Bill O'Reilly calls President Obama "weak", Putin "Stalin-lite" during interview with Glenn

September 24, 2014

Writer

The King of Cable News, Bill O'Reilly, joined Glenn on radio this morning to discuss his new book Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General, as well as the President's stance on the Islamic State. Unsurprisingly, O'Reilly did not mince words when it came to the President's record, calling him "weak" and saying that in the dangerous world we currently live in, weakness could be truly disastrous to America.

It's a fascinating interview, watch the full video below or scroll down for the transcripts.

GLENN: Good friend of the program and really famous guy, Bill O'Reilly is joining us now. He had a new book called Killing Patton. I don't know what his obsession with death is, but we were talking about his book last hour. And Bill, I don't know what your obsession with -- can I spoil the ending? Patton dies.

BILL: Did you read the book?

GLENN: I got to Page 143.

BILL: Good. For you, that's phenomenal. You must really like it.

GLENN: Do you normally get to Page 143, if you don't like it?

BILL: Yeah, Page 22 or 23.

GLENN: So Bill, lay out the premise here.

BILL: Look, last six months of World War II brutal beyond belief. Americans really don't know what happened in World War II. I didn't until I started researching the book. It's been romanticized for us, because it was the last great American world victory, but what was happening was really down and dirty. The problem was the Russians were allied with the United States, but the Russians were doing terrible things. And General Patton knew it. He wanted to fight the Russians after they defeated Hitler.

Eisenhower, FDR, Truman, none of them were on board with that. They kept trying to tell the American people that Stalin and Russians were good guys, our allies. That sets up the tension. Patton is adamantly opposed to the Russians. He rightfully predicted they would not leave the countries that they occupied, and he was setting up his third army to, after Hitler fell, go after the Russians and push them back, all right.

There's your tension.

So he lost the political game. He was about to come back to the United States to do a speaking tour, Patton was, saying what I just told you, that the Russians were bad guys. The day before he's supposed to come back to the United States, he gets into a hellacious automobile accident that is beyond belief, and I'll let you read the book to see, we lay out the facts.

GLENN: Because back then, if I'm not mistaken, cars just didn't get into accidents.

BILL: It was insane. He was in the hospital, partially paralyzed from the accident. He was joking with the nursing, drinking cognac conversing with his wife. He goes to sleep. The next morning the doctors come in to check on him. He's dead. Nobody knows why he's dead. No autopsy. He's right away put in a coffin and buried in Luxembourg. All the investigator documents disappear. All the witnesses to the accident on the other side, not the guys that were in

his car, but the other side that crashed into him, disappeared.

So it is a thriller about World War II, the end of the war, then a murder mystery about what happened.

GLENN: So Bill, if you would have reached out to me, I mean this sincerely, I have a document, a letter from Patton -- I will show it to you tonight on TV -- from Patton, to the guy he put in the rear command. He writes it at the Pentagon and he said these guys are going to screw this up. This is -- they are not going to do it and I am going in. And I'm not coming back. He knew he was on a suicide mission. He knew that the Pentagon was not with him, and he predicted his own death.

BILL: Yes, he did. Is that an original letter --

GLENN: Original letter.

BILL: That's amazing. I'm looking forward to seeing that. He did predict his death to his own daughters. The last time he saw them, he said I don't believe I'm going to survive, because he knew that there were two assassination attempts on him already. You expect that in war, but they were very, very nefarious.

Another thing was, there was a guy heading up the OSS, which today is the CIA, named Wild Bill Donovan. He hated Patton. He was adamantly against Patton, because he was Stalin's pal. All this is laid out in a thriller form. This is not a boring history book.

GLENN: Who are you alleging did it?

BILL: Stalin.

PAT: Stalin ordered a hit on him?

BILL: Yes. His Secret Service, who were assassinating people all over Europe.

PAT: Are you alleging Bill, in conjunction with the U.S.?

BILL: No, but I'm saying the OSS helped Stalin and his secret police and it wouldn't have been hard to get agents around Patton.

