The Ben Shapiro Show - Can Trump STOP World War III?

00:00:00.000 Folks, tons to get to on today's show.

00:00:02.000 The Russians are threatening further action in Ukraine.

00:00:04.000 The Chinese are threatening Taiwan. 1.00

00:00:06.000 The Iranians are threatening to go nuclear. 0.98

00:00:07.000 And President Trump may be the man who can stop all of it.

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00:00:30.000 Well, of course, this weekend marked Memorial Day, a grave occasion when we actually have the opportunity to honor our fallen warriors.

00:00:38.000 And that means that it's time to take a look at where the United States currently stands in the world geopolitically.

00:00:44.000 Well, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, did a couple of things over the weekend.

00:00:48.000 One of them, great.

00:00:50.000 One of them, not so good.

00:00:51.000 We'll start with the not so good.

00:00:52.000 He put out a statement.

00:00:53.000 On 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.

00:01:01.000 He did that on Memorial Day as well, which, again, isn't the best look because it's Memorial Day. 0.97

00:01:05.000 He 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. 0.98

00:01:20.000 And 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. 0.98

00:01:32.000 A Melvillian sentence there from the President of the United States.

00:01:36.000 Again, on Memorial Day, it isn't a happy Memorial Day.

00:01:39.000 It'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.

00:01:46.000 Here's what he had to say.

00:01:48.000 Every Gold Star family fights a battle long after the victory is won, and today we lift you up and we hold you high.

00:01:58.000 Thank you, thank you, thank you for giving America the brightest light in your lives.

00:02:03.000 It's what you've done.

00:02:05.000 We will never, ever forget our fallen heroes, and we will never forget our debt to you.

00:02:13.000 Okay, so, again, that's the proper tone for Memorial Day.

00:02:17.000 All of this part and parcel of a broader discussion as to what America's foreign policy should look like.

00:02:23.000 And it is kind of unclear what the Trump doctrine is at this point in time.

00:02:28.000 J.D. Vance, just before the weekend, spoke at the Naval Academy.

00:02:32.000 At the Naval Academy, he spoke at length about what he sees the Trump doctrine as.

00:02:36.000 And there's a lot of wiggle room here as to what exactly he means.

00:02:39.000 I 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.

00:02:47.000 For 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. 0.68

00:02:55.000 So 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.

00:03:08.000 In any case, Vice President Vance is laying out what he sees as the Trump administration's foreign policy.

00:03:14.000 And 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.

00:03:28.000 Here was the vice president of the United States.

00:03:30.000 But I actually think the most significant part of that trip is that it signified the end

00:03:46.000 We 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.

00:04:06.000 Now again, he's arguing here presumably against the war in Iraq.

00:04:10.000 The war in Afghanistan is a bit of a different story since originally the war in Afghanistan was launched on the back of 9-11.

00:04:15.000 So 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.

00:04:24.000 And obviously there are many different iterations of American foreign policy, many of them bad, very few of them actually wonderful.

00:04:32.000 Obviously the United States got involved in a war in Libya and overthrowing the Libyan regime.

00:04:35.000 That I opposed and thought was wrong.

00:04:37.000 The United States got involved in the war in Syria in sort of bizarre ways, the civil war in Syria.

00:04:42.000 The United States has been involved in a wide variety of conflicts all over the world, and so this requires more specific definitions.

00:04:48.000 So, 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.

00:04:56.000 Here's what he had to say.

00:04:58.000 Our government took its eye off the ball of great power competition.

00:05:02.000 And preparing to take on a peer adversary.

00:05:05.000 And instead, we devoted ourselves to sprawling, amorphous tasks, like searching for new terrorists to take out while building up faraway regimes.

00:05:17.000 Now, I want to be clear.

00:05:19.000 The Trump administration has reversed course.

00:05:22.000 No more undefined missions.

00:05:25.000 No more open-ended conflicts.

00:05:27.000 We're returning to a strategy grounded in realism and protecting our core national interests.

00:05:49.000 And consider how this played out in just the last major conflict we engaged in with the Houthis over in the Middle East.

00:05:58.000 We 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.

00:06:15.000 And that's exactly what we did.

