In the spring of 2016 hardly anyone thought Donald Trump had a chance of winning the presidency. Musa al-Gharbi and I were among those “hardly anybodys.” We agreed, in a prescient March 27 interview (write-up here) that the “fixed” selection of Hillary Clinton by Democratic Party elites was a sign that Trump would be the next president.
In retrospect, it was obvious. Clinton was such a weak candidate, and such a perfect foil for Trump, that no Democrat with a lick of political common sense would have supported her if they really wanted to keep Trump out of the White House. Obviously somebody had dictated that the Democrats were going to throw the race to Trump. Later, when President Trump followed Netanyahu’s orders to murder General Soleimani, the greatest military hero of his generation and likely future president of Iran, and move the US embassy to Jerusalem while forcing abnormalization on the US vassals in West Asia…well, it wasn’t hard to figure out who was in charge of the 2016 presidential selection process.
2024 was almost an exact replay of 2016. Once again, the Democrats nominated a guaranteed loser. Kamala Harris had already distinguished herself as the most spectacularly unsuccessful presidential candidate in all of US history. As Ron Unz wrote last summer:
Biden’s departure quickly elevated Vice President Kamala Harris as the likely name to replace him on the ballot and within a few days she attracted enough pledged delegates to confirm her nomination. But although the main reason for Biden’s removal had been his perceived political weakness against Trump, polls during most of 2024 had shown that Harris was just as unpopular as Biden…Entering the presidential primaries in January 2019, she quickly raised more money than any candidate other than maverick socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. With Sanders considered totally unacceptable by the party leadership, Harris therefore seemed ideally positioned for the nomination. But although Harris was enormously popular among the wealthy elite who dominated the party machinery, she proved so remarkably unpopular among actual Democratic voters that she abandoned the race after just ten months.
For decades, the byword for failed presidential candidacies had been the humiliating 1980 Republican campaign of former Texas Gov. John Connolly, who raised and spent $11 million—an unprecedented sum in that era—while only winning a single delegate. But Harris broke that longstanding record, with her dismal polling numbers leading her to drop out of the 2020 race before the first ballots were even cast in Iowa and thus gaining not a single delegate for the $43 million that she had raised and spent. So Harris ranked as perhaps the least successful presidential contender in all of American history.
Hillary Clinton may be nefarious and unpleasant, but at least she’s intelligent and experienced. No amount of media puffery could hide Kamala Harris’s obvious incompetence. She makes Trump look almost bright by comparison.
And then there is the genocide factor. Just as Hillary was the “bitch from hell” who cackled gleefully over the horrific murder of Qaddafi, so Harris appeared another “bitch from hell” who has been mindlessly cackling her way through the ugliest genocide in human history, presided over by her own administration.
Who selected Harris as the Democratic nominee? Certainly not the voters. On the contrary, the hidden hand of the central committee of oligarchs in charge of the Democratic Party orchestrated her coronation as the sure-to-lose nominee, in a totally opaque process that culminated with big media unanimously announcing that the fix was in.
When Biden withdrew, obviously the voters should have selected his replacement. Had they done so, Harris would have come in close to last, as she did in the 2019-2020 cycle. But the Democratic voters couldn’t be trusted. The Zionist oligarchs had other plans. They needed another Hillary—a candidate that Trump could plausibly beat.
As I wrote October 22nd for this month’s Crescent Magazine:
Experts on the weaknesses of US election systems like Jonathan Simon persuasively argue that those positioned to program or hack voting machines can easily determine the outcome of close elections. Since the 2024 election is expected to be extremely close, possibly coming down to a few tens of thousands of votes in key swing states, it seems likely that the president will be selected, not elected, and that the people doing the selecting will be oligarchs who own the voting machine companies.
So whom will they select? Historically, the computerized-vote-fraudster oligarchs have leaned Republican. And since Trump is the preferred candidate of organized crime, whose upper financial echelons are dominated by Zionist Jews, it seems likely that the victor will be the candidate the liberal media tells us will blow up democracy and end the world as we know it.
That prediction was right on the money.
