On today's show, Stephen K. Broussen and Rob Bluie of The Daily Signal discuss what to look out for in the days to come as the Trump administration begins its first week in office, including the confirmation hearings and the transition of power.
00:03:52.220And we should not expect anything like what we saw in 2017.
00:03:55.420Well, this poll should disprove all of that.
00:03:58.580And that's because, as you just pinpointed, nearly half of federal government managers are planning to do exactly what they did during the first term.
00:04:07.520And that is resist Trump at every turn.
00:04:09.540In fact, if you look specifically at the number of federal employees who voted for Kamala Harris, two thirds of them have said that they will outright ignore directives from the president or do things in that they can in their power to resist him from carrying out his agenda.
00:04:26.140This is the reality of what is going on in Washington, D.C. right now, a week before President Trump takes office.
00:04:32.340So this is why this is why the confirmations, we kept saying, guys, you've got to bring those forward and you've got to flood the zone because he needs the cabinet heads.
00:04:42.200But you've still got, you know, none of the second or third tier people.
00:04:44.900You do have the three thousand we send in day one.
00:04:47.440But those executive orders, Rob, that he's going to sign in this ceremony next week.
00:04:52.040And let's say there's 50 and they're all in different aspects, a lot dealing with, you know, the securing the border and deportations, some dealing with trade and tariffs, some dealing with these wars and many other things like the woke nature.
00:05:05.940Signing an executive order in the Oval Office is ceremonial and it's obviously it codifies it, but you have to force it through the system.
00:05:14.340The shocking thing about your poll is you say right out of the box, Trump is like in Saigon in 1966.
00:05:32.480And over this is a problem that is decades in the making.
00:05:34.780I mean, if you go back probably even 100 years to Woodrow Wilson's administration, I mean, you have had a situation where Democrats have just done a much better job of burrowing into these agencies and they stay there.
00:05:46.620Republicans leave office, whether it's George W. Bush or Donald Trump, and usually people leave.
00:05:51.740And in the case of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, people stay and they stay for a purpose.
00:05:57.580They stay to enact their agenda, not the president's agenda.
00:06:00.120This is why we are big advocates that the president should have the executive authority and the ability to fire these individuals who don't follow his directives.
00:06:07.640And so to your point about Senate confirmations, I think that it's imperative on the 53 Republican senators to move with urgency to get these cabinet secretaries in place and then moved with urgency to get their deputies in place because they're oftentimes the ones who are going to be on the front lines while the secretaries are out there testifying and, you know, doing other things that come with those official duties.
00:06:28.760You have a situation now where, yes, this week is packed with confirmation hearings, but I'm not confident that President Trump is going to start day one with his team in place.
00:06:39.000I mean, he may have a few people in place, maybe a Marco Rubio, maybe Pete Hegseth gets confirmed.
00:06:43.840If you look at what happened with Biden, though, Democrats moved with urgency to make sure he had everybody in place that he needed on day one, January 20th, 2021, to carry out the executive orders and make sure that they were actually enforced.
00:06:56.360And Donald Trump needs to have that same sense of urgency.
00:06:59.300And I hope that Republicans in the Senate give him the team that he has nominated so he can do that.
00:07:06.200Rob, once again, you bring up a brilliant point, just the process, folks.
00:07:09.640They go to the committee of jurisdiction to actually have the confirmation hearing.
00:07:15.380OK, we're going to cover that wall to wall. Right.
00:07:18.020Once again, then the committee has to vote.
00:07:20.820So what Rob's saying is that, hey, if you look at these things happening this week, unless we force these committees to vote later in the week or over the weekend, it can't go to the floor.
00:07:29.880And the Democrats are going to try to slow everything down, use every technique, use floor speeches, all of it.
00:07:35.460But you've got to get to the floor to actually have a vote of the entire Senate, who is the human resources department really of the government.
00:07:42.140So there are two big functions is advice and consent on nominees and its treaties.
00:07:46.300That's really what they were set up in the Constitution to do.
00:07:48.600So if you just look at the timing, we could be and they could kick the the the the the committee vote into next week and then and then drag out the Trump could be a week, 10 days, two weeks to get some of these key these key people in there.
