Rep. Jake Auchincloss Discusses Trump’s Failures Around the Globe

0:29We'll be right back.

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3:09Ben Meiselas:ZetBound and its delivery device base in QuickPen are registered trademarks owned or licensed by Eli Lilly & Company, Get subsidiaries or affiliates. United States senators from both parties, Republicans and Democrats and independents, sent a delegation of 10 senators to Greenland, to Nook, where they wanted to send a powerful message to the people of Greenland and the people of Denmark. We have your back, and we, on a bipartisan basis in the United States, do not support Donald Trump's threats against Greenland. against Denmark, against NATO. If he moves on Greenland and NATO, we will make sure that he is impeached, that he is thrown out, that he is convicted, that he is gone.

3:56Ben Meiselas:And we will use all of our resources in the United States Senate to ensure that there is not an invasion. We will do everything to protect you. I mean, you had Republican senators there like Murkowski, Tillis and others joining with Democrats like Shaheen and and Coons and others. Let me show you what went down when the United States senators were there in Greenland in Nuuk, standing side by side with Greenlandic and Denmark lawmakers, the prime minister of Denmark, the prime minister or premier of Greenland. And first, here's Murkowski in her speech that she gave. Short clip. Let's play it. And this is from Nuke.

4:41Ben Meiselas:Play this clip. Thank you. Thank you for your continued friendship, your leadership. And to my friend and the leader of our delegation, Senator Koontz, thank you for leading such a strong bipartisan and, as you point out, bicameral delegation. I think that that's important. I think it's important that it be recognized that when it comes to matters of relationships with our friends, with our allies, as we have here in Denmark, as we have in Greenland, that it is not a subject of Republicans versus Democrats. It is a recognition, again, of a strong and a continuing relationship over decades. It is one that we need to nurture, as with all relationships.

5:29Ben Meiselas:You need to nurture and take care of them, and you need to have constructive dialogue. And as has been noted, there's not only been good dialogue here at the parliament today, but this morning earlier with the prime minister of both Greenland and of Denmark, just yesterday in Washington, D.C., we had visits with the foreign ministers of both Greenland and Denmark. So constructive, important dialogue that is ongoing now and will move forward. So it is it's important to be here. I think presence means a lot. And this, again, bipartisan delegation to be here with our partners is important. So thank you for the opportunity to to share the time and again, the fellowship.

6:21Ben Meiselas:We appreciate it. This is from Senator Coons. Let's play it. This is a 10-member bipartisan, bicameral dialogue from the United States Senate and the United States House. And we are grateful for your hospitality for 225 years of being a good and trusted ally and partner. We had a strong and robust dialogue about how we extend that into the future. We expressed our gratitude for the sacrifice of Danes who served and fought and died alongside Americans when we were attacked 25 years ago. We spoke about the value of NATO and the commitment to respecting the core principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and self-determination.

7:04Ben Meiselas:And we spoke with clarity about the importance that the people of Greenland make their decisions about their future. So it was a constructive and hopeful dialogue, and we look forward to continuing. Next, I'll show you what a Greenlandic lawmaker had to say. Play this clip.

7:45Ben Meiselas:are a member of NATO and we are happy to cooperate through NATO. And I think we have lots and much more to work with each other on in these situations because NATO has been here for many, many years, and we hope that it will stay many more years to come. Thank you. And next, we'll show you what Senator Shaheen said and warned Donald Trump about. Here, play this clip. An American military takeover of Greenland would threaten NATO as we know it. And even short of that, just the suggestion that the U.S. would take Greenland by force does real damage not just to the relationship with Greenland, with Denmark, but to America's own national security.

8:33Ben Meiselas:It erodes decades of hard-won confidence among allies, and it weakens the sense of security that comes with it, and that rhetoric plays right into the hands of our greatest adversaries, Russia and China. Vladimir Putin would welcome any move that fractures NATO or diverts attention and resources away from Ukraine. It's a point that your prime minister made again when we met with her this morning, and she's made very eloquently over a period of time. If we're serious about limiting Russia's influence in the Arctic and beyond, the most effective way to do that is by defeating Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.

