On today's show, we take a look at where the United States currently stands in the world geopolitically. President Trump's trip to the Middle East this past weekend included a visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, and a speech at Arlington National Cemetary in honor of our fallen heroes. Meanwhile, Vice President Mike Pence is laying out what he sees as the Trump administration's foreign policy.
00:00:53.000On Memorial Day, and he's fond of doing this, putting out these statements on sort of national holidays or national days off, in which he rips into his political opposition.
00:01:01.000He did that on Memorial Day as well, which, again, isn't the best look because it's Memorial Day.
00:01:05.000He put out a statement saying, Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped, radical left minds who allowed 21 million people to illegally enter our country, many of them being criminals and the mentally insane, through an open border that only an incompetent president would approve.
00:01:20.000And through judges who are on a mission to keep murderers, drug dealers, rapists, gang members, and release prisoners from all over the world in our country so they can rob, murder, and rape again, all protected by these USA-hating judges who suffer from an ideology that is sick and very dangerous for our country.
00:01:32.000A Melvillian sentence there from the President of the United States.
00:01:36.000Again, on Memorial Day, it isn't a happy Memorial Day.
00:01:39.000It's actually not the proper greeting, but in any case, the actual good thing that he did was, of course, he gave a speech at Arlington in which he discussed our national heroes.
00:02:05.000We will never, ever forget our fallen heroes, and we will never forget our debt to you.
00:02:13.000Okay, so, again, that's the proper tone for Memorial Day.
00:02:17.000All of this part and parcel of a broader discussion as to what America's foreign policy should look like.
00:02:23.000And it is kind of unclear what the Trump doctrine is at this point in time.
00:02:28.000J.D. Vance, just before the weekend, spoke at the Naval Academy.
00:02:32.000At the Naval Academy, he spoke at length about what he sees the Trump doctrine as.
00:02:36.000And there's a lot of wiggle room here as to what exactly he means.
00:02:39.000I think that Vice President Vance likes to use the Iraq War as sort of the bugaboo to attack any ideology that he does not find particularly good.
00:02:47.000For American foreign policy, that's fine, but you're going to be hard-pressed to find anybody who, knowing all we know now, would go back in time and do the Iraq war again.
00:02:55.000So I'm not sure who he's arguing against here, aside from a very, very small coterie of people who refuse to acknowledge the reality, which is that we didn't find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that the occupation did not go the way that it should have gone and all the rest.
00:03:08.000In any case, Vice President Vance is laying out what he sees as the Trump administration's foreign policy.
00:03:14.000And so what he suggests is that President Trump's visit to the Middle East, in which he visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE, was designed and sort of recapitulating an American foreign policy that is based on a realistic assessment of what the world looks like.
00:03:28.000Here was the vice president of the United States.
00:03:30.000But I actually think the most significant part of that trip is that it signified the end
00:03:46.000We had a long experiment in our foreign policy that traded national defense and the maintenance of our alliances for nation-building and meddling in foreign countries' affairs, even when those foreign countries had very little to do with core American interests.
00:04:06.000Now again, he's arguing here presumably against the war in Iraq.
00:04:10.000The war in Afghanistan is a bit of a different story since originally the war in Afghanistan was launched on the back of 9-11.
00:04:15.000So it was in fact a core American national interest to defenestrate the regime that had protected Osama bin Laden in the aftermath of the murder of 3,000 Americans.
00:04:24.000And obviously there are many different iterations of American foreign policy, many of them bad, very few of them actually wonderful.
00:04:32.000Obviously the United States got involved in a war in Libya and overthrowing the Libyan regime.
00:04:37.000The United States got involved in the war in Syria in sort of bizarre ways, the civil war in Syria.
00:04:42.000The United States has been involved in a wide variety of conflicts all over the world, and so this requires more specific definitions.
00:04:48.000So, J.D. Vance suggests, the vice president of the United States, that the American foreign policy has to be focused on our pure adversaries encountering them.
00:04:58.000Our government took its eye off the ball of great power competition.
00:05:02.000And preparing to take on a peer adversary.
00:05:05.000And instead, we devoted ourselves to sprawling, amorphous tasks, like searching for new terrorists to take out while building up faraway regimes.
00:05:27.000We're returning to a strategy grounded in realism and protecting our core national interests.
00:05:49.000And consider how this played out in just the last major conflict we engaged in with the Houthis over in the Middle East.
00:05:58.000We went in with a clear diplomatic goal not to enmesh our service members in a prolonged conflict with a non-state actor, but to secure American freedom of navigation by forcing the Houthis to stop attacking American ships.
00:06:21.000Now again, the Vice President would go on to suggest that the shift in thinking from ideological crusades to a principled foreign policy Restores the credibility of America's deterrence in 2025 and beyond.
00:06:32.000And the Houthi example is a very interesting one for him to use here because the reality is that the Houthis have not actually ceased their activities in the Red Sea.
00:06:40.000Originally, we did not define our battle against the Houthis as simply restoring deterrence with regard to Houthi attacks on American ships.
00:06:48.000The goal was to restore freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.
00:06:52.000The goal was to ensure that people could use the Red Sea in the Suez Canal again.
00:06:56.000In order to ship things, including oil and LNG, from the region.
00:07:04.000The Houthis are still shooting a couple of missiles a day over Saudi Arabian airspace at Israel.
00:07:09.000They're still shooting at a wide variety of ships in the Red Sea, and shipping has still not been restored in the Red Sea.
00:07:16.000So the question becomes, when we are articulating a foreign policy, can I agree on a sort of surface level of everything that the vice president is saying right here?
00:07:22.000I don't disagree with anything that he's saying.
00:07:24.000But the use of the Houthis is kind of a telling example because one of the things that is sort of an open battle in the administration that we all need to keep our eye on is what this sort of language obscures.
00:07:35.000What is the actual policy of the Trump administration?
00:07:38.000Is it a policy that makes sure to actually set red lines that are keepable?
00:07:43.000When the vice president suggests, for example, that every mission has to have an exit strategy with an end in sight, here's what he said, just to quote him.
00:07:53.000Past leaders sent our service members on mission after mission with no exit strategy, no end in sight, and with little articulation for the American people or for the warfighters about what we were doing.
00:08:08.000When we extend the deployment of an aircraft carrier, that has real impact on people's lives and we're aware of it.
00:08:16.000Of course, they miss their loved ones and their home life.
00:08:19.000They accept that sacrifice, and that's the job that you've taken on.
00:08:23.000But the job that we have taken on is to never misuse that sacrifice or never ask you to do something without a clear mission and a clear path home.
00:08:33.000Okay, now again, all that sounds really nice.
00:08:35.000The reality is that foreign policy is a lot messier than that.
