The REAL STORY Behind Trump's Attack On Nigeria

I'm not gonna start a war, I'm gonna stop wars. No more wars, no more disruptions, we will have prosperity and we will have peace. Under Trump, we will have no more wars, no more disruptions, and we will have prosperity and peace for all. I am the candidate of peace, I am peace.

We are learning new details about the deadly strike operation that President Trump says he ordered on Islamic State terrorists in Nigeria. Listen to this.

Yeah, we'll get into all of the claims that they've made.

But Donald Trump, the peace president has once again delivered peace or at least pieces of people and buildings blown apart by our weapons and yet another country around the world. Because the peace president seemingly can't go more than two or three weeks without saying at least pieces of people and buildings blown apart by our weapons in yet another country

around the world. Because the peace president seemingly can't go more than two or three weeks without starting another foreign conflict. In this particular case,

as you saw, it is in Nigeria over what he is calling a genocide against Christians in that country. Which we're going to dive into the facts, see if we can figure out what's really going on.

But Cenk, let's start with your two cents.

Yeah, so wait till you see what's actually happening in Nigeria. This idea of Muslim versus Christian is kind of hilarious. There's some of that going on, but there's such a wide variety.

I can't wait to tell you about it now that I know all about Nigerian politics and tribalism and bandits and the different kinds of attacks that are happening there. So that's part of the story. I think that unfortunately, Israel is another part of this

story, even though it's Nigeria. It's always Israel, and I'll explain how. And of course, the hypocrisy of Trump on anti-war is enormous. We have a poll about it in a minute

for you. And John's third or fourth cent here is that he knows why this happened, and I'm very curious about that as well.

Yeah, well, I'm glad that you have read up a lot and become an expert on this topic. I've read a little bit, but I'm not an expert. I thought that it would be elitist

of me to know more about this country we're going to war with than the president does. So I know next to nothing, so I feel like I'm on Trump's level with this. But anyway, he posted this, it's Christmas Day, he launched this conflict, that's great. Tonight at my direction as commander in chief, we launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS terrorist scum, saying that they are viciously killing primarily innocent Christians at levels not seen for many years and even capital C centuries. Blah blah blah, I previously warned the terrorists, the Department of War as he calls it, that's

its preferred pronouns, executed numerous perfect strikes as only the United States is capable of doing. They're not going to let radical Islamic terrorism prosper. May God bless our military and Merry Christmas to all, including the dead terrorists.

That's, I think he gets the holiday spirit. I do think that he gets that. So, look, we're going to dive into the facts about the supposed genocide.

Also bear in mind, we're going to talk about the facts about this being ISIS terrorists, because that's not necessarily as cut and dried as he would have you believe either.

A lot of this feels pretty dishonest, but let's see if we can rewind a little bit, figure out how we got to the point that the United States is launching what were it to happen to us, we would label it,

obviously, as a war. For some reason when the United States bombs a country, it's just like a cool thing you do on Christmas Day. It's not warmongering or anything. But anyway, it seems like a Fox News segment about a month and a half, two months ago was what kind of

kicked this thing off. And in the segment, we're going to show you a bit. John Roberts had on Ryan Brown, the CEO of Open Doors US, an organization supporting persecuted Christians. And take a look at this.

Open Doors keeps track of Christians who are killed around the world in religious violence. Here's your statistics for 2025, 4,476 Christians murdered so far worldwide, 3,100 of them in Nigeria. I mean, Nigeria is a country that the United States has a fairly close relationship with. Does this president need to step up

and do more or does the United States at large need to do more? I mean, what could the US do to try to stem the killings?

I love the distinction he makes between the president doing more and the United States doing more. Like Donald Trump Trump's gonna fly over there and deal with it single-handedly or something. But anyway, they're obviously, they're hoping to get the United States military involved. More conflicts, good for Fox News, good for the defense industry and all of that. And

almost immediately after that segment aired, which Donald Trump was obviously watching because he's never not watching TV. He posted this on to True Social, saying that if the Nigerian government continues to allow the killing of Christians, apparently the Christians are the only ones that need to be protected, the other people dying there doesn't matter. The USA will immediately stop all aid and assistance in Nigeria. And this is gonna be a literal verbatim quote in case you're listening.

