ATHENS, Greece — The post-election climate in the United States has been nothing short of bizarre. Recount efforts in several states are being championed by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, accusations have repeatedly been made that the “Russian menace” influenced the presidential elections and the victory of Donald Trump, and that Russia is also behind an online disinformation campaign which the mainstream media describes as “fake news.”

One of the websites accused of delivering “fake news” is that of former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury under President Ronald Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts. An author and analyst and former Wall Street Journal editor, Roberts has become a vocal critic of neoliberalism, austerity, and those who seek confrontation with Russia and China.

In this interview, originally aired on Dec. 8 on Dialogos Radio, Roberts discusses Trump’s electoral victory and Hillary Clinton’s defeat, what interests may be behind the electoral recount efforts, the “Brexit” vote and recent Italian referendum result, and the conflict in Syria. He also shares his reaction to the accusations of delivering “fake news.”

MintPress News (MPN): Why did Donald Trump win the election, and what does a Trump presidency mean for the United States and for the world?

Paul Craig Roberts (PCR): We don’t know yet what it will mean. We know what we hope it will mean. Trump won because he spoke directly to the people in a way that they haven’t experienced in my lifetime. He told them that the ruling oligarchy did not and would not have their interests in mind, that they had been sold out with the oligarchy moving their jobs offshore to where labor is cheaper while still expecting from the unemployed American workforce to buy the products that are brought in from China and Indonesia and India and elsewhere. This resonated with people, as they have been experiencing this now for roughly a quarter of a century. There’s been no growth in real median family income in decades. Young people can’t find jobs to support an independent existence. The value of a university education is collapsing because there is no employment for that type of an education, and people realize that the economic policy of the country has been captured by the oligarchs and serves only a very few interests. The consequence has been a massive change in the distribution of income inside the United States. The United States now has one of the worst income distributions in the world. In fact, it’s worse than income distributions in many Third World gangster states.

[Trump] spoke directly to these things. He also said that he would not see the point of conflict with Russia, which no one sees in an era of thermonuclear weapons, and he also said that he didn’t understand the function of NATO, 25 years after the Soviet collapse. This also resonated with the public, because they understand that all of these supposed threats are bleeding them in order to put hundreds of billions of dollars into armaments industries. That’s the reason why he won the election, and the reason we are hopeful is that we assume he is sincere about this. We assume he’s sincere because of the fierce opposition he has from the ruling oligarchy and from their media “presstitutes,” who did anything they could to demonize Trump, to turn him into a “Putin agent,” and so forth. But the public ignored them, or at least enough of the public ignored them for Trump to carry almost all of the states except for a few really large cities on the coast.

MPN: Do you believe President-elect Trump will keep his campaign promises, and what do you make of his Cabinet selections thus far?

PCR: We don’t know if he will be able to. The oligarchy’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost, so the oligarchy lost the election, but they did not lose it by such a great margin that they’ve given up. They’re still in the fight, they’re still there. Trump has a billion dollars but they have trillions. They’re well-established. They have many, many servants and think tanks and university faculty and the media [on their side], and of course, the neoconservatives, who have dominated American foreign policy since the Clinton regime. So they’re still there, and Trump is in combat with these people.

Trump’s appointments, we don’t know whether they will support what he wants to do or not. If they support him, they are the type of people he needs. They are well-to-do, they’re self-confident, they don’t need money from the oligarchs, they don’t have to worry about their careers when they leave government. So he does have the kind of person you’ve got to have if you’re president, to bring about any change. So the real question is, will they support him or will they go with the oligarchs? We don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see what happens. We can’t judge them based on their past associations. I don’t think any of them are actual representatives of an oligarch’s agenda. So there’s a chance they will support him and that they will be strong enough people that he’ll have the government that will actually do something. But you can’t take it for granted, because as I said, the oligarchs lost but they weren’t routed. They’re still there.

MPN: What would a Hillary Clinton victory have meant for the United States and the world, particularly in terms of foreign policy?

PCR: It would have meant war with Russia and China and the end of life on Earth. She’s an insane warmonger, she demonizes Russia and the president of Russia, calling him the “new Hitler.” She said that the South China Sea is an area of the United States’ national interest. You can’t be more provocative than this, and if you have a president who convinces Russia and China that they’re going to be attacked, they’re not going to sit there and wait. So we really have escaped Armageddon by the defeat of Hillary Clinton. This would have been the worst possible outcome imaginable. Of course, it would have been bad on the other score — jobs, I mean, she’s the agent of the big banks, they made her rich! She and her husband have a personal fortune of $120 million, given to them by the oligarchs, and their foundation has $1.6 billion, also given to them but not just by domestic oligarchs, but by oligarchs abroad. [The Clintons] sold influence for money.