00:08:04.720How do we what's your recommendation to the audience of what we have to do to make sure we expedite that?
00:08:10.080Well, Steve, you've had some committee chairman like I'll give kudos to Mike Lee, who is running the Energy Committee, who has said he is not going to let the Democrats stonewall him and pull out these procedural hurdles.
00:08:22.040You have other Republicans who I think are are more deferential to to the process and the system and making sure that all the paperwork is in.
00:08:29.580And we know that in some cases these these FBI background checks can take a long time.
00:08:39.980But, you know, Steve, it's it's so critical.
00:08:42.420And here's why, because we have already heard that it's going to be 18 months to two years that Trump's going to be able to, you know, if that's his window, basically, to make sure that he accomplishes the legislative and the executive priorities that he wants to put in place.
00:08:55.860At that point, Democrats, you know, still will start to gum up the works.
00:08:58.820We'll have another election to think about.
00:09:00.240And so everything that he can do starting on day one and throughout those first 100 days will be important.
00:09:07.280You outlined the 25 to 50 executive orders.
00:09:10.040You actually need people in place to carry out those actions.
00:09:12.900So in some cases, he'll have people who go on a landing team or will step in and acting roles until the secretary is confirmed.
00:09:19.280But, you know, that's limited in their capacity.
00:09:21.360We even had Democrats and those on the left use lawfare to challenge actions by individuals who were in an acting capacity in the first term.
00:09:29.840And so you have all sorts of potential impediments that that will be standing in his way.
00:09:35.500And so I hope that Republican senators and there are 53 of them.
00:09:38.460We have to remember that he can lose up to three of them.
00:09:41.280I hope that they will recognize, just as Democrats did four years ago, that the president deserves his team.
00:09:46.500And by the way, we should also remember, Steve, the Democrats moved in lockstep four years ago.
00:09:52.200Not a single Democrat senator opposed a single Biden nominee.
00:09:57.220This is unheard of that you have Republicans who are now saying that they might not vote for some of these people, even though the American people have given Donald Trump a mandate.
00:10:06.480I mean, it's incredibly frustrating that Republicans, you know, tend to be this firing squad against their own.
00:10:11.420So, Rob, I want to have you back on the next couple of days, talk about the deconstruction of the administrative state, how DOGE can help that and how that ties into this poll that you guys have that says that 50 percent are going to be a resistance to the president's to basically remember the chief executive officer of the of the government, the commander in chief and also the chief magistrate, the chief law enforcement officer.
00:10:42.320The good news that I think coming out of the poll is that 54 percent of Americans, so a majority of Americans, say that Trump should have the authority to fire them if they don't comply.
00:10:50.500So hopefully the American people will still be on Donald Trump's side.
00:11:48.220Make it part of your daily diet, your media diet, to get up to speed on everything.
00:11:53.240Josh Pettit, I just want to make sure you understand, this is not simply a problem in the federal government.
00:11:59.980Josh Pettit, who's one of the great thinkers in the game of golf about the history of it, the architecture of it,
00:12:05.580also knows California politics in a very sophisticated way.
00:12:09.260Josh, and I wanted to get you on here.
00:12:11.080We started the morning show about Gavin Newsom, his complaints about the president, where actually Eric Prince was on about a recall petition about Gavin Newsom.
00:12:20.860And he actually recommended Elon Musk as a guy.
00:12:23.700They actually run for governor against Newsom, replace it.
00:12:26.480And you've been very good as one of my guides out there.
00:12:29.280And you're saying, and I lived there for 20 years, but I didn't even know the depth of the problem.
00:12:33.220You're saying, hey, look, all that's good.
00:12:36.020But don't think that solves the problem.
00:12:37.640The problem you have in Sacramento and throughout the state is probably worse than you've got with the administrative and deep state in Washington, D.C.
00:12:46.140Explain to the audience exactly what you're talking about.
00:12:51.580Well, if not worse, it's on the level.