And may very well go into that now disgraced country guns ablazen, the President of the United States says, to completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities. He's saying basically there's cherished Christians warning the Nigerian government better move fast. So he waited about six weeks, I guess that's something. And they did these strikes, killing at least five people, leaving over 30 seriously wounded.

And I think at this point, Jake, we should probably get into the conversation around this. Because the reason that he seems to be interested in this is the reason that Fox News was interested in it.

Is that they can spin a very selective interpretation of the conflict to make it seem as if this is people hunting down Christians. And of course, the right is always looking for opportunities to feel

that they are an aggrieved minority. That's why they are saying this about Nigeria. It's why they have pretended there's this genocide against white farmers in South Africa.

On the damage report this morning, I pointed out that I also think it's convenient to them to have these narratives at a time when they've probably begun to feel after a couple years of what's going on with Gaza. Kind of feel like maybe they're on the wrong side of this whole thing. These people sticking up for Palestinian kids who are being killed

certainly look like the good guys in this story. Wouldn't it be good if they had a conflict they could pretend puts them on the right side of calling out genocide. So what do you know? What is a fairly complicated civil conflict in Nigeria gets

reinterpreted as a genocide against Christians, which is more palatable for their domestic

audience, but what do you think? Yeah, so we're going to play a series of macabre fun games here about this, okay? Because all this is disastrous, but we're going to nevertheless do

a poll about it. And I'm going to poll John, and he doesn't know the geography of Nigeria apparently as well as I do. So that'll be fun and you can play along as well.

The first poll is on TYT.com, and we're asking when Trump said he was anti-war, what did he mean? A, I'm going to bomb Iran. B, I'm going to bomb Nigeria. C, I'm going to bomb Venezuela.

D, I'm going to bomb every country I can think of and see if I can still get people to believe I'm anti-war.

Okay, so-

Okay, that's a tough one.

A lot of bombings for the anti-war president. So take your time with that one on

TYT.com.

All right, now we move to the interesting little thing that John alluded to there, which was, well, they said on Fox News there's news there 3,100 Christians killed in Nigeria.

And they didn't say who killed

them.

That's interesting. So we're going to come back to that in the midst of this quiz and give you a sense of what's happening in Nigeria. First of all, quick fun facts about

Nigeria, split nearly evenly between Christians and Muslims. About 53% Muslim, 45% Christians. Anytime there's a split like that, you're going to have trouble no matter what the religions are, the backgrounds, or the ethnicities are. And there has been some trouble among those clans. But that is not the only thing dividing Nigeria. In fact, Nigeria is a gigantic country,

largest in Africa, 230 million people, 300 different languages spoken. And that's going to play a big role in what we're going to describe

here.

All right, so John, there are several different areas of Nigeria. There's the Northeast where there's Boko Haram, a very dangerous Muslim fundamentalist terrorist group,

okay? So their big problem in Northeastern Nigeria, often attacking the Nigerian government. The Nigerian government has Muslims

or Christians in it, but it's, again, a majority Muslim country. Nevertheless, Boko Haram is attacking within that country as Muslim fundamentalists tend to do, right, when they're going the Jihad

violent direction, okay. So then we've got in the Southeast, a massive separatist war that occurred that killed nearly a million people. And so a lot of Christians died

there. Now, it's Christian separatists that have done that war. So take that for what it might be. Now we go to the Northwest, and the Northwest is bandits.

And so the bandits are of different varieties, tribes, clans, etc. And they mainly they do a lot of different kind of crime. It originally started as a vigilante group, but

then developed into basically a mob mentality, which is usually what happens once you go towards violence. So they started doing different crimes, including kidnappings.