MPN: What is your reaction to the recount effort being led by Jill Stein? Who do you believe is behind all of these efforts?

PCR: The oligarchs, obviously. I mean, Jill Stein couldn’t get any funding for her presidential campaign, but she instantly got something like five or six or seven times the amount of funding she got for her entire campaign, for the recount! Where did that money come from? Not her supporters. And what this is about … the oligarchs were positioned to steal the election for Hillary. But they got deceived by their own propaganda, that she was the shoo-in winner, The New York Times telling them that it was 94 percent certain that she would be elected. They didn’t bother to steal the election, because they didn’t think they needed to. And they were shocked, everyone was shocked — that is, not the people voting for him, but the media, the oligarchs, the established interests. They were shocked by the election results, and so they’ve used Jill Stein, who really has no standing in this issue, since it doesn’t involve her campaign, she has no chance of benefiting from a vote recount. So they’re using this corrupt woman, who sold out the Green Party, to try and throw a monkey wrench into the Electoral College. The only states being recounted are the three that he won which he wasn’t expected to win [Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin], and his margin in these three states is not very great. They’re not recounting votes in states that he lost by small margins, only where he won by small margins. This is an effort to steal the election from the working class who elected him, and Jill Stein is part of it.

MPN: One of the reactions of the mainstream media has been to attack online news outlets which they claim are delivering so-called “fake news.” Your website was included on this list of alleged “fake news sites.” What’s your response to these claims, and who do you believe are the true purveyors of fake news?

PCR: We know the true purveyors are the media, the press prostitutes. We call them “presstitutes.” The mainstream media throughout the West is totally corrupt and has no integrity. What you see happening is that the independent internet media is taking away the oligarchy’s control over the explanations that people receive. So everywhere you see the subscription rates of newspapers falling dramatically, the viewers of TV programs falling dramatically, and internet readership rising. And so this is an effort to try to discredit the people who actually tell the truth by identifying them with Russia. They are hoping that all the demonization of Russia during Obama’s second term has aroused fears that the “Russian menace” is back, and they’re hoping this fear is substantial and that by associating those of us who challenge their lies, with Russia, they will discredit us.

Who’s funding it? We don’t know, because the people who prepared this list, no one knows who they are. When the Washington Post gave it [the group PropOrNot] all that publicity, they very carefully did not say who these people are. It is a new internet site that didn’t exist before a couple of months ago. Who is funding it? I would say the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a U.S. State Department-funded [organization]. It could be the CIA. It could be George Soros. But it is an oligarch operation, which, of course, involves the military-security complex, because they are the greatest beneficiaries, in terms of money and power, of all the threats, all the wars. They want a Russian threat, for their budgets and for their police state powers. Those are the people who are most likely funding it, but it hasn’t worked! All it did was to provide people with 200 sites they could go to, to find out what the truth is!

I think it’s failed, but it shows the desperation of the oligarchs, and what they will do now is, they will use the people they still control, in the House and the Senate — the oligarchs will get some type of legislation passed that will put pressure on people who dissent from official lines of the oligarchy, that dissent from stories they plant in the “presstitute” media. And so it’s going to be perhaps harder to express dissent or tell the truth in the United States, but we’ll just have to see what they do to Trump. Some people say that he was always a fake, but that doesn’t make sense to me because the oligarchs didn’t need him when they had Hillary. And they clearly didn’t want Trump in the election. They tried to deny him the Republican nomination, and then they used the media against him in very vicious ways during the presidential campaign. Trump said once that he believes in revenge, and I hope he does. I hope he exacts revenge on the oligarchs.

MPN: What has been the aftermath of the Brexit vote for Britain, and have the doom-and-gloom scenarios regarding the impact on the British economy come to fruition?

PCR: No, of course not. The opposite! What’s happened with Brexit is, I think it’s been overturned. The United States is not going to permit Brexit, Washington won’t permit it. Now, this may change with Trump, but under Obama, you may remember he traveled to London to tell the British prime minister to forget all about leaving the EU. The EU is a creation of the CIA. It was created so that the United States could more easily maintain control of Europe. It’s easier to control the EU Commission than to control 20-something different governments. What has happened is, the United States government used three corrupt British judges that decided, “Well, the people may have voted, but you did not really have to pay attention to them, it’s all up to Parliament and Parliament can decide that we’re not [leaving].” And, of course, Washington is now lobbying the Parliament very hard, with promises and money and, no doubt, threats.

So I don’t think Brexit will happen, it’s being overturned. The notion that it would take two years to get out — when that came out, instantly I said, “They’ll never get out.” Two years is all Washington needs to overturn it. I think it’s already overturned with that court ruling. So we had three two-bit punk judges overruling the majority vote of the British people, and they call it democracy! What kind of democracy is it? That’s not a democracy, when three two-bit punk judges who don’t amount to anything overrule the majority vote of the British people! And they call it democracy, oh boy! What a joke! There are not any democracies in the West. Europe is a collection of American vassals. It’s been that way since World War II.