PAT: One of the other fascinating things in the book -- I never heard of this -- the British actually shot down Patton's personal plane.

BILL: RAF fighter attacked Patton. He survived because of the skill of his pilot, but it was a marked plane. Nobody knows who was piloting the plane, because there were a bunch of people, even Russian pilots that had access to those spit-fires, but there's a lot of stuff many this book that people are just going to keep you up at night.

GLENN: Bill, I so appreciate especially this particular book, because once we got into bed with the communists, we changed fundamentally as a nation. When the Progressives saw fascism and communism and they at first thought this was the way to go, and I think they still do, some people think communism is the way to go. That's what the global warming thing is about. We lost our way. And really bad nefarious things happened, because we were starting to look tell collective.

BILL: The communist influence, after World War II in the United States --

GLENN: Wait. Before World War II, during World War I, that's where the birth of the Progressive movement came from. One of my favorite dark quotes from any President was FDR saying I've got a lot of friends that are communists. Doesn't mean you are un-American.

BILL: True. That just heightened when we allied with the Soviet Union to fight Hitler. And all of that was in play. There was a tremendous amount of ideological stuff in play. Patton wasn't an ideological guy, but he was thinking of running for president, that's another reason people didn't like Patton. But he was a warrior and he saw the Russians as villains and he was right. I mean, there's no doubt that George Patton's vision of Stalin and the Russians was 100% correct, and if we had followed his vision, this world would be a totally different place now.

GLENN: Let me switch to current events. How are you, first of all?

BILL: Good. Overly busy, but good.

GLENN: Overly busy?

BILL: Yes. I work --

GLENN: You have a whole hour. Uh to work every day. The working man right now. Listening to you, like --

BILL: I should be a man of leisure, but I am compelled, as you are to bring the truth of the American people.

GLENN: Let's switch gears here and bring the truth to the American people. ISIS, we have anyone about this for a long time.

BILL: One year.

GLENN: This is the caliphate that some were warning.

BILL: You?

GLENN: And these guys are here. They are coming back over. Do you have a sense -- first of all, have you ever seen any time, even in World War II, you know, FDR says we aren't going to get involved, and then he switches gears, about '39, and says okay, I was wrong, puts new people around him. This president is not putting new people around him, not cleaning out Clapper or anyone else that said this is nothing to worry. Do you have any faith that we know what we are doing or on the right side?

BILL: I'm looking at Obama speaking now at the United Nations and his top priority is global warming, not fighting terrorism. He's a weak President. Any fair minded American would agree that he is weak. Weakness in a dangerous world is a threat to the country because the bad guys are emboldened by weakness. The best example is Putin. He's Stalin-lite.

So the president is a weak leader. His priorities lie in social justice, and in liberal causes like global warming. He has no stomach for the fight. I mean, can you imagine George Patton's opinion of Barak Obama? Could you just imagine? I mean Patton looked down on Eisenhower and FDR to some extent, but I don't believe we have a concerted plan to fight word-wide terrorism. A big mercenary army, under the supervision of Congress and trained by the United States, and financed by the coalition that the Obama administration is supposedly putting together but no, we don't have a uniform strategy. The president had to bomb ISIS because of the beheadings. He had to. He didn't want to, because like the "New York Times", which printed today on its editorial page, ISIS is not a threat, in the opinion of the "New York Times", to the United States. What are you going to do?

GLENN: You think that's sane at all, to say they are not a threat in the United States?

BILL: I can't see any way that you couldn't project in the future that a group like ISIS that's now controlling thousands of square miles would dispatch people to try to kill infidels in a number of countries. Why can't the "New York Times" project that out? It happened before on 9/11 and it was an organization that didn't have nearly the power of ISIS, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. They hatched the plot. If they could do it, why couldn't ISIS do it and ISIS is up front saying we want to do it and we're going to do it, but still the "New York Times" doesn't see them as a threat. Doesn't make any sense.

