Jon Stewart on Iran, Israel and Trump’s Hush Money Trial | David E. Sanger

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It's America's only source for news. This is the daily Churn with your home show door. Hi, everybody welcome. Oh I almost I almost surprise myself. What the heck? What is my head doing? There? We go? Hey, you are going to do show? Miname is John Stuart unbelievable show. They're already exhausted from the open. By the way, how was your weekend? My weekend was breaking At this moment. Israel underfire from Iran.

It's just raining rockets with those sirens blaring out.

We do effectively have World War three in progress.

Oh no, not world War three. I'm still writing a rock war on all my checks. But yes, the skies above Israel were lit up like I want to say Christmas tree, but that's probably not for that area. Menora is the moment society has dreaded since the arms cysts of nineteen forty five finally upon us. As Einstein said, he doesn't know what weapons World War II will be fought with, but he knows the next ones will be

Jordan's air force also intercepted and shot down dozens of drones that violated its airspace and were on their way to Israel.

And we've now learned that Saudi Arabia and the UAE provided real time intelligence that helped track the incoming missiles. What are the teams in these wars? I don't even know the teams anymore? The Arab countries are helping Israel. I don't know what the teams are. We need to sort this out with jerseys or something, because Iran could attack at any moment.

In a statement, Iran said it now considers the matter.

Concluded, Hey, do you hear that we're good?

We're good.

We don't. By the way, he was delicious. Really that's what got me. Anyway, We're gonna be okay.

Israel has vowed it will respond to Iran.

All right, can I have a word with you? Middle East? Over here? A shaloma lekam trying to cover all bases. Listen, I hope this doesn't sound patronizing, but when we in the West drew your region's borders and set you up with perfectly functioning dictatorships, we expected a little better. See. The agreement was we would make up a whole new bunch of countries, some of which made sense, and in return, you would give us your delicious oil. That was the deal.

Run?

Oh? And apparently now there's two kinds of Islam. I mean, you could have told us that before we got into this. As I said earlier, arbitrarily jerrymandered your homeland. So do better keep that oil coming. And by the way, we got enough trouble keeping track of our own wars. Like this weekend, our former president and illustrious historian Donald J.

What an un believable battle. That was the Battle of Gettysburg. What an unbelievable I mean, it was so much and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible and so beautiful in so many different ways. It represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg.

Wow. That is plagiarized almost directly from my seventh grade book report Gettysburg. Wow. I did not know, hadn't my man? It was vicious and horrible and beautiful? Is he talking about a Civil War battle or a horse giving birth? Later? It was bloody, but it's life now, obviously not a Civil war buff like but unlike me. He even knows all the famous quotes.

I go to get his Burg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch, and the statement of Roberty Lee, who's no longer in favor? Did you ever notice that no longer in favor? Never fight uphill, me, boys, Never fight uphill. They were fighting uphill? He said, Wow, that was a big mistake. He lost his great general and they were fighting.

Never fight uphill, me, boys. It is. It is true the North did have the higher ground, But I'm pretty sure that Robert E. Lee was not a leprechaun. Ah, I never fight up here. That's not how to take back to Narth spotty, lord, you can't be fighting up here me byes also a minor point, but I'm pretty sure Robert Lee would not have told them never fight uphill, since he's the one who told them to fight up hill. He wasn't like, hey, you know, they go up the hill.

Now breaking news the first ever criminal trial involving a former president will soon get underweight.

Oh my god, Donald, don't run up that Hell me bye, stay down, stay down to hear me by, stay down. Yes, After years of anticipation, our criminal trial of a former president has begun, and by all accounts, it is absolutely revetting.

Forty minutes ago, you wrote to an observation that I was very surprised Trump appears to be sleeping.

His head keeps dropping down and his mouth goes slack.

Tell us about.

That, well, Jakie appeared to be asleep.

A jake? What part of head down? Ice closed? Drool coming of his mouth? Do you not get over here? He's snoring, he's doing the hong shoe, he's doing the me There's a piece of paper going up and down and up and down in his mouth. He's asleep. Imagine committing so many crimes you get bored at your own trial.

This is an elegical persecution. This is a persecution like never before. Nobody's ever seated a big like it. And again, it's a case that should have never been brooked. It's to the soul character. And that's why I'm hurried for having to be here.

Well, it's true. Trump is always very proud to be part of any assault on America. Look even oh worse, Yes, mister Stewart, we agree. Look, even if the prosecution is a bit of a stretch, it's not persecution. The guy's not Nelson Mandela or Jesus.