MPN: Italian voters recently voted no in a referendum on amendments to the nation’s constitution. What does this vote, in your estimation, mean for Italy and for Europe?

PCR: It’ll end up being overturned, like the Brexit vote. Just like they are trying to overturn Trump’s election! I mean, that’s what this vote recount is about. It’s the oligarchy trying to overturn the people’s will, just like the three judges in Britain, like what happened in Greece [in the July 2015 referendum]. The vote, in itself, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Brexit hasn’t happened, I don’t think it ever will. We don’t even know if Trump is going to be president. But that’s the whole purpose of the vote recount, to block it. They wouldn’t be doing it otherwise. They’ve got all kinds of agents to use, all kinds of things to do.

One of our best journalists, Chris Hedges, who has had to go independent because the prostitute media no longer will publish his work … he’s concluded that elections can’t change anything, only revolution can change things. I think that’s what the oligarchy is proving. They are proving that you can’t change things with elections, because it’s really not a democracy, it’s a facade, and when the people vote, in come the oligarchs and they overturn it one way or the other. How will they overturn the vote in Italy? I don’t know, but they’ll overturn it, or they’ll ignore it, or some judge will rule that Italian law is subject to EU law, that EU law is supreme. They can do all kinds of things.

MPN: Do you believe that we are heading toward that revolution that Chris Hedges spoke of?

PCR: I don’t know. It depends on the people. They don’t seem to be nearly as feisty as they used to be. In previous times in the United States, when we reached this kind of situation, the government was scared of the people and had to make concessions. I don’t see the government afraid of the people today. They’ve got a police state established, they’ve got internment camps built, they’ve militarized the police, the police are as well armed as the military, the police routinely shoot people down the streets. I just don’t know how hard the people have to be pressed. Maybe they just simply will cease to have any gain in their living standards and some slight declines over time but won’t actually be facing starvation and homelessness, as they have in the past. So who knows? I don’t know. But I don’t think they will succeed in changing anything with elections. Possibly, Trump being the kind of very strong-willed, determined, ego-type person that he is, that’s the kind of person you need for a leader if things are going to be changed. You can’t have some conciliatory, shrinking violet who wants to get along with everybody. You can’t get change out of that.

It could well be that Trump is already rich, he doesn’t need any more money, he has a big ego, and he wants to go down in history as the man who saved America, “Trump the Great.” So if he has that kind of a goal, then the oligarchs are up against a real formidable president. If he can find other people to back him, we can get some change. But it remains to be seen. We can’t know that in advance. That’s the hope. What the result is, we don’t know, but that’s the hope. The hope is … Trump has a huge ego, wants to be “Trump the Great,” wants to save America, and that that’s more important than having a few more billion dollars, that he doesn’t care about all these people, these oligarchs, they haven’t supported him. So maybe something will happen, we’ll just have to see. Maybe they’ll prove Chris Hedges wrong. But it’s hard to bet one way or another.

MPN: What’s your take on recent developments in Syria, including the attempted invasion of Syria by Turkish troops, and what do you believe we’ll see in Syria going forward in light of a Trump presidency?

PCR: As far as I can tell, the Russians and Syrians have won that war. They’ve defeated the Washington-supported ISIS. The Obama regime sent ISIS to Syria to overthrow [Syrian President Bashar] Assad when the Russians prevented our involvement. So that way we can pretend we don’t have anything to do with it. But I think the Russians, as I said, defeated ISIS. I think it could have happened much sooner, but [Russian President Vladimir] Putin kept pulling out, kept trying to appease the Europeans, hoping they would see they didn’t need to be American puppet states, but he seems now to have finished the job, more or less. I don’t think the Turks would be permitted to invade Syria, the Russians would just tell them no. And, I don’t think the Turks think they are a match for Russia or that the Turks are stupid enough to think Europe and the United States are going to come to their aid if they get in a war with Russia.

These nuclear weapons are very, very powerful. Russia can wipe out all of Europe in a few minutes. For these itty-bitty European politicians to be running around fomenting trouble with Russia, they’ve got to be insane. There’s no way Europe can come out of this. The same with the United States. Here we are demonizing Russia and China. These are powerful nuclear powers. We can’t possibly survive a conflict with them, no one can. It’s all insanity, it’s nonsense. Europe is unable to produce leadership that’s intelligent. Putin, he’s intelligent. For some reason the Chinese can produce intelligent leadership. Who in Europe has intelligent leadership? Nobody. Maybe we finally have it with Trump, we don’t know yet. But there’s not any intelligent leadership, none in Europe.