Today's News, January 3, 2025

Good morning, everybody. Joanne will be here, but she's still out on a run. Sorry, just kidding. I had to say that. She's traveling. So we weren't actually going to do a what the heck just happened this morning.

And then at about 1.38 Eastern time this morning, the US struck Venezuela. And I figured you all would want to hear about that. So let's wait for just a minute until Facebook gets here. And by the way, I was up when the strikes happened. And so I am a little short on sleep. So I may be not even as more incoherent than usual today.

Facebook is here. So hi, everybody. So as I said, I'm here today without Joanne, but this is a good time to remind you that she does have her own YouTube channel. She does do her own shows.

And we always forget to say that because we have such a good time talking. And today she is on the road, so we're not going to do our usual what the heck just happened. And I'm sorry about that. We had intended sort of to take the day off, but then, as I said, about 1.38 Eastern time, the United States struck Venezuela. And I wanted to give you the back story for why this matters so much. Aside from the people in Venezuela, aside from the fact that Maduro So, I let's start with the first piece that you're gonna hear a lot of,

and that's that Maduro's a bad guy, and he is. That just is the case. The government of Venezuela was elected originally, but then now he won't leave office and he has destroyed Venezuela's economy. That's one of the reasons that so many Venezuelans

are leaving the country and going not just to the United States, by the way, but elsewhere. That is not however, really apparently why the Trump administration is going after Venezuela. As you know, we have been bombing small boats

apparently from Venezuela. One of the things to be careful about in the news is that when people start to repeat stuff, it takes on a life of its own. So we, our understanding is that when people start to repeat stuff, it takes on a life of its own. So we, our understanding is that the small boats that the administration has been bombing

by calling them narco terrorists are from Venezuela. But right now we still don't know who those people are. So when I use words like allegedly, or we think, it's worth remembering that it least appears that one of those boats was not from Venezuela. And I say appears because the whole point is this has been shrouded in such extraordinary

mystery. But the administration has been hitting those small boats, arguing that the drug traffickers that are using the country of Venezuela to move drugs are affiliated with the Maduro regime, which experts say is not the case. And it's also worth remembering that when the Trump administration insists

that those drugs are killing a lot of Americans, they are implying that the drugs that are crossing Venezuela from other countries, by the way, Venezuela itself is not a big producer of drugs, it's a trafficking corridor. They're implying that those drugs are illegal fentanyl, illicit fentanyl, but they're not. The drugs that come across Venezuela overwhelmingly are cocaine, and that's what the administration

has said to Congress, that this is cocaine they're going after. But then to the public, they're saying this is killing a lot of people and cocaine is nothing to take for your health, but it's not fentanyl.

So there's a lot of fuzziness going on around there. So what happened last night was an extension of those attacks on those boats, which most legal experts think are illegal because we're not at war with Venezuela and there's been no due process for the people in those boats. And in the past, we have simply stopped those boats and taken them to a port for their, for the legal system to work its course. And in fact,

recently, at the end of 2025, when the US hit a couple of those boats, and it appeared there were survivors, they called in the Coast Guard to come get the survivors and do the normal, which is take them to a place where they can be tried or, you know, arrested and tried. There appears to have been a covert operation in Venezuela that Trump blurted out on the radio the other day. But now this morning, as I say, a little before 2 o'clock, the United States appears to have struck the capital of Venezuela, Caracas, and taken out, literally not killed, but taken away Maduro and his wife.

It appears that his vice president, Maduro's vice president has fled to Russia. But again, we're early days here, and I'm just telling you what's in the news this morning so that we have a baseline for the background that I wanna give to you and why this matters

aside from what matters to the Venezuelan people, whom I don't study, by the way. I only know any foreign country as it interfaces with the United States. So my apologies to anybody that I, you know, can't answer any more questions on that.