00:12:53.760And, you know, first of all, going back to the morning show, which I caught bits of, the San Francisco disaster of 1906 was first caused by an earthquake,
00:13:03.860which then led to the city burning down, which then led to the 1907 financial panic.
00:13:10.800J.P. Morgan got involved, tried to pull resources, and then the rest is history.
00:13:15.480But to your question, you know, I'm seeing all these people, and I love me some Eric Prince, huge Eric Prince fan.
00:13:23.380And there's a lot of sentiment out there.
00:13:25.820People are talking about recall efforts, and we've got to get rid of these incompetent executives at the state level and at the local level, you know, in the case of L.A. with Karen Bass.
00:13:41.220That will not solve the underlying issues here.
00:13:46.220It'll help maybe around the margins, but it's not going to solve for the structural underlying issues that have compounded for decades and that are now manifesting themselves.
00:13:55.180What we're seeing is not simply a manifestation of incompetence.
00:13:59.340Just a little inside baseball and California politics, the most powerful political lobby in California is not the tech lobby.
00:14:10.040It's not the labor lobby, even though historically Sacramento and San Francisco were labor towns.
00:14:16.300It's not the more recent LGBT woke lobby.
00:14:33.940And until we address that and dismantle that brick by brick, the California administrative state, just like we have to do in D.C., we're not going to get much progress coming out of executives.
00:14:46.500Even if you get a guy like Elon in there who, you know, whatever, that's interesting.
00:14:50.720You and I may have some philosophical disagreements with Elon, but I think we did admit he's probably a phenomenal executive and a brilliant engineer, and he could probably solve certain things.
00:15:02.360But he or any other executive that goes in there, suppose we do recall Newsom, they are going to be fought tooth and nail every step of the way by the environmental industrial complex, which consists of the politicians in both state houses, a network of attorneys, lobbyists, consultants, NGOs.
00:15:21.760And they really make up this bureaucratic, tech-to-cratic class.
00:15:26.360And that's where the power in California resides in this scenario, most particularly at the California State Water Resource Control Board, the Department of Water Resources, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the California Coastal Commission in certain zones.
00:15:45.100They're very, very powerful. And until you dismantle these agencies, we're not going to solve these problems with the infrastructure deficits that we're seeing.
00:15:56.560We have not, you know, the population of the state of California has doubled in the last 40 years, and we have not increased our water storage capacity during that time frame at all.
00:16:06.880There's been tons and tons of money, billions of dollars allocated to the water infrastructure, and it's always gotten diverted away.
00:16:13.480Okay. Ten years ago, the California voters passed Prop 1, which is this boondoggle bond initiative, and it was sold to the public as for water infrastructure, storage capacity, conveyance systems, all these things.
00:16:26.96095% of that money was diverted away, and it went to all of these NGO groups that run these habitat restoration projects, and they get extremely wealthy in the process.
00:16:35.840And then they have their 501c3s that they run their operations out of, but then adjacent to that, they have their 501c4 operations that are political arms, they're PACs, and then they install their own bureaucrats, their own politicians, and they keep the money cycling going.
00:16:52.700It's just this recurring, you know, these environmentalists, I consider myself environmentalists, but the environmental lobby, they came to do well, and they did really well indeed.
00:17:32.340Amazingly, I guess, wet winters the last couple, and they're saying, oh, well, that grew the feeling.
00:17:37.680Weren't they supposed to store that water?
00:17:40.160Isn't there some big debate or crisis over they were supposed to have this storage capacity, but somehow the bond issue didn't pay for it, so the water just ran off?
00:17:48.920So they've had these incredibly wet winters, but there's nothing to show for it, and they're still sitting there fighting over the Colorado River, sir?
00:18:01.880Yeah, we've had two back-to-back years of record rainfall that had followed a couple-year drought stretch.
00:18:08.860The reality is we live in a Mediterranean climate here.
00:18:11.360We're always cycling in and out of drought years and El Nino years or clumps of years, and again, we don't have the water infrastructure to be able to store the water that can be utilized for the 36 or 38 million people that live here.
00:18:28.840And furthermore, we have the ability to do it.
00:18:36.800California, we have the ability to have water free to the residents of the state.
