🧠 Is Trump the unexpected peace broker?
In this thought-provoking episode, award-winning journalist Aaron Maté explores whether Donald Trump's claims of negotiating peace in Ukraine hold real weight — or if it's just campaign posturing. 🇷🇺🇺🇦
📉 Can Trump break the endless war cycle where Biden and NATO have failed?
⚖️ What are the real stakes for Russia, Ukraine, and U.S. credibility?
🎯 Maté digs into the history, the power players, and the media distortion around it all.
💬 Is peace even possible in this geopolitical climate?
Join the conversation — and get the context you won’t find on cable news.
🔔 Like, comment & subscribe for more fearless analysis that cuts through the noise.
#AaronMate #UkrainePeacePlan #TrumpNegotiations #RussiaUkraineWar #Geopolitics #USForeignPolicy #EndlessWars #PeaceTalks #NATOPolitics #TruthUnfiltered #Trump2024 #RealJournalism #UkraineConflict #GlobalDiplomacy #DeepStateWatch #MediaBias #UkraineCrisis #AlternativeVoices #WarAndPeace #PoliticalAnalysis
In this thought-provoking episode, award-winning journalist Aaron Maté explores whether Donald Trump's claims of negotiating peace in Ukraine hold real weight — or if it's just campaign posturing. 🇷🇺🇺🇦
📉 Can Trump break the endless war cycle where Biden and NATO have failed?
⚖️ What are the real stakes for Russia, Ukraine, and U.S. credibility?
🎯 Maté digs into the history, the power players, and the media distortion around it all.
💬 Is peace even possible in this geopolitical climate?
Join the conversation — and get the context you won’t find on cable news.
🔔 Like, comment & subscribe for more fearless analysis that cuts through the noise.
#AaronMate #UkrainePeacePlan #TrumpNegotiations #RussiaUkraineWar #Geopolitics #USForeignPolicy #EndlessWars #PeaceTalks #NATOPolitics #TruthUnfiltered #Trump2024 #RealJournalism #UkraineConflict #GlobalDiplomacy #DeepStateWatch #MediaBias #UkraineCrisis #AlternativeVoices #WarAndPeace #PoliticalAnalysis
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03:41So Trump has to pick a choice here.
03:44Does he want to actually engage in diplomacy, which means addressing the grievances of your
03:49adversary?
03:49And Russia has a lot of them.
03:51Or does he want to continue to play the tough guy?
03:53And I think he's trying to find a middle ground.
03:55And Russia, because it went to war over this, is not going to accept that.
03:59And so if this is the continued course, what is going to happen is Trump will not go to
04:04Congress to ask for more money.
04:06That I am sure of.
04:07That's the one thing I think he can offer Russia here tangibly.
04:10And Russia has said there's no point in talking about a ceasefire if the weapons are going
04:15to continue.
04:15But if the intelligence support from the U.S. to Ukraine continues, and if European states
04:21can continue arming Ukraine, not to the extent that the U.S. can, but still to some level
04:25that is substantial, then this war will go on for a long period of time.
04:31So two questions.
04:33One is how much longer will the pipeline flow before Trump has to go to Congress and ask
04:40for more or just say, that's it?
04:42And two, is General Cavoli and his crew still in Wiesbaden, Germany, working with Ukrainian
04:49intel on targeting, on finding Russian targets?
04:56On the first question, how much longer is anyone's guess?
04:59A lot of money was appropriated last year, $60 billion.
05:03That's a lot.
05:04And that should last Ukraine at least, you know, a year.
05:09And we're coming up on that now.
05:10So who knows?
05:11I don't know how long they can stretch that out for.
05:14As for Cavoli, yeah, there is still obviously a U.S. force in Germany.
05:18And I believe formally, I think some managerial responsibility has been farmed out to the
05:23Europeans.
05:23But really, we all know who's running the show.
05:25And yes, so yes, it's safe to assume that the U.S. military is still playing an integral
05:30role in intelligence support to Ukraine.
05:33Here's President Trump two days ago talking about weapons to Ukraine.
05:40Chris, cut number one.
05:41If there is no peace deal, will the U.S. cut off military aid to Ukraine?
05:44I don't want to tell you that.
05:45I'm not going to tell you whether or not I would or not.
05:48I want to leave that as a big, fat secret because I don't want to ruin a negotiation.
05:52But I will tell you, I was not happy when I saw Putin shooting missiles into a few towns
05:59and cities.
06:00And that was not something that I like seeing.
06:03And I thought it was inappropriate.
06:04But I think the whole war is inappropriate.
06:08Well, he should talk to Pete Hegseth, who's shooting missiles into towns and cities every
06:12day in Yemen.