But the story that matters here in the United States and therefore to the rest of the world is twofold. The first part of that story is, as I have been recording now for months, Donald Trump is in an extraordinarily weak position. That is, his poll numbers are abysmal. The economy is in bad shape. There have been signs that the economy is better

lately than people, economists are saying, but we really can't trust the numbers anymore because he has, because of the delays and so on. That's not to say that the economists working in the federal government are all corrupt by any stretch of the imagination, but those numbers are just not solid anymore. In addition to that, the Epstein files are clearly a huge problem for the former president, not the former president, for the president. As they are trickling out,

the Department of Justice has broken the law by not releasing them as the law required by November, I'm sorry, December 19th. And the ones that are coming out are already really bad, bad enough that any other president's career would have ended.

And then New Year's Eve, the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee led by Jim Jordan, a Republican of Ohio, released the transcript of the December 17th interview that former special counsel Jack Smith gave to the House Oversight Committee about Trump's retention of classified documents and attempts to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021 and everything that went around that. And that testimony was absolutely damning.

The fact that they released it at night on New Year's Eve shows you how desperate they were to hide it. So with that back story, the Supreme Court before the end of last year said to Trump that in a preliminary decision, it was not the final decision, but it tended to show which way the decision was going to go, that Trump could not deploy federalized National Guard troops in the area around Chicago. That's what the suit was about. But the implication was he was going to have to pull back his federalized National Guard troops

from every place they are, except Washington, D.C., which is not a state and which is overseen in a different way than the states are. And Trump immediately, or shortly after that, said, well, I'm going to pull out the troops from Portland, Oregon, Chicago, and I'm going to go with Los Angeles. Again, I'm a little tired. But I could come back. And people at the time interpreted that as,

I wasn't fired, I'm leaving kind of thing, that this was something that he was gonna show his power some other way. And you need to have that backdrop behind you too for what is happening in Venezuela. Okay, so now he has struck Venezuela and he is taking

out the leader of Venezuela and the leader's wife. Again, bad people. But he was on the Fox News channel this morning basically saying, now we have Venezuela's resources, primarily its oil and the sweet crude that is off the coast of Guyana. It doesn't really matter.

The point is there are resources in Venezuela that Trump is now saying, again, he says a lot of stuff, but saying the United States now has control over. And that's one of the things that the administration has been saying is that Venezuela took American oil and we want it back.

And there's a long long complicated argument behind that but suffice it to say that this that Venezuela did not take America's oil that's that's a rabbit hole I'm not going to go down because I wanted to get to this part and this is actually why I'm here this morning this is a really really really big deal that the United States has struck Venezuela. And the reason that it is such a big deal, aside from everything else I've just said,

is because the United States, with this action, has signed on to the project of destroying the rules-based international order that the Allies, after World War II, worked with other countries to put together to prevent future wars. What that means is this. Remember in the early 20th century, we had World War I, and then before that had...

was even in the rear-view mirror, practically, we had World War II. And those wars are just hideous, hideous wars. I mean, they're world wars, right? And you know all the stories about both of them. At the end of World War II, the allies of which the United States was a major partner, recognized two things. They recognized that the world had to have a better way to solve differences between countries.

And they recognized, especially Eisenhower, Dwight D. Eisenhower is gonna become the United States president in 1953, was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces. And he recognized the importance of this. And that is, at the end of World War II, the world has nuclear weapons. And nuclear weapons

are game changers. Because what they do is they say, if countries get mad enough at each other, and you get a wackadoodle in charge, and he doesn't use the word wackadoodle, but it works. He's talking not only about political extremists, but also religious extremists and other extremists who can commandeer a population. This is a little bit of a rabbit hole I'm going to give you, but this is a real issue

after World War II. People are trying to figure out why populations will follow a wackadoodle like Mussolini or Hitler or whatever. And this is where a lot of my work centers is how do you get a population to say, oh yeah, I'm okay with this.

