The text of our full discussion appears after this:
by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
July 29, 2026
My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!
Frank and I discuss:
Yesterday’s White House meetings with the leaders of Ukraine and Israel
Why Trump is happy with both of them
PLUS how Muslims are using the implosion of leftist denominations in America to turn church buildings into mosques.
Finally, we mourn the loss of our friend and American hero Sam Faddis.
It’s 16 minutes of in-depth analysis you won’t want to miss. If you prefer to read, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!
Now, here’s our full discussion:
Frank Gaffney: Welcome back. Let me say welcome, for the first time in far too long, to our friend and colleague Rod Martin.
Rod is, of course, chairman of the board of our Institute for the American Future, which, as you know, makes this program possible. We’re grateful to him for that service. But in addition to it, and his various entrepreneurial business enterprises, we’re especially grateful for The Rod Martin Report, which he disseminates at RodMartin.org. I strongly encourage you to take advantage of it. It’s a great online resource: a free-range mind, as I’m fond of saying, at work. You can benefit from it in addition to his visits with us here.
Rod, welcome back. It’s so good to have you with us, my friend.
Rod D. Martin: Good to be here.
Frank Gaffney: I am still in shock at the departure from this Earth of our friend and colleague Sam Faddis. Peter McIlvenna, in the previous segment, gave us a nice tribute to Sam. I wonder if you might be willing to do the same.
I know you featured his work on The Rod Martin Report platform from time to time and valued his friendship and comradeship, really, in our Committee on the Present Danger: China, as did I. Your thoughts, sir?
Rod D. Martin: Losing Sam is quite a blow, and we lost him much, much too young. My goodness. He died of COVID and COVID complications. I guess that can get any of us, especially if we’re over a certain age or have any comorbidities, but it is a shock.
That’s the kind of thing you would have expected five years ago, not so much today. I certainly didn’t imagine we’d lose Sam.
Sam was an American hero. He was a brilliant mind. I didn’t always agree with his point of view, because sometimes he was way more pessimistic than I was. But Sam had reason to be. Sam understood just how terrible things can be under the hood in our intelligence community and how that affects everything else.
He shone a light on it that very, very few voices are able to do well, and certainly not with the patriotism and faithfulness of Sam Faddis. It’s just a tremendous blow. He was a great man. He’ll be deeply missed, and I know that all of us are praying for his family.
Frank Gaffney: Amen, and for his happy transition to Heaven as well.
Ukraine’s Pressure on Russia
Frank Gaffney: Rod, let me ask you about events coming up this afternoon, I believe, at the White House. There will be the funeral of Lindsey Graham. Among those attending will be Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, who will also have time with the president of the United States on the margins of all that.
Give us your crystal-ball assessment of what’s likely to come from those meetings at the White House, sir.
Rod D. Martin: First, Ukraine. They’re doing what Trump wanted them to do, which is actually be effective, and they’ve gotten brilliant at it.
The military-industrial complex in Ukraine has become quite remarkable and, interestingly, is beginning to be diversified out of Ukraine into non-target zones in Europe. That’s a little dangerous: Putin has made clear that those plants are targets. But it’s a little hard to see Putin attacking a factory in Germany.
This is having a positive effect on European rearmament at a moment when they’re actually committed to doing it. We’ll see if they stay committed. We’ll see if that’s all talk. But so far, so good.
They’ve pretty much all hit their 2 percent of GDP defense-spending goal. They’re on their way to 5 percent, a point and a half of which is infrastructure. But they desperately need infrastructure. On the entire continent outside Russia and Ukraine, there is only one single munitions plant that can even make artillery shells. It’s ridiculous, and it has to change.
Ukraine is having a positive effect on that. Ukraine is also really putting Crimea at risk, in much the same way that they did Kherson early in the war. They have attacked Russia’s ability to resupply Crimea to a degree that is genuinely threatening Russia’s ability to hold it.
The drone strikes are fantastic. But far beyond Crimea or the land bridge to it, the drone strikes even as far away as Omsk, the largest refinery complex in Russia, are having a tremendous negative impact on Russia’s ability to pay for its war and fuel its army, not to mention its civilian economy.
Russian refining capacity is down more than 50 percent. I was going to say almost 50 percent, but that’s out of date. They’re now down 58 percent in refining capacity in Russia. They can’t sustain that.
Russia used to be the world’s largest oil producer. They’re actually importing gasoline from Belarus now.
Zelenskyy is getting it done, and that’s really cool. We’ll see where it goes. But this is what I was saying a year ago: Trump’s strategy with Putin was always carrot and stick. You can make a deal right now, and we can end the slaughter. Russia is suffering about 40,000 casualties a month, just on their side. It really is a slaughter for both sides.
You can end all that now on terms that are reasonable for everybody, or we’re going to give you the stick. The stick was always those 3,350 ERAMs that are about to ship, unleashing Zelenskyy to hit targets deep inside Russia — which Biden never let him do — and generally putting pressure on the Shadow Fleet such that Russia can’t make the money it needs to function.
That’s all good news, and Zelenskyy is going to have a good day. For Netanyahu…
Frank Gaffney: I’ll ask you to pause for just a second, Rod. We’ve got to take a break.
We’ll talk about Bibi and another issue that’s very much on my mind: churches going out of business in this country and being bought up by mosques. What does that portend, not just in terms of religious services in any given community, but for what I think of as the critical infrastructure of jihad?
