In this episode, Alex Blumberg takes a deep dive into the Trump administration's approach to immigration, trade, and due process, and why the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the president's immigration policies.
00:00:31.640Think about this administration for a moment.
00:00:34.020It is filled with the wealthiest group of businessmen we have ever seen in any modern White House.
00:00:40.260Yet not a single one of them has explained to the president that when the richest country in the world, that's us,
00:00:46.800buys more stuff from other countries than they buy from us, it's not a subsidy.
00:00:52.540We want and need the stuff that those other countries make.
00:00:55.820We don't have the resources to make everything in America, or we've chosen not to.
00:01:00.000Part of capitalism is American companies making choices about whether or not they would rather produce things here or import them from other countries.
00:01:09.120Importing is not necessarily a bad thing.
00:01:12.340A trade deficit is not necessarily a bad thing.
00:01:14.920And the businessmen surrounding the president in this White House, they know that.
00:01:19.600But they appear to have no interest in telling him, which leaves our economy in the hands of someone who apparently wants to isolate America as the rest of the world economy is moving on without us.
00:01:33.880These cases involving the administration and immigration policy.
00:01:37.400We keep hearing about due process applying to non-citizens.
00:01:57.700It traces its roots all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215.
00:02:01.140And I say all that because these are not just words on a page.
00:02:04.800This is one of the most foundational promises of a free and democratic society.
00:02:11.180Without due process, any of us can be snatched up off the street, imprisoned, deported, without any trial, without any hearing, without a judge even taking a look to see if there are charges against us, to see if those charges are legitimate.
00:02:25.260It is fundamentally anti-American to reject the premise of due process.
00:02:30.120After the Civil War, one of the very first things that the Reconstruction Congress did was apply the guarantee of due process to the states so that everyone would be protected.
00:02:38.740The states, the federal government, the president himself, every single government official in this country must respect every person's right to due process.
00:02:47.940Not just every citizen, not just every lawful immigrant, but every person.
00:02:57.100Yeah, I'm kind of surprised to see that this completely unthought out, sort of off-the-cuff tariff deal hasn't resulted in China bending to American wheel.
00:03:13.560Anyone who has ever studied economics, global economics, or China could have told you that.
00:03:18.640So, you have to wonder what the endgame is here, because it just has seemed to be so haphazard and random and just simply not strategically thought out.
00:03:32.560I don't know what they thought was going to be the outcome of this unforced error of just declaring a war on our closest trading partners and allies.
00:03:47.080Have we ever seen our Constitution been tested in this way like this before?
00:03:52.300I think only the Civil War could be a comparison to our current moment.
00:03:56.820To see a president and, frankly, also a Congress abandon these basic premises of our Constitution.
00:04:04.380You know, the framers really did not envision a president as corrupt and lawless as Trump entering office.
00:04:11.640They constructed an office whose holder would not be able to wield so much power and push down so many checks and balances.
00:04:20.320Unfortunately, the United States Supreme Court took away a lot of the checks and balances on the president in decisions like the horrible immunity ruling from last summer.
00:04:29.440And so, we are left now with a president who feels, understandably, that he's empowered to push aside any constitutional restrictions that clash with his agenda.
00:04:38.320He came in saying he wanted to do mass deportations.
00:04:41.680And the reality is you cannot do deportations at that scale without violating due process, the rights of both immigrants and citizens who will be caught up in those raids.
00:04:52.480I mean, we had ICE raids here in Washington, D.C. today, masked agents bursting into restaurants, attempting to arrest undocumented immigrants.
00:05:00.760What if a citizen was there and was Hispanic and didn't have their passport on them and got snatched up and put on a plane that was sent to El Salvador?
00:05:08.880Without due process, that person is gone, possibly forever.
00:05:13.000That's why the Supreme Court intervened recently to try to put some restraints on what Trump is doing here.
00:05:18.120But the Supreme Court has not been a consistent protector of liberty under this administration yet.
00:05:22.640And I really hope it wakes up to the threat that Trump poses.
00:05:24.980This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
00:17:43.480And in some cases, this budget actually does get there.
00:17:47.560When we say it's a net 17 percent cut, that includes a massive investment in national security.
00:17:54.320You know, the one thing that the federal government is, like, supposed to do, defend the American people and secure the border.
00:18:00.620The president is investing in an unprecedented way in national defense while also cutting the woke and weaponized government along the way.