And Eisenhower cares deeply about this. It was actually Eisenhower, studying Eisenhower that got me interested in it because Eisenhower recognized that it was such a huge deal for the world going forward. He was profoundly moved by having seen the order of prison camp and what humans would do to each other. And he recognized that if humans would do that to each other in a world that had nuclear weapons, they could literally end the world. So at the end of World War Two, the allies and their

and their partners got together and said, we have to come up with a better way. And what they did is they came up with the idea that across the globe, there would be rules that rather than just having rules within a state, within a country, that there would be rules for the world. And those rules, some of them were financial, some of them were, you know, we've got the International Declaration of Human Rights. There are all these different ways that the countries in the world were supposed to work together. And crucial, crucial, crucial

to that was the United Nations. The United Nations eventually becomes headquartered in New York and the United States is like the anchor of the United Nations. And the United Nations matter for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons the United Nations matter is because it says other countries or countries cannot invade each other. You cannot just say I want your oil and go into that country, which is the way we got into the messes of World Wars I and II, that you must respect each other's sovereignty. And then there are all these ways that we can work out disputes

and so on. Now, there are people, and I am one of them, who have always felt that there was a weakness written into that charter.

But I'm not sure that's a rabbit hole you want me to get into.

The point here is that there were rules

and big countries were not supposed to invade little countries, bigger countries. So if you think, for example, about the first Gulf War, what the United States did under Republican President George H.W. Bush is they said to Iraq, no, you can't take Kuwait. And that, I don't know about you, when I was much younger then, and I was like, ah, it's all about the oil. But in fact, there was the principle that Iraq could not simply say, hey, I'm taking Kuwait. We pushed, if you remember, the United States troops pushed Iraq back over the border

and stopped. So, you know, you do you, but we are going to make sure that you can't just take over a smaller country. All right. That's the rules based international order. Now, Russia doesn't like that. Under Putin, Russia does not want the international, the rules-based international order because it wants Ukraine, and it also wants other countries,

but pretty openly wants Ukraine. And this has been a struggle that's been going on. Remember that the United States, Russia, and the UK promised that we would respect Ukraine's sovereignty if Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons. It did give up its nuclear weapons and in goes Russia in 2014. And the United States stood against that, but somewhat half-heartedly. And this is the struggle that's

been going on since then, since 2014, for the control of especially those eastern parts of Ukraine. Putin needs those. He wants those and he needs those. There's all kinds of problems in the Russian economy, which is actually quite an interesting rabbit hole that I won't take you down right now.

But he wants and needs those industrial areas of Ukraine in order to prop up his own rule in Russia, and that's in real trouble right now. Meanwhile, he also recognizes that Trump's position, including his mental position, is dramatically weakening. So if he's going to get that, he's got to get that now. So one of the things that Putin has articulated repeatedly is the desire to get rid of the rules-based international order, which he says is threatening him,

even though it's simply saying, no, you can't take over Ukraine. And he wants to replace it with something based in the idea of spheres of influence. That is, you'll get one really big dog in an area, and all the other countries are going to have to do what it says. And that's his plan for going forward. And he obviously wants control of Ukraine, and he wants to continue to influence and

gain control over Europe. And this is one of the things that Europe is madly trying to prevent. You're seeing the militarization of the borders with Russia and the repeated defense capabilities increasing in Europe. And they're saying, we're very concerned about Russia deciding it's going to do more than it is already doing in Europe, where it's poisoning people and attacking undersea cables and hitting infrastructure and so on. There was an attack on Poland less than a month ago, I think, in which a train track

was blown up. So Russia wants to get rid of that rules-based international order because it wants more influence in Ukraine and it also wants influence in Russia. But there's more than that. Russia can't do that on its own. Russia is not strong.

Russia's economy, as I say, is in really bad shape. And Putin's got a real problem. He's lost more than a million men in his war on Ukraine, which he expected would take a few days, right? How can he possibly do that? He can't. But the biggest dog in the world is the United States of America.

So if he could get the United States of America to sign on to that, the game has changed. And this is one of the reasons that people, a number of people, including me, have called attention to the United States' national security strategy document that came out about a month ago,

in which the United States no longer said Russia was a problem, but began to attack Europe, our ally in this international rules-based order. With the US attack on Venezuela against the tenants of the UN charter, the United States is putting its stamp of at least condoning a big power attacking a smaller power. And you know that this is what's going on because instantly Taiwan, which is very concerned

about an invasion from China, popped onto social media and said, hey, we're not buying this. We're not, we're still believe in our sovereignty. And Europe instantly said, we still believe in the rules based international order because they want to hold off Russia. So what the United States just did is it said we're tossing overboard the rules that have kept the world from another world war since the 1940s and instead believing that we want to have our own sphere of influence.