06:13Over 500, according to Larry Johnson, over 500 million dollars worth of munitions dropped
06:23on, aimed at, exploded in Yemen, Mr. President.
06:27Or his good friend Netanyahu, who is doing the same in Gaza while also imposing a starvation
06:33siege that Trump has done nothing to address except supporting it.
06:37But yeah, look, on this point, again, he's caught.
06:39He wants to end the war, but he's not yet made the political decision as to how far he's
06:47willing to go to address Russian concerns.
06:49And look, it's Russia's choice to fight.
06:51Russia went to war over this.
06:53And so Trump isn't obligated to meet all these Russian demands.
06:59I mean, especially, and it's hard given that Russia made the decision to invade for a U.S.
07:04president to reach some kind of sweeping deal with Russia.
07:06You know, I understand that.
07:07But from Russia's point of view, I don't think they care.
07:10They went to war over this.
07:11This is about their perceived security concerns and their perception of the well-being of ethnic
07:16Russians inside Ukraine who were threatened by the coup forces that the U.S. empowered
07:22with the backing of the Maidan coup in 2014.
07:24And so if Trump is not going to make a decision, Russia is going to continue pressing ahead.
07:29And no matter what Trump says about Putin, you know, he's not happy with this.
07:33Vladimir, stop as he implored Putin to do recently on social media.
07:37Russia is not going to care.
07:38And they're going to go ahead.
07:40Let me just stop you for a minute.
07:42Fox News is reporting that Mike Waltz has been fired as national security advisor.
07:49I don't know if you heard this.
07:50It apparently just broke a couple of minutes ago while we were on air.
07:57Do you know any more about this than this simple headline?
08:01I heard rumblings of this.
08:03I mean, this was going around.
08:04And Trump initially stood by Mike Waltz.
08:06But it was clear that, especially given what happened in the first term when Mike Flynn
08:11was also fired pretty quickly, that Trump didn't want to look weak again and once again
08:17fire a national security advisor so soon into his term.
08:21But look, this seemed pretty inevitable after Mike Waltz was responsible for adding Jeffrey
08:25Goldberg to that signal chat.
08:26And that was a massive embarrassment, despite the fact that Trump did his best to spin this
08:31and say that the fake news media was hyping this up.
08:34No, that was a disclosure of classified information.
08:37That was a major embarrassment.
08:38And so it was only a matter of time that Mike Waltz would be shown his way out the door.
08:42I have to say, politically, Mike Waltz has long represented the same sort of neocon dogma
08:48that people like Donald Trump claimed, and I stress claimed, to oppose.
08:54Endless wars, all the wars that Trump says he opposes, Mike Waltz has supported.
08:58So politically, this leads to someone who is less of a career neocon than Mike Waltz.
09:03And I think this is a development to welcome.
09:05Someone I don't, I never heard of by the name of Alex Wong, W-O-N-G, the principal deputy
09:13national security advisor, was also fired today.
09:17Yeah, he's also, he was also implicated in adding Jeffrey Goldberg to that signal chat.
09:21So I'm not surprised that he's been ousted as well.
09:24All right, back, back to where we were.
09:29Talk about the people around Trump and who's a neocon and who's not.
09:32Tell me what you think of this.
09:34Chris, the Hegseth full screen.
09:38This is the Secretary of Defense of the United States on his own ex-account.
09:44Message to Iran, we see your lethal support to the Houthis.
09:50We know exactly what you are doing.
09:53You know very well what the U.S. military is capable of, and you were warned.
09:58You will pay the consequence in caps at the time and place of our choosing.
10:03But what does this accomplish while Whitcoff is trying to negotiate with the foreign minister
10:09of Iran and negotiate with Putin and negotiate with Hamas?
10:17When Trump appointed John Bolton in his first term as his national security advisor, he was asked many times afterwards, why did you appoint John Bolton, who opposes everything that you stood for in your campaign and campaign against endless wars?
10:32And Trump said, you know, I like John Bolton there because he made me look, because he's crazy, because John Bolton's crazy.
10:38And I wanted our adversaries to think that I had someone crazy around me because I thought that would help my negotiating position.
10:44I want them to think that we're crazy enough to take reckless action.
10:47So maybe that's the method behind this madness of having his defense secretary openly threaten Iran with war, and Trump thinks that that will help his negotiating position, as Steve Whitcoff is currently engaged in talks, high-level talks, serious talks with Iran.
11:05It makes no sense to me.
11:06I think it's totally reckless.
11:07I think it's very dangerous.
11:08Imagine if an Iranian military official in that position said the same thing about the U.S.
11:15I mean, it's very dangerous stuff, but Trump feels as if this is a good way to do business, and let's hope that this is Trump's way of trying to do a deal, that he thinks that, like, by looking tough, it'll be easier for him to make a deal with Iran.