00:06:19.000 Okay, we can pause it right there.

00:06:21.000 Now 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.

00:06:32.000 And 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.

00:06:40.000 Originally, we did not define our battle against the Houthis as simply restoring deterrence with regard to Houthi attacks on American ships.

00:06:48.000 The goal was to restore freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.

00:06:52.000 The goal was to ensure that people could use the Red Sea in the Suez Canal again.

00:06:56.000 In order to ship things, including oil and LNG, from the region.

00:07:01.000 That has not, in fact, been restored.

00:07:03.000 And let's be clear about this.

00:07:04.000 The Houthis are still shooting a couple of missiles a day over Saudi Arabian airspace at Israel.

00:07:09.000 They're still shooting at a wide variety of ships in the Red Sea, and shipping has still not been restored in the Red Sea.

00:07:16.000 So 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?

00:07:22.000 I don't disagree with anything that he's saying.

00:07:24.000 But 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.

00:07:35.000 What is the actual policy of the Trump administration?

00:07:38.000 Is it a policy that makes sure to actually set red lines that are keepable?

00:07:43.000 When 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.

00:07:53.000 Past 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.

00:08:08.000 When we extend the deployment of an aircraft carrier, that has real impact on people's lives and we're aware of it.

00:08:15.000 They miss their families.

00:08:16.000 Of course, they miss their loved ones and their home life.

00:08:19.000 They accept that sacrifice, and that's the job that you've taken on.

00:08:23.000 But 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.

00:08:33.000 Okay, now again, all that sounds really nice.

00:08:35.000 The reality is that foreign policy is a lot messier than that.

00:08:37.000 So, for example, the United States currently has troops stationed in South Korea.

00:08:41.000 Why?

00:08:41.000 That is an open-ended conflict.

00:08:43.000 There's an armistice with North Korea, and the United States is, in fact, maintaining the peace in the region.

00:08:49.000 Between South Korea and North Korea, by having a trigger force there, the United States still has military bases in Japan.

00:08:54.000 Why?

00:08:54.000 Presumably to deter a Chinese takeover of the South China Sea.

00:08:58.000 The United States still has overflight and overwatch power over the Middle East.

00:09:03.000 Why?

00:09:03.000 To ensure the free flow of oil, for example, and to prevent, I assume, the nuclearization of Iran.

00:09:08.000 I mean, that's something that President Trump has said himself.

00:09:12.000 This kind of easy notion.

00:09:15.000 That 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.

00:09:22.000 And it very often is the predicate for a bad argument about how the United States needs to spend less on, for example, military development.

00:09:29.000 Right now, the United States spends approximately 3.7% of our GDP on military.

00:09:35.000 That is actually historically low.

00:09:36.000 So I turn to our friends and sponsors over at Perplexity to ask a quick question.

00:09:41.000 How much has the United States defense spending declined as a percentage of GDP since 1900?

00:09:46.000 And 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.

00:09:55.000 And 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.

00:10:02.000 We had a spike to about 4% of GDP during World War I. Then, spending went up to 40% of GDP during World War II.

00:10:10.000 And then, during the Cold War in Vietnam era, 50s through 70s, we saw sustained high spending typically between 7% and 10% of GDP.

00:10:19.000 During the 80s, because of the defense buildup that ended up crushing the Soviet Union, we were spending about 6.8% of GDP.

00:10:26.000 In 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.

00:10:35.000 We're at 3 to 3.5%.

00:10:36.000 So bottom line is this.

00:10:38.000 If 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.

00:10:46.000 A 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.

00:11:00.000 That is maintained.

00:11:02.000 By the American military.

00:11:03.000 That's the reality of the situation.

00:11:04.000 That's always been the reality of the situation.

00:11:06.000 And 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.

00:11:22.000 And by the way, that's been true all along.

00:11:23.000 This idea that's straying from the founders is not true.

00:11:25.000 There's a very famous story about George Washington going all the way back to the Constitutional Convention.

00:11:30.000 There was a constitutional delegate.

00:11:32.000 Who suggested that the standing army of the United States should be limited to 5,000 men.

00:11:37.000 The 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.

00:11:43.000 And 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.

