JUDGE- Everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, September 23rd, 2026. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us from, he managed to find a quiet corner in the United Nations, even though nearly every country in the world has representatives there at the moment. Before we get to what we can expect from Prime Minister Netanyahu tomorrow, yesterday the President made some comments which you have characterized as deranged. I'm speaking of course of his threat to annihilate Iran. What was your reaction when you heard that, Professor Sachs?
SACHS- I shuddered then and I shudder now, that a President of the United States can stand at the podium of the UN General Assembly speaking to world leaders in a language of annihilation of other countries and of sending them to hell.
It was ghastly unprecedented totally disgusting, disgraceful for the United States. But I would also say a measure of how broken the constitutional order of the United States is, something that you know, Judge, you lead on with every opening of every segment of your broadcast about undeclared wars, about breaking our constitutional order, about losing our freedom. Trump basically said, like a madman, which I think arguably he is, that he and he alone will decide the survival of Iran. He said that he has a big, big choice to make. Maybe Iran will be a great country. Maybe Iran will be annihilated. Maybe Trump will send it to hell. And not only was the language vulgar in a way that I certainly could never in my lifetime imagine coming from a President of the United States or anybody standing at the UN podium because what Trump said was odious and completely in violation of every religious, moral, ethical, and legal standard that we have in this world. It was also a measure of the brazen collapse of our Constitution.
Is there a political system where one man decides the fate of another civilization? Is that how the American system works? Of course, the answer is no. The Founding Fathers who rebelled against a mad King George III were very explicit in the Declaration of Independence celebrated this year, 250 years ago in its issuance. So we're in the 250th anniversary, one that Trump says is about our freedom. It was explicitly that King George abrogated, took on the authority to put the military above civil rule. And when the founding fathers wrote the U.S. Constitution, they assigned specifically the power to declare war not to the commander-in-chief, but solely and exclusively and not by choice, not if they care about it or want to, or want to delegate it or not, but solely to the United States Congress.
And Trump said yesterday, he doesn't care what the public thinks. He doesn't care what the vote is. He says, "Doesn't even cross my mind." And he said earlier in this year, Judge, when he was asked, well, are there any limits on your power? He thought about it, he said, yes, my morality, but it's my will. It's what I want to do. Otherwise, no, there are no other limits.
What did our Congress do on that occasion?
I can tell you as we know that the majority party in both houses
simply remained silent. That is a violation of their sacred oath
of office which is to uphold the Constitution.
Trump yesterday says he's going to have the difficult choice of whether to annihilate, by the way, one of the most ancient civilizations in the world, 5,000 years old, 20 times older than the United States of America. And what did our Speaker of the House say? Well, he said nothing, of course. What did our Senate majority leader say? He said, of course, nothing. What did all of the party of the President of the United States say?
The members of Congress, they said, of course, nothing. This is worse than the Roman Empire. There was a Senate that actually still said something. Our Senate says nothing.
Judge, we are so broken that not only do we have a madman in power, but there is no respect for our constitutional order.
And the president can make statements as he made yesterday, unprecedented in the chamber of the General Assembly in front of the world leaders speaking like the worst tyrant or gangster imaginable and not a murmur from the Republican Party which dominates the House and the Senate. You know, I am not partisan. And a Democratic President who dared to be as absolutely mad and deranged as this president would probably find subservience in that party, too. So, I'm not even making a partisan point. I'm making a point about the collapse of our constitutional order. Have we come to a point where one man who I happen to think is utterly incompetent, utterly sociopathic actually, when people are killed at his order, not a moment of reflection or remorse when 150 school girls are murdered and he knows the truth. He says, "Yeah, the Iranians probably did it." We'll find out.
No, not any control at all in our system of government. So for me, you asked how I feel. I shudder at the last 24 hours both at what the President said. It made my skin crawl. I was sitting there in the chamber listening to this madness. I mean it's really psychopathic madness speaking in this way in a vulgarity that is unimaginable.
But then I've shuddered since then at the lack of response by the leaders, the majority leader of the US Senate, the Speaker of the House, Supreme Court justices, anybody to say no. In our system of government, it's not one person who decides on the fate of another civilization. We are a country. We say first of all representation, and the American people are aghast at this. They oppose it overwhelmingly. They do not support this war of Netanyahu and Trump which is a two-person war of murder and destruction and assassination of leaders of another country. They do not support it. And the constitutional order which is that we are a representative government and our representatives have an oath of office that only they can declare war. So where are they standing up to say no, you don't have a penny to spend on this.