9:14And that's precisely why the current debate over Greenland makes so

9:20Ben Meiselas:little sense. As your prime minister and Greenlandic officials have said, And if the United States wants to do certain things in Greenland, whether it's build more military bases, develop the critical minerals that are there, all we have to do is partner with you all. That's been made very clear. We've had a standing treaty with Greenland dating back to 1951. And as many of you know, the United States once operated 17 bases in Greenland. As I said, my father was stationed there in World War II. It was the United States that determined that we were going to close those 16 other bases. So whether it's U.S.

10:08Ben Meiselas:bases to defend against Arctic threats or critical mineral deals, your leaders here in Denmark and in Greenland have made clear that they want to partner with us. So I think the threats are not only unnecessary, they are counterproductive. They risk undermining not just our relationship with all of you in Denmark, with the people of Greenland, but the broader NATO alliance in the process. I know there are real deep concerns here in Denmark and in Greenland. Yesterday we met with your foreign minister and with the foreign minister of Greenland. They talked in very personal terms about how, particularly people in Greenland who are thinking about their foreign minister talked about children going to bed at night, worried about whether when they got up in the morning they were going to have been invaded by the United States.

11:07I can see why that feels personal to people.

11:12Ben Meiselas:I believe saner heads will prevail. I believe that because we have institutions that are acting in the United States on both sides of the aisle in Congress. There's overwhelming support for our relationship, for NATO, and among the American people. I don't know if you all saw the recent poll that showed that 86 percent of Americans said they would oppose the use of military force in Greenland. And while the Trump regime continues its threats to invade Greenland, and as we have various European countries now sending special forces to Greenland to protect it from a United States invasion, you also have the Secretary of Defense, who unlawfully refers to himself as the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, announced a major deal with Elon Musk to put Grok, the AI that Elon Musk has on X, to now go through all of the classified systems and all of the systems at the Department of Defense and to basically run it here.

12:21Ben Meiselas:Just watch what Hegs had said. But today, we're excited to announce the next Frontier AI model company to join GenAI.mil. and that is Grok from XAI, which will go live later this month. So I want to thank you, Elon, and your incredible team for leaning forward with us on this as well. Very soon, we will have the world's leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department. Long overdue. I want to bring in Congress Member Jake Auchincloss. I do want to talk about the Grok AI piece of it all. But Congress member, you're a Marine veteran. You served in Afghanistan.

13:06Ben Meiselas:You led a team in Panama. You have a lot of experience on foreign policy. You saw this meeting that transpired or you've heard about it. You've learned about it, even briefed about it, where you had the foreign minister of Greenland and Denmark show up. Apparently, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio continued to say, no, we want to conquer you. We're going to conquer you. And then it kind of ended pretty quickly. This meeting, we've been seeing footage this morning of the Greenlandic minister almost kind of getting very emotional on TV because the people there are traumatized right now within Greenland.

13:46Ben Meiselas:They think they're going to be invaded at any moment. What do you make of this? Ben, thanks for having me back on. He should be emotional. He's defending the sovereignty and self-determination of his people. Americans certainly get emotional about that when it affects our patriotic allegiance to the United States of America. Let me, before we talk about current events with Greenland, just rewind the clock to 2019. So in 2019, the Danish intelligence services uncovered a Russian false flag operation in which Russia was falsifying documents purporting to show that the United States was trying to seize Greenland from Denmark.

14:29And the reason that Russia and its intelligence services was committed to this operation is that they knew that that false flag operation would sow discord amongst NATO and thereby empower the Kremlin as it attacked or prepared to attack NATO's allies on Europe's eastern flank. Well, the Danish intelligence services found out and debunked this false flag operation in 2019. But it turns out that Russia need not have even bothered to use its intelligence services because the American president is doing exactly what they were trying to do with covert services six years ago. What this American president is doing is sowing discord in NATO at a time when NATO needs to be strong and unified as it defends its eastern flank, and two, driving Greenland directly into the arms of the Russian and Chinese governments.