00:11:52.000 The constitutional delegate proposed a 5,000-man cap on the army in the actual Constitution.

00:11:58.000 And George Washington agreed.

00:12:01.000 And then sarcastically said that there had to be a stipulation added to the Constitution that no invading army could number more than 3,000.

00:12:07.000 Of course, the joke he was making is that when it comes to foreign policy, necessity is the mother of policy.

00:12:14.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:14:23.000 So you can have all of these principles that we all hope to have about no open-ended missions, no long-term commitments.

00:14:32.000 The 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.

00:14:42.000 And so the question becomes, for the administration, how strong are the administration's red lines and what happens when those red lines are crossed?

00:14:49.000 When it came to the Houthis, the United States drew a red line.

00:14:53.000 Originally, it was about freedom of navigation.

00:14:54.000 That was literally in the signal chat that got leaked to Jeffrey Goldberg, which was accidentally included in the signal chat.

00:15:01.000 It's about freedom of navigation.

00:15:02.000 That freedom of navigation has not, in fact, been restored.

00:15:04.000 Now, again, you make the case that shouldn't have been the mission in the first place in the Red Sea.

00:15:07.000 Fine.

00:15:08.000 But that was not actually the mission.

00:15:10.000 The 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.

00:15:18.000 Again, you can make the argument that that's a good policy or that it's not a good policy.

00:15:21.000 But let's be clear about what happened there.

00:15:24.000 And right now, America's enemies are perceiving, at the very least, this happens to every president.

00:15:28.000 It shouldn't really be happening to President Trump is the truth.

00:15:31.000 The 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.

00:15:38.000 Trump 1.0 was extremely predictable on foreign policy. 0.74

00:15:41.000 If you cross a red line, you will get punched in the face.

00:15:43.000 If you do not cross a red line, we'll negotiate with you.

00:15:45.000 That was the foreign policy of the United States.

00:15:47.000 It was an actual peace through strength, realist foreign policy in Trump 1.0.

00:15:51.000 But America's enemies and opponents There's a lot of debate inside the administration over whether Trump 1.0 was too hawkish.

00:16:03.000 That is why, for example, there's been a lot of roiling debate over the makeover of the NSC, the National Security Council.

00:16:10.000 The National Security Council, which is now under the tutelage of the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, was basically cleansed.

00:16:16.000 And many of the people who were cleansed were some of the more hawkish voices at the NSC.

00:16:20.000 Leading to the supposition that Vice President Vance actually has a lot to do with staffing up at the NSC.

00:16:24.000 Now again, maybe you agree with Vice President, that's fine.

00:16:27.000 Everybody's allowed to have their own view on this, and maybe he's right. 0.92

00:16:30.000 But America's opponents also see this, and what they widely perceive right now is that now might be a good time to push.

00:16:37.000 That is certainly clear from Russia, it is clear from China, and it's clear from Iran.

00:16:41.000 Russia, China, and Iran are all pushing very hard right now, sensing weakness in the Trump administration approach.

00:16:47.000 Now, I think that they're wrong.

00:16:49.000 I think that President Trump has a gut-level desire for a peace-through-strength policy.

00:16:55.000 And there are members of the administration who are much more aligned with the Trump 1.0 peace-through-strength policy.

00:17:00.000 One of those would be the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.

00:17:03.000 He put out an ad today that is very much peace through strength based.

00:17:07.000 No more distractions.

00:17:11.000 No more distractions.

00:17:14.000 No more electric tanks, no more gender confusion, no more climate change worship.

00:17:20.000 We are laser-focused on our mission of warfighting.

00:17:28.000 We 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.

00:17:38.000 It's called Peace Through Strength.

00:17:41.000 You look into the eyes of these young Americans who are giving up the best years of their life in a uniform to serve their nation.

00:17:48.000 They are incredible.

00:17:52.000 Okay, so again, this ad is much more.

00:17:57.000 This is the peace through strength perspective, right?

00:17:59.000 So that's sort of the Hegseth side.

00:18:00.000 And again, there is a debate inside the administration about all of this right now.

00:18:04.000 The vice president seems to be taking the lead in a lot of these debates.