I don't mind being Nelson Mandela because I'm doing it for a reason.

Trump also shared two articles that compared him to Jesus Christ. One was titled quote the Crucifixion of Donald Trump.

Hi don't let him crucify me. Boy. We had full teme coverage out of the courthouse in Lower Manhattan to day. Here with an update on which Martyr Trump more resembles Jesus or Nelson Mandela. It's Ronnie Chag and Daisy Lida. I'm gonna start with Ronnie Chag, Jesus or Mendela.

Clearly Mendela, all right, both for two heroes unjustly persecuted by a corrupt legal system. And as Mendela often said, and I quote, this is a witch hunt hoax.

I've never even met horseface.

I totally disagree. Ronnie Jesus Christ. He's obviously Jesus Christ. It's right there in the New Testament or in its sequel, The Art of the Deal, chapter ten, verse eight, and lo he evicted the rent controlled tenants. And it was good and tremendous and vicious and beautiful Jesus.

Wow. Oh, hang on, hang on, just think about this on second. Okay, Trump and Mendela they both had three wives, eh, Jesus, they even have a serious girlfriend.

Okay, the guy had no riz. I don't think Rizz is an approval anyway. Mendela was in prison for twenty seven years, Ronnie, So it's.

Yes, But if you add up all the prison sentences Trump got for other people from January sixth, and his campaign and his business, it's way more than twenty seven years. Okay. Trump is like ten Nelson mandelas.

No, Ronnie Trump is Jesus.

They both have a ton of buildings with their names on them, filled with portraits of themselves to be worshiped, and they both sold sneakers, gold sneakers.

Hold On, hold on, I'm sorry to interrupt that this is ridiculous.

Okay, Johnson, everybody.

Trump is not Mandela or Jesus. Okay, we all know that Donald Trump is oj.

I don't think that, did you say oj Yeah?

John oj Trump? They were both icon celebrities in the eighties. Plus Donald J. Trump is the J for juice probably, but most importantly, their obvious guilt didn't deter their loyal fans, who either think they're innocent.

Or don't care they're guilty.

Jesus had loyal fans not like this.

So if he's ojay, you're saying that whether or not Trump slept with Stormy Daniels or paid Stormy Daniels hush money, it's not gonna matter. He's walking away a free man.

Yes, And personally I'm excited for the moment in the trial when Trump will drop his pants and say, if the glove don't fit, you must have quit.

Well by Donathy and Jocks, everybody won't come back with David Sanger, don't go away?

Why come back to the time I got tonight a White House. A national security correspondent for the New York Times. His latest book is called New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's struggle to defend the West. Please welcome back to the program, David Sanger. So we wrote another batter new prot works. David. First of all, thank you. It's nice to see you again.

Good to be here.

Is the premise that the United States did a poor job of managing risk after the fall of the Soviet Union, Well.

We certainly made a lot of false assumptions, bad assumptions.

That doesn't sound along the way, Yeah, I.

Wouldn't be as, wouldn't be as. And the fundamental argument of the book is that we believed, somehow we deluded ourselves into believing that China and Russia, each for their own different reasons would like to sign up to the Western world that we were going to go say, look, we got this whole thing figured out. All you guys do is come in here and sign on the dotted line.

Right, We're going to do a rules based democratic foundation order and everybody'll be cool with it.

And that was supposed to be the end of history, because right we were.

Said, it's the end of history. Western liberalism is triumphant, and we can all just skate on the glorious booty that we get from it.

Right now, you can't blame just him, because there were a lot of other people believe JUSTI, okay, and I signed on to a little bit of this myself, so I confess. But I got to tell you this basically went on for thirty years, good twenty five anyway, because we were busy doing the wars on Terry. We were just talking about those little.

When you talk about in the book, there's a lot of stories of how George Bush thought that there would be a great reprochemont with Putin over there shared dislike of terrorism and the two of them. I mean, there's stories in there that come out of James Bond. You're on a yacht with George Bush and Putin and they've just seen a very dark version of the Nutcracker. You're like, it's not even the regular Nutcracker, it's the dark Nutcracker.

And you're like, I bet Bush really enjoyed that.

I'm sure you love anything high.

So, so this was two thousand and two. We were in Saint Petersburg. We were floating down the Never River. They're in a great party boat.

There's this guy.