And there they have kidnapped 52 Christians out of a Catholic school recently, aha. So that's your anti-Muslim, now turns out they also kidnapped 25 Muslim students from a Muslim

school because they're banditos, they're bandits, okay. So then you go to Central Nigeria, and in Central Nigeria we have a war between the farmers and the herders. I mean, you go to Central Nigeria, and in Central Nigeria, we have a war between the farmers and the herders.

I mean, you want to talk about old school, herders versus farmers is like the oldest battle there is. It happened in Central Asia, it happened in Scotland. And so they're doing that battle

and they're hacking away at each other. Now the problem is that the farmers are largely Christian, the herders are largely Muslim. So that gets into some tribal and religious issues.

But what people noticed is, actually the people grabbing the land the most are just wealthy folks from Nigeria, who are using the farming and the herding and the Christianity and the Muslim and

all that stuff as an excuse to do more land acquisition, okay. So- Now John, out of all those different problematic places in Nigeria, where do you think we

bombed, the Northeast, the Northwest, the Southeast or Central Nigeria? Now a lot of Christians dying in a lot of those areas, and a lot of Muslims dying in a lot of those

areas, so where do you think we

bombed?

Well, I'm going to be honest, I was not expecting to be quizzed. And now I'm really second guessing myself, but I was fairly certain up until about 90 seconds ago that it was the Northwest.

Yeah, you are correct. We bombed the bandits in Northwest. Nice job. So the bandits have no religious affiliation necessarily. Like I said, they kidnap Christian

and Muslim students for ransom. They're mainly just criminals. Boko Haram's in the northeast, we didn't bomb them. The people that killed a million people in the southeast are mainly Christians, so we didn't bomb them. And the landowners that are stealing everything in the middle of Nigeria, we certainly didn't bomb them.

Obviously not. Well, first of all, Cenk, can we just point out, and if you're MAGA or whatever, feel free to disagree in the comments.

Do you believe that Donald Trump could have extemporaneously given a cogent breakdown of the conflicts across Nigeria like Cenk just did? He wasn't reading that off the script.

Do you think Donald Trump could have done that? And if he had done it, do you think he could have done it without referencing winning Pennsylvania three times in a row or

something like that?

Come on.

Anyway.

Look, forget saying it extemporaneously. Does Donald Trump know 10% of that? Yeah. No. So apparently he saw a report on Fox News a little while back that said that they were killing

Christians in Nigeria. He's like, so let's bomb it. So that's part of the answer. I think Israel is part of the answer. But John, you said you had part of

the answer. Is it the distraction you mentioned earlier or is it something else?

No, I mean, I'm only about 30% serious, but six weeks ago, he says, if you keep killing Christians or whatever, we're gonna do this. That's quite a while ago. What's closer? Nicki Minaj appearing at the Turning Point USA thing and talking once again about genocide against Christians in Nigeria. Now, she paid a price for it. She supposedly lost something like 10 million followers on

Instagram and has in fact fled Instagram following that. But perhaps she got her ultimate goal, which is she called Donald Trump hot on stage, fluffed his ego a little bit. And her number one political issue, all of a sudden the American government snaps into action, starts doing strikes within six days of her appearance on stage.

I'm just saying. I'm just saying. Yeah, so your theory dovetails with mine to some degree. So under the rubric of everything is Israel, so here, I think the number one group pushing this in America is Israel first.

And why do I say that? Number one, my evidence among other things, and it's just circumstantial as you'll see here. I'm certainly not claiming I have definitive proof and etc, right?

But number one, social media reaction. So before the bombings, there was a lot of talk of, yeah, genocide. Why are we doing anything about

the genocide in place x, y, z, right? They've been saying that for a long time. And recently, the momentum picked up for Nigeria. Genocide, forget the genocide in

Gaza, the real genocide is by banditos in northwestern Nigeria. No, it's the bandits, the Nigerians,

they're the real terrorists.

