[Transcript edited for clarity and flow.]
Hello everybody, and welcome to this episode of Mary Trump Live. It is wonderful to have you with us.
It really does look as if Donald Trump, because of a combination of ignorance, hubris, incompetence, and the fact that he's so easily manipulable, is pushing the United States closer to war with Iran, a situation that was not on anybody's radar two days ago. And he's doing it in part by ignoring his own intelligence. Let me rephrase because that makes it sound like he has intelligence to be ignored. He’s ignoring the people in his own intelligence community—that’s better.
After fleeing the G-7 Summit Monday evening, Donald took to his failing social media site to brag that,
“The United States now has complete and total control of the skies over Iran.” Donald said he knows where Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is hiding, calling him a “easy target” and adding, “We're not going to take him out, at least for now,” which, if I were a member of the Iranian government, would sound like a threat.
Back in March, Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, testified to Congress that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. Further, she said, Khamenei has not reauthorized the suspended program. When asked about this testimony on Air Force one early this morning, Donald dismissed it saying, “I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to having it, unquote.”
So once again, Donald is deliberately rejecting of U.S. intelligence gathering because it contradicts his preferred narrative. This is the same pattern we saw when Donald sided with Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies in 2018. Gabbard is not scrambling to make it seem as if she and Donald are on the same page, but if intelligence says one thing and Donald says the opposite thing, how exactly are they on the same page? I find it deeply troubling that we even have to take such things into consideration, but one fundamental danger we face in this situation, is that the more we have to worry about this, pushback Donald gets, the more likely he is to double down on his threats. As often is the case, he may escalate his threats to wage war to make himself feel better and to make sure that everybody else looks wrong, even if they're not.
Some people in the MAGA movement are turning away from Donald over his rhetoric vis-a-vis Iran. Tucker Carlson accused him of being complicit in the act of war. Marjorie Green, Republican representative from Georgia, said that foreign intervention puts "America last.”
Congress is stepping in with a bipartisan resolution to block unauthorized strikes on Iran. Donald held a meeting within the situation room earlier this afternoon leaving many wondering if he's about to drag us into a war that is not America's war to fight. Over the past several days, the United States has rapidly deployed more than 30 aerial refueling tankers to the region, positioning itself for a possible escalation.
I don't know if anybody remembers this, but in 2016, 2020, and 2024 Donald campaigned on the promise to stop endless wars and to keep the United States out of foreign conflicts. Now he's threatening airstrikes and ignoring intelligence so that he can rationalize those airstrikes.
It should be obvious by now that most of Donald’s promises turn out to be utter lies which makes me think that a significant minority of people in this country like big lied to. There was literally no evidence to suggest that Donald would be a peace-loving candidate. After all, he revels in being cruel. He’s been known to obsess over nuclear weaponry for decades now. He's fantasized about nuclear war. He's a nihilist. We know that he is so thin-skinned and depraved that he would choose armed conflict over being humiliated.
Here's another thing that we need to keep in mind. Donald is a very ignorant man and he from the Dunning-Kruger effect—a bias that in which somebody overestimates their abilities in an area in which they have limited (or no) competence. But it's worse than that. For years, Donald has been saying things like, “I know more than the generals.” More about what specifically we don’t know because nobody bothered to ask him that question, but if they had he probably would've said he knows more about everything including military history, military strategy, and “the nuclear,” as he puts it.
Donald never feels as if he has to learn anything because he believes he knows everything already. He has no intellectual curiosity whatsoever. If you combine that with his ignorance, his lack of intelligence, and his arrogance, that is a very dangerous combination. Why doesn’t he believed the reports of his own intelligence agencies? Well, the intelligence contradicts his beliefs, and he thinks he knows better.
This is about Donald’s fragile ego and there is nobody who can stop his reckless escalation. There is nobody left who would even dare try. This will not end well.
As international tensions are on the rise, tensions with ICE are also increasing. In recent weeks, ICE agents have been detaining people who show up for routine court hearings and Brad Lander, New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate, has been visiting these hearings. Yesterday was his third day in attendance and he was arrested by ICE agents in a very chaotic scene outside of federal immigration court because that's America now.
What exactly led to this unprovoked violence against Lander? He had the audacity to protest against the fact that masked federal agents were detaining a man as he left an immigration hearing. Lander simply wanted was to see a judicial warrant. He kept his hand on the detainees shoulder while asking for proof of the man's crime. That was Lander’s purported offense.
Lander was released a few hours ago without charges, but the U.S. attorney's office said prosecutors are still investigating the incident, including the claim that the Department of Homeland Security submitted that Lander assaulted law enforcement. The footage, of course, shows that no such thing happened.
ICE agents do not have the authority to arrest United States citizens. If they don't have an arrest warrant, they should not be engaged in detaining American citizens or anyone else. And why is it that these agents feel the need to hide their identities? You would think these guys would be proud of the work they're doing on behalf of the fascist Trump regime. But first of all, they don't want the hassle of being outed because even if they don’t know what they're doing is wrong, they know it’s unpopular. Second, a lot of them are afraid that if their identities are found out people might come after them and their families. That would be wrong and that would be un-American but they have no such concerns about the impact of their actions on the lives of the people they target.
Desperate to meet the 3,000-detainments-per-day quota set by Nazi Stephen Miller, ICE has begun to detain some of our allies who aided U.S. army forces during the Afghanistan war. It doesn't matter to the Trump regime that these people who assisted our troops in Afghanistan were promised asylum in this country. This is just another instance in which the Trump regime has completely discarded people's right to do process—a right granted by the Constitution to every single person on American soil, citizen or not, born here or not. So for any of us to think that we’re safe just because we were born here or because we’re an American citizen is misguided. Many people who have been detained were here legally—they had the right visas, they had the green cards, they did everything they were supposed to be doing. None of that mattered.
There is some small sliver of hope that ICE will not be able to keep up its current pace of detentions and deportations because the agency is running out of money. Budget experts estimate that the agency could, in fact, run out of funds by next month. Axios reported that ICE is over a billion dollars over budget, which makes you wonder what the Department of Government efficiency was really doing other than trying to steal Social Security from us.
According to legal experts, this may be illegal. Under the Anti-Deficiency Act, federal agencies can't spend money they don't have. Remember, federal agencies are supposed to be funded by Congress. The executive branch can't just decide to reallocate funds randomly, but that's exactly what's happening here with ICE.
According to multiple news outlets, ICE has been forced to rely on other agencies including the FBI, the DEA and A TF, just to meet the daily arrest quota. Lawmakers from both parties are now warning that the Department of Homeland Security may be violating federal spending laws.
These manufactured crises—of the immigration state of emergency on the one hand and ICE’s budgeting problems on the other—is being used to push Donald's big abominable bill, which includes a 75 billion dollar handout to ICE over five years. That’s a massive amount of money that will go directly towards the Trump regimes project of kidnapping and disappearing brown peopl and surveilling communities of color. That's 75 billion dollars that won't go to agencies that actually need it to make our lives better.
July 17th is the date that’s been set for the next round of mass protests against Donald and the Trump regime. The date is of particular significance because it marks the anniversary of the death of civil rights activists and former congressman John Lewis. Lewis was a titan of the Civil Rights movement and it would be a fitting way to honor a man who showed such enormous courage in the fight to make sure that all Americans were treated with respect and afforded the same rights. We need men like John Lewis in these times. Unfortunately, he’s not here to help us out of this, so the very least we could do is make sure we show up to honor him and the fight he so courageously engaged in for his entire life.
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