00:18:43.200We could have water too cheap to meter.
00:18:45.740You know, decades ago, we used to think, thinking forward technologically, we'd have energy too cheap to meter, and regulations largely have gotten in the way of that.
00:18:54.340In California, we could have water too cheap to meter, but there's so much money on the line.
00:19:00.360All these water districts, every time there's a drought cycle, they want to have for double, 2x their water rates, and then the water rates never come down when we go out of the drought cycles, and they're always claiming that they're going to use the money for more infrastructure.
00:19:13.200But guess what always happens is the infrastructure projects that get proposed, they always get shot blocked by the environmentalists.
00:19:21.320There's a body of law—it's not a law, but it's a body of law—called CEQA, California Environmental Quality Act, that was passed in 1970, actually signed by Ronald Reagan, governor at the time.
00:19:34.940That and the Endangered Species Act, for other reasons I won't go into, which is passed at the federal level.
00:19:40.040And they weaponize CEQA, and they use it to dismantle any project the environmentalists don't want, which is most of them.
00:19:48.040And then the few projects they do allow built, you know, their donors are developers that they let get by.
00:19:55.620But anything they don't want built, including these water infrastructure, the storage capacity, reservoirs, conveyance systems, they always get nixed.
00:20:03.780They get dragged out for years and decades, and they never happen, much like we've seen with this debacle of this high-speed rail project that's been going on for years, if not a couple of decades now.
00:20:14.220It's gotten nowhere, wasted billions of dollars.
00:20:17.840The waste, the corruption, the graft, it would make Tammany Hall blush.
00:20:29.340Josh, where do they go on your social media to get you?
00:20:31.980Because I want to break this down so people understand what we're really up against in California.
00:20:36.420Well, as a golf course architect, I inadvertently found myself in the middle of all of these water projects going to meetings in Sacramento because I spent half of my time trying to mitigate against this water issue for my clients.
00:20:52.580And so I've, over the last 10 years, I've learned the way the system works inside and out.
00:20:57.300And so, you know, as a golf course architect, that's my line of country, but I've seen behind the curtain, and I've seen the way the apparatus in Sacramento works, and I've connected the dots with all these different things.
00:21:15.640I run a museum, a historical institution for the greatest golf course architect that ever lived named Alistair McKenzie, and that's the McKenzie Institute on Instagram or Dr. McKenzie on Twitter.
00:21:28.980I don't really do personal social media.
00:21:58.320But I've got to get your two cents here.
00:21:59.960Earlier in the day, we had this situation.
00:22:02.100You have been adamant about this because you've really been at the forefront of the story for us in Europe, out of Rome, about the Ukraine war.
00:22:12.300And we're sitting there telling President Trump and just saying, hey, watch out.
00:22:16.560You see what the color revolution people are doing, led by Robert Kagan.
00:22:20.140They want you to step in and take ownership of the war.
00:22:23.560Give us your assessment, given what you've heard Walt say, you've heard Sepp Gorka say, but you're also seeing the buried leads in some of these newspaper reports.
00:22:34.400Basically, my analysis on this, going to the Mike Waltz comment, saying that President Trump, when he assumes power on the 10th, should pressure Zelensky into lowering the Ukrainian age of consent to 18, if I think it's 25 at the moment.
00:22:50.380The problem with this is that, let's say, Zelensky doesn't want to do that because he knows how unpopular it is right now.
00:22:56.580And he also knows he has a minimal democratic mandate.
00:23:01.000But if Zelensky were to do this, were to comply, and hundreds of thousands of extra kids are as a consequence of that massacre,
00:23:11.420at six months down the line, it's no longer the case that President Trump doesn't have a moral stake in this war.
00:23:24.400He absolutely would have one, which then obviously frames the question in these terms.
00:23:30.120Is he going to give Moscow what Moscow wants?
00:23:32.880Or is he going to continue to fight on behalf of Zelensky and follow through on what the Biden administration has been doing?
00:23:43.840And from then, I know you mentioned that this is very similar now to Vietnam-style escalation.
00:23:51.040The question is, I would pose it like this.