00:08:37.000So, for example, the United States currently has troops stationed in South Korea.
00:09:15.000That the United States can simply, in pinpoint fashion, define our conflicts and get in and get out is not the way actual foreign policy really works.
00:09:22.000And it very often is the predicate for a bad argument about how the United States needs to spend less on, for example, military development.
00:09:29.000Right now, the United States spends approximately 3.7% of our GDP on military.
00:09:36.000So I turn to our friends and sponsors over at Perplexity to ask a quick question.
00:09:41.000How much has the United States defense spending declined as a percentage of GDP since 1900?
00:09:46.000And as Perplexity points out, defense spending was actually quite low in the United States, other than in World War I, for the period 1900 and 1930.
00:09:55.000And the reason for that is because the empire upon which the sun never set was not the American empire, it was actually the British empire at the time.
00:10:02.000We had a spike to about 4% of GDP during World War I. Then, spending went up to 40% of GDP during World War II.
00:10:10.000And then, during the Cold War in Vietnam era, 50s through 70s, we saw sustained high spending typically between 7% and 10% of GDP.
00:10:19.000During the 80s, because of the defense buildup that ended up crushing the Soviet Union, we were spending about 6.8% of GDP.
00:10:26.000In the aftermath of the Cold War, we dropped down to about 3.5% of GDP, went up slightly during the war on terror to 4.5% of GDP now.
00:10:38.000If you believe that we are now living in a much more dangerous world than we were in, say, 1996, then obviously that's going to require more of a military spending commitment.
00:10:46.000A safer world, a world in which free trade actually applies, in which you do have freedom of navigation, in which economic growth is the norm, in which the United States has trade capacity and commerce, in which global growth is the norm.
00:11:04.000That's always been the reality of the situation.
00:11:06.000And this sort of notion that I think has been promoted by some on the more isolationist side of the Republican aisle, that if the United States basically defines in pinpoint fashion its own military engagement, that the rest of the world will simply comply, that is not the way the rest of the world works.
00:11:22.000And by the way, that's been true all along.
00:11:23.000This idea that's straying from the founders is not true.
00:11:25.000There's a very famous story about George Washington going all the way back to the Constitutional Convention.
00:11:32.000Who suggested that the standing army of the United States should be limited to 5,000 men.
00:11:37.000The reason was that there were a lot of members of the founding generation who didn't like the idea of a standing army on the national level.
00:11:43.000And George Washington, who had to fend off the British with an army of essentially irregular soldiers, militiamen, who he had to cobble together throughout the Revolutionary War.
00:11:52.000The constitutional delegate proposed a 5,000-man cap on the army in the actual Constitution.
00:12:01.000And then sarcastically said that there had to be a stipulation added to the Constitution that no invading army could number more than 3,000.
00:12:07.000Of course, the joke he was making is that when it comes to foreign policy, necessity is the mother of policy.
00:12:14.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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00:14:23.000So you can have all of these principles that we all hope to have about no open-ended missions, no long-term commitments.
00:14:32.000The reality is, That in a world in which the United States refrains from any long-term commitments and refrains from flexible policy, what you end up with is more red lines crossed, actually.
00:14:42.000And so the question becomes, for the administration, how strong are the administration's red lines and what happens when those red lines are crossed?
00:14:49.000When it came to the Houthis, the United States drew a red line.
00:14:53.000Originally, it was about freedom of navigation.
00:14:54.000That was literally in the signal chat that got leaked to Jeffrey Goldberg, which was accidentally included in the signal chat.
00:15:08.000But that was not actually the mission.
00:15:10.000The ends were shifted in order to achieve some sort of titular end to a conflict with the Houthis so that the United States could then go and pick up checks in Qatar.
00:15:18.000Again, you can make the argument that that's a good policy or that it's not a good policy.
00:15:21.000But let's be clear about what happened there.
00:15:24.000And right now, America's enemies are perceiving, at the very least, this happens to every president.
00:15:28.000It shouldn't really be happening to President Trump is the truth.
00:15:31.000The reason it shouldn't happen to President Trump is because if President Trump had foreign policy team number one, Trump 1.0 in place, it wouldn't be happening.
00:15:38.000Trump 1.0 was extremely predictable on foreign policy.
00:15:41.000If you cross a red line, you will get punched in the face.
00:15:43.000If you do not cross a red line, we'll negotiate with you.
00:15:45.000That was the foreign policy of the United States.
00:15:47.000It was an actual peace through strength, realist foreign policy in Trump 1.0.
00:15:51.000But America's enemies and opponents There's a lot of debate inside the administration over whether Trump 1.0 was too hawkish.
00:16:03.000That is why, for example, there's been a lot of roiling debate over the makeover of the NSC, the National Security Council.
00:16:10.000The National Security Council, which is now under the tutelage of the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, was basically cleansed.
00:16:16.000And many of the people who were cleansed were some of the more hawkish voices at the NSC.
00:16:20.000Leading to the supposition that Vice President Vance actually has a lot to do with staffing up at the NSC.
00:16:24.000Now again, maybe you agree with Vice President, that's fine.
00:16:27.000Everybody's allowed to have their own view on this, and maybe he's right.
00:16:30.000But America's opponents also see this, and what they widely perceive right now is that now might be a good time to push.
00:16:37.000That is certainly clear from Russia, it is clear from China, and it's clear from Iran.
00:16:41.000Russia, China, and Iran are all pushing very hard right now, sensing weakness in the Trump administration approach.
00:17:14.000No more electric tanks, no more gender confusion, no more climate change worship.
00:17:20.000We are laser-focused on our mission of warfighting.
00:17:28.000We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.
00:18:19.000And when those impulses are right, they are great.
00:18:21.000And when they are wrong, they run up against reality and he shifts his impulses.
00:18:24.000That is why President Trump is such a pragmatist.
00:18:27.000And so right now, America's enemies, our opponents, are showing that they believe that there is play in the joints and weakness at the seams with regard to America's foreign policy.
00:18:35.000There is no question that's what's happening.
00:18:43.000They're simultaneously negotiating with President Trump.
00:18:46.000And by negotiating, I mean stringing President Trump along.
00:18:48.000They've been doing this with the Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, who again has yet to negotiate a really good deal anywhere that he has been deployed.
00:18:54.000In any case, according to the Wall Street Journal, Russia has now launched its largest ever drone and missile assault on Ukraine on Monday, according to Ukrainian officials, defying President Trump's calls for an end to the bombardment.
00:19:06.000Ukraine's Air Force said Russia launched more than 350 explosive drones and at least nine cruise missiles.
00:19:10.000Kiev scrambled aircraft and deployed electronic warfare systems and mobile air defense teams throughout the country in response.
