of these problems.

And I very much doubt that his tariffs, even at this very high level, are going to bring a lot of manufacturing back to America.

It's just gone for good, and we have to accept that and move on.

But you know, I think Trump and a lot of other populist that leaders make a lot of empty promises to tap into this popular anger that they're exploiting.

But could a component of that be that Trump realizes understands since this is a guy who I really fundamentally think he learned what the Walmart shopper was really like by watching WWE right Worldwide Wrestling, where he could see the visceralness that these people, many of them understood that it wasn't real, but enjoyed the realness of people hitting the floor and the panomime of the shows, and that he really understood that he really could see the simplest, lowest basis.

Personality in America is relatively easily manipulated, but he appears to have mastered psychological capture of you know, of the MAGA movement, if we want to call it an ideology, because you mentioned that it was very improvisational, which means he's constantly watching the waves of what works, what doesn't work, but he only cares about what works and what doesn't work for his base.

We saw this week that a five generation family farm in North Carolina is going under.

They said the tariffs have killed them.

They understand that it's a direct result of the choices Trump made.

And at the end of this one interview where they had really three generations of the family farmer in there, each one of them said, I absolutely would only support Donald Trump.

I can never have voted for the other side.

And they almost literally said, if that's what it costs.

If our family farm is part of that, then that's just the way it is.

That smacks of something very different, right.

This is uh, that's when you come to me and you say there's an economic component to this.

It may exist for a few minutes, but for those who are suffering, if it's a choice between their buying of MAGA and Trump as their leader, then they don't care about the economics, even of their own family.

Or do you think that that was just an odd ball thing?

Well, I would make two points.

One is it is very odd the way that Trump governs only for his base, because pretty much every other president has always tried to expand their base, and they've viewed part of their job as being to increase their levels of support, even if it's just for purely political reasons.

You want more support, not less if you want to win elections.

I mean, that's that's kind of elections.

One oh one.

That's why you know, every other US president has been over fifty percent supported at some point during their presidency and Donald Trump is the only one who never has been.

And he's figured out this formula for political success, which basically relies on mobilizing his base rather than expanding his base, mobilizing his base by alienating everybody else.

And you know, in twenty sixteen, this this to me seemed like a losing strategy.

But obviously Trump is a much smarter politician and tactician than I am, or a lot of other people, because he figured out how to do this and you know, double down on his he and he did manage to expand his base somewhat while still alienating most Americans.

But you know, he used the electoral college math in his favor.

Now, the second point that I would make, though, is that while this has been a somewhat successful formula for Trump and at least two out of the three elections in which he has run, it's still a formula with major costs.

And you saw it, for example in twenty eighteen when Republicans suffered a massive repudiation in the midterm election.

You saw it.

In the midterm election we just had in Virginia and New Jersey and elsewhere where Republicans suffered just suffered massive defeats.

And while that formula may may work for Donald Trump, I'm not sure if it works for Republicans in general.

So I think there is it's a perilous way to run a political party.

Yeah, but when you know, the first thing Donald Trump said right after the massive loss on you know, during the elections was Trump wasn't on the ballot.

He has a mindset of where this is all.

He doesn't care about the politics.

I think I think he cares more about the adoration, the personal you know, satisfaction of his own narcissism.

Is America, right, Donald Trump is America.

America is what Donald Trump says of it, which is typical of fascist, you know, dictators all around the world.

I mean, I've got to give you a historical example.

My father, World War Two veteran Korea Vietnam loved Edie.

I mean, he just liked and you know what he said, He goes, I like that he's sticking it to the West, right, He's just getting up there wearing you know, wearing kilts and the colors of the Black Watch and then going out and talking about how they should massacre white people.

This is it's it's panamime, it's theater and that drama.

Now, of course, my father long since rejected that.

You know, when it came to treatment in the United States, he himself was was born of the you know, of the Jim Crow era, and spent eighty percent of his life drinking out of different water fountains and using different toilets.

But I think that that, though, is a factor that the Trump, as Maga says, Trump being Trump, no matter what he would say.

And Jimmy, I think it was Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert did a fake video montage where they had a focus group, and it was Donald Trump, you know, allegedly saying, yeah, I put video cameras in women's bathrooms and showers.

Otherwise, how else why I see them?

And every person in the room justified what he said.

So long as this cultism continues to enthrall just enough people to get a win, which is all I think he cares about.

You know, I think that we have this horrible, sinking problem.