00:23:53.420Looking at Donald Trump, knowing something of his psychology,
00:23:56.540I would say for him, his only kryptonite is the perception of weakness, of signaling weakness.
00:24:07.100If you get to six months and he's morally browbeating Ukraine into lowering the age to 18,
00:24:13.500it's not a case that he will then be, that he will own the war, though, of course, he will.
00:24:18.700But the question is, is that if he withdraws the United States, leaves Ukraine out to dry,
00:24:24.140that is signaling a massive perception of weakness, Stephen.
00:24:29.100There's no getting around that if he does that, if he stays in for six months and then gives Putin everything he wants.
00:24:35.700The only way to avoid this, you know, this is something we've been saying on the show again and again,
00:24:39.780the only way, and there's no upside for this, for Trump whatsoever, if he stays in for six months.
00:24:46.880If he stays in for three months, he's going to start owning the disaster that Biden has left him.
00:24:53.640Only people won't blame Biden, they will blame him.
00:24:57.640The only way out of this is if in the first 24 hours, Donald Trump does exactly what he promised he would do in the campaign.
00:25:05.940J.D. Vance, right, he said, frankly, I don't care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.
00:25:11.580Where is that now, that dynamic that we were hoping for from this administration?
00:25:15.920It does not seem to be sustained looking at General Kellogg's contributions to the debate.
00:25:23.080It doesn't seem to be sustained by looking at Dr. Gorka's contributions to the debate.
00:31:43.080And with Noura bin Laden, we're going to have full coverage of Davos on the same day that the inauguration, as Davos kicks off.
00:31:50.420So we'll be going back and forth between the inauguration, actually the days of thunder that start right after that when President Trump starts signing the executive orders, goes over to the White House.
00:31:57.960Noura bin Laden. But that entire crowd is licking their chops.
00:32:02.040And don't take it from me. I'll put back up on social media this evening.
00:32:06.080I'll put on the Robert Kagan piece in The Atlantic, which lays it out.
00:32:09.340They see this as, oh, if Trump doesn't go forward with their plan, it's a major strategic defeat and he's going to own it.
00:32:15.340The only way you own it is if you step into it.
00:32:21.780Ben Harnwell, where do people go to stay up to speed with everything you're putting up on social media?
00:32:28.840Getter, Steve, under at Harnwell, my profile.
00:32:33.520I'll just finish with this observation.
00:32:35.600Let's wheel out the Professor John Mearsheimer line here that he said 10 years ago about Ukraine being walked down the primrose path to its own destruction.
00:32:44.360Donald Trump now is standing at the beginning of the same primrose path and the people around him are holding him by the hand and they're urging him to walk down the same primrose path.
00:33:30.600We used to do the Wednesday show with him all the time in his show.
00:33:34.920It's this is all Mearsheimer playing out, not just the primrose path to fight this to the last dead Ukrainian.
00:33:39.620That's why the parents over there, the reason it's still 26 years old and the war, you know, Mike said, well, I don't think most Americans know it.
00:33:46.220Everybody in the war room posse understands because we've talked about it for two years.
00:33:48.840The reason the Ukrainians couldn't get through any of their legislature is that the parents said, no way.
00:33:55.500They've never really had any big volunteers in the 18, 19, 20 year old, except a couple of performer things you used to see on CNN and MSNBC.
00:34:11.100Tomorrow's show, we're going to be dipping in and out of the confirmation hearings, particularly Pete Hegseth, the national security part of it, the defense, SECDEF defense department.
00:34:21.960It's going to start on the show that precedes us, the morning show here in Real America's Voice before the war room, where I think we're going to catch up with this rally that's going to go on from officers who are actually serving the field in Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:34:35.020And then there's going to be a big turnout at the hearing tomorrow.
00:34:39.060Captain Mo Bannon will be part of that.
00:34:40.920So we'll and we're going to be going back and forth from our contributors, breaking news to what's happening at the confirmation hearings tomorrow.
00:34:49.460David, amazing piece, because it's so given everything we're talking about here the last week and this week to know that people are thinking downrange every way, because I say I say, hey, look, everything we've got in the field of action.
