Former Congressman Jimmy Duncan Jr Warns Trump on Iran, Israel Lobby
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We're going to have a fascinating conversation today. We have one of the few lone voices in the last several decades that we've had our Congress, and it's flipped hands a few times between Republicans and Democrats, but one of the few voices consistently against foreign adventures, interventionist foreign policy.

And he is a voice that has been a beacon for fiscal sanity as well. Former Congressman Jimmy Duncan Jr. joins me. How are you doing, sir? I'm doing fine, David, and it's an honor and privilege for me to be on with you. And thank you for the good work that you do through your program and in other ways.

Well, thank you. And it's going to be a real fascinating conversation. You've got a new book out of one dimension before we get started. We'll kind of use that as a reference point. Okay. From bat boy to congressman. Can you tell me about a little bit of this story? You were, you started off as a bat boy and baseball. Is that right?

Well, many, many years ago, I was a bat boy for the Knoxville Smokies minor league baseball team. And I did that for five and a half seasons when I was a boy from the time I was 11 until I was 15. And I've said before that I think I maybe should be in the Hall of Fame because I don't know anybody else.

that ever was a bat boy as long as I was. But the reason I was, I did it the first couple of seasons for free and the next, uh, next few seasons for a dollar 50 a game. And I don't think they could have gotten anybody else to work quite as cheaply as I did. Wow. Yeah. So you started off in the baseball world. Your family had some history there, right? Right. My, my dad, uh,

As a young lawyer in Knoxville, put together a group of four men and went to Montgomery and bought the team in the middle of the 1956 season and then moved it to Knoxville. And then in the offseason, he worked out an agreement with Baltimore Orioles to become a farm team of Baltimore and

the thing that finalized the deal, my dad told Harry Dalton, the farm director of Baltimore, that they would do the agreement if they would take Earl Weaver off their hands because the Knoxville team owned minor league, some minor league teams owned players in those years. And the only player that Knoxville owned was a second baseman. My dad had named him as the playing manager of the team.

And they said, well, they would take Earl Weaver and they would make him the manager of their rookie league team in Fitzgerald, Georgia. And then he worked up through the ranks and ended up becoming a Hall of Fame manager with the Baltimore Orioles. Wow. Baseball fans will remember the name Earl Weaver. And in fact, there's a new book out about Earl Weaver called Miracle Manager. Wow.

Your father, talk about him, he was in Congress as well, right? And he was also the mayor of Knoxville. Is it Knoxville he was the mayor of? Yes. I was very proud of my dad. My grandparents in Scott County, Tennessee, had a subsistence farm and 10 children, almost no money. And my dad hitchhiked into Knoxville with $5 in his pocket.

And 20 years later, was elected to Congress. I mean, elected as mayor. And then six years after that, elected to Congress. And in his three races for mayor, he got 90% of the black vote. He was city law director for three years and then mayor for six years between 1956 and at the end of 64. Those nine years were years of...

battles over integration, but the, uh, the black community in Knoxville loved my dad. Wow. And he, so he, how'd he go from $5 to his name to, to mayor in 20 years? He must've been a mover and a shaker. He was the mover and the shaker. And, uh, and, uh, I, I've, I heard him say several times, he said that, uh, doing something beats doing nothing every time. And so he, he, uh, uh,

You said the words. And then also, that was good for me because I ended up representing several African-American people in my law practice and then tried to be fair in my judgeship. And so I think I'm probably the only person

I was probably the only Republican member of Congress who was ever the Grand Marshal of the Martin Luther King Day Parade, but I was one year when I was in Congress. Wow. And what do you think, what was the kind of crossover appeal in terms of Republican, but yet also being able to bridge bridges in communities that typically are associated with Democrat voting? How did you have that crossover connection?

Well, well, my dad was a conservative Republican, too, but he was not maybe not quite as conservative as as I was. I guess he was more conservative and I'm a little more libertarian. But but I was I really was very proud of my dad and he was just a kind. I described him one time.

in a newspaper article here that he was the kindest, sweetest, toughest, hardest working man I ever knew. And I meant tough in a good way, but he, he treated everybody well, black, whatever. And, and so what I always said, I said, you know, Democrats can go into black churches on the Sunday before the election. And that's all they need to do.