GLENN: We are talking to Bill O'Reilly, author of the new book "Killing Patton", and he also does some TV show; but as you were researching the Nazis and looking at this, I can't help, because I'm a student of second Word War myself, I can't help but think we are repeating all of the mistakes, the same things are going on, the same denials are going on, making the same friendships, instead of making them with communists, we are making them with Islamic extremists. And ISIS is in my opinion, worse than the Nazis, because the Nazis at least had to hide everything.

BILL: Well, Nazis also had a structure whereby the Third Reich had ambassadors and this is before the war started in different countries and actually had elections -- they were rigged, all that. These ISIS people are just barbarians, and they made a terrible mistake in the beheadings of the two Americans and the Britain. If they had not done that, Beck, Obama would not be engaged right now.

So ISIS could have flown under the radar and expanded their power and influence and money, and they would not have been confronted by President Obama, but they made that big mistake, and now the United States is going to punish them. They will. We will. But that doesn't mean the jihadists are going to be defeated. They will pop up someplace else. You have to have a concerted plan to defeat this.

GLENN: If you were President of the United States today -- and I'm not -- I know that you would not salute the marines with a coffee cup in your hand -- if you were the President of the United States today what would you -- what would we be doing today?

BILL: Good question, and I will give you a precise answer. You could go on to O'Reilly.com for all the details --

GLENN: Don't do that.

BILL: The first thing you have to do is declare war on terrorism. Congress has to declare who are on the Jihadists. So the United States declares war on Islamic terrorism. That's the bill. Congress passes it, I sign it, as president. So now we have the power to go anywhere in the world to get these guys. But why should the United States taxpayers foot the bill for this, when it's a worldwide problem?

So we get our 50 nations -- that's what Obama says we have in our coalition -- and they pay for a 25,000-man force, mercenary force, that is under control of Congress, trained by NATO and American

officers on American soil. This is a rapid deployment force that goes everywhere in the world to confront these people when we need people on the ground to fight them. It doesn't diminish the United States armed forces. We still have our military intact. This doesn't have anything to do with them. These are private citizens that apply for the job, well-paid, and we choose the best all over the world, and we craft this force. This is going to happen, by the way. And that

force goes and fights on the ground against ISIS, al-Qaeda, whomever, Boko Haram, whatever it is. Now, this instills --

This instills fear into the jihadists, because they know there's nowhere to hide it's a declaration of war and they have elite fighters coming after them, who are going to kill them. So that's what I would develop on the military front. If you had a guy like Patton, who you could put in charge overall command, you do it. But we don't have anybody like Patton now. And that is a big deficit for the United States.

GLENN: Do you know why we don't?

BILL: Because of politics.

GLENN: They killed him.

BILL: Any real aggressive officers, they don't get promoted.

GLENN: I will tell you, that I love our military and I love our -- I just love our military and I respect they will, but I will tell you that I am gravely disappointed in some of the leadership in our military, because they have been, you know strung up --

BILL: Politicized.

GLENN: Yeah. Somebody needs to put their stars down on the table and say Mr. President, no thank you, and I'm turning it around, walking out of your office, going to the press.

BILL: Well you see it now with Gates and Panetta, two former Secretary of Defense, both have books ripping up Obama. Well, why didn't you do it when these mistakes were made.

GLENN: Thank you. It's one thing to read "Killing Patton". That's your theory, and this is your work and your job. It's not like why didn't you say something, Bill, on "The O'Reilly Factor".

You are in office, seeing these things, you don't wait for the book. You go out and you say it.

BILL: Right. I am resigning because this. This is happening. We are in danger. So I mean that's what we don't have. That's what Patton did. Patton told the press, he was very straightforward saying these guys, these Russians, they are dangerous. They are not our friends. And that got him killed.

GLENN: Bill O'Reilly, the man along with Roger Ailes, who built FOX News channel, talking to the guy who almost single-handedly destroyed FOX News channel. That wasn't my intent. I walk out going wow, crap that didn't work --

BILL: Well you destroyed CNN, so you got at least one of them.

GLENN: Thank you so much.

BILL: See you on TV tonight.