00:18:07.000 But here is the thing.

00:18:08.000 Reality exists.

00:18:09.000 I've said this a thousand times.

00:18:10.000 I'll say it a thousand more.

00:18:11.000 President Trump does not have thoroughgoing philosophies when it comes to foreign policy or domestic policy.

00:18:17.000 President Trump has impulses.

00:18:19.000 And when those impulses are right, they are great.

00:18:21.000 And when they are wrong, they run up against reality and he shifts his impulses.

00:18:24.000 That is why President Trump is such a pragmatist.

00:18:27.000 And 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.

00:18:35.000 There is no question that's what's happening.

00:18:37.000 Look at Russia's behavior. 0.80

00:18:42.000 They've been upping the ante.

00:18:43.000 They're simultaneously negotiating with President Trump.

00:18:46.000 And by negotiating, I mean stringing President Trump along.

00:18:48.000 They'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.

00:18:54.000 In 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.

00:19:06.000 Ukraine's Air Force said Russia launched more than 350 explosive drones and at least nine cruise missiles.

00:19:10.000 Kiev scrambled aircraft and deployed electronic warfare systems and mobile air defense teams throughout the country in response.

00:19:16.000 The 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.

00:19:27.000 Trump went on social media on Truth Social and he posted he has gone absolutely crazy.

00:19:31.000 He is needlessly killing a lot of people and I'm not just talking about soldiers.

00:19:36.000 And he put up this post.

00:19:38.000 Missiles and drones are being shot into cities in Ukraine for no reason whatsoever.

00:19:41.000 I've always said that he wants all of Ukraine, not just a piece of it.

00:19:44.000 And maybe that's proving to be right.

00:19:45.000 But if he does, it'll lead to the downfall of Russia.

00:19:48.000 Likewise, President Zelensky is doing his country's no favors by talking the way he does.

00:19:51.000 Everything out of his mouth causes problems.

00:19:53.000 I don't like it, and it better stop.

00:19:54.000 This is a war that would never have started if our president is Zelensky's, Putin's, and Biden's war, not Trump's.

00:19:58.000 I'm only helping to put out the big and ugly fires that have been started through gross incompetence and hatred.

00:20:04.000 Hey, so he starts off right there and then it sort of goes wrong.

00:20:07.000 Again, I'm not sure what he wants from Zelensky that Zelensky hasn't already given him.

00:20:10.000 Zelensky has given him the immediate ceasefire.

00:20:12.000 Zelensky has said he will go anywhere for direct talks.

00:20:14.000 Zelensky gave him the rare earth minerals deal.

00:20:16.000 It's sort of both sides of him from the Trump administration and from President Trump is the reason why Putin is pushing.

00:20:22.000 Putin believes he can get away with it.

00:20:24.000 Now, President Trump, when he says that President Putin has gone crazy and he's kind of not sure.

00:20:33.000 What happened to him?

00:20:34.000 Nothing happened to Vladimir Putin.

00:20:36.000 He's one of the most consistent leaders in modern world history.

00:20:39.000 He'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.

00:20:52.000 Again, Putin has been absolutely consistent.

00:20:55.000 Every single president seems to make this mistake with Putin.

00:20:58.000 George W. Bush famously suggested he looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and saw through to his soul.

00:21:03.000 Barack 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.

00:21:12.000 Joe 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.

00:21:23.000 Everyone makes this mistake with Putin for some odd reason, but Putin has been absolutely consistent.

00:21:29.000 By the way, Putin responded to President Trump's suggestion that Putin had gone crazy by suggesting that this was emotional overload.

00:21:40.000 So 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.

00:21:49.000 This is a very crucial moment, which is, of course, associated with the emotional overload of everyone absolutely and with emotional reaction.

00:21:57.000 Now, again, What the Russians are pretty openly saying at this point is that they would like to continue their expansion in Ukraine.

00:22:06.000 They apparently are recruiting another 50,000 troops.

00:22:08.000 That, of course, is no surprise.

00:22:10.000 They're happy to throw men into the maw, into the gristmill. 0.92

00:22:16.000 The Kremlin continues to maintain that they're not going to end the war short of more territorial expansion.

