"The Final Bluff" | Jeffrey Sachs Exposes the Fatal Move That Triggered Netanyahu's End

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]uh, for joining us. I want to spend some time uh, exploring this New York Times report that Netanyahu and company plotted a coup in Tehran involving the former hardline president of Iran, Ahmadinejad, but before uh, we get there, uh, I want to ask you, can Donald Trump sue himself?

[00:00:23]I mean, to me, this agreement that Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, who should never, ever be the attorney general of the United States, is unconstitutional, unethical, and unenforceable.

[00:00:38]Trump just has his uh, hand in the kitty on everything. We have lost any semblance of the rule of law. It stinks so badly that even Republican senators are scandalized, and that goes a long way. Our political system has been corrupt for decades, but Donald Trump is without any constraint at all. He is enriching himself and his family using uh, government resources for absolutely uh, not only personal benefit, but narrow partisan benefit, and uh, it's the likes of which we've never seen in our country.

[00:01:29]And um, the instrument for much of this is a very fine trial lawyer who has totally corrupted himself in an effort to induce the president to name him attorney general, but after his performance behind closed doors, so we only know what happened by a few senators that have leaked it, after his performance before the Republican Senate Caucus 2 days ago, it'd be hard for me to believe that he could be uh confirmed as Attorney General. This guy will do anything the president asks from indicting the former director of the FBI on a matter of free speech to indicting the former president of Cuba on a matter of government security. So, let me ask you this.

[00:02:18]If if a foreign or ter- or or what you believe is a terrorist organized airplane is illegally over your airspace and you ask the plane to turn around twice and it doesn't turn around, of course you can shoot it down. Remember when the balloons were flying over the United States, we were going crazy and the and then the Biden administration finally shot them down. They turned out to be nothing, but we had the right to do so.

[00:02:44]I'm not in favor of killing people, but doesn't the government have the right to do what what the Raul Castro is accused of having done?

[00:02:54]What the Cuban government did was in uh defense, uh national defense. What Trump does is murder. He just kills people in boats in open waters without the slightest uh claim, uh the thinnest veneer of national security.

[00:03:16]So, Trump's just an outright murderer.

[00:03:19]Uh Cuba was acting in self-defense.

[00:03:23]We were horrified, rightly, uh that uh someone made an assassination attempt on US government officials. It happened a short time after the United States had deliberately assassinated the leadership of Iran.

[00:03:40]This is a a strange situation. We are using words of law by gangsters on in our side, uh who commit far worse abuses than anything we're claiming of other countries. It's It's absolutely >> When President Trump When President Trump in his first term dispatched CIA drones to kill General Soleimani, that was actually an act of murder. Soleimani was on a peace mission. He was in a country that was an ally of ours, Iraq.

[00:04:22]He was a general of a country with which we were not at war at the time, Iran.

[00:04:26]There was no lawful basis to assassinate him. Is somebody going to indict Trump for murder?

[00:04:35]Well, uh This is what is happening.

[00:04:41]Our presidents are in general murderers. They order the assassinations or the killings of people that I do not have any protection. There's no judicial claim or anything else. Trump does that regularly right now. But I would say that this kind of extrajudicial killing is part and parcel of American statecraft at least in the 21st century from George Bush Jr. to Obama to Trump 1 to Biden to Trump 2. But happened is it's become completely normalized so that it's just normal that the president orders murder from the White House and the murder of the leaders of other countries or the kidnapping of other countries' leaders or now the indictment which is a prelude to another US regime change operation, which is underway in Cuba. So, we have a a gangster government. Uh we have uh most leaders in the world afraid because if they say something, the gangsters will go after them. Uh so, we have a lawlessness right now, which we've never seen before. Uh Right.

[00:06:15]And what are they going to do with >> work. It it doesn't doesn't So, President Trump is going to send a bunch of beefy soldiers to kidnap a 95-year-old man in Havana? We're we're within I don't know, hours or days of another regime change operation.

[00:06:40]And again, uh it's blatantly fundamentally illegal uh by any international standards, illegal by United States actions. Right.

[00:06:53]>> But, commonplace. If I could, I wanted to read everybody the reason why the UN was set up. Uh knowing that we'd be talking about this topic, in the core purposes of the United Nations, it says, "All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."

[00:07:28]This was the We don't want another World War, and we don't want nuclear annihilation. So, all member states, that includes the United States, which really once upon a time set up the United Nations, shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. We're using it right now.

[00:07:58]We're about to overthrow Cuba.