Glenn: Pay attention to what the State Department's RADICAL reset is signaling

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For years, the U.S. State Department operated on inertia—an institution locked into a cycle of caution, consensus, and risk aversion.

Speeches were careful, strategies were diluted by committees, and action was often defined by what couldn’t be done. The language was always the same: "nuance," "complexity," "stakeholders." Rarely was it about results.

That has changed.

What’s come out of the State Department in the last hundred days is a complete departure—not just in tone, but in structure.

Under Secretary Rubio, the department isn’t just adjusting tactics. It’s undergoing a philosophical reset.

The most telling shift is this: the department is no longer preoccupied with managing decline or defending abstractions. It’s operating from the premise that U.S. foreign policy must serve actual national interests, not vague global norms or ideological missions.

Look at the key decisions. The Global Engagement Center—an office that claimed to combat disinformation but increasingly acted as an internal censorship tool—is gone. Not repurposed. Not renamed. Eliminated. Aid programs that masked themselves as diplomacy while undermining core U.S. positions have been cut. Contracts to NGOs with open hostility toward U.S. policy goals? Revoked.

This isn’t cosmetic. It’s structural.

The department’s reorganization is consolidating power downward—removing bureaucratic silos, emphasizing merit over ideology, and restoring clarity to diplomatic goals. This isn’t about optics. It’s about removing friction between strategy and implementation. On immigration and border enforcement, there’s now a foreign policy posture that treats visa privileges as exactly that—privileges, not entitlements. Visa holders who break laws or support terrorist groups lose their status. Period. No press conference required. Just enforcement.

Regional partnerships are now framed by expectations, not entanglements.

Countries that allow mass illegal migration into the U.S. are being held accountable. Agreements are being structured around reciprocity. When those agreements are ignored, consequences follow. China’s influence in the Western Hemisphere, long treated as inevitable, has been directly challenged. Beijing’s role in Panama, particularly regarding the canal, has been dismantled through diplomacy backed by leverage, not lectures. That wasn’t done through press statements—it required statecraft, pressure, and the willingness to say no.

In Europe, there’s been a reframing of NATO obligations. Not as symbolic unity, but as measurable responsibility. The benchmark is no longer two percent. The conversation is now five. That changes the nature of the alliance. In Africa, the posture is shifting from dependency to commercial engagement. Trade, not aid. Access, not assistance. Diplomacy with terms, not with guilt.

The contrast is stark.

This isn’t a matter of tone or branding. This is a systemic shift away from a model that rewarded process over outcomes, toward one that is rediscovering the purpose of diplomacy: to secure advantage, resolve conflict, and protect national interests.

This recalibration will not be popular in foreign capitals used to ambiguity, or in institutions comfortable with drift. It’s also not universally admirable. It’s direct. It’s unambiguous. And it signals something rare in modern American foreign policy: conviction.

That alone is worth paying attention to.

Glenn: Why Memorial Day is not just another holiday

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They wore the uniform so you could live free. This holiday, ask yourself if you're living in a way that honors that sacrifice — or cheapens it.

Your son has been a Marine for what feels like an eternity. Only those who have watched their children deploy into war zones can truly understand why time seems to freeze in worry. What begins as concern turns to panic, then helplessness. You live suspended in a silent winter, where days blur and dread becomes your constant companion.

Then, in an instant, it happens. What you don’t know yet is that your child — your most precious gift — fell in combat 60 seconds ago.

This is a day for sacred remembrance, for honoring those who laid down their lives.

While you go about your day, unaware, military protocol kicks into motion. Notification must happen within eight hours. Officers are dispatched. A chaplain joins them. A medic may accompany them in case the grief is too much to bear.

Three figures arrive at your door. One asks your name. Then, by protocol, they ask to enter your home. You already know what’s coming. You sit down. He looks you in the eye and says:

The commandant of the Marine Corps has entrusted me to express his deep regret that your son John was killed in action on Friday, March 28. The commandant and the United States Marine Corps extend their deepest sympathy to you and your family in your loss.