And you can see this with Trump talking about taking Greenland, which by the way, in April, in April, oh, it feels like a million years ago, Russia, Putin gave a speech saying, hey, take this seriously because the US should have Greenland. Well, what's in Greenland is, of course, access to more resources, but also if the US had more power over Canada, Greenland, the United States, and now South America, it becomes the hegemon of the Western Hemisphere here. It is a

much weaker position for the United States than it has had since the 1940s, because rather than being part of the entire globe, we simply become the power that's going to grab all the resources in other countries. But it's one that looks very attractive to somebody like Donald Trump because of the degree to which he and his cronies can do what Putin has done, which is strip the lands for parts and put the money in their own pockets. And you know, already we are seeing people in Trump's circle reaching for the oil in Venezuela and there's

just going to be extraordinary corruption around this. Trump has done this without the approval of Congress. And that's the final piece here that you need to pay attention to. He is claiming the right to invade another country without provocation. I mean, this idea that these are narco terrorists that are hurting the United States is a fantasy.

Without provocation and without consultation with Congress. And this was really deliberate. The first attack on the boats was on September 2nd. That's the double tap strike that has, you know, gotten such attention. But it was on September 2nd, that's the double tap strike that has, you know, gotten such attention. But it was on September 2nd and within two days, under the War Powers Act of 1973,

the president has to inform Congress that he has done so. And Trump did that and he said, I'm informing you because of the War Powers Act, but under the War Powers Act, the president has only 60 days to act without getting approval of Congress to continue those strikes. And Trump just blew through that. He never got that approval. And now he has just continued with that, going into Venezuela without Congress. Congress under the Constitution is the only body that can declare war. And again, under the War Powers Act, he ought to have consulted with them. It appears, as I say, very early days here, that he informed Republicans in the,

at least on the Gang of Eight, that he was going in, but not the Democrats. Which says he is declaring himself the leader of a one-party dictatorial state. And that's the other piece here. When you think about this, again, Maduro is nobody's buddy. He's just not. But there are...

The way that Trump has done this, and Trump's advisors, by the way, I'm not sure how much of this is Trump and how much he just likes the bangs, which is what he was talking about on the Fox News channel. The way he has done this not only destroys the rules-based international order, it also destroys another guardrail of the Constitution. So when I say this is a really, really, really,

really, really big deal, this is a cornered president who is in serious trouble with the American people and with legal issues over, I mean, he seems to think the problem with the Epstein files at least so he says is that people will be embarrassed. They're not hiding those files to stop people from being embarrassed.

They're hiding those files because there's something huge in them. And by the way I was an Epstein files skeptic big time. But the more they're doing this and the more we're seeing, the more you know there's just got to be something there. Or they would have released them all. And then we've got Jack Smith out there right before January 6th, which is coming up in

three days, and has been a real issue of concern for a lot of us is that on the fifth year anniversary of January 6th, he would try something. Well, here we have an attack on the rules-based international order. Here we have an attack on the US Constitution. And if we get rid of those two things, because of the direction and the ideology of people like Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, the next step in the United States is to move

more and more into an authoritarian regime like that. And if that authoritarian regime like that gets its full hold here in the United States, you can look at Russia now, where there's a very few people who are extraordinarily rich but whose lives are very much in danger. A lot of them seem to have a lot of problems

with windows and poison. And you can assume that those trends that we're seeing in the United States already are going to be coming here. So when you see people saying, well, Maduro is a bad guy,

this is a great way to get rid of him, this is the way the United States should operate, be very clear that Maduro is absolutely a bad guy, but if you break all the rules to get him the way Trump has done, what's being destroyed is not simply Maduro's regime. And by the way, I should have said this, heads of state enjoy immunity. There's no way that we should have the right to try him, especially since we did try and convict by a jury of the former president of Honduras, who was doing the drug trafficking, and Trump just pardoned him.