Transcript of this morning’s Press TV interview
Trump has declared victory. The Republican former president is ahead so far, as vote counting is still underway in few remaining states. He's won Georgia, North Carolina, and projections have also shown that he's won Pennsylvania. Based on electoral college votes, Trump has 51% of the votes secured.
Well, for further insight on the results coming out of the U.S. presidential election, we're now joined by Maryam Azarchehr, who's with us in our studios from the Press TV Iran desk. Also, we have Kevin Barrett, joining us from Saidiya, Morocco. Let's start off with Maryam here in Tehran. Maryam, let's talk a little bit more about the results that we've seen. It's projected that Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States. Talk to us about the ramifications, the ripple effects that we'll be seeing in the region as the Israeli crimes are ongoing in the Gaza Strip in Lebanon. And also, if you may talk to us about the effect that it will have with regards to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Maryam Azarchehr: Thank you so much. With the election and what happened with Trump today, the US has not only lost the Western front—basically the Western hegemonic front is not only losing militarily in the region, but it's also losing culturally. Because we have a person who has 34 convictions inside his own country alone.
You talk about the assassination of Commander General Qasem Soleimani, about the support of terrorism by every U.S. president. It really doesn't make a difference between Republican or Democrats. But what it shows to the world—they are always using all kinds of media, using Hollywood, to show the U.S. as if it was on some kind of moral high ground, as if it was democratic.
There were American values. There was the American dream. But the person they have as president, because of his convictions, it couldn't even work. And in order to gain more votes, he went and spent some time at McDonald's pretending he would understand the pain of the regular workers. He wouldn't even be able to be hired by McDonald's because of all the criminal convictions he has. And now he's the president of the United States.
The biggest problem, the biggest threat to the people in our region has not only been the American military and all the American military bases in our region, and not only the terrorists they have created and funded in the region, like Daesh, also known as ISIS. There are so many threats to our people because of the Western hegemonic front. But a major threat also was them believing the propaganda. Because the Western propaganda is always telling people, "if you are like us, you would have a better country, you would have a better world," basically setting the U.S. as an example for the world. And I think at this point, with Trump winning, there is really nobody who knows anything about politics, about anything, who would look at the U.S. as a model of anything. It is really not a model of democracy.
There's the Israeli genocide in Gaza. They've had (American) support for (genocide) for decades, but now people see it openly. And so probably the most significant effect it has for the people is to further understand this whole false propaganda about the US.
And now they see it on different levels, right? It's on the moral level, the complete downfall of the U.S. regime. On the military level, they haven't been able to destroy the resistance in the region.
So all of this Western Hegemonic Front together, supporting the Zionist regime with all the weapons they had, they have not been able to destroy the resistance with its thousands of resistant fighters.
And in terms of economy, it's always the U.S. enforcing sanctions on different countries and also punishing other countries. Not only is Iran constantly sanctioned, as it has been for over four decades, but it's also been sanctioned by other U.S. allies because the the U.S. will punish other countries that will do business with Iran.
But the U.S. hasn't even been under any sanctions, and the people are suffering in terms of economy. The highest GDP in the world, and then we have one out of every five kids is food insecure in the U.S. So many people hungry, so many people homeless.
So the U.S. has lost its ability to be a model in anything, much less morality.
Let's cross over to Kevin Barrett, who's with us from Saadia in Morocco. Give us your thoughts, please, on the outcome of the U.S. presidential race. Which of the policies, in your opinion, play the most significant role in this election?
The issue of foreign policy. foreign spending overseas, the Gaza genocide pumping all the money into the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and of course, the unequivocal support for the Israeli regime. These were all major factors, weren't they?
Kevin Barrett: I think that what we saw was a complete rejection of the status quo and the media brainwashing machine in particular. The American people have been systematically lied to over the years and the decades and told a story about how their system works and how their country works. It's just not true. The United States has not been a democratic republic since World War II. It's been an empire. And that empire is run by a combination of military intelligence people and oligarchs.
They've kept the formality of the democratic system. As Michael Glennon writes in his book, National Security and the Double Government, the United States today is comparable to how the United Kingdom or Britain was in the 19th century, and even today to some extent, when they had a royal family, a king, a queen, etc., who was supposedly running the government. But in fact, all real power had slipped away, and it had become just pageantry and spectacle, bread and circuses.