00:35:01.880Now, Hakeem Jeffries and these guys are looking to raise two billion dollars to flip a handful of seats to take control of the House.
00:35:09.260The first order of business they're going to have is the impeachment of Donald Trump.
00:35:12.160And we're going to be right back to the beginning of all this.
00:35:14.380And guys like Zuckerberg and all these guys are down with their million dollar checks as supplicants today will go through this entire flip.
00:35:21.480You've got a great piece up in the dispatch that says, hey, people are thinking about this and they're actually getting ahead of it downrange.
00:35:28.200Walk me through your piece about the midterms.
00:35:29.860So I was taking a look at the evolving political operation.
00:35:34.440I should say the emerging political operation in the incoming Trump White House.
00:35:39.240And what I found fascinating, Steve, was that, as expected, the political operation led by, you know, informally or formally led by Donald Trump.
00:35:49.720But his deputy, Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, James Blair, deputy chief of staff for political legislative affairs, Matthew Brasso, the political director on the outside, Chris Lasavita, who was helped with Wiles in managing the 2024 campaign.
00:36:05.420All of them are going to be focused on the legislative agenda with narrow majorities in the House and Senate, the House obviously very narrow, the Senate, even though it's 53 seats, that doesn't give you a lot of wiggle room.
00:36:17.920So they're going to be focused on getting that reconciliation bill through with the tax implications, border implications, energy implications.
00:36:29.400But you're also going to see – and this is what I thought was so interesting and what I featured in the piece was a deep focus on the 2026 midterm elections.
00:36:38.660The White House political operation wants to vet the candidates that Republicans are recruiting for the House and Senate and even for some of these governors' mansions.
00:36:46.700They want to vet their campaign teams, and I think in a way Trump is able to do this.
00:36:53.200It's not unheard of that White Houses are involved in this, but I think we're going to see a much deeper involvement from this White House political operation in part because Trump's endorsement is so coveted in Republican primaries.
00:37:08.720And what the Trump operation has figured out is because they want our endorsement, it gives us a lot of influence and they plan to use it.
00:37:16.700I want to go because one – this is inextricably linked, as you said, with what's happening here.
00:37:22.940Is your sense – because I heard the Senate was pretty adamant last week in the meeting saying, hey, look, we've got to do two bills.
00:37:28.000We've got to get this border energy bill out there, maybe throw in some defense.
00:37:43.000Do you have a sense of where the political team is coming down on that in respect to 2026 of either holding what we've got now or potentially increasing this?
00:37:55.240I think this is still a moving target, Steve.
00:37:57.020I think we know that Senate Republicans prefer the two-bill strategy.
00:38:00.860I think House Republicans, because the majority is less than a handful of seats, I mean it fluctuates.
00:38:07.340And at the moment it may be just one or two seats.
00:38:09.580I don't think they want to have to go through this twice, and I think that's what's motivating their desire to stick with one bill.
00:38:15.460Cram it full of everything we can possibly get in there.
00:38:18.940Let's just do it once because we don't know if we can do it twice.
00:38:22.180And, of course, the Senate is a more complicated and somewhat deliberative body, and so they're thinking it will be easier from a policy perspective for us to get the various votes we need if we can actually break it up into two different bills.
00:38:37.440But I think ultimately it's going to be about where the president is.
00:38:41.420That's an obvious answer to give you, except, as you know, with Trump, he is either, one, cagey or, two, unsure of what he wants.
00:38:49.380I think he's trying to let the House and Senate fight it out.
00:38:53.280And then whatever works, he'll say, I'm for that.
00:38:59.480You know, the war and possibly was very involved in a lot of these reapportionments, realignments, the fights in Florida, the fight in North Carolina, the fight in Missouri, Tennessee, all of it.
00:39:08.940But when you look at how we pulled this off in 2024, a lot of that tied back to that.
00:39:16.740Are the political team of Susie and Chris, et cetera, are they going to work on these things too early on to make sure that we got a better sense of where some of these potential pickups are going?
00:39:26.160And also make sure we don't lose what we got, because I know New York's tight.