11:28That's my hope, because short of that, if this actually is a genuine threat, and they're considering striking Iran seriously, and they're deploying the defense secretary to make that threat, I mean, that's very, very ominous.
11:41Here's another, Hegseth.
11:44Chris, post this one.
11:47Well, that's this.
11:50This is Professor Mohamed Mirandi.
11:53Oh, okay.
11:53Sorry.
11:54So this is Professor Mirandi to Hegseth.
11:56Correct.
11:57Thank you, Chris.
11:57And thank you, Aaron.
11:59I'll read it.
12:00We see your lethal support for the Zionists, the child killers, the rapists.
12:05We know exactly what you are doing.
12:07You know very well what the resistance is capable of, and you were warned.
12:11You will be remembered as an accomplice to the hashtag Gaza Holocaust.
12:17All right, that might explain some of Hegseth's language, which mirrors a little bit of what the professor said.
12:23Do you know or know of this professor?
12:25Yeah, Professor Mirandi, I know him very well.
12:27Well, he's mirroring what Hegseth said.
12:29I mean, he's responding to Hegseth.
12:31That's what he's doing there.
12:32And, you know, look, Professor Mirandi, he doesn't speak for the Iranian government.
12:38So he's speaking for himself.
12:41All this bellicose talk on all sides, I would like to see negotiations.
12:46This is a very serious issue.
12:48There are serious talks going on.
12:49Well, that's my point.
12:51Witkoff, for all of his newness to the government, is a serious negotiator.
12:57And Hegseth is sounding like a schoolyard bully.
13:01Yeah, sure, exactly.
13:02I mean, it's ridiculous what he's saying.
13:03First of all, the premise of his comment that Iran is basically controlling the Houthis, a.k.a. Ansar Allah, it's farcical.
13:13Ansar Allah is an autonomous movement.
13:16They've made a decision to intervene to try to stop the Gaza genocide.
13:20You can criticize them for what they're doing in terms of going after ships if you want to.
13:27But to say that Iran is responsible, there's no evidence for that whatsoever, just as there's no evidence that Iran even knew about October 7th.
13:35These are all autonomous organizations, movements in Yemen with, you know, a large number of supporters who act on their own.
13:43And, you know, Max Blumenthal, my colleague, has done interviews with the senior official with Ansar Allah, who explained that from their point of view, this was an obligation to do something for the people of Gaza while the rest of the world watches silently as the people of Gaza are subjected to a genocide.
14:00So they've intervened in the way that they can, which is disrupting ships near Yemen.
14:05The idea that Iran is behind this, there's no evidence for that whatsoever.
14:08Let's go back to Trump's negotiating.
14:12Does he have any leverage with Putin?
14:15Well, he could have leverage if he chose once again to adopt the Biden policy of spending tens of billions of dollars on a proxy war.
14:24But look, you know, Trump has changed his mind a lot.
14:28He but he campaigned against this.
14:30He talked about making peace and he clearly does not want to be a part of this war.
14:34So I don't see him going before Congress and asking for another 50, 60 billion dollar military package for Ukraine.
14:41I spoke to someone close to the White House who also said there's no way that it's going to happen, who has a pretty good handle on Trump's thinking on this.
14:48Now, granted, Trump does change his mind a lot and who knows with him, but I'm pretty confident that he won't go before Congress.
14:55So that's his main point of leverage.
14:57He's threatened new sanctions on Russia.
14:59He's talked about secondary sanctions, which means that going after countries that buy Russian energy.
15:04But if he does that, that's going to hike energy prices for Americans.
15:08And Trump already dealing with a troubled economy and still grappling with the turmoil of his tariff rollout.
15:16I just don't think he's in any position to do that.
15:18Here he is yesterday in an interview with Glenn Beck saying Putin is easier to deal with than Zelensky.
15:27Cut number nine.
15:29I think he treated you poorly in the Oval myself.
15:33He's he's kind of a punk.
15:35But is is is is he the problem?
15:39You said it.
15:40Yeah.
15:40Is he the problem?
15:42Is Putin the problem or is Europe the problem?
15:46So, look, Russia is a very big military force and Ukraine isn't without Ukraine.
15:54And I'm the one that supplied the javelins to them.
15:56So, you know, I'm I did a lot for them because the tanks got stuck in the mud and then they got javelins.
16:02Right.
16:03And it's been remember this.
16:04I say it here.
16:05I say it every time.
16:05This is Biden's war, not my war.
16:07I'm just trying to end it.
16:09And I'm actually ending it.
16:10Yes, for money.
16:11But I'm not ending it for that.
16:13Number one.
16:13I'm ending it because they're losing five thousand people a week.