This moment has played out thousands of times across American soil. In 2003 alone — just two years after 9/11 — 312 families endured it. In 2007, 847 American service members died in combat. In 2008, 352. In 2009, 346. The list goes on. And with every name, a family became a Gold Star family.

Honor the fallen

For most Americans, Memorial Day means backyard barbecues, family gatherings, maybe a trip to the lake or a sweet Airbnb. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying these things. But we must never forget why we can.

Ask any veteran who lived when others did not, and you’ll understand: Memorial Day is not just another holiday. It is a solemn day set apart for reverence.

So this weekend, reach out to a Gold Star family. Acknowledge their pain. Ask about their son or daughter. Let them know they’re not alone.

This is a day for sacred remembrance, for honoring those who laid down their lives — not for accolades but for love of country and the preservation of liberty. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

They died for the Constitution, for our shared American ideals, and the worst thing we could do now would be to betray those ideals in a spirit of rage or division.

We cannot dishonor their sacrifice by abandoning the very principles they died to protect — equal justice, the rule of law, the enduring promise of liberty.

This Memorial Day, let us remember the fallen. Let us honor their families. Let us recommit ourselves to the cause they gave everything for: the American way of life.

They are the best of us.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Trump exposes Left’s habeas corpus hijack in border crisis

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Democrats accused the president of declaring war on civil rights. In reality, he’s defending habeas corpus while they drown it in delays and legal loopholes.

Tuesday’s congressional testimony from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem turned heads for all the wrong reasons. Pressed to define “habeas corpus,” she stumbled. And while I respect Noem, this moment revealed just how dangerously misunderstood one of our most vital legal protections has become — especially as it’s weaponized in the immigration debate.

Habeas corpus is not a loophole. It’s a shield. It’s the constitutional protection that prevents a government from detaining a person — any person — without first justifying the detention before a neutral judge. It doesn’t guarantee freedom. It demands due process. Prove it or release them.

Bureaucratic inertia, activist judges, and political cowardice have turned due process into a slow-motion invasion. And the left knows it.

And yet, this doctrine — so essential to our liberty — is now being twisted by the political left into something it was never meant to be: a free pass for illegal immigration.

The left wants to frame this as a matter of compassion and rights. Leftists ask: “What about habeas corpus for migrants?” The implication is clear: They see any attempt to enforce immigration law as an attack on civil liberties.

But that’s a lie. Habeas corpus is not an excuse for indefinite presence. It doesn’t guarantee that every person who crosses the border gets to stay. It simply requires that we follow a process — a just process.

And that’s exactly what President Donald Trump has proposed.

Habeas corpus, rightly understood

Habeas corpus is the front door to the courtroom. It simply requires the government to justify why someone is being held or detained. It’s not about citizenship. It’s about human dignity.

America’s founders knew this — and that’s why they extended the right to persons, not just citizens. Habeas corpus isn’t a pass to stay in America forever — it’s a demand for legal clarity: “Why are you holding me?” That’s it.

If the government has a lawful reason — such as illegal entry — then deportation is a legitimate outcome. And yet, the left treats any enforcement of immigration law as a betrayal of American ideals.

The danger today isn’t that habeas corpus is being ignored; it’s that it’s being hijacked. The system is being overwhelmed with bad-faith cases, endless appeals, and delays that stretch for years. Right now, the immigration courts are buried under 3.3 million pending cases. The average wait time to have your case heard is four years. In some places, people are being scheduled for court dates as far out in 2032. Where is the justice in that?

This is not compassion. This is national sabotage.

Weaponizing due process

The left uses this legal bottleneck as a weapon, not a shield. Democrats invoke due process as if it requires the government to play a never-ending shell game with public safety. But that’s not what due process means. Due process means the state must play by the rules. It means a judge hears a case. It means the law is applied justly and equally. It does not mean an open border by procedural default.

So no, Trump is not proposing the end of habeas corpus. He’s calling out a broken system and saying, out loud, what millions of Americans already know: If we don’t fix this, we don’t have a country.