Republicans have to work that a little bit harder and they have to go into the black churches three weeks after the election and keep on going. Yeah. And that's, that's what my dad and I always did. We went, uh, we went into the black communities, uh, a lot more at non-election times than we did at election time. And it seemed to work for us. Wow. Now you, uh,

you, you followed in your father's footsteps and got into politics. At what age did you know, or what was your moment that you realized that you were going to be in politics as well? Well, of course I grew up in a political family as I, uh, uh, and then as I got into college and, and so forth, uh, uh, I would, uh, drive my father around or I would, uh, uh, go places with him or substitute for him. And, uh,

uh, slowly, uh, the politics got into my blood. And, and, uh, so, um, uh, I had a, uh, I was very, very lucky. I got in, I had a very successful law practice and then I got, uh, I became a criminal court judge trying to felony criminal cases. And, uh, and I got real good ratings from the bar association on my judgeship. And then, um,

And I basically, I guess you could say I ran for Congress for about 15 or 20 years before I ever ran for Congress. Yeah, I see. You know, you and Congressman Ron Paul and Walter Jones became known as, and there was others too. So if there's somebody that you'd like to mention, you can. But I remember you three were really one of the big,

voices, the only voices in the conservative movement or the Republican Party at a national level who would do anything to speak against any of the wars over the last 20 something years. So how did that come about? How did you guys find yourselves on that path? I guess everybody had their own timing about how they got to that perspective, but just tell me your view on how you became an advocate of non-intervention foreign policy.

Well, there were several things, David, and that's probably the only area that I really am different from my dad a lot because he actually was a state commander of the American Legion when he was a young lawyer. But I grew up in a very patriotic house, and I went to Congress, and I was pretty much a traditional lawyer.

Republican at that time, and I actually voted for the first Gulf War. But then I saw those elite troops that they said Saddam Hussein had, I saw them surrendering to camera crews and empty tanks.

And I started thinking that, boy, they had really exaggerated the threats. Yeah. And so then I was speaking to a group at the Greenbrier one time, and I picked up a newspaper down there, and I saw that one of our bombs that we were bombing, we were enforcing in no-flight zone against Saddam Hussein, who really had almost no air force at that point.

But we were dropping bombs, it said, every fourth day. And we're spending about $4 million a day at that point, long before the second, the big Iraq war. And it told, I think it was on the front page of the Washington Post, it told about one of our bombs going astray and killing seven little boys. And it told about the terrible anguish of a

whose son had had his head blown off. And so when the second, when the bigger Gulf War rolled around, and also I'd noticed that there were, there seemed to be no fiscal conservatives at the Pentagon. I mean, we were spending money we didn't have, and we just kept trying to outdo everybody by always increasing the military budget

And I was a fiscal conservative about everything. So I started noticing that they seemed to be exaggerating any kind of possible threat and spending so much money and wasting so much money. And then when the second war rolled around, I read everything I could get. And I read in Fortune magazine, it said a prolonged war,

in Iraq would make our soldiers sitting ducks for Islamic terrorists. And they had an article in U.S. News World Report at that time, and it said, why the rush to war? And so I saw that we were being urged into a war by chicken hawks, neocon chicken hawks, who had never served in the military.

And so then when they found out that I was leaning against the war, I got called down to a little secure room at the White House with Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet and John McLaughlin, who were the head and deputy director of the CIA. And I asked them down there, among other things, there had been a front page article a couple of days before by Lawrence Lindsay, a Harvard professor who was President Bush's advisor.

a main economics advisor, and he said that a war with Iraq would cost us $200 billion or more. And I asked about that, and Condoleezza Rice said, oh, no, it wouldn't cost us that much. It'd cost us $50 or $60 billion, and we'd get some of that back from our allies, which I've said since then that had to be the worst estimate in the history of the world. And so then I asked him, did they have any evidence of any imminent threats?