And it's not to say there isn't terrorism in Nigeria, there is,

right?

And there could be, there was, I think, 8,000 people killed overall last year. I think more Muslims than Christians in Nigeria, if I remember that right.

But just don't quote me on that, you can look it up yourself.

But it's not-

We can show the data going back to 2020, if we bring up graphic eight as you discussed discuss it does the breakdown of the last five years basically. Okay, great. Let's show that so

you can see the real facts and the exact facts, right? And so you're seeing that there on the screen. Meanwhile, obviously in Gaza, there's 70,000 dead at a bare

minimum, but the idea here is distract and the Israelis believe that things have gotten religious partly because they pushed the religion angle here nonstop. No, if you blame Israel, you're blaming the Jews,

you're blaming the Jews, right? And make everything about religion, it's a dirty Muslims, the real problem is the Muslims. And I told you three months ago, there was a propaganda campaign

started and all of Israel first did it at the same time. The real issue isn't Israel, the real issue is Muslim terrorists and Israel's at the forefront of protecting you against the dirty, savage Muslims. And the bigotry towards Muslims

went into hyperdrive, hyperdrive, with no brakes in the car at all. And now this is another wave of, no, the real terrorists are the Muslims in Nigeria. And if you care about religion,

you should care about protecting the Christians in Nigeria from the Muslims. Remember, don't think about Israel, don't think about our slaughter of the Muslims.

Only care about hating Muslims. And we've got a good opportunity here in Nigeria where we can get you to hate them and pretend that it's only violence against Christians.

And that that's the real problem

in America.

And of course, John, among the 100 things wrong with

that logic is, John, among the 100 things wrong with

that logic is, yes, but we're not funding any of that in Nigeria. Whatever atrocious attacks are happening by Muslims or Christians or bandits or farmers or

herders in Nigeria, we didn't pay for any of that. Whereas we paid for all of Israel's genocide and all of their war crimes and

all of their war crimes and all of their wars. Yeah, it is ironic to be told by people who have some sort of biological opposition to ever exercising empathy that those of us using it actively should be using even more of it in more circumstances. First of all, lead by example and not just opportunistically like in this. And you're totally right. It's not hypocrisy. First of all, we should acknowledge conflicts in other areas. But as you point out, it's not exactly the same thing.

We are much more directly implicated in one of these attacks than the others. Also, it's the sheer amount of death over a very small period of time.

There are a lot of substantive differences between these conflicts. But let me also say, in closing, the fact that if you actually care about the Christians that have died, it is a tragedy that these people have died. It's just an equal tragedy to the tragedy of the more Muslims who have died in that conflict. It's terrible that all of these people are dying.

And it would be one thing if Donald Trump was saying, I've been really paying attention on Nigeria. It's a lot of chaos, they feel terrible for that country. So we're gonna get involved, and we're gonna try to do the right thing and take down some of these bandits or whatever. But that's not what he's doing. He's not being honest. And does anyone actually believe that he even gives a damn about the Christians of Nigeria? You think Donald Trump would spend five minutes talking to a group of Nigerian Christians? You think he actually gives a damn, any more than he cares about white farmers from South Africa. He doesn't even care about that. It's a convenient thing that he knows some

of the conspiratorial people in his base love to talk about on Twitter. So it's easy, he can say, Pete Hegseth, go bomb them or whatever. I don't care, I don't wanna hear anything about it. It's the dishonesty and how obviously they're using people's lives or deaths just to distract or to earn some points. It's just gross. And to then hear people like getting pissed off at us, because we care about what's happening in Gaza, when this is clearly so artificial, so just self-serving the way that they approach this.

Being told that we're not exercising empathy in the right way is disgusting. Apologies, I know that we're over. Any final thoughts before we go to the break? Nope, other than don't go to war I know that we're over. Any final thoughts before we go to the break? Nope, other than don't go to war

with Nigeria.