16:18Things were said like when Zelensky was in the Oval Office, I was talking about getting it done.
16:25And he starts screaming.
16:26But we need security, meaning security after the fact.
16:29I said security.
16:30I don't even know if we can get this deal done.
16:32He's asking for more.
16:34Just more and more and more.
16:36And he doesn't have the cards, as you know, because you see what's happening over there.
16:42He doesn't have the cards.
16:44So hopefully he's going to get it done, because I don't believe that Vladimir Putin would be doing this for anybody else but me.
16:52And I would say thus far, he's been easier to deal with than Zelensky.
17:00To deal with than Zelensky.
17:03An interesting, it seems to me strange, but an interesting observation.
17:09Zelensky is a puppet of the United States.
17:12Russia isn't equal to the United States.
17:15Zelensky is also a puppet of the supernationalists around him.
17:19He may truly be a puppet.
17:21He's not even the legitimate head of state.
17:25Zelensky, to me, is a hostage.
17:27He's a hostage to the ultra-nationalists, the extremists, who have repeatedly threatened his life if he makes a peace deal that addresses Russian concerns.
17:34And this goes back a long time.
17:35He's also a hostage to the U.S., and particularly the previous administrations, who did nothing to back him up when the ultra-nationalists, including neo-Nazis, were threatening his life.
17:47And he's especially a hostage to the Biden administration because he made the huge mistake of listening to them.
17:54They duped Zelensky.
17:56They promised Zelensky that if he walked away from that peace deal with Russia that his own team brokered in April 2022, three years ago as we're speaking, they promised him that we'll give you security guarantees.
18:09That recently came out from a Ukrainian negotiator, Alexander Chowley.
18:14He said that, you know, in talking to the U.S. and U.K., they said, we're not going to reach a peace deal that involves Russia.
18:20So if you want security guarantees with us, you have to not make a deal with Russia.
18:24So they listened.
18:25They walked away from Istanbul.
18:26Then they came back to Joe Biden and Boris Johnson and said, how about those security guarantees?
18:31And Joe Biden said basically, no, forget that.
18:34We'll give you weapons, and that's your security guarantee, meaning that we're going to dupe you into walking away from a peace deal.
18:41And then if you want anything from us, it's just weapons so that we can continue to use you to bleed Russia.
18:47And now Zelensky, having been duped by that, he needs something to show for it now from Trump.
18:51Trump's not going to give it to him.
18:52Well, are there security guarantees in the minerals deal?
18:55How can the United States have access to Ukrainian minerals without United States protection of the real estate?
19:01There's no security guarantees whatsoever in the minerals deal.
19:04All there is is Zelensky being so desperate that he's willing to do anything that could possibly, he's hoping, he's throwing it like a Hail Mary here.
19:13He's hoping that by signing this deal finally with Trump, that this will draw the U.S. closer in and will compel the U.S. to protect Ukraine in ways that Ukraine wants.
19:22But the deal doesn't contain any of that because Trump's not going to do that.
19:26This is just a desperate move by Zelensky to finally cave to Trump.
19:29What are Senators Lindsey Graham, John Goofball Kennedy, and Richard Blumenthal up to?
19:35Well, they want those secondary sanctions imposed to target Russia and anybody who does business with Russia.
19:41That's what they feel is the way to get leverage over Russia.
19:46John Kennedy just said that we're not going to have peace unless we make clear to Russia that we can turn the Russian economy into fish food.
19:53That was his term.
19:56This is a graduate of Oxford University who puts on this act to appeal to his audience in Louisiana.
20:05But what is accomplished by making a threat like that?
20:08This is as absurd as Lindsey Graham saying we're going to bomb the Iranian oil refineries.
20:14Exactly.
20:15Yeah.
20:15Look, it's tough talk.
20:16It's hard for these people to imagine engaging in diplomacy with an adversary, especially Russia, given the animus that still lingers from the Cold War.
20:26A lot of these people come from that period.
20:28They're steeped in this idea that you just can't negotiate with Russia.
20:31You can't make peace with what they still consider to be the Soviet Union, even though the Soviet Union has been long gone for three decades.
20:38And so that's where they're coming from.
20:39Just the concept of diplomacy just doesn't register with them.
20:44Aaron, thank you very much.
20:46Thanks for your time.
20:46Thanks for accommodating my schedule, dear friend.
20:49Look forward to seeing you again soon.
20:51Likewise.
20:51Thank you, Judge.
20:52Okay.
20:53And coming up later today at 1130 this morning, Colonel Douglas McGregor at two o'clock this afternoon, Colonel Larry Wilkerson at three o'clock this afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer, Justin Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
21:23And coming up later at 1130 this morning, Professor John Mearsheimer, Justin Napolitano for Judging Freedom.