And they didn't. And in fact, George Tenet confirmed that in his first speech at Georgetown University the day after he resigned as head of the CIA. And so then I said to him, I said,

Well, if you go to war in Iraq, you're going to be financing it with massive deficit spending. You're going to be going to war to enforce UN resolutions when conservatives have been the traditional biggest critics of the UN. You're going against every traditional conservative position I've ever known. You're going to have to be doing huge

foreign aid, when conservatives have been the biggest critics of foreign aid. So I ended up, I voted against it, and I can tell you it shocked my district. I mean, it shocked it. And about a year after I voted against the war, I was supposed to speak at a Baptist church one Sunday in my district, and the minister called me very apologetic and said his main deacon said he would pull out if I came.

And just apologized to me. And I said, no, don't worry about it. I said, oh, you know, I won't come. But then it was clearly the most unpopular vote I ever cast. But it amazed me that over three or four years' time, the most unpopular vote I ever cast became one of the most popular. Yeah.

Yeah, it tends to be the way it goes with these wars. At first, everybody's in a war frenzy because of the propaganda and the media drumbeat for war. And then after the disaster unfolds, it becomes one of the worst things they ever got on board with. Yes, and I spoke on the floor several times, and I voted for us to get out of Afghanistan.

So when you were initially summoned by the White House with Condoleezza Rice and others, did you have a... There was a sense of a veiled threat, like you better get online, or they weren't going that way? They were just being polite? Or, like, how did you read them? No, they were very nice to me. And actually...

The Saturday morning before that vote, I went to have breakfast with my uncle Joe, a very respected judge in Tennessee. And he and he actually had I was very close to him. In fact, he became like a almost like a second father to me after my dad died. And and then also Bill Vaughn and Bob Griffiths, my two closest friends. And Bob was my chief of staff. And

And Bill worked part time on my staff and all three of them told me that I that I really really should vote for the war because everybody in my district was for it. And so actually, when I voted against it, I really thought that I might be ending my political career. And I mean, but I just couldn't. I just I just I left that breakfast thinking that I might go ahead and vote for it. But just because of.

the people closest to me were for it. In fact, but then the, and the night before I voted on it, my older sister told me that a television station in Knoxville had a poll and said 74% of the people in our, in the viewing area were for the war and 9% were against and 17% were undecided. And I had that in my mind, but they're just something, something was inside of me that I just couldn't vote for it. And, and, uh, I still, uh,

I just became a very anti-war Republican, and I still feel that way. I mean, I'm not a pacifist, and I'm not anti-military, but I guess I came to believe what the Marine General Smedley Butler said, that war was a racket, and it all ended up, it was all about money and power.

It was all about more money for the leaders of the military who always wanted more money. And it was more about power and people and leaders in the Congress and the White House trying to show how patriotic they were. And it just wasn't right, I thought. Yeah.

Now, what was that like for you, gentlemen that voted against the war in the Republican Party? Did you suffer well-financed primary opponents? I know Ron was always, they had tried a few times to get him out, but he kind of built a loyal following and

It appears that the leadership of Israel just gave up trying to go after him. Did they go after you and Walter Jones? Did you guys have a lot of friendly atmosphere towards you in general in Congress during those early years of the Iraq War when everybody was still in favor of it? Well, Ron and I both, I guess we...

we suffered within the Congress itself on getting positions. I mean, uh, in my first six years, we were in the minority and almost all the Republicans voted together, but then they had all, they started having these appropriations bills and Tom delay was our whip. And he really is sort of strange, but, uh, he, uh, became almost more powerful than the speaker. In fact, he put Danny Hastert in as speaker and, and, um,

And I kept voting against the appropriations bills. And he came to me on the floor one night and he said, he said, Jimmy, these are Republican bills now. And I said, yes, Tom, but you're spending more than the Democrats were spending. And I will give him this much credit. They still weren't spending as much as the Democrats wanted to spend. But

We had the opportunity and we didn't do anything to hold down on federal spending. And actually, I think that's what led to the formation of the Tea Party. But actually, the first election after I voted against the Iraq War, I had the mayor of my fastest growing town ran against me in the Republican primary.