00:18:10.300This would be spending levels, non-defense discretionary federal spending at the same level as 2017.
00:18:20.420So people talk about getting to pre-COVID spending levels.
00:18:23.240This is actually the spending levels under Barack Obama's last year in office before the first President Trump term had his opportunity to get in there and sort of make his mark on spending.
00:18:35.060If you include inflation over the years, this would be the lowest level of non-defense discretionary spending since the early aughts when I was still in college.
00:18:45.860So this is exactly what the people elected the president to do.
00:18:49.740The big question, obviously, is what next?
00:18:51.940You know, traditionally, the president's budget has been kind of symbolic, maybe a marker.
00:18:57.740And then the House and the Senate start their appropriations process, such as it is or isn't, and work from there.
00:19:05.880I think this time is going to be different.
00:20:15.100Happy to do my best to create some clarity here.
00:20:17.820You know, after 15 years in Washington, if there's one thing I'm convinced of, it's that they make this complicated on purpose in order to avoid accountability.
00:20:56.840And what Congress is supposed to do now is take this budget that the president has proposed and use it as the framework for the FY 2026 appropriations process that they'll go through.
00:21:09.600In an actual world, that means that the 12 appropriations subcommittees go through the budget line by line and figure out exactly how they want to spend taxpayer money, right, moving forward.
00:21:20.580This is the president saying, I think you should do it this way.
00:21:23.640And when it comes to DOGE, what you see in this president's budget is the DOGE-identified opportunities for cuts put into law, put into writing.
00:21:34.020So when the president says, we got to get rid of all of this weaponized and wasteful and progressive money that's going to NGOs through international aid programs, that is reflected in the cuts that he's proposed in this budget and so on and so forth.
00:21:51.760And now, as I said, it becomes incumbent on Congress to actually take that proposal and make it real.
00:21:58.500Right. Very good. Excellent. Outstanding.
00:22:00.720Eric, hang with us. EJ and Tony is also with us.
00:22:11.240David, I tell you what, the big downward revisions for Biden administration era data keep coming in thick and fast.
00:22:20.900The latest that we literally just got this morning at 10 a.m. from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that in the third quarter of last year, a period when we were previously told the economy added 399,000 jobs.
00:22:35.740It turns out that private sector job growth in that quarter was precisely zero.
00:22:41.300We added no private sector jobs during that time.
00:24:08.960Now, of course, these these data that we got today are essentially going to be part of the annual revisions.
00:24:17.200But those annual revisions don't come out right away.
00:24:19.880As the name implies, annual, they only come out once a year.
00:24:23.620And they cover a period from March of one year to March of the next.
00:24:28.740So that means that we're not actually going to get these data until next year.
00:24:34.500In other words, we're not going to see the the total impact on the jobs numbers during the Biden during the entirety of the Biden administration until 2026.
00:24:43.740What was last year's what was last year's revision, just as a reminder to the war room?
00:24:49.340It was a downward revision of eight hundred thousand.
00:25:25.100E.J., give me an Eric, if you're still with us, give us you know, we we cover the downers and the reality of the papers.
00:25:32.060But President Trump, you know, two trillion capital investment committed by U.S. firms, seven trillion overall from other countries coming this way.
00:25:40.580What how would you frame that good news for the American workers, for manufacturing, for jobs back E.J. and then Eric?
00:25:48.540Well, we got to remember when we're talking about all this investment pouring into this country, what are people getting in exchange for this investment?
00:25:55.980In other words, this capital surplus, all this capital flowing into the country, which is going to create American jobs, it's going to create revenue streams for Americans, right?
00:26:06.800We're going to see a return on investment here as well as return on investment abroad.
00:26:11.620That's great when we see capital flowing into the country.
00:26:14.740That's the flip side of the trade deficit.
00:26:17.760We we often look at the trade deficit and we think that it's always and everywhere bad.
00:26:22.380It's really not that you think of a trade deficit like putting on weight.
00:26:27.160You can put on weight for a good reason or a bad reason.
00:26:29.400You can either be gaining muscle because you're working out or you can be gaining fat because you're eating too much and not working out.
00:26:35.400When we talk about all this investment pouring into the country, that's like putting on muscle.
00:26:40.760Conversely, when we're selling off all of our farmland to the Chinese Communist Party, that's like putting on fat.