00:19:16.000The latest attacks came just hours after President Trump issued a strong rebuke of Russian President Vladimir Putin denouncing airstrikes on the Ukrainian capital and other cities that killed at least 12 people on Sunday.
00:19:27.000Trump went on social media on Truth Social and he posted he has gone absolutely crazy.
00:19:31.000He is needlessly killing a lot of people and I'm not just talking about soldiers.
00:20:36.000He's one of the most consistent leaders in modern world history.
00:20:39.000He's been absolutely consistent in his territorial ambitions, in his desire to restore a quote-unquote Russian greatness, in his desire for Russia to be perceived as a global hegemon in its own right, as a global power, not a regional power, a global power.
00:20:52.000Again, Putin has been absolutely consistent.
00:20:55.000Every single president seems to make this mistake with Putin.
00:20:58.000George W. Bush famously suggested he looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and saw through to his soul.
00:21:03.000Barack Obama tried to set a reset button with Vladimir Putin and then dismissed Russia as a geopolitical enemy in 2012 in his race against Mitt Romney.
00:21:12.000Joe Biden tried to make overtures to Putin originally suggesting that if Putin sort of lightly, if he sort of lightly invaded Ukraine, well, then there might not be a lot of American pushback.
00:21:23.000Everyone makes this mistake with Putin for some odd reason, but Putin has been absolutely consistent.
00:21:29.000By the way, Putin responded to President Trump's suggestion that Putin had gone crazy by suggesting that this was emotional overload.
00:21:40.000So the Kremlin, their spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said, quote, We are really grateful to the Americans and to President Trump personally for their assistance in organizing and launching this negotiation process.
00:21:49.000This is a very crucial moment, which is, of course, associated with the emotional overload of everyone absolutely and with emotional reaction.
00:21:57.000Now, again, What the Russians are pretty openly saying at this point is that they would like to continue their expansion in Ukraine.
00:22:06.000They apparently are recruiting another 50,000 troops.
00:22:10.000They're happy to throw men into the maw, into the gristmill.
00:22:16.000The Kremlin continues to maintain that they're not going to end the war short of more territorial expansion.
00:22:21.000And this, of course, is leading to Western pushback, particularly from the German Chancellor.
00:22:29.000He has now come out, Frederick Merz, and he said that Germany, along with Ukraine's other key Western backers, had lifted range restrictions on weapons they sent to Kiev to fight against Russia.
00:22:37.000Which, by the way, is the correct response.
00:22:40.000If Russia gets to fight an endless war against Ukraine, then Ukraine should have the ability to strike at, for example, Russian weapons depots and supply lines inside Russia.
00:22:48.000Here's Frederick Merz, the German Chancellor.
00:22:53.000There are no longer any range restrictions on weapons supplied to Ukraine, neither by the British, nor by the French, nor by us, nor by the Americans.
00:23:04.000This means that Ukraine can now defend itself, for example, by attacking military positions inside Russia.
00:23:12.000It couldn't do that until a while ago, with very few exceptions, and didn't do that until a while ago either.
00:23:27.000That is President Trump actually trying to apply peace through strength.
00:23:30.000He's doing the same thing, apparently, in Northern Europe.
00:23:33.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration wants NATO to get more lethal.
00:23:38.000A testing ground is Europe's north, where NATO faces Russia on two sides.
00:23:41.000Some European officials worry America's commitment to the transatlantic alliance is waning, given President Trump's criticism of it and his stated desire to reduce military engagement abroad.
00:23:49.000But U.S. military commanders say that their posture remains firm.
00:23:52.000Brigadier General Andrew Sasolov, deputy chief of operations for U.S. Army Europe and Africa, said, from a U.S. Army perspective, my orders haven't changed.
00:24:01.000The High North and the Baltics have been thrust into the center of U.S. war planning, as their access to shipping routes, territory, and energy reserves will be crucial to the West in a new era of geopolitical conflict.
00:24:10.000The region is hawkish on Russia and is driving European efforts to rearm and boost defense budgets, including support for Ukraine's armed forces.
00:24:18.000Nordic countries have been ramping up their military spending.
00:24:21.000That includes, of course, Finland, Norway as well.
00:24:25.000So, again, that is President Trump reacting in the right way.
00:24:28.000And he's going to have to because he is going to be pushed.
00:24:31.000We'll get to more on this in just one moment first.
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00:26:18.000The same thing holds true with regard to China.
00:26:21.000So, right now, China has been withholding from some sort of blockade or attack on Taiwan.
00:26:30.000One, they're not quite sure what President Trump is going to do if there were some sort of blockade attempted against Taiwan.
00:26:35.000There are definitely members of the Trump administration who basically would abandon Taiwan.
00:26:39.000To its fate, regardless of the consequences.
00:26:42.000One of the sort of strange statements about this was made by Elbridge Colby, who is a deputy secretary of defense for policy.
00:26:54.000He's been a big proponent of the idea that we ought to shift our focus from the Middle East to China.
00:26:59.000But then he's also made statements like, if Taiwan gets attacked, we do nothing about it.
00:27:02.000So I'm not sure how that shifts the focus precisely.
00:27:04.000China is basically banking on the United States not doing a lot about Taiwan and or they're hoping that the United States through its own trade policy is going to sort of self-defeat.
00:27:14.000That the United States is going to weaken itself with its allies and thus lead to further inroads for the Chinese in their race toward artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence.
00:27:24.000So the question for China is, is the window closing?
00:27:27.000If China believes the window is closing, then they absolutely could go for Taiwan.
00:27:55.000But there is a vast income divide in China.
00:27:57.000A huge percentage of the population makes like $150 a month.
00:28:02.000And those people live out in sort of the rural areas of China.
00:28:06.000China has done a sort of incredible job of ensuring that its cities are not swelled with these people.
00:28:12.000They force people to stay in their own areas.
00:28:15.000And then they artificially boost buying in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.
00:28:19.000A lot of what we see sort of publicly from China is not exactly what is going on in China.
00:28:23.000So it is certainly true that they're sucking in money from the periphery.
00:28:26.000And then they are using it in a sort of fascistic and mercantilistic push.
00:28:30.000For manufacturing supremacy, and that's particularly true when it comes to artificial intelligence.
00:28:34.000However, they do have some very serious burgeoning financial problems.
00:28:38.000Obviously, they have a big real estate problem on their hands.
00:28:41.000They have a demographic problem on their hands.
00:28:44.000There are folks like Kenneth Rogoff, the American economist who teaches at Harvard University, who suggested that actually the Chinese rates of growth are likely to slow sometime in the near future.
00:28:55.000If that happens, are they more or are they less likely to make a move?
00:28:59.000The answer probably is more likely to move on Taiwan, which presumably is why, according to the Taiwan News, China has now strengthened its ability to rapidly attack Taiwan.