[00:08:01]We've kidnapped and basically in a conspiracy taken over indirectly the government of Venezuela. We tried in a completely hairbrained scheme of Trump and Netanyahu to do the same in Iran. Same plot, same idea. It's led to a worldwide disaster as these uh uh madcap operations do. They're not just ludicrous, they're tragic in their outcomes. And the whole point of the United Nations was stop doing this for God's sake. But Trump is completely himself without any idea of law or restraint. He's told us that. He said the only restraint is is his own decisions. That's all that counts. He's told us that. When he said that, we didn't say uh this man is not fit to be president of the United States because that's a violation of his oath of office, a fundamental violation. Nobody said it.

[00:09:08]Where was the Speaker of the House?

[00:09:09]Where was the majority leader of the US Senate? These institutions have become meaningless because these people do not understand or honor their oath of office. The gangsterism of Trump is clear, but what's amazing is how uh the people in his party, because they're so scared of him, because they put themselves above the country and above the Constitution, don't do anything about it. It's true. You do something, well, with this thug until uh he's really brought to law, yeah, you may pay a price like uh Massie did last week, the congressman who stood up and told the truth about Epstein and about many other things of Trump. You might pay the personal price, but our country's at stake, for God's sake.

[00:10:00]This is really the point.

[00:10:02]All right, I do want to get to this bizarre alleged plot involving uh former President Ahmadinejad, but before we do, I I not to animate you, but to induce your response, I have to run a clip of President Trump 2 days ago on a on a tarmac in which he says of Prime Minister Netanyahu, he says this twice, he'll do whatever I want him to do, and I'm wondering if it's really the other way around, but you tell me after you watch this. It's pretty brief and very direct.

[00:10:35]>> Chris Cut number six.

[00:10:36]>> What did you say to the to Prime Minister Netanyahu about Iran and how long to to hold off on strike?

[00:10:41]>> he'll do whatever I want him to do. He's very very good man.

[00:10:45]Uh he'll do whatever I want him to do, and he's a he's a great guy. To me, he's a great guy.

[00:10:52]Don't forget he was a wartime Prime Minister.

[00:10:55]And he's not treated right in Israel, in my opinion.

[00:10:59]Aside that he's a great guy, but will Netanyahu do everything Trump wants him to do, or is it the other way around?

[00:11:06]Will Trump do everything Netanyahu wants him to do? Well, I think Trump is right.

[00:11:12]If Trump said to stop doing this, Netanyahu would have to stop doing it.

[00:11:16]The the point that Trump is really making is that every illegal action, every illegal war, every completely bizarre scheme Trump has signed off on.

[00:11:32]He He's not uh a puppet of Netanyahu.

[00:11:35]He's just an idiot.

[00:11:37]What What is your take on this New York Times piece alleging effectively that the former President Ahmadinejad was co-opted by the Israelis and ready to be installed in place of President Rouhani, whom you and I have met and interacted with?

[00:11:54]Well, I think that the point of the story is correct and I was waiting to hear details like this. The point is the following.

[00:12:02]And again, I would like people to understand if they don't know the history, US foreign policy going back to the creation of the CIA in 1947 is based on uh regime change. That means that the United States abrogates to itself the claimed right to decide who governs in other countries. And if the United States doesn't like who's governing because maybe they won't give an oil concession or they won't allow a military base or they won't pay a payback or they won't give a bribe or they won't let their territory be used for an insurgency against a neighboring country, then the CIA, which is a private army of the United States, abrogates to itself the right to bring down that government. What we're watching is this behavior. It's happened probably a hundred times since 1947.

[00:13:09]Lindsay O'Rourke, the superb political scientist at Boston College, wrote a book about this about eight years ago called Covert Regime Change. She was a PhD student of John Mearsheimer. She documented 64 regime change operations, mostly CIA, between 1947 and 1989. She pointed out that they're disasters. They lead to civil war. They lead to insurrection.

[00:13:38]They lead to continued unrest. They lead to boomerang [clears throat] effects on the United States. They don't work.

[00:13:45]But the CIA is a kind of madcap, completely unaccountable agency.

[00:13:52]A few presidents tried to keep it a bit under control.

[00:13:57]President Kennedy tried the hardest and he probably lost his life because of that effort. Trump just encourages it. So, with Venezuela, we knew the story as it's told that the valiant US military went in and captured the president by surprise. Wasn't true. The stories that have now come out are that there This was a regime change in Venezuela with a conspiracy between the CIA on the one side and elements that are now in power in Venezuela on the other side who conspired to remove the president and then get a promotion themselves. And money, no doubt, changed hands as well.

[00:14:47]The Iranian operation was the same. They told us in the first day, "There will be a new regime. It will be pliant to the United States."

[00:14:59]That operation failed.

[00:15:02]Then it was surmised that what the US and Israel had supposedly meant was that they would kill a lot of people, including the religious leader and leaders of the government, and then there would be a public insurrection, and then the regime would change. That story never seemed right to me. I was waiting for the inside job, who they were going to put in place, how this coup was actually going to work. And I credit The New York Times with doing a good job of telling us what the real story was. Yes, Trump said, "I'll pick the next government."