Wait, you were floating down the river with them. I was floating down on the boat behind it. We weren't eat like tubing. That's what white house reporters do, isn't it. We were in the pools, just this sign. The pool was a river, all right, Okay. So so we're following him down and there's this guy serving dinner. He's kind of big and hulking. It turns out it's Pregosion.

Okay, Jenny Progosion, the head of the Terrible Army.

Well, at the time, he was putin chef. Okay, his only job was make sure the meals were good and a really glowering Wait.

So he's like Bobby Flay and then he turns into the head of a Mercenary Army.

Well before he did that, he ran the Internet Research Agency and tried to fix the twenty sixteen election with this information.

They really are renaissance, man, it really is. I mean that's talent, that's talents. So now this appears to be going along until George Bush wants them to go after Islam terrorism. And then at that point Putin wants them to go after Chechtein.

Right, or at least Putin wants to use the excuse to go after Cheschney. And that was the beginning of Bush beginning to think, you know, maybe this guy isn't the one we thought he was.

He looked into his soul.

Yeah, well, you know, he may have looked at the wrong soul. So so in two thousand and seven, Putin shows up at this thing called the Munich Security Conference and he says, you know, there are parts of Russia that have been separated from us that really belong to us, that to the Russia that Peter the Great created. And remember Putin isn't trying to recreate the Soviet Union. He

Progosian? No? No, no, how do we miss all of this? And even if we had been onto it, what would we have done differently?

So first it was a combination of sort of bad intelligence, wishful thinking. Oh, sure, he's going to be troublesome, but at the end of the day, he cares about his oil exports, his gas exports, more than he really cares about this. And look up until the weekend before the invasion happened.

There's a story.

No, the invasion of Ukraine in twenty twenty two.

So all past twenty fourteen, Yeah.

Twenty fourteen comes, he takes crimea. Obama says, I'm not going to war for something that used to belong to Russia. Nobody does sanctions for a year, right, And then next year the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel signs the nord Stream two agreement, creates this pipeline that runs from Russia around Ukraine's what doesn't get any revenue from it, and straight into Europe. And he says, she says, you know, Putin's.

A reliable supplier. Is realistic? Yeah?

Right, okay, reasonable assumption maybe because he really hadn't cut off gas supplies. So what happens next? Seven years later he goes after full on Ukraine. The US reveals the intelligence in starting in the late fall, they get this remarkable intelligence. They send Bill Burns, the CIA director who used to be ambassador to Russia, to say, this would be a really bad idea. Putin says, oh, I'm not

So what did he think that noise was? He got out of town kind of fast. So this is all hindsight, though in truth, what could we other when someone is imperialistic in that way? What can other powers do short of an actual shooting war to prevent these kinds of things. There's no guarantee that tougher sanctions after CRIMEA would have deterred him. It sounds like this is kind of his destiny and he's fulfilling that destiny, come hell or high water.

So that's the other piece of this, which is we impose our values on Russia China and we think, well, we're not going to do something that would get in the way of our economic interests.

Neither would they.

So China's a really interesting example. Xhijingping comes in more than ten years ago. Joe Biden spent a lot of time with him, traveled around with him. But the intelligence reports of as she are, this guy's not going to challenge the West. He's going to tend to his economy,

That's just convenience. It's not are we lying to them or are we lying to ourselves? I think more to ourselves.

So, you know, we did not want to conceive of a world in which we were back in superpower conflict. We wanted to live in the world in which the US was the predominant power. We finally calmed down the Middle East or doing real well with that, and and that we could focus on competing with China, some containment of Russia. And you know, Biden happened to be the one sitting in the office, sitting in office when this all fell apart. And most of the book is a

They're nice, not familiar with the last name, but go ahead.

Yeah, he's actually sat of the black sheep of the family. I a Democrat who raises money for Biden among others. So they're, you know, nice New Yorkers walking around with their wine looking at his art collection. The President comes in and says, by the way, we're going through something that is the closest to nuclear war we've had since the Cuban missile crisis. They're all looking at each other, like.

He drops that at a cocktail party.

I'm sure they all thought that it was really the moment to get out of the Hamptons.

Don't you think he drops that? And then it's like, do you guys have breathe like he does.

Actually, people in the White House were amazing. Now call it his Armageddon speech, because he had just said the same thing in the Oval Office.

Right then. Then he turned to everybody and go and my word is don't. That's a big thing now, he tells. He tells dictators don't don't. And they're like, okay, haven't we sowed the seeds of this with our own arrogance and cavalier approach to a lot of these foreign policy conflicts.