We’ll talk about that with Rod Martin on the other side of this short break. I hope you’ll stay tuned. Be right back.
Netanyahu, Iran, and the Abraham Accords
Frank Gaffney: Welcome back. We are visiting with Rod Martin of The Rod Martin Report. You can follow it at RodMartin.org. Please do. It will make you smarter and probably better-looking as well.
Rod, we were talking about guests at the White House. Talk to us a little bit about how it might go with Benjamin Netanyahu there today.
Rod D. Martin: The media really wants there to be a rift between these guys. That’s how they’re playing it, but I’m sorry, I just don’t see it.
Do they disagree on some things? Yes, probably. I was just saying that I occasionally disagreed with Sam Faddis on some things. It doesn’t mean I didn’t love him. It doesn’t mean that he wasn’t amazing. He was probably right when I disagreed with him. But that’s not the point.
You have two people in a room. They’re going to disagree sometimes. That’s not what’s really happening here. If it were, Mike Huckabee would no longer be the ambassador to Israel. You’d have somebody else in that role.
This is good cop, bad cop. We don’t have the Israelis attacking Iran, and the Iranians have learned their lesson enough to stop attacking Israel. Some of that is a reduced capacity to fire missiles with that kind of range, but most of it is just the certainty that the IDF is going to hit them disproportionately if they fire missiles — that don’t even get through Iron Dome — at Tel Aviv.
What do we have? We have the threat that we can unleash Israel. We have the Lebanon deal, which is proceeding well. We’ll see if it lasts. We’ll see if it works.
But the fact that Lebanon has now actually recognized the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the State of Israel is just remarkable. They’ve technically been at war since Lebanon declared war on Israel in 1948. This is a huge step forward.
Certainly, Hezbollah is geographically isolated if the Lebanese government is against it, the Israeli government is against it, and the Syrian government is against it. This is all progress.
I think what we’re seeing, again, is this good cop, bad cop game that gets you to what Trump has always said his real aim was. Just the other day, the U.S. announced the Saudi 123 nuclear-power deal, and Trump immediately came back and said, “But this is not going to happen unless Saudi Arabia signs on to the Abraham Accords.” Full stop.
That’s Trump’s aim. He wants a regional, general peace. You’ve got to take Iran off the board to do that. Once you’ve done it, everybody gets rich together. But second, you get to draw down forces in theater a bit and focus on the real threat, which is China.
Frank Gaffney: I hope this is the kind of outcome we get from this meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu. We’ll see. We’ll have you back to talk about it.
Churches, Mosques, and Civilizational Jihad
Frank Gaffney: Let me pivot to another topic, not unrelated to what is animating the threat from Iran. That would be what I call Sharia supremacism.
Let me give you some thoughts of my own, and then we’ll talk to Rod about them.
The Western Journal reports that seven Catholic churches in Minnesota are effectively going out of business, ending Sunday Masses due to declining attendance and a lack of priests.
It is predictable what will happen next: at least some of those churches will be purchased by Muslims and converted into mosques, whether there are prospective congregants or not.
Sharia supremacists in that state and others across the country are practicing the “build it and they will come” model of settlement in America.
An alarming BanSharia.com webinar just last week described what is really going on here. In accordance with the Muslim Brotherhood’s playbook, known as the Explanatory Memorandum, Islamic societies, centers, and mosques are part of a civilization jihad aimed at destroying Western civilization from within, by the hands of the unbelievers and the believers.
We must root out the process by which this critical infrastructure of jihad is being inserted into our country.
But let’s hear what Rod Martin, who knows a thing or two about churches, having served in senior positions with the Southern Baptist Convention in the past, makes of what is happening in churches in this country. Not least, what is likely to happen as their roles, or certainly their physical infrastructure, are supplanted by this critical infrastructure of jihad? It’s the only way I can describe it.
What do you think, Rod?
Rod D. Martin: Let’s start with the churches. We’ve got really fascinating data now that shows that the decline of Christianity in this country has stopped and possibly reversed.
You had this explosive growth of what are called the “nones” — none, as in "no religious affiliation: “I don’t have a religious affiliation. None.” The explosive growth in that has stopped cold and, again, slightly reversed.
But it’s really interesting where it grew. It mostly grew in liberal churches that were promoting Critical Theory and were out there marching beside Queers for Palestine. Those guys are going under.
The far-left Presbyterian Church (USA) used to be gigantic. At the current rate, in five years it will be smaller than the conservative Presbyterian Church in America, which was always about 10 percent of its size.
We see liberal churches that have facilitated the rise of communism and Islamism. They are dying, and yes, Muslims are inheriting a certain percentage of their property.
That’s a bad thing because, aside from the spread of Islam, which, if you just see Islam as a religion, is already a problem — that’s certainly not where I want things to go, speaking as a Christian — the bigger point that you keep making correctly is that mosques tend not to be centers of worship as much as arsenals for jihadis, training centers for insurgents, and all manner of terrible things.
You don’t have to look much further than — oh, wait — any country in the Middle East to see exactly that.
We have to separate the political agenda of a lot of Muslims, which I would contend comes straight from the Quran, but obviously a lot of other Muslims would disagree. We have to separate that political agenda, which is revolutionary, from First Amendment speech.
Frank Gaffney: Amen. Rod, we have to leave it at that. Come back to us soon. I hope all of you will do the same. Until then, go forth and multiply.