[00:15:41]He said it. He told us. This is not subtle. People need to listen.

[00:15:46]But then, now we know what they had in mind, which was that they were going to take a former president who was under house arrest and against the current government, and they were going to put him in place. And then, they had to spring him from his house arrest, so they had to kill the guards around him, but it turns out, apparently, that they injured this guy as well. And so, the plot failed right away. In the meantime, the whole world economy is reeling, oil prices are $110 a barrel, gasoline in the United States is $4.50 a gallon, the streets of four moves are closed, thousands have been killed, tens of billions of dollars have gone because of this craziness.

[00:16:39]Now, when is that going to be made public and held accountable?

[00:16:44]Obvious answer, never.

[00:16:47]Never. There's no accountability.

[00:16:51]Gangsters aren't accountable.

[00:16:54]This kind of uh undeclared war, as you your show leads in rightly every episode, this has become commonplace, just as it says.

[00:17:06]Nobody looks at this. The last time that one looked at the horrors under the covers of the CIA was 1975.

[00:17:17]It was called the Church Committee. uh Church of Idaho, a brave man, looked and found out that it was far worse than anyone thought. That was 51 years ago.

[00:17:30]We've never had another look. So, yes, this madcap crazy idea and Trump is right. Netanyahu didn't tell him to do it. Netanyahu wanted to do it. Trump's an idiot enough to do it. The other presidents before him knew that this was crazy, but not Trump cuz he doesn't understand.

[00:17:49]And so, this is where we are. And the New York Times did a good job telling us in two good stories. One about the meeting with Netanyahu, the head of Mossad, and Trump [clears throat] where they were the only three in the room that thought that this whole idea wasn't crazy. And then the second story that exposed just how completely crazy this whole thing is.

[00:18:13]But the mindset needs to be understood.

[00:18:17]The mindset is the United States shouldn't leave well enough alone. The United States shouldn't abide by any international law. The United States shouldn't abide by the UN Charter that it created. The United States should change governments when and where it wants. In Mexico, in Greenland, in Canada, in Venezuela, in Cuba, in Iran, you name it. That's our foreign policy, so-called.

[00:18:48]It's true. You look at Rubio, you know it it can't be based on diplomacy.

[00:18:52]That's for sure.

[00:18:54]Well.

[00:18:55]This is where we are.

[00:18:56]>> be what has become of Ahmadinejad? Has he been arrested and executed? That makes this treason. Well, probably probably [laughter] they're not too humored by what happened. I that I'm sure. We don't know.

[00:19:11]And we have no more information than what I have no more information than what what was given in that story. But the point is what we're doing is nothing like what is discussed on the surface. It has nothing to do with the Constitution. It has nothing to do with international law. It has nothing to do with national law.

[00:19:35]Trump is enriching himself. He's enriching his friends. He has taken over the machinery of government and uh our speaker of the house and our majority leader are co-conspirators because they are silent even though they are a co-equal branch of government with a constitutional responsibility to stop this complete lawlessness. Of course, the Justice Department once upon a time the idea was that it was actually about justice. Now it's about Trump's uh complete use of the words of law to go after his enemies or his supposed enemies and to enrich himself and his friends.

[00:20:23]Uh Chris, I have one or two more questions for Professor Sachs, but I want you to change the title of this episode to Professor Sachs on fire.

[00:20:36]Um is the Strait of Hormuz open or closed? Are negotiations still going on?

[00:20:42]Or when Trump says This is going to aggravate you cuz I think I know the answer.

[00:20:48]Oh, we're getting close. Is he just manipulating the market again?

[00:20:52]Yes, he is.

[00:20:54]We're not getting close by any sign whatsoever that we can see. I we're in a situation that has been understandable from the second day. Once this madcap plot to put Ahmadinejad in power failed within the first minutes, the United States was trapped. The United States was trapped because the whole idea was not only illegal, uh reckless, but it was doomed to fail if this crazy plot wasn't successfully realized, which it was not and it failed. So, from the second day onward, Iran had retaliatory capacity and deterrent effect. Then, the United States could take military action against Iran, no doubt, but the result would be the destruction of the Middle East. The result would be the destruction of the world economy. So, Trump threatens and blusters, but if he acts, we have what is now a a a a a a a a a a very uh serious economic crisis. We have the calamity of the century. Uh and um probably someone has explained that maybe in slow simple language to Mr. Trump that you can't do it, that there is no option. They fired a lot of generals that apparently told uh Hegseth and Trump that, but uh the others that came in have been clear. So, no, there's no uh military solution. Trump blusters, he threatens, uh but he can't do anything other than blow up