00:39:30.360I imagine North Carolina is going to be a major battlefield, particularly since we lost a lot of down ticket, given how Trump did at the presidential level.
00:39:39.820Is there a sense that we've got to get involved in those fights too as a predicate to getting ready for the midterm?
00:39:46.640I think we're going to find out more about that as things go along.
00:39:50.360I mean just for your viewers' understanding, reapportionment doesn't come along again until the end of the decade, right?
00:39:55.180So our boundaries are set, and you're going to see the NRCC on the House side, NRSC on the Senate side heavily involved in trying to defend these majorities and hopefully from their perspective expand the majorities.
00:40:11.280I think that they're going to have to defer to Trump and his team more than we have seen from congressional committees interacting with presidents in the past, at least initially.
00:40:25.720A lot of this, Steve, is going to have to do with the incoming president's political position as we approach Election Day 2026, right?
00:40:34.420If he's in a really good position, he's going to have a lot of juice.
00:40:36.840If his approval ratings are suffering, if people feel like he hasn't dealt with inflation and the border, those two main things they really elected him to do, then he's going to have less juice, and Republicans will start to separate from him.
00:40:49.300But initially, he probably has more political capital within his own party to begin a presidential term, as much of that as I have seen since Barack Obama 2008.
00:41:04.760That's why it's so important to get this stuff done and get it done quickly.
00:41:08.480By the way, there's all kind of analysis out.
00:41:10.420In 2030, if we do that, even without this whole controversy of which I was involved in in 17 about do you count illegal aliens or not, even without that, I think it's 10 electoral votes and a bunch of seats, a bunch of seats going to go to Texas and Florida.
00:41:44.680I don't know that he will run on that.
00:41:46.480At least – in fact, I would predict he will never run on that.
00:41:49.440But, Steve, when you're in the minority, it's much easier to unify, and it's much easier to raise resources because everybody can imagine that their money and their volunteer efforts, it's going – that it's going to go to exactly what they want it to go to.
00:42:05.780You don't have to deal with the details and come on and satisfy everybody's individual asks until after you win the majority.
00:42:15.040Amazing. Amazing piece over there, and I like the fact that people are already thinking downrange because everything – it's all intricately linked for how we do in the midterm.
00:42:25.840If you want to stop the Trump movement, you want to stop Trump's presidency, just lose the House in the midterm, and, man, it will be a whole different calculation.
00:42:33.240David, where did people go to get your social media, where did they get you over the dispatch, all your reporting?
00:43:33.700The whole predicate of President Trump's economic plan is not tariffs. That's a central piece, right?
00:43:41.720It's not taxes that's a central piece. It's not deconstructing administration or deregulation.
00:43:48.120These are all component important pieces.
00:43:50.960The substrate that he is built upon is full-spectrum energy dominance, that his theory of the case is an industrial power.
00:43:59.500You have to have cheap, plentiful, and ready energy all the time.
00:44:03.620Your sense, as we get up to the 50, it looks like, executive orders of the 100 that may be signed next Monday, what's your sense of where we stand in that most key component, the full-spectrum energy dominance brother?
00:44:18.780Well, I think his position on tariffs is a sophisticated business-like one.
00:44:25.020It's about recognition that it's probably going to be impossible with the four-seat majority to dismantle the Biden IRA legislatively, which would be the easiest path forward.
00:44:34.200And since that can't really be done, the next step to squash it is to go after tariffs on China, who import 88 percent of the thin-film PV, solar, all of the lithium-ion batteries, essentially all of them into this country, inverters for battery storage, for solar, voltaic, for utility-scale solar farms.
00:44:53.620Imposing hefty duties on them will be a counterbalance to the inability to unwind the Biden IRA, which I think he recognizes legislatively is going to be very hard, a very, very long putt.
00:45:07.480We've had the last five years – I look back at the last five years of new generation capacity additions in this country.
00:45:14.440Ninety-one percent of them have been solar, wind, and battery storage.
00:45:18.420Only nine percent of new generation added in this country in the last five years has been baseload, nuclear, plant-volved, or gas-volved combined.
00:45:28.060Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Full stop. Full stop. Full stop.