00:29:07.000The Chinese Air Force has expanded its combat radius with new fighter jets, such as the J-10, J-16, and J-20, which can reach Taiwan from bases deep inside China without the need to refuel, a Taiwanese defense official told the Financial Times.
00:29:19.000Chinese military aircraft now enter Taiwan's air defense identification zone more than 245 times a month, compared to fewer than 10 times per month.
00:29:28.000Five years ago, according to Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense, aircraft also crossed the Taiwan Strait median line roughly 120 times a month.
00:29:36.000In the naval domain, a U.S. official says the Chinese Navy and Coast Guard maintained a near-constant presence of about a dozen ships near Taiwan.
00:29:44.000With access to nearby ports, Chinese ships could move into a blockade posture in a matter of hours.
00:29:50.000And forward deployment of vessels allows for faster coordination of airstrikes.
00:29:53.000Meanwhile, Chinese leader Xi Jinping...
00:30:04.000U.S. Army War College expert Joshua Arostegui says, quote, this reflects the PLA's renewed emphasis on Taiwan and lays the foundation for actual war fighting capabilities.
00:30:14.000And of course, Joe Biden left the United States military in the lurch, the sort of trade posture originally taken by the Trump administration during Liberation Day, which is gradually being corrected.
00:30:24.000China alienated a lot of the allies the United States would need to call on.
00:30:28.000And there remain open questions about what the United States would do in case of a Chinese move against Taiwan.
00:30:51.000is obviously banking on the fact that the United States is looking for an off-ramp with China.
00:30:55.000I do not think that China took, for example, the Trump administration's refusal to actually impose the TikTok ban as a sign of friendship.
00:31:02.000They took that instead as a sign of weakness, and they are building up their capacity to invade Taiwan, which of course would be disastrous for the global economy because Taiwan produces all the sophisticated semiconductors basically on planet Earth.
00:31:15.000And then meanwhile, the Iranians seem to be openly strengthening their position in negotiations.
00:31:20.000They seem to believe that President Trump actually wants some sort of off-ramp with Iran more than Iran wants an off-ramp with the United States, which, if true, would be an insane proposition.
00:31:48.000It is a bizarre negotiation strategy to continue to maintain that you're having great negotiations while Iran is continually publicly strengthening its own position, rejecting your core demand.
00:31:57.000The United States' core demand by President Trump, again, is the same president.
00:32:00.000President Trump was right in Trump 1.0.
00:32:02.000He said the Iran deal, the JCPOA, cut by Barack Obama, was the worst deal in American history.
00:32:12.000The JCPOA essentially granted Iran a clear pathway to a nuclear bomb while allowing them to use funding.
00:32:17.000For their ballistic missile development, for the funding of their proxy terrorist groups all over the region, ranging from the Houthis to Hamas to Hezbollah.
00:32:25.000It was an awful, awful deal, which is why President Trump pulled out of it.
00:32:28.000Why would he seek to re-enter such a deal?
00:32:32.000Placate the isolationists who mistakenly believe that if Israel bombed the Iranian nuclear facilities, somehow this would pose a grave global danger to the United States?
00:32:43.000Please explain to me the chain of events.
00:32:49.000Again, the sort of language coming from the Trump administration here is bizarre and mixed, shall we say, because what's being conveyed by the Americans is optimism about a deal.
00:32:59.000What's being conveyed by the Iranians is that they are not making any sort of real concessions with regard to their nuclear program.
00:33:05.000So here is President Trump over the weekend saying that the United States talks of Iran have been good.
00:33:09.000Very importantly, we had some very good talks with But I think we could have some good news on the Iran front.
00:33:30.000And Israel, we've been talking to them, and we want to see if we can stop that whole situation as quickly as possible.
00:33:37.000But having to do with nuclear, we've had some very, very good talks with Iran.
00:33:45.000Okay, very bizarre to say that we've had very, very good talks with Iran, considering the fact that according to the Iran International publication, Ahmad Bakshayesh Ardistani, a member of Iran's Parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, told Didban Iran that the offer right now from Oman includes a temporary pause in enrichment with the possibility of resuming activities afterward.
00:34:08.000He says Tehran has not accepted the proposal due to concerns rooted in past experiences.
00:34:13.000He said the Omanis told us stop enrichment now for six months and then resume it again.
00:34:16.000But Iran has not yet accepted this offer because based on past experience, there's the likelihood of further excessive demands from the other side.
00:34:22.000So in other words, the Omanis are trying to push the Iranians into a six-month pause.
00:34:29.000Number one, it would open up the Iranian economy.
00:34:31.000Number two, it would allow them to rebuild all of their air defense systems that Israel couldn't actually strike their nuclear facilities.
00:34:36.000And number three, it would push toward a JCPOA 2.0.
00:34:42.000Apparently, according to Artistani, if negotiations break down, Iran possesses 300 kilograms of enriched uranium, an amount he said is sufficient to produce 10 atomic bombs.
00:34:51.000He said, quote, there will be a deal, and Iran will enrich at a level one step above the JCPOA.
00:34:59.000That's basically Iran spitting in the eye of the Trump administration.
00:35:03.000While President Trump is saying the negotiations are going well, something is not being conveyed to President Trump.
00:35:06.000I don't know who's talking to President Trump.
00:35:08.000I don't know what the Whitcoff team is doing in these negotiations.
00:35:11.000I don't know what the flow of information is, but the Iranians are openly spitting in the eye of the United States, taking these positions publicly.
00:35:18.000You know, if President Trump is pissed at Zelensky, who gave him everything he wants on the rare earth minerals deal and the ceasefire and the direct talks, why is he so sanguine about the Iranians who are openly rejecting the key negotiating point in his demands?
00:35:30.000I mean, over the weekend, Christine Ohm, the head of the DHS, was on Fox saying that Trump will never accept a nuclear capable of Iran.
00:35:37.000Meanwhile, the Iranians are saying, we won't do a deal unless we're nuclear capable.
00:35:42.000And the president will never accept a nuclear-capable Iran.
00:35:45.000He will never accept them having nuclear weapons and building the capacity to that.
00:35:50.000The intelligence information that they have and that Israel has and they share with the United States and that we also have and are using for those conversations is critically important.
00:36:00.000So I think the message to the American people is, is we have a president that wants peace, but also a president that will not tolerate nuclear Iran capability.
00:36:13.000Okay, so is that the position of the Trump administration, or is there going to be a giant cave?
00:36:18.000We don't know yet, and the Iranians don't know yet either, which is why they're pushing.
00:36:20.000By the way, the idea that the Iranian regime is somehow friendlier toward the West, or they've moderated in any way, weird, because the newspaper for Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, according to Fox News, praised the terrorist who murdered an American and Israeli Wednesday night in Washington, D.C., calling him, quote, our dear brother.