So as people are saying at this point Maduro's people are probably looking at how much money it will take to free Maduro if he puts it in the pocket of Trump which is of course exactly what Putin does grabs people and then uses them essentially as hostages. So this late or early morning strike against Venezuela is not simply let's get out, get rid of a bad guy. It is, and by the way, there was an election in Venezuela in 2024.

There is an elected leader that was not Maduro. My guess is the Trump administration is not going to be putting that person in power, but we'll see. But when you look at this moment, this is a huge crisis for the United States of America, not just for Venezuela. And it is a huge crisis for the world because of the breakdown of that rules-based international

order that has kept us from a war since World War II. You know, we've had local wars, but we've not had a world war, a war in Europe, for example. And it is a direct attack on the U.S. Another direct attack on the U.S. Constitution. So don't be fuzzy about what happened here and this would be a great moment to speak up to your Congress people, especially your

Republican Congress people. The Democrats have already come out and said, excuse me, what are you doing here? But they are not in the majority. And a lot of the Republicans started out, even the far right ones, started out by saying, hey, wait a second here, this doesn't look legal. And they're already starting to come around because generally, wars make a president more popular, and they don't want to buck Trump and say, you know, we're going to back Maduro on this because, again, Maduro is a bad guy.

Light up these freaking phones because I think if you've listened to me before, you've heard me say that we're facing a crisis because Trump has gotten more and more and more and more cornered. And as I've been saying and wincing, the next three months, which I said three days ago, are going to be hideous as he and his people try to to maintain control because it's coming down to the line here.

Either they are going to grab control and turn the United States into a dictatorship or the American people are going to take our system back. And we're going to make it based in the law again and not in personalities, and we're going to start to enforce the laws against corruption, and we're going to enforce the Constitution, and with luck we're going to make this country and its rules and laws more responsive to everyday people.

You can see that building. One of the reasons I highlighted the Mamdani speech yesterday, a lot of people said, well, we don't know what he's going to do. And I'm like, 100%, we don't know what he's going to do. And I'm always a skeptic when a politician says they're going to do anything. But the language matters.

The fact that, you know, he's talking about using a government for good anymore, stopping corruption and so on. This is the moment for the next, like I say, three months is the time I give it. I'm thinking we're going to have an answer by May as to what's going to happen to the Trump regime. But now is not the time to roll your eyes and say, ah, we always go into Latin America. The United States has a terrible history with Latin America, going back to the 1840s at least. That's a rabbit hole someday. Well, not even a rabbit hole. Someday I'll

do a whole episode at least on that. But this is not that usual. This is an attempt to side with Russia to overturn the rules-based international order and align the United States with Russia rather than with Europe, rather than with democracies, rather than with the idea that countries should have their own right to sovereignty. And once we have given that up, we have not only given up the sovereignty of all nations, because all it takes is somebody with more muscle to come take you over, we will also have given up a significant portion of the American Constitution,

and given the President the ability to take the US military and do whatever he wants with it, without oversight by Congress. And so when those strikes, literally last night I was finishing the letter and I was all set to go to bed. I wanted to go to bed earlier, but I was reading the news and always when I finish a letter I always am thinking about the next one and I was actually sort of shaping out the next two. And I saw the first video coming out of Venezuela. I remember it's 1.38 and I was like, no.

And then within 10 minutes, there was confirmation. And I thought, this is it, here we go. On that note, please speak up. This is it. And it's gonna get worse. I've maintained this all along, it's going to get worse. You know, I've maintained this all along. It's going to get worse.

But the vast majority of Americans want the Constitution. They want rules. They want laws that apply equally to everybody. They want to be treated equally before the law. They want to have a right to a say in their government. And they want to have equal access to resources.

And my friends, that is not a radical position. That is the same position that FDR had in the 1930s. It is the same position that Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, had at the turn of the last century. It is the same position that Abraham Lincoln took in the 1860s. That's what it means to be an American. And this is our moment to try and protect that for the 21st century. Anyway, by my calculation, Trump should be about to speak about what he's done. You can go hear what he has to say about it.

But that's the backstory. That's what's at stake in the U.S. strikes on Venezuela. Thank you for being here. And if more happens, I will keep coming Thank you for being here. And if more happens, I will keep coming on in an impromptu way like this. Thanks for being here.