15:22I served on the Select Committee on China last Congress. To this Congress, I served on Energy and Commerce, which has jurisdiction over critical minerals. I will tell you what the president is talking about with national security interests by seizing Greenland has zero efficacy. There is nothing he is saying that makes any sense from a national security perspective. We have everything we need when it comes to our military alliance with Denmark, a founding member of NATO.

15:48Ben Meiselas:A lot of, you know, Trump has been talking about taking over Greenland now for a long period of time. It does, though, seem that it accelerated recently about the time where you had the Russian envoys meeting in Miami, though, with Whitcoff and with Kushner. That was that weekend in Miami. Then there's that announcement, like literally the next day that Landry, the governor from Louisiana, would be a special envoy to Greenland. And then Landry starts talking about, yeah, we want to take it over. That's why I'm becoming an envoy. And, you know, I'm not trying to find links where they don't exist.

16:34Ben Meiselas:But when you share the story about 2019 of Russia covert operations wanting to sow discord by planting that seed of threats to the sovereignty of Greenland and then to see, you know, these these top Russian officials show up, meet with out, meet with Kushner and meet with Witkoff. And then all of a sudden a special envoy gets appointed to Greenland and all of these talks accelerate. What are we not talking about right now? Now, you and I will talk about it now, but we're talking less about Ukraine and is there going to be a peace deal there? And with all of these conflagrations across the world, Ukraine now is kind of gets pushed to the bottom of the list, which is what Putin wants.

17:19Ben, you're putting your finger on it. So if you think about NATO, right, it's got an eastern flank where it is trying to defend Ukraine's sovereignty from Russian belligerents. And now it has a Western flank issue where it's trying to defend Greenland from American belligerents. This plays directly into Putin's hands. And the link, I think, is twofold. First, that 28 point plan that the president initially proposed for Ukrainian peace, eight of those 28 points were non-starters. One of those points was joint Russian-United States minerals, mining, and oil ventures. Well, where would those joint ventures happen?

18:04In Greenland. And that does two things for the Russian government. One is it ties it back in to a lot of Western trade and commercial exchanges that it had been iced out of after its invasion of Ukraine and that Russian government needs those sources of revenue. And two, to your point, it demoralizes, disorients and distracts NATO from what needs to be its singular focus, which is defending the sovereignty, not just of Ukraine, but of all the Baltic states. Yeah.

18:32Ben Meiselas:And when we're that exact conversation, you're having minerals and other resources, oil, Venezuela and, you know, having Delcy, who's very close with Putin and Lavrov and Iran and China. the authoritarian still run Venezuela along with Diodados Cabello Maduro's enforcer keep the Maduro regime in place become in Trump's mind an owner with Russia now becoming more of a renter of of the resources there you know are is this all part of the framework that Rubio set out about spheres of influence and that Russia has all of Europe and Russia and all that area. Xi Jinping, China has all of Asia, the U.S., Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, anything in its hemisphere.

19:27Ben Meiselas:And then to Europe, what you're saying, then they trade the resources. And, you know, where something like Iran comes in is it gets a little murkier because that's not necessarily in these spheres. So you've got Trump saying to the people of Iran who are protesting, I've got your back. You said it on January 2nd. If a single protester gets killed, I got you. We're going to help. The protests start to grow. There's anywhere from thousands to tens of thousands. We don't know the number of people who have been slaughtered, but it could be, we've heard huge numbers. We've heard all different types of numbers.

20:04Ben Meiselas:And now we're getting conflicting reports. I mean, there may be strikes in Iran, But there seems to be now lots of pushback against that from Russia and elsewhere. So I don't know. These are the kind of conversations that what are you making of all of that together? I think a first order approximation. You are right that the spheres of influence mentality deeply influences MAGA and this administration. They view it as the manifestation of their America first mentality. So the United States is Western Hemisphere, as you said. China gets to do Asia Pacific, including Taiwan and potentially Singapore.