00:26:46.360So when we talk about trade and we talk about all these trade negotiations, remember, we're trying to get a better deal for American exporters and for American workers.
00:26:55.880We are not trying to eliminate the trade deficit.
00:26:58.560The trade deficit very oftentimes gets a bad rap.
00:27:01.880But the flip side of the trade deficit right now is an investment surplus.
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00:30:17.380Perhaps Jack Goldsmith has forgotten about the latent power of President Biden that he exerted bringing in 10 million illegal immigrants.
00:30:26.620It's strategically coordinated events, a million dead boys laying over Ukraine, Russia that could have been easily avoided, 37 trillion in debt.
00:30:37.220Biden pardons everybody on the way out the door.
00:30:40.440And Jack Goldsmith, the opinion leader here at the New York Times, instead of weighing in, he was, I think he was under George Bush, it says, yeah.
00:30:51.540So instead of going after Congress, right, why isn't anybody going after Congress?
00:30:55.340If the president's too powerful, well, why don't you write a letter about the Congress not doing anything?
00:31:00.960That seems to be a more profitable way to go.
00:31:04.600Anyway, on that note, we've got Dave Walsh coming in to explain how President Trump is using his full latent powers to restore our economy and restore energy.
00:31:16.640I think you've got to chart it up for us.
00:31:18.540And so just call for it when you need it.
00:31:20.040Yeah, you know, electrification in abundance at low cost is certainly at the core of any ability to reshore manufacturing and restructure and rebuild the economy and for us to export heavily again, industrial products.
00:31:33.500We've had recently a majority of the major grid coordinators, PJM, MISO, the Southwest Power Pool, SWAC, which is California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, before Congress reporting out in more vigorous terms than I use the electrification shortage in all of their regions.
00:31:54.040And these regions include 280 million U.S. citizens.
00:31:59.120We've got half of the regions in the country under warning by NERC for the National Electoral Liability Association for shortages and brownouts like the one in Spain, affecting possibly up to half the people in the country across the upper Midwest, the West in SPP, PJM, which is where you're sitting, Dave.
00:32:17.480Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio, MISO, which is 15 states in the Midwest, covering about 40 million people, warnings in the peak days of the summer heat, the peak days of winter cold, the accelerated possibility of brownouts due to not enough electrification.
00:32:39.100I have a slide, one slide to show about that, how this works.
00:32:42.700If you look, the blue line across 2042, this is within MISO, again, 15 states across the Midwest, 40 million people.
00:32:51.520The blue line is the advertised rating plate capacity of new generation being added out there, which looks like a lot, looks like close to 60 gigawatts.
00:33:01.580The trouble is that's momentary maximum capacity, that number, the rating plate number.
00:33:06.740The real energy capacity is the red line, and you can see net capacity on continuous energy is reducing in the same period by close to 38 percent, because all of the resources being bid in to be built in the next 20 years across MISO basically are solar.
00:33:27.680The big part now is solar, secondly, wind, third battery storage, a little bit of gas turbine combined cycle that actually runs all the time.
00:33:37.040But in the vast majority, 80 percent of the queue, what investors are bidding in to MISO to erect and PJM to erect, and actually around the country, is all solar and battery storage based on taking advantage of these huge incentives.
00:33:50.000Incentives to buy equipment from China, install it here, and go ahead and electrify with vastly reduced energy equipment.
00:33:58.960So you've got a lot of the country under warning for brownouts, just the same as Spain had.
00:34:03.400And we came perilously close last summer in SPP, the Southwest Power Pool, 15 states, on three separate days in August of losing the grid there under severe warnings of a resource advisory on August 23rd,
00:34:17.040August 25th, a conservative operations advisory, and finally on the 26th, an emergency alert, because 37,000 megawatts of wind in that region, in that huge region of 15 states, dropped to 1,200 megawatts all of a sudden.
00:34:31.880So we had warning advisories that we were that close on a, if you go to a Monte Carlo simulation or gambling, we were that close to losing that whole grid last summer.
00:34:41.620Texas, just two years before, eight separate days, we were that close, within 5% to 6% of losing the entire grid because of now not enough electrification due to the mass adoption of part-time, very part-time devices.
00:34:55.920This just doesn't work mathematically.
00:34:58.340And the grid management are saying it's very loud and clear.
00:35:33.420The capacity to build that now is very, very limited here.