We control the power of the purse. The tens or hundreds of billions of dollars that Trump has wasted of American income in this flagrant war of whim.
Where is Congress to say you have no authority whatsoever to spend that because only we can decide on the spending and only we can declare war. So this is the grim fact. It wasn't just the awful statements. That was my first reaction. But then I thought, what have we come to when one person can make a statement like this and then remain essentially unchallenged in the United States system of government. You can't even hear this in any other country, talk like this.
JUDGE- One senator has spoken out, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. She didn't address exactly what he said, but she said she's very anxious about using her voice to go against the grain in Washington because, quote, "The retaliation is real." Now, I don't know what she means. I don't know what they could do to her. Take her office away and put her in a broom closet like they did to Ron Paul. I don't know. But, Professor Sachs, he threatened to murder 91 million human beings.
SACHS- Yes, he did.
JUDGE- What is he trying to accomplish? Does he think he persuaded anybody to join him in this potential murderous rampage?
SACHS- I think he horrified the whole world yesterday. I think American people and people everywhere should understand that Trump disgraced the United States of America. Trump thinks that gangster talk, that punching someone in the face before you break a contract, which is his life's work, that trying to scare the other side, that this is fine and acceptable. And you know, grown-up behavior is something actually a little bit different. And behavior in the United Nations, which was founded by the United States, created by the United States, created by Franklin Roosevelt, whom I regard as our greatest President ever, with the idea of ending the scourge of war, which had visited two succeeding generations of humanity, was to give a sense of decency, diplomacy, negotiation, not speaking of annihilation.
You know, I spent many, many years studying President John F. Kennedy's last days, because after the Cuban missile crisis, he spent his last year in the most brilliant statesmanship of the modern American presidency negotiating peace with the Soviet Union in what came to be the partial nuclear test ban treaty. And with incredible brilliance and eloquence and generosity of spirit and humanity and a help from Pope John the 23rd and a partnership in fact with Nikita Khrushchev who said, yes we must do this to save humanity. They made this treaty and after they made this treaty at the height of the Cold War, the two sides came together to sign what proved to be a tremendously historic and important treaty because it led on to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and the other arms control treaties just as President Kennedy said it would. President Kennedy stood at exactly the same place that President Trump stood yesterday, but he said he said something a little bit different. He said that a ray of hope had pierced the dark clouds of the time and that there was just a chance that they were moving towards peace, and he closed that unbelievable speech that he gave in September 1963 just weeks before his assassination.
And he recounted, he said that Archimedes the ancient Greek scientist had said to his friends, "Give me a place to stand and I can move the world." Speaking of the lever and President Kennedy then turned, world leaders, let us take our stand here in this place and see if we can move the world towards peace.
JUDGE- What a difference.
SACHS- That's, that's the American greatness.
That is the greatness that had the whole world saying American
leadership is gifted. We want to work with the United States to
move towards peace.
He was killed soon after. Many people think because of his peace initiative. But the point is that is American greatness. What Trump did yesterday was a disgrace to our country.
JUDGE- You're probably going to see, if you have the stomach for it, another speech that will you will find deranged and that'll be Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu tomorrow.
SACHS- Every speech he has given at the UN has been deranged and I listen to the Israeli speeches in this chamber and they are deranged. They are just accusations. The world is anti-Semitic. No, the world watches Israel's slaughter of the Palestinian people. They watch the genocide taking place in Gaza. They watch these lawless, bigoted so-called leaders that are Netanyahu's partners in murder and crime like Smotrich and Ben Gvir and how they taunt and torture the Palestinian people and how they encourage confiscations of their land and simple murder of farmers and their families which is happening in the West Bank to top off what has happened in Gaza. And then this man comes and has the audacity to talk about, oh the great danger of the world is Iran and spews hate instead of looking for a way to make peace in the midst of his complete criminality and lawlessness.
And when he speaks from the podium, he will be the person that has an arrest warrant for him by the International Criminal Court. And incidentally, because the International Criminal Court identified Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders as criminals, Trump said yesterday that not only is the United States sanctioning the international criminal court because the Israel lobby told him to do so, but he called on the international community to leave and dismember the International Criminal Court. In other words, we will just not have justice. We will have annihilation if he decides. That's what Donald Trump told the world yesterday.
