Timothy Naftali

He didn't like all of them.

He has some great choice things to say about Pierre Trudeau and others, but he believed in alliances.

He wasn't about to disrupt and destroy what he had inherited, even though he differed from some of his predecessors.

We live in an era with a president who is disrupting and destroying because he can't.

Well, I mean, one of the problems for those of us who study this is that the documents are pretty sparse about congressional corruption in the 19th century.

We have some documents about presidential corruption, but keep in mind that before Chester Arthur, ironically, pushes for civil service reform and we get a nonpartisan professional civil service,

Government jobs were given away to the highest bidder.

So in a sense, you had a basic corruption at the core of presidencies because – I want to dissent for that.

I was thinking about being the head of the post office, or actually the customs duty officer, also the person who had the concession on the, and then in that era, the Indian land reservation.

Those people made lots of money.

Also, that was the era when government documents were actually printed by private companies, and that particular contract was worth a lot of money.

No, the president didn't get any cash in return.

but he was paying off an ally and there was a business consequence for the ally.

If you look at the essence of all of these peace discussions, it is no surprise that sovereign wealth funds are involved.

because we, not the American people, but we, our government, is seeking resources.

So it's not a peace agreement.

What is happening is that we are engaging in some kind of bribery scandal with all these countries.

where we are saying, give us a piece of your, whatever your mineral results, mineral resources might be, like in Congo, there are certain kinds and in Ukraine.

And we're saying, we'll help you by throwing our weight around, but in return, you're gonna help us.

And us is not the American people writ large, but the presidents, I would call them the chauvinistas or chauvinistas of Mar-a-Lago, the people that are close to the Trump family.