Rod Blagojevich
speaker
701 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 26 Mar
Rod Blagojevich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The electrical grid, they bombed military bases. This was May of 1999. And I went, I was a young congressman there. I was the only Serb. The Serbs are a small group in the United States and they don't have any political clout. But Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Jackson and I went there because three American soldiers were taken prisoner by the Serbs during the war. And
No one knew what was going on with those soldiers. And so Reverend Jackson had this stature, and he was close to Clinton, and he went there. I went there because I speak the language because my father came from that country, and I was able to assist him in getting the release of the three soldiers. This was the Milosevic government at the time. And we got the soldiers home.
But what I like to talk about with regard to Serbia is it's a country in the Balkans that follows a Judeo-Christian tradition. It's very much like Israel in the sense that it's in a place where they're standing up for those sorts of things.
And the Serbs have felt very betrayed by the United States for choosing to be on the side of countries that were with the Axis and with the Nazis in World War II. And those wars down in the Balkans and throughout Europe are wars of ethnic cleansing. All the sides do it. There's no one side that, you know, is... crystal clean on those issues.
They're fighting for borders and they're fighting for villages and places where historically one group claims they had a claim to and another group claims they had a claim to. So these are complicated issues. But the United States decided to pick sides and force this country to give up a part of their country with a lot of significant religious monuments there.
And this government that's there today very much wants to reopen relations with the United States and have better relations. It's a growing economy. They're doing very well economically because they're good, hardworking people. And it's interesting.
In a poll recently of European countries in this presidential election, Trump versus Kamala Harris, the Serbian people had the highest support of Trump. Something like 59% of the Serbian populace supported Trump in the last election better than any other European country. And so whatever I can do to be helpful to the place my father came from. I'm American-born. My mother was American-born.
Oh, no. Oh, no, I'm not. No.
Unlikely. Oh, come on. No, unlikely I would take it.
McDonald's. He likes McDonald's.
He likes McDonald's. But there's a new opportunity with Trump and his administration to rethink sort of our policy and some of those old relationships.
She's the director of national intelligence. That's a huge, huge, huge position.
You're talking about an almost immovable object. You're talking about the deep state. You're talking about entrenched interests within government and outside of government. You're talking about what I call the political industrial complex. It exists in Washington. It exists in state governments like in Springfield, Illinois. It's the usual people.
And the two parties are split on some issues, but they play the game within certain parameters. And if somebody wants to think outside the box and challenge that and actually try to shake that up and change the priorities of how it operates, frankly, to actually benefit the people more.
Because the mindset there – and I know this because I was a congressman for six years and I was a governor for six years. The mindset isn't what we can do for the people back home. The mindset really is what the people back home can do for us and for all the different special interest groups that operate and are lunching up on this system. This is very real.
It's very real in every part of government. It's very real in – The military industrial complex, which is something Tulsi Gabbard and Hexeth and the others who, if they get their positions, are going to be addressing. The weaponized Department of Justice, very real. I'm a living testament to that, and so is Trump. Very real. The bureaucracy that's entrenched, that you have a hard time moving.
These government employees, many of whom now are even going to the office. They're working from home. They are entrenched. They're hard to move. So, this is going to be real hard. It's going to be constant war. They're going to fight back, and they're going to keep trying to do to Trump what they've been doing.
And I think the opportunity for the Trump administration, for President Trump, is the first six months to a year, because this time he has a bit of a honeymoon with the voters. He didn't get that in 2016, but this time he has it. He's got wind at his back, because that was a mandate.
Yeah, it was a mandate. He's got that. But he's going to get no honeymoon from the Democrats. And traditionally, presidents get, even the other party will give them the first three to six months before they start pissing all over them. You know what I mean? Trump and Lincoln are the only two presidents who never got a honeymoon. In Lincoln's case, the southern states seceded and left.
Trump wasn't quite that bad. But no one's been treated as a new president as terribly as Trump has been treated by the Democrats in Washington. Because he's a real threat to change things. And he's a guy who's actually trying to keep his promises. And these appointments, they're very different. They're very unusual.
Showing 561–580 of 701 · page 29 of 36
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