JUDGE- I'm sure that like everything else he said it fell on deaf ears, but I want to play for you the gauntlet that Iranian President Pezeshkian threw down knowing that he would be followed tomorrow, I think tomorrow morning, by Prime Minister Netanyahu. Listen to the, he touches the third rail here, that at least in American government, you're not supposed to say, and he said it. Chris, cut number six.
Pezeshkian in video- "Proved. We have proven that we're not afraid of fighting of war. One, a war that is defensive in nature. And we will stand in defense of our beloved Iran, our homeland, until our last breath. Ladies and gentlemen, the topic of this gathering is mutual trust. That cannot be achieved through words only, but by abstaining from using double standards. Atomic and nuclear bombs are in the hands of the Israeli regime, but the inspectors are requested to come to Iran. Israel has murdered savagely over 70,000 innocents in Gaza. But Iran, while behind the table of negotiation, was bombed. Israel has the bombs, has weapons of mass destruction, not a member of the non-proliferation treaty during her shameful life, has not allowed a single inspection, but they are rewarded by all the means necessary for them to be able to bomb any capital in the region at will. I will repeat the nuclear weapon is in Israel but the inspectors in Iran."
JUDGE- have said it more clearly.
SACHS- Yes, it's not exactly a secret that Israel has dozens by some estimates a couple hundred nuclear weapons. Nobody that I know knows exactly the count but this is not a secret. What is absolutely correct that President Pezeshkian said is that Israel never joined the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Remember how I said that the partial nuclear test ban treaty that President Kennedy negotiated in 1963 was the prelude to the non-proliferation treaty which came a few years later and that requires countries to be inspected.
And what President Pezeshkian is rightly pointing out is Israel never acceded to the treaty. Iran did. Iran acceded to inspections. Iran agreed that the International Atomic Energy Agency would monitor Iran's activities to ensure that they were peaceful. That was the basis of the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was a treaty agreement that was ratified by the permanent five member states of the United Nations plus Germany and then ratified by the UN Security Council in which Iran opened its nuclear facilities to rigorous inspection by the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency. What happened to that treaty?
Trump ripped it up because the Israel lobby in the United States, pushed by Netanyahu said, "Rip it up." Israel wanted us to go bomb, to go kill, to go attack. Iran said, "We will abide by the non-proliferation treaty. We will abide by inspections. We will do what Israel has never done."
Interestingly, if we go back now, it's 64 years to 1962. President Kennedy was aghast that Israel was working on atomic bombs.
This is what he heard in a number of ways, including from U.S. intelligence. He wanted Israel to stop. He put tremendous pressure on Israel for inspections.
Israel refused the United States presence and ability to inspect Dimona, which was their nuclear facility where they were secretly building their atomic bomb. And they delayed and delayed and delayed. And then when President Kennedy was absolutely livid that Israel was going to put nuclear weapons into the Middle East and insisted now we have waited months, years for inspection. We will come to inspect. That's when the first prime minister of Israel Ben Gurion resigned and he resigned in a tactical resignation because he was followed by a man named Levi Eshkol. And Eshkol said to President Kennedy, "Oh, oh, oh, uh, sorry, I've just come into office. I, you know, we'll, we'll get to those inspections soon, but it's, I'm a little overwhelmed, Mr. President. It's going to take some time and then we'll get to the inspections." Well, um, the delay came. The delay enabled Israel to finish its atomic weapons and by November 22nd of the year, President Kennedy was dead and there was no pressure from the United States after that for inspections. So, the U.S. demands for inspections and openness of Israel's atomic weapons died with Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963. So, there's a long, long, long history to this. And it's very sad. It's very tragic. It's very reckless. But you know when this egregious, illegal, violent war where the United States and Israel assassinated the head of state of Iran and murdered dozens of the top leaders of Iran on February 28th of this year, this is on the basis of complete lies because this was again at a moment when there were ostensibly negotiations because the Iranians as you know, because we heard it also directly at the United Nations together from the Iranians, wanted diplomacy where the International Atomic Energy Agency would be inspected.
That's the whole irony of this from the beginning. And on that day, Netanyahu is one of the most awful people in this world in what he has done to this world and created this destabilization said openly, "This has been my dream for 40 years to pull the United States into this war against Iran." Can you imagine this is his lifelong dream to create the chaos that we're living through right now?
JUDGE- I thank you Professor Sachs. It's hard for me to
follow anything that you've just said because it's so articulate
and so incisive.
You and I will be together tomorrow afternoon, will be able to
comment on what Prime Minister Netanyahu has said, and I look
forward to being with you. Thank you.
SACHS- Very good. Thanks a lot. See you soon
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