And American democracy is like that. It's just pageantry and spectacle. It's bread and circuses. The voters don't decide anything, and their votes aren't even counted properly. It's very, very important for those of us speaking in free media outlets to point out that, as Jimmy Carter, the former American president, has repeatedly stated, American elections are so corrupt that they're not even worth monitoring.
Since 2002 the votes have been counted by voting machines that are eminently hackable, and their black box software is controlled by a handful of Republican billionaires. And there has been a consistent shift towards the Republican party since then, with Republican candidates for national offices benefiting in the neighborhood of an average of two to four percent over what the polls show they should be getting.
I'm not saying that the democratic oligarchs don't cheat either. But the point is that these election results are really selection results. The United States is governed by a coalition of oligarchs who sometimes are feuding with each other, and sometimes uniting in defense of their common interests.
And they selected Donald Trump. He wasn't elected by the voters. Yes, it's possible that a few percentage points of Americans who absolutely otherwise would have voted for Harris decided not to because they opposed genocide. That could have had some kind of effect. That would be true if the votes were counted properly. But we can't even have confidence that our votes are counted properly.
People should read about the election integrity movement. Jonathan Simon has written about this in his book Code Red. But I think that the American people may not have awakened to that. They may not have awakened to the repeated frauds that are being perpetrated on them by the Zionist oligarchs who run their country. But they know that they're being lied to at least. And so that's why they're voting for a multiple convicted felon, that their most prestigious media outlets and all of their academies and universities, all of their elites are telling him that this man is a criminal and he's a potential Hitler and so on. That's what they're being told day and night by the most prestigious media and the most prestigious people with cultural capital in the United States.
And yet a lot of Americans support Trump. We don't know what the real numbers are. Again, the voting machines are completely untrustworthy. But it's clear that about half the American people who would actually be gullible enough to go vote would be quite likely to vote for Trump. And that shows that those people have lost confidence in the brainwashing system that's pushing their buttons and trying to make them drool on command like Pavlov's dog.
I think that the consensus of the oligarchs this time was indeed to select Trump as president. The reason was that given the state of extreme strife and division and acrimony between the red and blue camps in the United States, that if they were to select Harris, that the Trump side, the Trump supporters, would revolt much more violently than they did in 2020. And the country would become ungovernable, and the empire would become unsustainable.
So I think they felt that they had little choice but to put in Trump. And Trump's economic policies will benefit the wealthy, the billionaires, more than Harris's would.
And I think that they expect that if they have to wage military war on the various fronts where they're desperately trying to sustain their empire, that a Harris presidency would not convince the kind of Americans who are willing to sign up for the military to go and fight in foreign countries, whereas they're hoping that Trump can or could, so they can still use the American military as a big stick to threaten the world with.
So I think that the oligarchs, the plurality of oligarchs, selected Trump. Who knows to what extent these voting machines, especially in the key swing states, were programmed. I expect to be interviewing Jonathan Simon and other election integrity experts on my podcast to try to get to the bottom of that.
But once again, there was a huge divergence between the polls and the results. And once again, as always, that divergence massively favors the Republican Party. And is it a coincidence that most of the voting machine companies are owned by Republican Zionist billionaires? I don't think so.
Right. And let's go back to Maryam, who's with us in her studio. Mariam, many of our guests, including Mr. Barrett right now, basically are saying that this system of voting in the United States, it's rigged. It's not a democracy. It's an oligarchy. I want you to break that down for us a little bit about the system that we're seeing of the ballot box in the United States. And just to end it on a quote from the famed George Galloway, which we mentioned earlier: He said, it's not a democracy if you need a billion dollars to run.
Maryam Azarchehr: Exactly. As you know, a lot of even the people who do vote, and they actually believe that their voting makes any difference at all, which it doesn't, are fooled by what's called name recognition. They vote for the names they have heard. And who's name gets to be out there more is all based on money. Whoever has major money and whoever has the support of the most capitalists behind them wins. And as a result, those capitalists, those who gave that major money to these candidates, later expect them to pass policies that are very much against the interests of the American people and for the interests of those capitalists. This is what happens at the end: whoever has the most money will be heard more.