So there's been a lot of that going on in American history for a long time. Teddy Roosevelt, you know, took over his fair share of territory. But I think in the Biden administration we've had to sort of face these contradictions because at the beginning of the administration, the president was saying just what you said, this is a battle between democracy and autocracy, and everyone says, Okay, that's pretty clean.

Then he goes to just not true.

Yeah, Then he goes then he goes to Saudi Arabia does the fist bump with NBS right, And I was on that trip.

They weren't quite sure. How that are you ever home?

When you cover the White House, you got to go where the president goes as part of the job. And then you know, we move on to what's been happening in Israel and h and the Israel Hamas war. And as you said earlier, we are in the very odd position of both providing aid and providing the arms that

Would it simplify our position if we stopped pretending our morals were beyond the reproach of all these other countries? Would it help us to not have to scold everybody for failing to live up to principles that we very clearly do not uphold.

Well, at least we have some principles. Okay, that's the one thing.

We say that. But you know, you can invade a country, what happened in Iraq. That's you can't call for regime change? What did we do in Libya? Every time we say these things, we undercut our own position with I mean, for God's sakes, Iran is an enemy today because we overthrew their democratically elected government nineteen fifty three. That's right. So at what point do we just admit that this is how we're behaving.

The odd thing is at the moment that presidents do admit that, they get chewed up for admitting to American error. Obama went and apologized to the Iranians.

Saying apologize. I'm just saying, like, take off the mask and go, you know what this is? It strikes me as it's colonialism and imperialism in a more modern form. China is in Africa trying to extract. We're trying to extract. We're militarizing economic rivalries and creating all kinds of chaos and death over what is ostensibly trying to get better deals.

Well, some of it's better deals, some of it is protecting technology. And I argue in here that with China as opposed to Russia, this is, first of all, this is incredible competitor and it's a competitor and a military sphere, in the technology sphere, in finance, in economics, and we're their best customer and then they are ours. And that's really what makes this different from the old Cold War. So a reason there's new in new Cold Wars, and there's a reason there's an ass at the end. First

Case, fighting the wrong terminology, because isn't that Look, the only people that never lose a war or the military industrial complex are the people that sell the weapons. And if we continue to if we continue to push that, you know, weaponization of these economic rivalries, aren't we just playing into that cycle?

We are playing into the cycle. But if you're in a world in which vacuums happen, if we say, okay, we're done with this, you're going to go back and build our big walls and sort of received from it, someone fills that space. And that space is going to get filled largely by China, some by Russia, some by

It seems like what we should do is be honest about what our aims are in the way that China went into Africa and did Belton Road, knowing that really it's about cobalt and lithium, and rather than us going into Africa and just building up all these small military juntas that end up creating all those dictatorships that create so much cash and pain for those countries.

Well, I'd argue that now we're not doing it with cobalt, We're doing it with semiconductors.

Right.

So the the big story that we tell in here went to Taiwan. Spend a lot of time at Taiwan Semiconductor, which is the biggest producer of the most advanced semiconductors in the world, and you looked at the question does that create a silicon shield for the United States and for Taiwan? In other words, that the Chinese would not dare take over Taiwan because they would lose access to Taiwan semiconductors.

We're going to learn any sentence that begins with would they dare? Yes, they would dare, and so would we and so and so.

My argument here is it's a silicon shield for a little while, John, but eventually the Chinese are going to learn how to make everything Taiwan Semiconductor is making. And at that moment we've got a real Taiwan crisis. And so the book is sort of a warning head to what these next twenty or thirty years are going to look like, because this is not a world in which these new cold wars are going to end sometime soon.

I don't believe that last part.

The Trump's never leaving.

I think the two of them, honestly, it'll be like twenty eighty four and they'll be like it's another Biden Trump rematch. I can't believe it. Two heads in a jar, who pro wars? It is available now, David Sire and Hijo, thank You's notch op for tonight before we go. We're checking with your hosts for the rest of the week. Don't say so, don't say hello, They'll say excited for you know, ho's the week? What are we gonna be

No no, no, no no no no, no, no, no no no.

I'm looking for the real players.

I'm asking the Republican Party to pay me hush money.

Well that's a fair point. Don't say so on all this week.

Let me say it again, more sheep is not going to solve the wolf problem. My advice to the President today, for what it's worth, mister President, don't stop it. Support Israel with respect. Go to Amazon and buy a spine on.

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