00:36:38.000Those are the people who are being negotiated with and who want a nuclear weapon and who believe that if they just stall enough, President Trump will cut a deal.
00:36:45.000Well, President Trump, I don't believe he will cut a deal.
00:36:47.000I don't believe that President Trump is going to cut JCPOA 2.0, no matter who in the administration is urging him to do so.
00:36:53.000I don't think President Trump is going to cave on Taiwan.
00:36:56.000I don't think that's President Trump's way.
00:36:57.000I think that in reality, President Trump is a peace through strength president, but that needs to be conveyed, not just in words, but in actual forward posture in military spending.
00:37:10.000Because, again, the United States has spent the last 20 years being non-credible in its threats.
00:37:15.000The Trump administration was credible during Trump 1. Joe Biden was not credible in his threats.
00:37:19.000Barack Obama set red lines and then immediately obliterated them as soon as they met with the light of day.
00:37:25.000President Trump 2.0 does not need to be like Barack Obama or like Joe Biden.
00:37:30.000He came into office promising precisely the opposite.
00:37:34.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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00:38:35.000Meanwhile, on trade policy, the Trump administration continues to sort of try things out and then see how they work.
00:38:41.000So over the weekend, the president of the United States threatened Tim Cook, suggesting that Apple needed to manufacture the iPhone in the United States.
00:38:51.000It was sort of a bizarre statement, considering the fact that the United States is not going to be a salutary place to it.
00:38:59.000If you want the iPhone to cost you $5,000, that's a really good way to do it.
00:39:03.000Cook had tried to shift production away from China and toward India, which would be really, really good.
00:39:06.000The United States needs to foster better economic connections with India, a rising power that is a bulwark against both Pakistan and China.
00:39:13.000And so it would be good if Apple made more connections with Modi's India.
00:39:17.000That would be an excellent, excellent proposition.
00:39:19.000President Trump, of course, has suggested instead that there needs to be a reshoring of manufacture of iPhones in the United States.
00:39:27.000Apparently, on Friday morning, according to the New York Times, President Trump caught much of his own administration and Apple's leadership off guard with a social media post threatening tariffs of 25% on iPhones made anywhere except the United States.
00:39:38.000The post thrust Apple back into the administration's crosshairs a little over a month after Cook had lobbied and won an exemption from a 145% tariff on iPhones assembled in China and sold in the United States.
00:39:48.000Now, we should point out at this point, that's not going to cause Apple to reshorts production in the United States.
00:39:54.000Because the differential in cost between producing an iPhone in India and producing an iPhone in the United States is way bigger than 25%.
00:40:00.000So all you will do is ramp up the amount of money it costs the American consumer to buy an iPhone.
00:40:04.000He's not going to reshore because of that.
00:40:08.000Again, if the costs of reshoring are higher than 25%, you'll just leave the production in India and pay the 25% to get the iPhones into the United States and consumers will effectively pay it.
00:40:40.000Also, the sort of tariff war is, in fact, leading to selective inflation in product prices in certain areas.
00:40:46.000According to Axios, from Ralph Lauren to Barbie Maker Mattel, several household names have recently announced they are looking at higher prices in an effort to...
00:40:56.000Last month, CEOs from some of the nation's biggest retailers warned President Trump his trade policies could disrupt supply chains.
00:41:03.000Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested that the foreign countries and producers would bear the cost of the tariffs.
00:41:10.000And then Walmart warned that it would raise prices.
00:41:12.000And at that point, President Trump suggested that Walmart should eat the tariffs, which, of course, is not a thing that is going to happen in reality.
00:41:19.000So apparently Ralph Lauren, Walmart, Mattel.
00:41:22.000Volvo, Subaru, Ford, Nike, Adidas, all of them are talking about now increasing prices.
00:41:28.000And those increases in price are going to make it hard for the Federal Reserve to, for example, lower interest rates.
00:41:33.000The mortgage rates are currently still riding up around 7%.
00:41:35.000So it's going to be very difficult to unlock the real estate market with the interest rates that high at this point in time.
00:41:43.000However, President Trump did announce that he would be delaying another proffered tariff.
00:41:49.000So President Trump, over the weekend, Threaten the Europeans with a 50% tariff.
00:41:53.000He said, they're not negotiating fast enough.
00:41:54.000And so we're just going to dump a 50% tariff on them.
00:42:48.000The promise was tariff war would lead to better deals.
00:42:50.000We're still waiting for many of those better deals to materialize.
00:42:53.000And we've gotten to kind of where we needed to get to with China, sort of.
00:42:57.000We're down at a 30% tariff rate on Chinese goods.
00:43:00.000China has dropped its tariff rate on American goods to 10%.
00:43:03.000We need to radically lower our other tariffs on all the countries surrounding China so as to help box them in using our trade measures.
00:43:10.000Stephen Moore, who's a financial advisor to the president, an economic advisor, he celebrated the olive branch by the Europeans.
00:43:18.000Look, I do think this is an olive branch by the Europeans and Ursula to come to the negotiating table, which is what Trump wanted.
00:43:26.000And the significant thing, I think the stock market, when it opens on Tuesday morning, remember tomorrow is a big holiday, I think investors will be happy to hear this news because it means that these tariffs that were supposed to be imposed as early as next week, now if I heard the president correctly, it's going to be another month.
00:43:52.000Getting the Europeans to the table would definitely be a good thing.
00:43:54.000We also need the Europeans to actually shift their trade away from China.
00:43:57.000If the goal is to isolate China, if the goal is to prevent China from cheating on IP and cheating on its artificial exchange rates on its currency, if that's the goal, then we actually need to pursue policies that achieve.
00:44:12.000Speaking of a win for the Trump administration, this is, in fact, a good thing.
00:44:15.000I understand there are people who don't understand how this deal works, but the reality is that it is good for Nipon Steel to actually be able to bid for U.S. Steel.
00:44:23.000U.S. Steel is not an American-owned company.
00:44:25.000It is not an American government-owned company.
00:44:27.000It is just a steel company in the United States called U.S. Steel that has sort of a long and storied history, but it doesn't belong to the American government.
00:44:36.000U.S. Steel is simply an American firm that produces overpriced steel and has thus been subjected to a shrinking share of the markets, both internationally and domestically.
00:44:47.000Nipon wants to come in, change over the management structure, make it significantly more cost-effective.
00:45:51.000We have to see what the details of the deal look like.
00:45:53.000But honestly, it's really not up to the United States government, or it shouldn't be, if a foreign investor decides to buy a share of an American company.
00:46:01.000Unless there is some sort of national security issue involved, which there simply is not with regard to U.S. Steel.