20:37definitely Hong Kong, all the way through the South China Sea and their nine-dash line projections. If you're the Philippines, a longtime U.S. ally, watch out under Donald Trump, because now you're in the Chinese sphere of influence. And that Russia gets to have its kind of traditional Slavic empire. I think that is a first order approximation. What I think you are not maybe not discounting, but maybe underrepresenting is how much crony capitalism and just downright corruption can influence that. Like, yeah, the first order of approximation, I think Donald Trump finds that kind of appealing. But hey, you buy some meme coins from the guy and it's all for sale, right?

21:16So that is what I think is gonna happen with the Venezuelan oil, where, yeah, he thinks that's the United States fear of influence, but he's kind of open to being bought out of that mentality. And what he has refused to do is rule out US boots on the ground in Venezuela. Now, my boots have been on the ground in Latin America. And I recently just this morning teamed up with James Tallarico, who is the state representative from Texas running for United States Senate in Texas as a Democrat. And the two of us provided our perspective on what the president is doing in Venezuela as someone seeking to represent Texans, the oil producing capital of the world, and someone who has military experience in this part of the world.

22:03And our consensus is that this does not serve the interests of American national security or of the United States energy economy.

22:14Ben Meiselas:And touching on the crony capitalism or just the self-dealing part, where is the oil money from Venezuela going to bank accounts in Qatar? We learned is going to be holding a lot of this oil money. And it's like, why would it be going to bank accounts in Qatar versus, you know, anyway. Ben, how are the Qataris supposed to afford to buy jets for the president if they don't have Venezuelan money? Please. I mean, it makes all the sense in the world. Let's talk about the Grok piece of it. But before hitting there, I mean, we if you look at what's happening now in Minneapolis and St. Paul and the thousands of ICE forces in militarized gear who were there marching around.

23:02Ben Meiselas:And we've been following these protests closely. And by and large, the protests are peaceful and overwhelmingly peaceful. And what you would observe with all the people on the ground watching is these agents would roll in. They start pointing their weapons in people's faces, and then they start throwing chemical agents at people who are on the sides of the road. They killed a woman, Renee Nicole Good. They've shot other people and then provide stories that often don't match what happens when you learn the next the next few days of what really happened. And they terrorize these communities and they're trying to, you know, now they're talking about Insurrection Act and all of these things.

23:49Ben Meiselas:It's like this was their design to create something that looked like a war zone, that they created the scenery. and what do you make of it? I mean, you've seen the ICE tactics in Massachusetts as well, not to the extent in Minneapolis, but horrific stuff has happened in Massachusetts we've been following. So what do you make all of it as someone who's actually served in the military in major operations, led teams to see how ICE is behaving in the United States now? ICE has morphed under this administration from an arm of the law to an instrument of fear. They have used bounties and social media advertising to recruit individuals.

24:32They have then given them bare bones five weeks of training before sending out these individuals with firearms into combustible situations that ICE itself, as you have said, has engineered to be far more dangerous and contentious than would be necessary for civil immigration enforcement. And Minnesota is ground zero for this operation. ICE needs to be reformed, retrained. The masking, the indiscriminate policing tactics need to end because Americans deserve federal, state and local law enforcement that uphold public safety as opposed to instilling fear in our neighborhoods.

25:19Ben Meiselas:Talk about the Grok AI piece. There's a lot of issues there. And I know you've been concerned about how Grok AI has been used and can be used domestically. Now it's also going to be used as a lever of defense and going through classified documents. And that likely will also play into though how it could be used against citizens. So talk us through all of that. Ben, I don't even know where to start on this one. The first is power. Right now, the three most influential gatekeepers of news, information, entertainment in the world are Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and through its ownership of TikTok, the Chinese Communist Party.

26:05Those are the big three. That's a problem on its face that we have allowed billions of people to access information that is filtered through the algorithms controlled by those three actors. Now you are fusing that control over ideas and narrative with hard instruments of economic and military power vested in Elon Musk. Americans got to see Elon Musk in action over the first six months of this Trump administration. And it was an unmitigated disaster of not just incompetence and cronyism, but also corruption. They went in claiming they were going to save hundreds of billions of dollars. They instead eviscerated critical services that Americans rely on, like the pharmaceutical testing laboratory in St.