Is that what America has been for two hundre undred and fifty years, the good, the bad, and the ugly, which led us to twenty sixteen.

These people no longer care about America as an inclusive society, as a homogeneous you know, made up of immigrants.

Eploribus unam means nothing to them unless it means from many of US MAGA, we get Trump.

Yeah, well, it is striking that Pete Henksith, the Secretary of Defense who likes to style himself as the Secretary of War.

You know, he often says that the phrase that he hates the most is diversity is our strength.

For some reason, this is like a you know, a trigger phrase for him.

He is opposed to diversity, and he is you know, certainly implementing his agenda in the military by approaching a lot of minority and female general officers.

Well, it's just a white supremacist strategy.

Just that's you can't go any further than that.

It's not about diversity.

We used to call DEI used to be called what's that word, teamwork?

Yeah, but I mean this is I mean again, this is this is stuff that's popular with the Trump base.

Attacks on DEI, attacks on wokeness, tax on diversity, all this other stuff.

But uh, you know, you have to assume and hope that as the demographics of the country change and the the you know, the share of the population which is white non college graduates, which is really the core base of the Trump support, as a percentage of the population, that's going to shrink over time.

And so hopefully these these appeals won't work.

Although I think one of the more interesting developments in recent years has been that Trump has had some success in getting Latino support.

He certainly had some increase his Latino support in the twenty twenty four election, as I think he's lost most of that in the last year with these indiscriminate immigration roundups, just you know, taking all these law abiding people and out of their communities with these with these you know, federal forces and masks rampaging through various cities.

So again, this is not it's it's bizarre to me because it's not a strategy of political edition.

It's a strategy of political subtraction.

So even when he does manage to attract some non white support, he then very quickly does stuff that alienates those Latinos.

Well.

He has clearly embraced authoritarianism.

I wrote in my twenty eighteen book The Plot to Destroy Democracy that Russia, who was backing all of these oddball political groupings of extremist right wingers with their United Russia Front, who supported the right, supported the extremist Christians, and we're the first to support Trump understood that America as a country could easily be divided up.

This is an old KGB strategy from way back, and a country that's led by a KGB human intelligence officer, this would be the first thing he'd want to go back and try again.

Can we actually do it?

But seeing how Trump himself uniquely understood that he could divide the country into thirds, right, one third would vote for him, he would win by less than a percent, one third would vote against him, and the last third two thirds, you know, the last third really was was too distracted with their own lives and didn't care.

And this brings him back to Trump only winning.

My issue is how did he get MAGA to reject America, to reject the the you know that we the phrase we are a nation of immigrants, to literally mock in ridicule what's written on the statue of liberty.

It's almost like I described it as this, we are moved ourselves from an axis of democracies, you know, or an alliance of democracies, and almost like Trump wanted to join an axis of autocrats, right.

He wanted to join Alcci and Urdiwan and you know, in Hungary and Russia in you know, in North Korea.

Because he was madly in love with North Korea, so that he could rule over two thirds of the country while governing one third of the country.

One third of the country would have the constitution, and the rest would get whatever he chose.

Don't you think that we're barreling towards that level of you know, autocratical you know, constitutional autocracy is what I called it.

Oh, there's no question that Trump's second term is I think presenting the biggest challenge to American democracy that we've seen, certainly in our lifetimes.

Has he been here before?

Have we been here before?

I mean, I think you've seen I mean, I think what distinguishes this is You've seen, you know, undermining of democracy before.

But it's been in wartime.

It's been during the Civil War, World War One, world War two.

I mean remember in the aftermath of World War One, Woodrow Wilson jailed Eugene Dubbs, the Socialist Party candidate for president.

So we've seen repression before, but it's usually occurred during wartime.

This is unique for this massive expansion of presidential power without any emergency except kind of the made up emergencies that Trump himself declares, you know, claiming that having a trade deficit, which we've had since like nineteen seventy six, is all of a sudden, an emergency that warrants the imposition of terrorists in every country on the planet.

So it's you know, I would say the threat to civil liberties is not necessarily unique, but it is unprecedented in peace time without any obvious emergency to for justification.

And you know, right now it kind of feels like it often feels like the fate of our democracy hangs by the votes of Justice Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Comy Barrett.

That they're really to the extent that there are swing votes on the Supreme Court, they're the swing votes, and so you know, they will determine to what extent there are still guardrails and barriers to prevent the the untrammeled exercise of executive power, which is certainly what Trump is trying to do.