00:46:06.000And I think so much of the confusion is based just on the name U.S. Steel and the fact that we all have sort of seventh grade memories of what U.S. Steel represented in the early 20th century.
00:46:14.000Meanwhile, on the economic front, the situation continues to be a little bit fraught with regard to the so-called Big Beautiful Bill.
00:46:47.000The idea that we're increasing the deficit with the bill assumes sort of, it's sort of an accounting conversation.
00:46:53.000Is the amount of money the United States is set to take in based on the tax rates currently?
00:46:58.000Or based on the reversion to the pre-Trump tax rates.
00:47:02.000If you suggest that the amount the United States was set to take in was based on the pre-Trump tax rates, because this was set to sunset officially, that's when you get a quote-unquote deficit increase.
00:47:12.000If the suggestion is that the tax rates were basically always going to be extended, then what you're talking about is a deficit decrease from what it otherwise would have been because the bill actually attempts to cut the cost curve on things like Medicaid for people who are not working.
00:48:22.000We've done it the same way, exempt most programs, take a look at a couple, tweak them a little bit, try and rely on a CBO score, and then have that score.
00:48:30.000Completely out of context with anything that, you know, really we ought to be talking about, like the $22 trillion of additional deficit over the next 10 years.
00:48:39.000Okay, but that $22 trillion in additional deficit, as Senator Johnson correctly points out, that is attached to Social Security and Medicare in the main.
00:48:49.000Those are the chief drivers of America's national debt.
00:48:51.000And no one, as I've said a thousand times, is actually at this point willing to seriously consider cutting entitlements.
00:48:57.000Rand Paul, of course, has been very consistent on this throughout his career.
00:49:00.000Here's the senator from Kentucky making much the same point.
00:49:03.000This year in September, when our fiscal year ends, the deficit will be about $2.2 trillion.
00:49:08.000Now, people used to always say, the Republicans would say, well, that's Bidenomics, that's Biden's spending levels.
00:49:13.000When March, every Republican, virtually every Republican other than me, voted to continue the Biden spending levels, which are going to give us a $2.2 trillion deficit.
00:49:22.000And people are going to wake up in about two months and say, how come the deficit's still $2.2 trillion?
00:51:01.000Okay, so again, he is not wrong there either, except that whenever people in government talk about cuts, they don't actually mean that they are cutting.
00:51:08.000What they mean is they are cutting the trajectory of future increase.
00:51:11.000That's like saying that, yeah, I know I'm going to go into debt $200 next month, but I've cut back a little bit, so I'm only going to go into debt $150 next month.
00:51:33.000And it's always funny to hear people out of power talk about this because suddenly the minute they're out of power, they start talking about debts and deficits and entitlement restructuring.
00:51:40.000So Jack Lew, who of course is the former Treasury Secretary under Joe Biden.
00:51:45.000Here he was suggesting that what we actually have to do is raise the taxes and then carefully restructure entitlements.
00:51:51.000Weird, because you guys never talk about carefully restructuring entitlements when you have the capacity to do so.
00:51:57.000I think this is the opposite of what you do if you really want to reduce the deficit.
00:52:01.000If you really want to reduce the deficit, you have a bipartisan conversation about the difficult choices.
00:52:30.000Donald Trump ran on the proposition that the American people are not ready for this.
00:52:33.000He's the first Republican of my lifetime to run for president as the candidate to openly say he was not going to touch any of the entitlement programs.
00:52:40.000That's one of the reasons why he has been so successful in a sort of populist vein.
00:52:44.000Because it turns out that one of the best ways to win office is to promise everybody the moon.
00:52:48.000Lower taxes and high entitlement spending is in fact a quite popular position in the United States.
00:52:55.000Democratic position, which is higher taxes and much, much higher social spending.
00:53:00.000That is also a relatively popular position so long as you can lie and pretend that raising taxes on the wealthy is actually going to pay for everything, which of course it will not.
00:53:08.000So both parties that are totally dishonest about what it would actually take in order to get out of our debt crisis, which means, let's be real about this, we're going Thelma and Louise over that cliff.
00:53:24.000Joining us online is Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who's been a leader in trying to push this big, beautiful bill toward a better answer with regard to debt and deficits.
00:53:32.000Senator Johnson, thanks so much for the time.
00:53:38.000So let's talk about the problems with the big, beautiful bill.
00:53:41.000Obviously, House Speaker Mike Johnson is very high on this.
00:53:44.000Obviously, there are others in Congress who are as well.
00:53:46.000The argument that they are making is essentially that in order to come up with this big deficit number from this bill, you have to assume that the Trump tax cuts were going to expire, and you basically have to look at the decrease in revenue from the tax cuts being renewed as a form of deficit increase.
00:54:10.000Over the next 10 years, again, I'm not saying CBO is perfect, but I would say this is a rosy scenario out of CBO.
00:54:17.000They're projecting $89 trillion of spending over the next 10 years and a deficit of $22 trillion.
00:54:25.000So Biden left us averaging $1.9 trillion in deficit spending per year.
00:54:30.000CBO is projecting $2.2 trillion of deficit per year, and they're projecting $1.9 trillion So if we don't, if we don't, if we, and by the way, I would absolutely do this, extend current tax law.
00:54:44.000That's going to nip off about $4 trillion off of that CBO rosy scenario.
00:54:50.000So now you're up to $2.6 trillion per year.
00:54:54.000We are seeing the bond markets already react.
00:54:56.000If the interest rates go up to just midway between a 50-year average versus where we're at right now.
00:55:55.000Anybody who does touch them is immediately electrocuted.
00:55:58.000President Trump did run in 2016 on the idea that he really was not going to fundamentally change Social Security and Medicare.
00:56:04.000Is there a way for us to actually reduce the deficit and bring down the national debt without taking on these major entitlement programs that are only going to expand as our population ages?
00:56:54.000We need to do what Doge has done looking at these contracts.
00:56:56.000We need to go through more than 2,000 lines of the federal budget, line by line.
00:57:01.000Again, you can exclude Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid.
00:57:04.000I think we need to fix Obamacare because that's really the Medicaid portion that we're concerned about for single-age childless adults that are really leading to all this fraud by state governments.
00:57:16.000But leave that aside, there's literally hundreds of billions of dollars in both other mandatory.
00:57:21.000As well as discretionary spending that exceeds what we spent in 2019 fully inflated by population growth and inflation.
00:57:27.000You go back, by the way, to Bill Clinton's total outweighs.
00:57:31.000I don't think we were spending too little in 1998 or Barack Obama in 2019.
00:57:36.000You can save even more hundreds of billions of dollars, but you have to do the work.
00:57:45.000It's going to use the same old technique, exempt most things, focus on a couple programs.
