Trump Posts Video Calling Netanyahu “Deep, Dark, Son of a Bitch”

Plus, New York Times obsesses over Radio Free Europe and the CIA

Columbia Professor Jeffrey Sachs, a recent guest on Tucker Carlson’s program, says Netanyahu is trying to drag the U.S. into war with Iran. Sachs appears to have President Trump’s attention.

Back on December 17, 2024, we noted that Tucker Carlson had given a platform to Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs to spread anti-Israel lies. Carlson, we noted at the time, was a fixture of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, with speaking roles at the fourth night of the Republican National Convention and at Trump’s pre-election Madison Square Garden rally.

Some updates are in order on that front.

First, Carlson is continuing with the campaign to portray American involvement in the Middle East as the project of some malign conspiracy. In a January 3 email, the Tucker Carlson Network noted a report of a potential Biden strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. “Some of Washington’s biggest and most influential lobbies would applaud an assault on Iran, but the American people would not. They do not want war. It must not occur,” Carlson’s email said, describing it as “needless and destructive.” (Hillsdale College appears to have dropped its sponsorship of Carlson after I flagged the issue, though another mainstream conservative institution, the Heritage Foundation, seems to remain a partner.)

Second, Trump himself today posted to social media a two-minute clip of Sachs, the Columbia professor who ranted groundlessly on Carlson’s show about how neocons and Netanyahu were responsible for wars that caused a million deaths and cost America $7 trillion. “Why did the U.S invade Iraq in 2003?” Sachs asks in the clip posted by Trump. “Abe Shulsky, if you want to know the name of the p.r. genius. … That war came from Netanyahu, actually….He’s still trying to get us to fight Iran this day, this week. He’s a deep, dark son of a bitch, sorry to tell you, cause he’s gotten us into endless wars and because of the power of all of this in the U.S. politics, he’s gotten his way.”

Trump could be posting the video because he’s decided to help Israel attack Iranian nuclear sites and he wants to make that attack more of a surprise by deceiving the Iranians with the impression that he has decided not to launch such an attack.

Or Trump could genuinely be sympathetic to the Tucker Carlson view that America is better off staying out of Middle East wars, and he could genuinely have decided not to help Israel with any attack on Iranian nuclear sites.

In regard to Abram Shulsky, I had some dealings with him back in the 1990s when he was at Rand and I was in the Washington Bureau of the Forward. He was an expert on intelligence. I found him to be a straight shooter. The idea that he was somehow singlehandedly responsible for the marketing of the Iraq War in the U.S. is laughable.

Anyway, my sincere hope is that this from Trump is all a misdirection to confuse the Iranians about an impending strike. If it isn’t, and if the incoming Trump administration genuinely wants to relitigate the mid-2000s battles about the neoconservatives, Israel, and the Iraq War, it’s going to be a long four years indeed.

I suppose there is some middle ground in which the Trump administration gives Israel a lot of support to do things in the region without activating American military assets, or by which the U.S. takes actions without publicly claiming credit for them. It all should be clear fairly quickly after January 20.

One savvy reader of The Editors warned me recently that Talmudic study of Trump's tweets can be hazardous to your mental health. I answered, “My mental health is okay…It’s not so much the tweets as what they indicate about the policy.”

The CIA and Radio Free Europe: The New York Times obituary of folksinger Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame reports, “His father, a lawyer, was an assistant district attorney in New York under Thomas E. Dewey. He later became a vice president of the C.I.A.-funded organization Radio Free Europe.”

This is such such a jarringly strange way to identify Radio Free Europe. Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe helped to win the Cold War by supplying reliable information to those trapped behind the Iron Curtain. They still exist. Its website notes “RFE/RL is funded by the U.S. Congress through a grant from the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) and has had no connection to the CIA for over fifty years.” Is the sole fact that Times readers need to know about Radio Free Europe for the purpose of an obituary of Peter Yarrow really that the broadcaster’s U.S. government funding used to be delivered via the CIA rather than by some other mechanism? The Times managed to publish an entire obituary of Bernard Yarrow in 1973 without dragging the CIA into the story.

If the idea is to imply that peacenik Peter Yarrow’s singing career was somehow an act of revenge against his CIA father, this seems an awfully glancing way to do it. Plenty of organizations got funding from the CIA, including the AFL-CIO. When the Times writes about the labor movement, it doesn’t mention “the C.I.A.-funded AFL-CIO.” The passage reads as if it were edited by someone unfamiliar with the history of Radio Free Europe.

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