And I still got 88% of the vote. Unfortunately, after the Tea Party formed, and I had the most, probably the most Tea Party voting record in Congress, but I had a young man who ran against me totally in a Tea Party campaign. And I had always gotten about 87% of the Republican primary. And I

I had many people in that election, that primary, and they came to me and they said, we think you're doing a great job. We like your votes and so forth, but we just think you've been in there too long. And so there was a strong feeling in 2014 about the Tea Party that anybody who was in office for very long, and at that point I had been in 26 years,

And you just thought you were automatically bad regardless of what you did. But I still got, I fell all the way off to 60.5% of the primary vote, and that was disappointing to me. But Lamar Alexander was running that year, and he only got 48, he got reelected, but he only got 48% in the primary, and he lost his home county.

which was my second largest county, and the Tea Party was just very strong. But then I got in the usual mid-70s in the general, and then two years later I was on back up just where I had been. That Tea Party thing was an aberration one year, but I mean, I understood that.

Well, that Tea Party kind of got absorbed into Trump's movement, you know, a lot of it. Well, that's true. And then I ended up becoming one of the first members of Congress to endorse Trump for president. And I did that. I first was going to support Rand Paul, and that's who I really wanted.

But then he dropped out. And so then they invited me to come to Trump's first major foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington early in his campaign. And I was one of, there were five members of the House and one in the Senate, Jeff Sessions, who went to that speech. And I met Trump then. And I thought because of that speech and because of his platform that he was the least talkish person

They are the most closest to being an anti-war Republican of all those who were still running. And since Rand Paul wasn't in there, so then I went ahead and endorsed Trump. And I tell in my book that one of his campaign officials told me that he wanted to call me the next morning to thank me. And he called me and he was in such a he was in a real good mood.

And then, but my late wife was not speaking to me at that point about something. And I went into her and I said, Mr. Trump, you got a moment to say hello to my wife? And she goes, no, no. But I handed her the phone anyway. And then she came out five minutes later and said, boy, he was so nice and said,

He said, your husband sounds a lot like me. And she said, I told him, I know, great for the country, but hell to live with. And Trump always thought that was a really funny story. But anyway, but she got over it, partly thanks to how nice he was to her. Yeah.

So you've seen a lot of those warmongering tactics that they've done over the years, and I really wanted to get your views while I have you on what's going on with the drumbeat for war with Iran. This is something they've been pushing for such a long time, and everybody in talk radio, in Republican talk radio for decades has always pushed for war.

you know, the need to escalate things with Iran. And, you know, I remember when I was in school, they had Ahmadinejad as the prime minister of Iran. And they said he was going to be the one that was going to be the next Hitler. He was going to destroy the whole world and blow it up. And he was ready for the imam to come out of a well. And here we are, what, 20 years later, they didn't do that. But you still got the same voices, Mark Levin and everybody else.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the whole choir of interventionists saying it's time to do it, Trump. You got to do it. So it just seems like the pro-war crowd is more relentless now

than the anti-war crowd sometimes, you know, that they're just so propping, chomping at the bit to keep those wars done, you know? Well, let me tell you, of course, the companies that support lavish defense mending make big contributions in the Congress, and then the Israel lobby now, of course, controls our Congress totally.

And in fact, the only member now that has the guts to oppose the liberal, the Israel lobby is Thomas Massey. And I had the privilege of serving with him. He was there my last six years. And he always got a huge kick out of it that I voted with him right down the line. But I always sat on the floor with three members of the Appropriations Committee, three Republicans who were always there.

voting for all that stuff that I was voting against and he couldn't he never could figure out how I could get along with somebody but three members that were voting so opposite from me in our party but uh

I agree. Dave Smith, who has another podcast, and he's Jewish, but he said going to war with Iran would be insane. And then I have quoted in my columns that

Jeffrey Sachs, who is this longtime Columbia professor, one of the most respected foreign policy experts in our whole country. And he's Jewish and he has been so critical of Netanyahu. He's called him the most, you know, he's called him a war criminal and everything else. And he's

come out very strongly against going to war in Iraq. And so it's, I write a weekly column for a newspaper here in Knoxville called the Knoxville Focus. And you can see all my columns just typing in Knox Focus Duncan Archives. And I, in fact, I have several of my columns have been picked up by the anti-war website.