00:57:49.000Come up with a bunch of fake savings, put them out for the out years, cry for you and say, oh, look at what a great job we did.
00:57:54.000No, you completely missed the moment, completely inadequate.
00:58:00.000So when we look at those 2019 spending levels, just to get a little bit more specific, what kinds of things would have to, quote unquote, be cut in order for us to restore the 2019 spending levels?
00:58:09.000Because obviously, to I think everybody else, we remember 2019, it wasn't a year when we weren't spending lots of money.
00:58:15.000And you're right, obviously, that if we continued with our current level of tax revenue, stacked up against what the spending levels were in 2019, we actually would have a budget surplus.
00:58:24.000So what would that actually look like in practice?
00:58:27.000Well, it would look like the more than an inch thick budget that I've already produced that does just that.
00:58:56.000There are some programs that you can't touch that one.
00:58:59.000We need to examine all of these things.
00:59:02.000Again, line by line, I think you literally could cut hundreds of billions of dollars, a couple hundred million dollars at a time, line by line.
00:59:17.000So, Senator Johnson, when we look at the constituency of the Senate, obviously the Republicans have a majority, but it's a fairly narrow majority.
00:59:23.000You have a somewhat fractious caucus, obviously.
00:59:26.000You have fiscal conservatives like you or Senator Paul from Kentucky, but you also have Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, who's written full op-eds suggesting that any sort of cuts would be political disaster for him and for the Republican Party.
00:59:37.000How do you cobble together a majority just on a pragmatic level?
00:59:40.000For a better version of the big, beautiful bill that you're talking about.
00:59:43.000Well, first of all, it takes leadership.
00:59:45.000It takes the president to lay out the fact that this is completely unjustified, going from $4,400 billion of spending to over $7,000 billion of spending.
00:59:55.000You'll lay out exactly what caused it.
01:01:06.000You have to look at how completely unreasonable this level of spending is rather than start at an unjustified level of spending and then suffer death by a thousand cuts.
01:01:19.000Senator Johnson, on another topic, you've also reported a new report that shows a cover-up of adverse events in the COVID-19 injections by the Biden administration.
01:01:29.000They knew that there were, in fact, adverse events related specifically to things like myocarditis.
01:01:33.000And the Biden administration in 2021 basically downplayed a lot of those results, specifically in order to continue propagating untrue statements about the COVID-19 vaccine.
01:01:42.000Why don't you talk about what exactly that study found?
01:01:44.000Well, first of all, understand this is just the tip of the iceberg.
01:01:47.000It's been difficult to get the documents out of HHS, even though Bobby Kennedy completely wants to provide radical transparency.
01:01:55.000You still have the bureaucracy in place.
01:01:57.000I think we've had records destroyed, but we're starting to get some documentation.
01:02:01.000So what we were able to prove is that they were well aware.
01:02:05.000Israel contacted them at the end of February.
01:02:07.000We already knew that, but now we got the FOIA documents unredacted, and we know that they were having conversations internally asking the question, is there a signal on myocarditis for boys ages 15 through 18?
01:02:40.000I would say they hid the myocarditis signal.
01:02:42.000But again, this is the tip of the iceberg.
01:02:44.000I've been trying to get their analysis, their empirical basing analysis for years.
01:02:49.000We're finally starting to get some of that trickling in.
01:02:51.000We're starting to see that there were signals.
01:02:54.000We've got to put these studies together to prove that.
01:02:56.000But you're going to see, I think, more bombshells in terms of what they knew, what they hid.
01:03:01.000And let's face it, these injections caused all kinds of death, permanent disability, millions of adverse events, which to this day they're not owning up to, they're not admitting to.
01:03:17.000Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin doing yeoman's work with regard to budgetary issues and the like.
01:03:22.000Senator Johnson, really appreciate the time and the insight.
01:03:26.000Meanwhile, President Trump is making strong moves against Harvard.
01:03:32.000President Trump is now set to cancel the federal government's remaining federal contracts with Harvard University worth an estimated $100 million, according to a letter being sent to federal agencies on Tuesday.
01:03:42.000The planned additional cuts represented what the administration's official called a complete severance of the government's longstanding business relationship with Harvard.
01:03:50.000And that, again, is based on their unwillingness to change their order of business, their operations.
01:03:56.000His suggestion is that they have violated the Civil Rights Act.
01:04:00.000By essentially allowing a discriminatory atmosphere against Jews.
01:04:05.000If you want to make the argument that the Civil Rights Act is wildly overbroad and that it wraps up violations of the Constitution within it, I think that argument is not only plausible.
01:04:17.000There are certain aspects of the Civil Rights Act, such as banning discrimination by governments, that are correct and good.
01:04:22.000And then there's a bunch of stuff in there that really is a wild constitutional overreach.
01:04:28.000And there's a great book called The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell talking specifically about the constitutional shift over the Civil Rights Act, how the entire structure of the federal government got completely changed over by it.
01:04:40.000However, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
01:04:42.000And you do not get to play the game where local police departments all over the United States are sued into oblivion by the federal government for not violating civil rights on the basis of race.
01:04:52.000But Harvard University gets to violate the so-called civil rights of its students so long as those civil rights are the civil rights of Jews.
01:04:59.000That is the point being made by President Trump.
01:05:02.000On Monday, President Trump said he was considering taking billions in grant money from Harvard University and instead redistributing it to trade schools across the United States.
01:05:10.000He posted on Truth Social, quote, I'm considering taking three billion dollars of grant money away from a very anti-Semitic Harvard and giving it to trade schools all across our land.
01:05:18.000What a great investment that would be for the United States and so badly needed.
01:05:21.000The announcement didn't provide any further specifics, but.
01:05:31.000That is not, in fact, like an earned entitlement mandated by law.
01:05:35.000So he can simply say, listen, no further funding, no future funding.
01:05:38.000And there can be an argument over whether the university's violation of the Civil Rights Act justifies particular types of action by the administration.
01:05:48.000But the notion the federal government is bound and committed to continue funding Harvard University.
01:06:00.000But if the federal government under President Trump decides, then no further money will flow to Harvard.
01:06:05.000No further money will flow to Harvard.
01:06:08.000Harvard has been locked in a battle with the Trump administration since March, when the government said it was reviewing nearly $9 billion in federal funding over anti-Semitism concerns.
01:06:17.000So it'll be, by the way, You want to talk about genius populist moves?
01:06:22.000Shifting money from Harvard University with its endowment of something like $150 billion.
01:06:29.000Shifting that money over instead to trade schools is a wonderful populist move.
01:06:35.000Truly, truly a smart populist move by the President of the United States.
01:06:38.000And Harvard deserves every little bit of this.
01:06:40.000All they had to do was negotiate with President Trump.