00:45:32.160Give me that again because you have taught us that the solar and wind are ephemeral.
00:45:38.960You're saying of the 100 percent capacity added, only nine percent was in what we call real cheap, plentiful, ready-to-go energy 24-7, and the 91 percent has gone to all these kind of sidebar projects?
00:45:54.360Conventional, traditional base load, meaning 24-hour-a-day power plants have only consisted of nine percent of national new capacity power generation additions in the last five years.
00:46:05.760And it's worse than that on a net basis because we've shuttered about 22 net megawatts of coal, gas, and nuclear along the way.
00:46:14.480So the net increase across five years in actual energy capability of the electrical system is only 2.9 percent cumulative across five years, not per year.
00:46:24.780We're now projecting three to five percent per year growth in electricity need.
00:46:29.180So we are woefully, woefully short of electrification in the country, and these policies must be turned around, if not legislatively, then by duties, and then by chasing after utilities who have glommed on to the asset churn opportunity presented by lots of renewables, wind, solar, battery storage.
00:46:49.180So they get guaranteed 10 to 12 percent rate of return guaranteed to them by public service commissions and proceed with this because it's easy money for them.
00:46:58.660That's the bigger problem is getting utilities off of this who are major PAC donors and to, on a bipartisan basis, getting them weaned off of this being wedded to part-time, 24 percent of the time, electricity sources that are ruining the country's electrification.
00:47:14.860Listen, with everything I'm hearing about AI and how the stock market is predicated upon AI, that even now it's going down to second and third tranche companies, and we're going to Davos next week kind of for the first anniversary of the AI.
00:47:28.420And the whole Davos World Economic Forum is all about artificial intelligence put out.
00:47:33.640With the increased necessity of power for AI, how big an air pocket is this going to give us that President Trump is going to have to deal with?
00:47:45.220I had the privilege of the Money Center Bank invited me to talk to 10 hedge funds about three weeks ago on Wall Street about why the boom in GE Vernova.
00:47:55.420In the last nine months, there have been 10 times the number of heavy frame, heavy-duty gas turbines ordered in this country, 10 times more than the last five years per year this year.
00:48:08.620So suddenly there's an absolute boom going on in the way of folks understanding and recognizing they must have these units running to back up this horrendous part-time energy system we've built out now that I just explained.
00:48:22.600So there's a boom underway in this space.
00:48:30.280Yeah, partly driven by AI and data centers, but I think that's partly a politically correct way that Fink and our Morgan Stanley chair have used to explain that this part-time electricity does nothing for pulp and paper, cement making, aluminum making, steel making, car assembly, all of that also heavily dependent on baseload, constant-duty electricity.
00:48:51.180We're woefully, woefully short of that.
00:48:53.760So there's recognition in now utilities ordering gas turbines, betting on the administration change, which has now occurred, and looking forward to hopefully more baseload investment that they'll be making, hopefully.
00:49:09.740Real quickly, the EOs that you're anticipating and hope that the president's on top of in the first couple of days of next week, what are the one or two big ones that you hope to see?
00:49:20.880Well, he's going to – I'm almost certain he's going to restate his bulk electricity grid kibosh against procurement of bulk electricity grid components from hostile nations, most specifically China, being a hostile nation, can't supply power transformers and can't supply solar, wind, battery storage inverters.
00:49:40.480Critical components to the bulk electricity grid cannot come from hostile nations.
00:49:44.800That was a keynote of the last administration.
00:49:49.140I do think that the duties are going to be not pervasively applied at 25 percent, but targeted to those nations who are hurting us.
00:49:56.660China has basically taken over 70 percent of the power generation equipment market in this country from a 1 percent market share position 10 years ago.
00:50:06.620What we've got to get in the way of what they're supplying is part-time energy devices that basically ruin U.S. electrification and minimize it.
00:50:15.520So he's got to get in the way of that with duties targeted at China, and that won't be an EO, but that will be an action of commerce with duties targeting that kind of equipment coming from hostile nations that is equipment based on part-time electrification as opposed to baseload full-time electrification.
00:50:34.000Dave, social media, where do people keep up?
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