And the one that's in there this week is headlined Israel killing ambulance workers, starving little children. And I've been very strong in many of my columns against what Israel's been doing over there in Gaza. I think it's terrible. I think it's...

I said in that column that's in there now that the cruelty and hatred of the Israeli government, it just never ceases to amaze. I mean, killing, they estimate that one-third of those people that have been killed over in Gaza have been little children. In fact, there's a story in yesterday's anti-war website that tells about a little seven-year-old boy

who picked up a piece of Israeli ordinance and it exploded in his face and he lost his right eye and his dad said it would be a medical miracle if they can save his left eye, but they don't think they have the medicine and equipment to do it now because Israel's had this total blockade on Gaza ever since they broke the...

Israel broke the ceasefire on March 2nd, and now it's just terrible what's happening. They're starving people, and no medicine, no food. It's unbelievable. Yeah, and you've got folks like Colonel Douglas McGregor and Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis. They're not involved in the administration, and then even Dan Caldwell.

was pushed out of the Pentagon as a top advisor for Pete Hegseth. So it seems like anybody, I mean, Tulsi Gabbard was trying to hire Danny Davis. All the voices who are reflective of the America First foreign policy, it seems most of them are excluded out of any kind of advisory role. How come Trump seems to not, after all this time, still doesn't seem to have an ability to

Or I don't know what's going on. Why is he not able, you know, he put it all on the line. He was going to go to prison for life.

He almost lost his life twice at least. And he still doesn't seem to have control over personnel and personnel makes policy. So what's going on there? Well, David, it's very disappointing to me. I mean, Trump has always been very nice to me because he always has remembered that I was one of his first ones to endorse him. And in fact, in October of 2020,

The political director of the White House called and told me that President Trump, because of COVID, was only – each side was only getting 30 tickets to the debate. And one of me – President Trump – he said, President Trump talks about you more than any other former member. Right.

And he wanted to give me one of his tickets to the debate. And I went to the debate. And then a couple of years ago, the same man, he's now in Congress, but he was former political director for Trump. And he called and said, Congressman Duncan, do you remember me? And I said, yes. And he said, President Trump's coming to Nashville to speak to the Republican National Committee, and he wants to have dinner.

invited me and my wife to have dinner with him. And he's been very nice to me. But I can tell you, it's a sad thing for me. I mean, that Miriam Sadelson, they say, gave him $100 million for his campaign. And then it came out a few days ago on what big, all these big corporations that gave millions to the Trump inaugural campaign.

and had her name in there as giving $100 million for his inauguration. And so he just can't go against that $200 million. I think his instincts are anti-war, and at least the news did come out a few days ago that he wouldn't go along with it.

a war at least at this point in Iran, but then you keep up with this so well, you know that they've added a woman who's a joint American and Israeli citizen who used to work at one point, she worked for the Israel Defense Ministry, and then she worked, though, for Senator Cruz,

And now they put her on heading the Iran desk on the National Security Council. And, of course, she's going to be in about the key position that she could possibly be, urging or pushing for us to get into a war against Iran. And I think it would be a terrible mistake.

I do too. I think, you know, you wisely battled against the Iraq war. This would be much, much worse if we were to make the mistake of starting a war with Iran. Catastrophic.

Well, and like I told you, too, I spoke out that we needed to get out of Afghanistan years before we did. And then they had those 13 American soldiers killed right there at the end. And one of them was a young boy from my district. And that was the dumbest withdrawal in the history of the world. I mean, they left $85 billion worth of weapons.

brand new equipment over there. And it's just ridiculous. But the people in the Pentagon, they're spending other people's money. So they don't seem to care about, there's no fiscal conservatives in the Pentagon, I can tell you. Yeah. Yeah, it looks like they've kind of, you know, Elon had a little bit of a run there before the cabinet got put in place. But once the cabinet got put in place,

That $1 trillion or $2 trillion he wanted to cut has gone down to $150 billion, I think he said he's going to do. So I think the new boss is the same as the old boss. They said, ah, you know, he had that little bit of a period before they had all the cabinet positions in there. He was really, you know, slicing and dicing, and there was a lot of energy behind that. But now it seems to kind of petered out, at least at this point. So, yeah.