This crisis wasn’t an accident — it was engineered. It’s a Cloward-Piven playbook, designed to overwhelm the system. Bureaucratic inertia, activist judges, and political cowardice have turned due process into a slow-motion invasion. And the left knows it.

Abandon the Constitution?

Remember, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. But how do we balance the Constitution and our national survival without descending into authoritarianism? Abandon the Constitution? No. Burn the house down to get rid of the rats? Absolutely not. The Constitution itself gives us the tools to take on this crisis head on.

The federal government has clear authority over immigration. Illegal presence in the United States is not a protected right. Congress has the power to deny entry, enforce expedited removals, and reject bogus asylum claims. Much of this is already authorized by law — it’s simply not being used.

President Trump’s idea is simple: Use the tools we already have. Declare the southern border a national security emergency. Establish temporary military tribunals for triage. Process asylum claims swiftly outside the clogged court system. Restore “Remain in Mexico” so that the border is no longer a remote court room. Appoint more immigration judges, assign them to high-volume areas, and hold streamlined hearings that still respect due process.

That’s not authoritarian. That’s leadership.

The path forward

Trump is not trying to destroy habeas corpus. He’s trying to save it from being twisted into a self-destructive parody of itself. Leftists have turned due process into delay, justice into gridlock, and they’re dragging the entire country into their chaos.

It’s time to draw the line. Protect habeas corpus. Use it lawfully. Use it wisely. And yes — use it to restore order at the border. Because if we lose that firewall, we lose the republic.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Betrayal of trust: Medicare insurers face lawsuit over kickback scheme

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Editor's note: This article is sponsored by Chapter.

The U.S. government has filed a major lawsuit under the False Claims Act, targeting some of the biggest names in health insurance—Aetna, Elevance Health (formerly Anthem), and Humana—along with top insurance brokers eHealth, GoHealth, and SelectQuote. The allegation? From 2016 to at least 2021, these companies funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks to brokers to steer seniors into their Medicare Advantage plans.

If the allegations are true, it means many Americans may have been steered into Medicare Advantage plans that weren’t necessarily the best fit for their needs—not because the plans were better, but because brokers were incentivized by illegal kickbacks.

The Kickback Conspiracy

Navigating Medicare Advantage’s maze of plan options is daunting, so beneficiaries rely on brokers like eHealth, GoHealth, and SelectQuote, who claim to be unbiased guides. But from 2016 to 2021, insurers Aetna, Humana, and Elevance Health allegedly paid brokers millions in kickbacks to favor their plans, regardless of quality. Disguised as “co-op” or “marketing” deals, these payments were tied to enrollment targets. Internal emails revealed executives knew this violated the Anti-Kickback Statute, with one eHealth leader joking that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) would miss a $15 million Humana deal for minimal enrollments. Brokers used call routing to prioritize high-paying insurers, betraying beneficiaries’ trust.

Discrimination Against the Vulnerable

The scheme wasn’t just about profits—it targeted vulnerable beneficiaries. Medicare Advantage must accept all eligible enrollees, including disabled people under 65. Yet Aetna and Humana allegedly pressured brokers to limit their enrollment, as these beneficiaries were deemed to be less profitable. Brokers complied, rejecting referrals and filtering calls to favor healthier enrollees, incentivized by bonuses. This violated federal anti-discrimination laws and CMS contracts, undermining the founding principles of Medicare by discriminating against the very people it was created to aid.

False Claims and the Pursuit of Justice

The schemes led to false claims to CMS, with insurers certifying enrollments as “valid” despite kickbacks and discrimination. The government paid billions, unaware of the fraud. Examples include Humana’s $12,477 for a 2016 enrollment and Aetna’s $79,047 for a 2020 case. On May 1, 2025, the U.S. filed suit, seeking treble damages and penalties under the False Claims Act. Aetna and others deny the allegations, per May 2025 reports, promising a fierce defense. The case, demanding a jury trial, seeks justice for beneficiaries and taxpayers.

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