00:35:36.960Then, under the Obama administration, his eight years in office put a wrecking ball, and this is well documented through his DOE and EPA, to the coal industry.
00:35:45.500So, where we were, about 53% coal-fired, continuous duty, base load, coal pile equals storage, four months' worth of storage, put a wrecking ball to that industry, wanted to terminate coal.
00:35:56.680And those were the words of his EPA, which helped us attack the Clean Power Plan via SCOTUS, that they were overreaching their power and their charter in doing so.
00:36:09.700Biden, during his administration, put a wrecking ball to gas-fired combined cycle power plants, which is now 42% of the electrification of the country, stuff that runs all the time, based on American natural gas.
00:36:20.800He put in place EPA mandates to discontinue, unless carbon capture were applied, natural gas-fired power within about six years.
00:36:29.800So, the Democrats have consistently made moves under the guise of no strategy, only a carbon reduction strategy, nothing about added energy, to sap the electrification of the country.
00:37:41.260Look, the last time that India hit back at Pakistan some years ago, all of their bombs missed.
00:37:48.520They had spent a lot of money, and it's very dangerous when you spend a lot of money to think that spending money equals capacity.
00:37:56.420Because clearly, the last time they hit, the targeting data, the geo-coordinates and elevation have to be exactly right for the bomb to hit where it's supposed to.
00:38:07.520I think, in this case, the attacks, which were obviously done by Muslim extremists inside India, I'm not convinced that it was with any kind of actual Pakistani government sponsorship.
00:38:22.760The fact is, the Pakistani military is battling the Pakistani Taliban, takes up about 60 percent of the military's efforts, combating them along the Afghan border.
00:38:34.900However, I would not be surprised if those same Pakistani Taliban stimulated this attack to cause this level of trouble with India.
00:38:43.000But both the Indian military is not very capable, and Pakistan will try to hit back.
00:38:52.240I don't see this going anywhere because both of those countries would suffer massively if they got into an actual dust-up with tens of millions of refugees on top of displaced people, casualties and mayhem.
00:39:07.380Both of those countries are kind of living on the edge as it is.
00:39:09.740The last thing they need is, the last thing they need is a war.
00:39:41.900How do you think we're doing with India?
00:39:43.220And then any more you want to report on the trade wars and how that's going to make the U.S. great again?
00:39:50.520You know, I would not be that excited if we got to a zero-zero trade deal with India because their cost of labor is a micro-fraction of what ours is in the United States.
00:40:01.600Their cost of environmental compliance is zero compared to what it is in the United States.
00:40:06.520It would put a lot of U.S. manufacturing at a significant disadvantage.
00:40:10.560Look, Dave, I'm very old school on tariffs.
00:40:13.960I think a flat 10% or 15% tariff on anything coming into the United States is a good thing.
00:40:19.120I think protecting domestic manufacturing is a very good thing.
00:40:22.920And until the idea of free trade with a country where less than 50% of the people actually use toilets is a fool's errand.
00:40:34.020And the last time I was in Delhi was four years ago.
00:40:36.800And there was a big billboard in the airport from the National Ministry of Health saying,
00:40:43.140help us reach our goal this year of 50% toilet use across the country.
00:40:47.320So I don't get all excited about anything to do with India.
00:42:01.460Even before this trade dust-up, what I can even tell you from Trump administration 45,
00:42:06.920the Chinese Communist Party was very concerned about Trump's policy on trade and actually getting tough with them.
00:42:12.580Now that he's actually clearly gotten tough with them, it is a massive threat.
00:42:18.740The Chinese people kind of have this deal with the Chinese Communist Party that they're supposed to deliver economic development.
00:42:25.300And in exchange, people have effectively no rights and no actual freedoms.
00:42:29.580And now that the economic growth is very much in peril in the short term, there's going to be major unrest because of it.
00:42:40.580And on top of that, Xi's war on corruption before that really crushed a lot of the entrepreneur class and created the small-medium enterprises,
00:42:51.220which were creating the jobs, that's all largely dried up.
00:42:56.520And when you take Jack Ma, who's the Bezos, Steve Jobs of China, and you disappear him from society and he reemerges six months later having embraced supervision because he said something negative against his state, that's a problem.
00:43:11.780So China has – they rode a wave of massive economic expansion for years, and Xi has crushed that innovation and the freedom of maneuvering on the north.