uh looks like there's not going to be a lot of cuts like to the trillion level that they had originally promised but hopefully uh things can go back from the right direction in that regard but it's a it takes a lot of you know i i i interviewed ron right before the election and i said would you help elon and it went viral and and uh elon started tweeting out ron paul's show every day but ron was what right because he said at the very beginning he said

I am very skeptical at what they'll be able to actually get done. There's so much resistance that we need to keep our expectations very moderate. And he was right to say that because it seems like they're not going to get done the trillion-dollar cut that he wanted to do in the next two years. Well, and I knew that one of the first things that would happen would be the media would come out with tearjerker stories about people who were going to lose their jobs. And I hate to see anybody lose their job, but I can tell you,

You've got over $36 trillion headed to $37 trillion very quickly on our national debt. And if we don't do some of these very unpopular things that Elon Musk wanted to do or wants to do, we're not going to be able to pay our Social Security in just a few years with money that will buy anything. And it's stuff that really has to be done at the

Ron Paul's conference where I spoke, David Stockman said that our national debt was going to double in 10 years or less. And I mean, it's just ungodly almost where we're headed. Somehow people in our country think that what's happened in almost every country in the world

socialism has destroyed the economy of most countries in the world. And somehow our people think that we're immune from that in this country, but it can happen here just like it's happened in so many other countries. I want to land the plane here shortly, but I wanted to ask you also, I saw Curtis Weldon, a former congressman, was on with Tucker Carlson very recently where he was sounding the alarm about

I mean, he was up there with the establishment Republicans for a while, he was saying, and he's blowing the whistle that he thinks 9-11, there's a lot of cover-up going on and that the 9-11 commission was a total cover-up in and of itself. Do you share that view as he does, and what do you think of his claims that he's made? Well, I was good friends with Kurt when he was in the Congress. In fact, his birthday is one day later

after mine and uh same same year same same exact same age and and uh uh kirk uh um kirk was a good was a good friend he he became uh

I don't know how much of that program on Tucker Carlson's that you heard, but he became very bitter, and it's certainly understandable. They raided his daughter's house three weeks before the election and took her commuters and everything and then never even talked to her. Later on, they just did it to make sure he lost that election, and he did. And I think it's terrible what they did.

what they did to him but uh you know he's he's he's become i guess you'd say you can see you can see in the emotion that he has that he's become almost fanatical and trying to you know do something about it and i i hope that he's successful i don't know that he

I will tell you, I will tell you one little bit of a funny story. My, my, my, my book is, is two, it's 203 vignettes or stories from my time in the Congress. And some of them are humorous. And I tell them that at one point that I, uh, you know, people used to tease me about my accent all the time. And, and, uh, um, uh, and I've told the young people here, I said, uh,

All my life, when I've gone into other states, people have teased me about my accent and asked me to wear shoes and call us hillbillies and make fun of us. I said, now everybody in the whole country wants to move right down here with us. And my late mother moved from Iowa after college, and I have relatives all over the country. So I'm certainly not against anybody. But one night I was sitting on the floor of the house next to Congressman Jim Walsh of Syracuse.

And Kurt Welland was up speaking, and I said to Jim, I said, Kurt's dyed his hair. And Jim looked at me, and he said, Kurt's dad is here? He thought I said Kurt's father was in the gallery. He didn't understand what I'd said with my accent, but anyway.

Well, I really appreciate your time, sir. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, it's great having you, and we'll do it again sometime. I'd like to get your thoughts on current events as they unfold. Oh, I'd love to. And like I said, you can read my views, Knox Focus, Duncan Archives, and Ron Paul has run a lot of my columns on his website,

site and antiwar.com has run a bunch of my columns too and and uh and then the lou rockwell.com has run many of the things that i've written and i appreciate that and i appreciate you having me on and i'm sorry that we had some technical difficulties that were totally my fault

Oh, no problem. So I want people to check out your book, From Bat Boy to Congressman. And we'll talk again soon. And I appreciate your time. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Take care.