Michael Moynihan
speaker
842 appearances
21 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Michael Moynihan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yes. James Monroe in 1823 told European powers to get off the Western Hemisphere. Don't install your puppet monarchs. In a late 19th century, Donald Trump's favorite president, William McKinley, prosecuted and won the Spanish-American War. Now suddenly owns kind of Cuba and Puerto Rico and the Philippines, although that one didn't go so well.
But in that process and after he was assassinated, Teddy Roosevelt installed the corollary, which is basically the U.S. asserts the right to intervene into the internal politics and military situation. Of broader Latin America because it's our near abroad. We have special care of that.
And I think what Trump is doing right now in making kind of trying to kick China out of the Panama Canal and trying to assert more latitude over Greenland is updating the Monroe Doctrine in a MAGA type way. That was 30 seconds. Okay. I like that. That's pretty good.
Go ahead, please.
He says that to Melania every night anyway.
He also followed that up today, though, right? It's like, you know, the fake news or whatever. It's not true that I have made an agreement to, and then, of course, all caps, blow Iran to smithereens. Yeah. Uh, no, I haven't made that deal. So just to make that clear, um, uh, you know, I want them to succeed. They just can't get a nuclear weapon.
Um, I, I worry when he does that, uh, not just for my own sanity. Um, but I worry a little bit that he is going to, um, people are not going to take his threats seriously. Um, uh, I, uh, presumed in the middle East, there's a better chance for people to take his threat seriously, although there's the kind of fly trap scenario that a morning hand was looking into.
But, you know, you also wonder if Iran is saying, OK, well, let's see what just happened with Mexico and Canada. Maybe we'll find a way to make him declare victory with a deal on a nuclear program that is actually kind of beneficial to Iran. I think that he's legitimately a hawk on Iran, which is also something that one who is like a MAGA non interventionist or intervention skeptic should look at.
with some level of concern. I mean, what was the Iraq war actually kind of about at the beginning? It was to make sure that Iraq didn't get a nuclear weapon. And Donald Trump, I think the more significant thing that he did yesterday in the White House was actually not the Gaza comments. It was recommitting the U.S.
to sort of maximum pressure on Iran if they get anywhere close, not just to a nuclear weapon, but with being too aggressive in their ballistic missiles program and And elsewhere. So what does that mean? I think probably what that means is that he would let Netanyahu or Israel do what is necessary from their point of view to make that not happen.
But are we committing the United States to act militarily if Iran gets close to a nuclear weapon? And what does that mean? That's that's difficult.
No, Chuck.
And some of that, some 6.4 million of that happened under during the Trump administration or like that's what the level was. In Trump 1.0, it's still like, why? Why is this happening? The government should pay for this. I think one of the things that Elon Musk is doing right now as installing Doge into the U.S. digital services organization, which was started under Obama.
created under Obama to help fix the problems with the Obamacare website, but then became this sort of government deficiency thing. By doing that, he is sort of seeing how the machinery of payments and tech happens with the government. This is sort of the difference between him and Vivek Ramaswamy about what to do with Doge.
Vivek, I think, was more concerned with executive orders and looking for these kind of efficiencies. And Musk is like, let me get inside the tech. And we're seeing the fruits – and I was initially on the side of Vivek Ramaswamy's approach towards this. We're seeing the fruits of the Musk approach this week.
And part of this, from my point of view, is not good just in the sense of you don't want to suddenly have the U.S. not have its websites that you can look up information about from database sets and stuff. And also you shouldn't suspend payment of services that have already been given. However, part of it has been really good – in terms of people going, what? We pay for what now?
Which organization? We've had a lot of listeners in places like Poland and Hungary come back with reports of like, oh, that's interesting that this magazine or this civil society opposition group suddenly is saying that we can't pay our employees because the checks didn't come through from USAID. It's like, what are we actually funding out there? I would point out USAID is $44 billion a year in
The estimated cost to rebuild Gaza is north of 80 billion dollars a year. So it's not necessarily about, you know, we're going to reduce the size and scope of government just if we do this. However, it does show a thing that has existed and has been kind of put on steroids since the time of George W. Bush and the faith based initiative programs.
Government loves to give money to private charities, nonprofit groups, civil society groups. And it does that a lot in big cities like New York. It also does this in overseas in ways that most people are not aware of. And I think a lot of it is pretty skeevy.
It ends up sort of rewarding your political allies, allowing people to have a job when their administration or with their political team is kind of out of power. And a lot of it's gross. And so what Elon Musk is doing is sort of giving a margin call, wake up call, about the mechanics of that. And I think that is it is pretty useful.
Showing 581–600 of 842 · page 30 of 43
← Previous
Next →