Whereas you know, it's really been shameful to see the extent to which Congress is willing to abdicate its authority even over basic issues of the purse, where you know, Trump is refusing to spend congressionally appropriated funds, he is destroying congressionally authorized agencies like the US Agency for International Development or the US Department of Education, and Republicans in Congress have nothing to say about this.

It's it's really a shameful willingness to count out to extreme executive power, which they would never do for a minute if this was Joe Biden doing this for Kamala Harris.

It's all because it's Donald Trump.

Yeah, well, you know that's because we have a Duma.

We don't have a Congress now right we have are quickly following the oh yeah, Well.

Steve Bennon was a student of Alexander Dugan and he loves the entire concept of turning the United States into Putin's Russia.

But you know what, can you say?

You know one and I've got to tell you, you really just scared me a moment ago when you said that everything may come down to the two swing votes of Justice Robert Roberts and Amy Coleman Barrett.

Because I had Dolly Ellithwico on a couple of months ago, and she clearly stated that this Supreme Court is completely in the tank for Donald Trump.

Anything that may look like a little walk back is possibly tactical in order to try to maintain their twelve percent credibility, but that they will change all the laws because they agree with everything that he's doing.

And one of the statements that she made was I asked, I said, well, what happens if you get a President Newsom or a President AOC.

She said, they'll flip on everything that they've done, and that they are now an openly political machine that if it were, you know, politically, if it were politically important for Donald Trump to designate African Americans as having no rights in being a chair again, they would do it.

They've they've flipped over everything.

So why do you think Roberts and Barrett are swing voters?

Well, I mean, I'm not an expert on the Supreme Court, but I think that they have shown a willingness to break with Trump on some issues.

And I think, for example, you recently had the arguments in the Supreme Court over Trump's executive imposition of tariffs, which is clearly an abuse of his authority, so ruled by two lower federal courts, and I think you know from the indications from the oral arguments where most of the justices agreed that this was going too far.

We'll see how they rule.

I mean, we don't know.

I mean, I think in general, my take has been that the lower federal courts have done a pretty good job that they lower federal courts have actually, including a lot of Trump appointees, have been sticking up for the Constitution and individual rights in the face of this assault.

But the Supreme Court generally has been much more willing to go along with what Trump wants and wanting to avoid a confrontation with Trump.

But I think we'll.

See, like in the Tariff's case and cases about the extent to which Trump has the ability to remove, you know, governors of the Federal Reserve or other appointees.

I think we'll see what the limits of, if any, of presidential power actually are.

And then I think there might be some help coming down the road.

I mean, if Democrats are able to withstand the Trump jerrymander and win the midterm elections next year, I think that'll help to restore some checks balance as at least the household, and'll at least be able to hold hearings and to call people, call witnesses, and issue subpoenas and so forth to try to at least reveal what's going on.

But right now, it just feels like, you know, this all out assault on the checks and balances of the Constitution.

And you have to say that Trump has been pretty successful and undermining a lot of traditional limits on presidential power that we kind of took for granted.

He's showing that we can't take him for granted.

And you know that it's been extending into national security, and I know you're with Counsel of Foreign Relations.

It appears that everything the United States government is doing now is no longer based on the ideology of America as an ally of democracy.

But in my you know, I was a very low level person, right, but I was the person that did the job in the intelligence community to get the decision makers to make proper decisions on the basis of whatever policy.

Now it appears to be show me the money that you know, I used to make this joke when I lived in Abu Dhabi that you couldn't buy an American president.

That's frustrated the amiadis when I would go to these d Wan's, which are these private councils where you know, I worked for some of the shakes, and they I would say, well, there's just this level of interaction you cannot do with American presidents that you can do with businesses.

That is completely going out the window.

They know this man is purchasable and that he has a price, and all they have to do is work work their way up to the price, and they'll get whatever they want, whether it's you know, slightly toned down F thirty fives or you know, whatever Donald Trump wants.

He has completely reset how America does business in the world today, and it is no longer about human rights or to my receipt.

So how do we reset that.

I mean, let's say two years from now, or even a year from now, we win this election, you know, so long as he is alive and acting as the chief executive and pushing down to a young major you know, known Drinker who's the Secretary of War.

I always say it in quotes, and then you know you have this.

Did you know the Secretary of Army was thirty eight years old and a second lieutenant for four years the Secretary of the Army.

We have got these people who are saying we're gonna withdraw.

We're gonna slowly start moving America back from the Indo pak region.