There are other people signing up as candidates every term. But they don't stand a chance. The third parties don't really stand a chance in the face of this two-party system that has only two front runners. And of course we know the type of individuals that they are. They have big money, they have big support of Zionist institutions like the AIPAC, and that's the reason they even get to be seen and heard.
So whoever wins, really, it's the Israeli regime that wins. It doesn't make a difference in that sense. And of course, it depends on a variety of different factors. But in the end, we had the supporters of Trump, the supporters of Kamala, and each side also is made afraid of what would happen if the other one won the election. So a lot of people are coming to understand that it's not the interests of the poor, it's not the interests of the middle class that are anywhere in this equation.
One thing that all of these voters had in common, for instance, is that over 50% of Americans are against genocide. They have different views on how to deal with it. But they are proceasefire, at least. But none of this majority of voters, none of their voices were heard in either one of the candidates. Each candidate was competing in showing their allegiance to the Zionist regime. So what it really is, is a vote for a very rich minority by a large number of people who actually—a lot of them are suffering in all kinds of ways in terms of economy, with all the money being spent in invasions and these wars instigated by the US regime. It's the people suffering, it's the people not being able to get an education.
A lot of people, a lot of soldiers, US soldiers, when they talk about why they joined the army, they joined the army to be able to pay for their college, to be able to pay for their rents, to be able to pay for an education that should be everybody's right, honestly. The right to education is not something that should be denied. Or the right to food. When the UN was talking about the right to food, there's only one country and one illegal entity that basically voted against the UN resolution of food being a human right. The country was the U.S., and the illegal entity was the Israeli regime.
So these people are basically bearing the burden of whoever they vote for. And they will not be counted for anything, but they have heard these names. And of course, the media machine, the propaganda machine, if you see there were even different Americans talking about how on Instagram, Instagram was sending them alerts and messages and basically trying to get them to vote, to go out and vote, even though this voting in the end will not basically affect the average American.
Let's just get one last question in for Mr. Barrett as well. Mr. Barrett, it's basically the Republicans and the Democrats, they fight tooth and nail over every issue. domestic policies, immigration, the economy, but they're always on the same page when it comes to the issue of the Israeli regime and the crimes that they've been committing against the Palestinians for over seven decades now. Why is that?
Kevin Barrett: Well, unfortunately, the Zionist oligarchs who represent somewhere between one third and one half of the richest billionaires in the United States—these people are ethnically Jewish, and they are fanatically ethnocentric. They are absolutely rabidly dedicated to their tribe crushing all other tribes, being the dominant tribe. And they're brought up with a kind of a paranoia that the whole world hates them and wants to throw them in gas chambers and drive them into the sea.
This is the mentality that these people, even highly educated people who become billionaires or who were born billionaires, have. Obviously, when one-third to one-half of American billionaires come from that ethnic background and are well-trained in ethnic nepotism, they are going to be able to totally control the country.
2% of the American big capitalist economy can totally control American foreign policy towards, let's say, Costa Rica. These are the United Fruit Company people because they have an interest there.
So the Jewish Zionist oligarchs have this very strong interest based on their psychopathological programming that they grew up with manipulating the United States to support the genocidal entity occupying Palestine. And because they have that kind of power, basically they own both parties. We saw that in this latest election. This is the most Zionist-dominated American election in all history, and it's coming in the middle of the worst well-documented genocide in all of human history. The Zionist donors gave—well, just one donor, Miriam Adelson, who is the heiress to Sheldon Adelson's organized crime gambling and alleged prostitution et cetera, outfit.
I'm told by contacts in the American intelligence community that the Adelson family does routinely send out hitmen to kill people when they feel they need to. These are criminals. These are mafiosi.
And yet Miriam Adelson gave Trump $100 million. One person representing an organized crime group gave Donald Trump $100 million for this election. And according to reports, Trump promised in return that he will rubber stamp the Zionist annexation of the West Bank. And AIPAC, the Zionist lobby, put more than $100 million into this election as well.
So they own the country. We need an American intifada to overthrow this Jewish Zionist tyranny that is driving the United States into the ground.
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