01:06:54.000And so President Trump is using this as a club to clock them, as well they should be.
01:07:00.000Speaking of which, President Trump is also now looking to actually make people pay their student loans.
01:07:08.000So Joe Biden's proposition is essentially the American taxpayer should foot the bill for subsidizing all of these universities all over the United States.
01:07:16.000Well, now President Trump is saying, no, no, no, you got to pay off your student loans.
01:07:20.000According to the Wall Street Journal, borrowers have been required to repay their student loans for some months now.
01:07:24.000But just this month, the Trump administration began putting millions of defaulted student loan borrowers into collections and threatened to confiscate their wages, tax refunds, and federal benefits.
01:07:32.000The collections process was standard before the pandemic.
01:07:35.000So they're claiming this is something new.
01:07:38.000Now, if President Trump wants to do something truly populist, what he should do is Because it turns out that student loan balances are not equivalent across various career choices.
01:07:59.000Student loan balances from the federal student aid division, those loan balances typically go to majors that do not earn out.
01:08:08.000That's why you can't get a private loan on those things.
01:08:15.000It seems like a good opportunity to go back to many of these universities and ask them whether they defrauded their own student body in trying to promote the idea that a $200,000 degree in lesbian dance theory was going to somehow pay off in a six-figure salary.
01:08:30.000Meanwhile, the New York Times has an amazing rundown on the Democratic inability to communicate with the normies.
01:08:36.000It's an entire piece titled, Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward.
01:08:40.000Shane Goldmacher writes, So, it's pretty amazing.
01:09:08.000Six months after President Trump swept the battleground states, according to the New York Times, the Democratic Party is still sifting through the wreckage.
01:09:14.000Its standing has plunged to startling new lows, 27% approval in a recent NBC News poll that is the weakest in surveys dating all the way back to 1990.
01:09:23.000The stark reality is that the downward trend for Democrats stretches back further than a single election.
01:09:27.000Republicans have been gaining ground in voter registration for years.
01:09:30.000Working class voters of every race have been steadily drifting toward the GOP.
01:09:34.000And Democrats are increasingly perceived as the party of college-educated elites.
01:09:37.000The defenders of a political and economic system that most Americans feel is failing them.
01:09:41.000Well, actually, they are seen as the defenders of a moral system that is failing them.
01:09:46.000It is not just a political and economic system.
01:09:48.000It is a moral system whereby elitists at the top of American society decide boys can be girls, decide that a person who graduated from Harvard is of more moral worth than a blue-collar worker, and that people who go to church are, in fact, bitter clingers.
01:10:02.000This started under Barack Obama, and it never stopped.
01:10:05.000The first challenge for Democrats, says the New York Times, is that it is not just Republicans and Independents who've soured on the Democratic Party, it's Democrats themselves.
01:10:13.000The Democratic base is aghast at the speed with which Mr. Trump is undermining institutions and reversing progressive accomplishments and the lack of resistance from congressional leaders.
01:10:23.000So hilariously, they're trying to figure out exactly how to deal with this.
01:10:28.000Quote, fierce ideological debates over policies, whether to push for a stricter stand on immigration, defend transgender rights less forcefully or embrace anti-corporate economic populism are already playing out on Capitol Hill and the nation's 2028 campaign trail.
01:10:41.000And they point out, again, that they have lost men, like, across the board.
01:10:55.000Democratic donors and strategists are gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters.
01:11:00.000Commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.
01:11:04.000The prospectus for one new $20 million effort obtained by the Times aims to reverse the erosion of democratic support among young men, especially online.
01:11:12.000It is codenamed SAM, short for Speaking with American Men, a strategic plan, and promises investment to quote, study the syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.
01:11:23.000It recommends buying advertisements in video games.
01:11:26.000Above all, it says, we must shift from a moralizing tone.
01:11:29.000Well, I mean, they're not wrong that demoralizing is the problem, but they're not going to be able to abandon that sort of stuff because that is the essence of the Democratic Party at this point.
01:11:37.000It is not a sort of progressive redistributionism.
01:11:41.000It is arguments over whether you are an oligarch or whether you're experiencing food insecurity or whether transgender intersectionality is the way to perceive the world.
01:11:54.000Democrats have been too fond of using sociological Left-wing idiocies for too long to simply break out of it now.
01:12:01.000It's going to be very difficult for them to break that particular addiction, for sure.
01:12:06.000And by the way, the Democrats continue to move to the left.
01:12:09.000According to a brand new primary poll, AOC would trounce Senator Chuck Schumer in the New York primary.
01:12:16.000She leads Schumer 54-33 among likely Democratic voters in New York City.
01:12:25.000Because, of course, she is wildly to the left.
01:12:30.000The numbers are troubling for Schumer, obviously, according to the New York Post.
01:12:36.000It is amazing to watch as Schumer simply falls apart.
01:12:40.000But this is the next wave of the Democratic Party.
01:12:41.000This is why they're trying to try out Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff under Barack Obama, to try and be the guy.
01:12:52.000What an uninspiring crew the Democrats are rolling out right now.
01:12:57.000This, by the way, is the reason why Democrats tried to run a dead person in that last election cycle.
01:13:03.000Alex Thompson, who's the author alongside Jake Tapper of this new book about the Biden health cover-up, he points out that Biden aides, the way that they justified lying to the American public about exactly how bad things were for Biden is because they said it was the only way to save democracy from Trump.
01:13:44.000And one of the things that really, I think, comes out in our reporting here is that if you believe, and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe, that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy, you can rationalize anything, including sometimes doing undemocratic things, which I think is what this person is talking about.
01:14:05.000Again, I'm friendly with Sam, but we should remember that Sam Harris is still out there saying that he would rather have Joe Biden in a coma than evil Trump.
01:14:14.000The American people weren't up for it.
01:14:18.000But to close the loop on this whole scandal, even that is preferable to me and to, I think, many Democrats.
01:14:27.000than having someone who we consider to be genuinely evil, genuinely 100% purposed to serving himself in the office of the presidency.
01:14:38.000I would rather have a president in a coma where the duties of the presidency are executed by a committee of just normal people.
01:14:51.000OK, I'm just going to point out that that reason that doesn't work is specifically because if you lie to the American people, they will pick the other person.
01:14:58.000It is because of that belief that the American people could not be leveled to, that they couldn't be told the truth.
01:15:04.000It is precisely that reason why you have seen the rise of Donald Trump.
01:15:08.000All right, folks, the show continues for our members right now.
01:15:11.000We get into Rajiv Macron pushing Emmanuel Macron in the face on camera.
01:15:16.000Which is about the most French thing I can think of.
01:15:17.000Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.
01:15:19.000If you're not a member, become a member.