We're gonna withdraw from Europe, and we're to concentrate the entire two and a half century developmental might of America onto the American people in the American homeland, which just strikes me as insane when you consider that the United States Navy now has more firepower off of Venezuela than we did off Yemen in Iran when we attack them.

Yeah.

No, I think the whole Venezuela project shows, you know, the very concerning drift of our foreign policy and national security policy, because you know, since early September, the US Navy or the Special Operations Command, whoever's doing it, has been conducting these lethal strikes unsuspected drug couriers without any real legal authorization, and in that action.

Those are CIA drones.

The Navy is not going to Navy doesn't have enough justification to do that.

Well, it could be, It's hard to know, because you know, Pete Heixath fire at the Judge Avaca generals of all the services, and has installed basically loyalists, and they know that, and they also have this BS opinion from the Office of Legal count sought the Justice Department, similar to the opinion I'll see issue during the Bush administration justifying torture, and now they're justifying these lethal boat strikes, which I think most experts in the laws of war would say are extra judicial killings, because we don't have a right to just blow people up because you suspect them all drug dealing, which is not a capital crime to begin with.

But they're doing this, and you know, the the armed forces are carrying it out, which is which is very concerning because it seems like to me from the outside, it seems like they're carrying out what are probably illegal orders, even though they have some some some pretext justifying it, but it's it's not real.

And so this is really a misuse of the military, just as you know, the deployments of the National Guard to various cities with no emergency happening.

That's also a misuse of the military.

So, I mean, there's just so much going on.

I mean, the problem is it's very hard to wrap your head around it because you have these these very dubious or even illegal uses of force.

You have what you were just mentioning, which is the co joining a public and private interest with the Trump organization doing business abroad.

OHI Trump is president and benefiting from connections with the Saudi crown prints or others.

The same thing with Howard Lutnik is Commerce Secretary, same thing with Steve Wikoff is his piece envoy.

They all are doing massive deals in the Middle East and elsewhere, benefiting from the administration's official actions.

And it's and then you also have these all these exertions of presidential authority on executive order, you know, destroying conventionally appropriated agencies, you know, changing the way the West Governor's down business for years.

All these things going on at the same time.

It's just very hard to wrap your head around it or to figure out how to how to stop it all because it's like so much happening at once.

It's kind of overwhelming the system and uh, you know, ramming through any any safeguards in our in our constitution order.

And I think it's going to you know, to your question, I think it's going to take a long time to reassemble the building blocks of constitutional democracy.

And I think it's going to take action by Congress because a lot of things that used to be considered norms no longer are, and so they need to be legislator.

We need statutory language to say I mean oddly enough.

Right now, we have statutory language where it says the president is not allowed to order an IRS audit of anybody that he wants, but there's no language to say the president can't order a prosecution of anybody he wants, And so he's actually going on social media and ordering that his political opponents be prosecuted.

It seems like that's a pretty basic law that needs to be passed.

I mean, it's not going to be passed by Republicans while Trump is in office, but in the future it ought to be passed because Republicans ought to realize if Trump can do this, Democrats can do this, they're not going to want these same tactics use against them that Trump is employing right now.

And we just saw that yesterday with his tweet where he demanded the prosecution for treason and retweeted someone saying that the members of Congress who asked the members of the Armed forces to recall that they have an obligation under the Constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to not obey illegal orders, which is fundamental.

They teach this to you at boot camp.

All take stems from the Maylin massacre, you know.

William Cally killing two hundred and fifty innocent civilians, and Trump is retweeting that these people should be executed by hanging.

So this isn't a question of norms.

You're right, norms.

We should never use that word again.

If it's not law with applicable punishments.

Then you know, now the precedence has been set.

George Washington's fear that you're going to have a dictatorial president coming in and just deciding whatever he wants.

We technically have a micro monarch or want to be dictator or as General Millie put it, But you know a president that can say, my, all of these veterans who have served this nation, every one of whom have been in combat, should be executed for saying beware of the obligations you have to the constitution is absolutely mind boggling.

Well, as long as we're getting to the end of this, I have one last question.

Two years ago we went to Ukraine together and had a grand old time, and if you've been back, you probably know that if we go back tonight, nothing will have changed.

We will be going to the same bars, the same restaurants, and the same cruise missile attacks will be happening in the exact same fashion.

What's your take on Trump's twenty eight point plan to force Ukraine to give up twelve percent of territory it has not lost yet and to essentially give Russia everything that it won to achieve since twenty fourteen.