00:43:21.680Can you hold with us over the break, Eric?
00:43:54.000He's our wise man, a former CIA, Pentagon, and White House advisor with an unmatched grasp of geopolitics and capital markets.
00:44:01.100Jim predicted Trump's Electoral College victory exactly 312 to 226, down to the actual number itself.
00:44:10.980Now he's issuing a dire warning about April 11th, a moment that could define Trump's presidency in your financial future.
00:44:18.500His latest book, Money GPT, exposes how AI is setting the stage for financial chaos, bank runs at lightning speeds, algorithm-driven crashes, and even threats to national security.
00:44:30.080Right now, War Room members get a free copy of Money GPT when they sign up for Strategic Intelligence.
00:44:36.840This is Jim's flagship financial newsletter, Strategic Intelligence.
00:45:29.900His father literally rolled with Mao back in the day for the long march.
00:45:33.660There's the Shanghai faction, which he really crushed over COVID, and the Communist Youth League.
00:45:40.380Those two segments have been degraded a lot.
00:45:43.540However, the weakening of the economy, the uncertainty around economic growth and all those things have definitely made Xi's inevitability impaired.
00:45:57.360On top of that, all the generals that surround him have all paid for their positions.
00:46:03.480And so, it's a very interesting quandary what they're going to do on Taiwan, because the generals, I'm sure, are saying, let's go.
00:46:12.980They believe they're high on their own supply.
00:46:16.940Xi needs to make a deal to have some kind of economic pathway through this.
00:46:24.140So, I think Trump is in a very good position to hold their feet to the fire and to correct it.
00:46:30.300If Trump had not done this, the consolidation of manufacturing in China, outside the United States, was getting to the point of no return.
00:46:42.540And so, it is high time to bring a lot of that manufacturing back to America, whether it's pharmaceuticals, chips, electronics, a lot of things we take for granted.
00:46:53.220It makes sense to make it in America, not in China, not with people that hate our constitution, our freedoms, and our way of life.
00:47:34.940They brought troops from the most rural areas, the most ignorant troops to come in and smash them.
00:47:45.700I'd say, just like the Soviet Union, what the United States did with the Catholic Church and the British MI6, we weakened the ability in Poland and inside the Soviet Union for the state to control everything.
00:48:03.120China has dozens of different ethnicities.
00:48:06.580And if you look at China's history over the last two millennia, they come together under a strong dictator and then they fragment apart.
00:48:12.880And I think if we help China come apart and come apart into some of its component parts where it's not all under the Chinese Communist Party, that is in our interest.
00:50:17.980Pete Buttigieg is fighting Donald Trump's VA reforms, and he's pushing a woke agenda.
00:50:25.540He backed taxpayer-funded sex changes and wanted to rewrite Lincoln's VA motto, making it more gender-inclusive.
00:50:35.340Buttigieg wants to take us back to Joe Biden's broken, woke VA.
00:50:39.760All right, Mark, give us the overview, what you're up to with your group.
00:50:53.560And all political views are my own, but Mark, I've had it.
00:50:57.000Well, veteran action, I built this to be a smash-mouth, grassroots political organization that fights for our veterans and promotes President Donald Trump's America First foreign policy.
00:51:09.760And we're not going to allow these radical leftists like Pete Buttigieg to come to Iowa to attack President Trump and his VA agenda.
00:51:18.060You know, Pete Buttigieg, he won the Iowa caucus in 2020.
00:51:21.920He narrowly lost the New Hampshire primary.
00:51:24.620He was a very formidable candidate, and he turned in to be one of the most effective surrogates for Joe Biden.
00:51:31.720So no Democrat is going to come into Iowa uncontested, and veteran action is going to bring this smash-mouth philosophy.
00:51:38.440That I learned with my good friend, Mike Davis.
00:51:41.280You know, Mike Davis and I went to college together at the University of Iowa.
00:51:44.640He's my senior counsel at Veteran Action.
00:51:46.840And I helped build the A3P Action Center, which I'm bringing that same approach to Veteran Action.
00:51:52.440So not only can you see that ad, but we're encouraging the War Room Posse to go to VeteranAction.org,
00:51:59.540click on the Take Action button, and contact your lawmakers.
00:52:02.740Tell them to pass the Veteran Access Act.
00:52:06.220We believe that veterans deserve choice in their health care.
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