Full disclosure, everybody knows I was in the Ukrainian army for a year, so I was just asked to come back into the Ukrainian army.

So this is very personal to me.

But what's your take.

Well, it's a very strange document, this peace so called peace plan, which is leaked out over the last couple of days.

It's not clear whether it's actually been adopted by the Trump administration or not.

It seems to have been cooked up by Steve Whitcoff.

Who it Steff works for Putin.

Well, I mean, he just seems like a very clueless piece envoy and you know, working with his Russian counterpart to cook up what is I mean, it's not a peace plan.

It's like a plan for the capitulation of Ukraine.

This is basically like the holiday wish list of Vladimir Putin.

Everything he wants to basically in Ukraine's existence as a sovereign, democratic country.

So there's no way in hell Ukraine is going to go along with this.

There's no way and how Europe is going to go along with this.

And frankly, I'm not even sure Trump is going to go along with this, because it's not clear where he stands.

And we've seen this before where Trump talks to Putin and kind of adopts the Russian position, but then European leaders rush to the White House to talk to him and convince them to back off the Russian position.

And so I wouldn't be surprised if we see something like that happen again.

But I think even just entertaining this the so called peace plant, is bad news because it sends a signal to Putin of US weakness and a resolution and basically suggesting that there are elements of the US government that are willing to capitulate on Ukraine, which I know the Ukrainian people certainly are not willing to do.

I think that's precisely the wrong way to in the war.

The right way actually, I mean the irony is Trump in the last couple of months has actually done some good things, including putting sanctions on a couple of major Russian oil companies, including giving Ukraine permission to fire US made attackers into Russia itself.

The way you and the war is you increase the pressure on Putin, You decrease his oil revenues, increase the pressure on him to negotiate for real.

But then by entertaining this this pseudo peace plan, this this document for surrender, you're dissipating the pressure on Putin and encouraging them to think that the US will give in before long.

Just fundamentally, is America no longer a reliable ally?

Should I should should other countries just look at US now and say, hey, they're a transactional country.

We're going to have to do no matter what.

We just cannot trust America anymore one hundred percent.

I mean, Trump basically says it himself that you know, he's pursuing in America first policy, and so other countries are you know, kind of at the at the whim of the present of the United States, who will do whatever he thinks is in his advantage or the advantage of his country.

And so yeah, one hundred percent, I don't think, I mean, other countries are not necessarily going to rush to abandon US because they still need American support.

But I think they're realizing that this is not something they can count on for the long term, and so I think, I mean, it can actually have some beneficial impacts.

For example, you see Europeans now moving to raise their defense spending.

I mean, europe could potentially if they could just you know, unify themselves on defense and foreign policy more effectively, that Europe could emerge as a as a much bigger player on the world stage than it is right now.

But I think Europeans are understanding that they can't trust the US, and I mean right now, like almost all the aid to the Ukraine is coming from Europe.

There's almost none coming from the US.

The Europeans understand that they have to bear the burden themselves or they're going to suffer, you know, further Russian aggression.

Well we'll have to leave it there, you know.

I hope that that war can come to an amicable end, in the sense that the Ukrainians break Russia's lines, take back their land, kick them out of Crimea, and destroy their armies.

But I find it horrifying that my dad, who joined the Navy when he was fifteen years old in World War two to help fight against fascism and imperialism in Asia and Europe.

You know, would see his son and his kids and grandkids having a president who embraces all of that, who would have gladly joined Limburg in nineteen forty and keeping America out of World War two.

So Max Boot, thank you so much for coming on black Man's spot.

It is always welcome to have such a level headed and knowledgeable voice to talk to my to my listeners, So thank you very much.

Pleasure to be on with you, Malcolm.

Okay, we'll see us soon.

Wow, that was one of the more engaging and enlightening conversations we've had in a long time.

And it's important to understand that, you know, even though the Republican Party under Reagan was what we now see as a completely different animal than MAGA, MAGA still embraces the name, but seems to desecrate the legacy, and that goes into their foreign relations and the oligarch backed relations that Donald Trump seems to support.

Now, which is Trump is America.

All the monies comes to Trump.

Well, thanks for listening to this week's black Man Spy.

We really appreciate it.

You can find us on YouTube at black Man's Spy, on Twitter at Malcolm Nance, and most of my writing long form and all of these videos can be found at Malcolm Nance dot substack dot com.

Thanks for coming this week and I will see you on the beach