00:22:21.000 And this, of course, is leading to Western pushback, particularly from the German Chancellor.

00:22:29.000 He 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.

00:22:37.000 Which, by the way, is the correct response.

00:22:39.000 It is.

00:22:40.000 If 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.

00:22:48.000 Here's Frederick Merz, the German Chancellor.

00:22:53.000 There 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.

00:23:04.000 This means that Ukraine can now defend itself, for example, by attacking military positions inside Russia.

00:23:12.000 It couldn't do that until a while ago, with very few exceptions, and didn't do that until a while ago either.

00:23:18.000 Now it can.

00:23:21.000 Now, again, President Trump taking that position, and Merz said that that is going along with the American position as well.

00:23:26.000 That is a good thing.

00:23:27.000 That is President Trump actually trying to apply peace through strength.

00:23:30.000 He's doing the same thing, apparently, in Northern Europe.

00:23:33.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration wants NATO to get more lethal.

00:23:38.000 A testing ground is Europe's north, where NATO faces Russia on two sides.

00:23:41.000 Some 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.

00:23:49.000 But U.S. military commanders say that their posture remains firm.

00:23:52.000 Brigadier 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.

00:24:01.000 The 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.

00:24:10.000 The region is hawkish on Russia and is driving European efforts to rearm and boost defense budgets, including support for Ukraine's armed forces.

00:24:18.000 Nordic countries have been ramping up their military spending.

00:24:21.000 That includes, of course, Finland, Norway as well.

00:24:25.000 So, again, that is President Trump reacting in the right way.

00:24:28.000 And he's going to have to because he is going to be pushed.

00:24:31.000 We'll get to more on this in just one moment first.

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00:26:18.000 The same thing holds true with regard to China.

00:26:21.000 So, right now, China has been withholding from some sort of blockade or attack on Taiwan.

00:26:29.000 There are a couple of reasons.

00:26:30.000 One, they're not quite sure what President Trump is going to do if there were some sort of blockade attempted against Taiwan.

00:26:35.000 There are definitely members of the Trump administration who basically would abandon Taiwan.

00:26:39.000 To its fate, regardless of the consequences.

00:26:42.000 One of the sort of strange statements about this was made by Elbridge Colby, who is a deputy secretary of defense for policy.

00:26:54.000 He's been a big proponent of the idea that we ought to shift our focus from the Middle East to China.

00:26:59.000 But then he's also made statements like, if Taiwan gets attacked, we do nothing about it.

00:27:02.000 So I'm not sure how that shifts the focus precisely.

00:27:04.000 China 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.

00:27:14.000 That 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. 0.92

00:27:24.000 So the question for China is, is the window closing?

00:27:27.000 If China believes the window is closing, then they absolutely could go for Taiwan.

00:27:31.000 If they believe.

00:27:32.000 That the United States is weak and will do little.

00:27:36.000 They could absolutely blockade Taiwan. 0.61

00:27:38.000 And that would be global economic disaster.

00:27:40.000 Again, the only reason for China to do that is if they actually believe that their window is closing.

00:27:44.000 They're an aging country.

00:27:45.000 They do have significant debt problems.

00:27:47.000 Their economy has always been a bit of a paper tiger.

00:27:51.000 And I don't mean here they don't have enormous manufacturing capacity.

00:27:54.000 They do.

00:27:55.000 But there is a vast income divide in China.

00:27:57.000 A huge percentage of the population makes like $150 a month.

00:28:02.000 And those people live out in sort of the rural areas of China.

00:28:06.000 China has done a sort of incredible job of ensuring that its cities are not swelled with these people. 1.00

00:28:12.000 They force people to stay in their own areas.

00:28:15.000 And then they artificially boost buying in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

00:28:19.000 A lot of what we see sort of publicly from China is not exactly what is going on in China.

00:28:23.000 So it is certainly true that they're sucking in money from the periphery.

00:28:26.000 And then they are using it in a sort of fascistic and mercantilistic push.

00:28:30.000 For manufacturing supremacy, and that's particularly true when it comes to artificial intelligence.

00:28:34.000 However, they do have some very serious burgeoning financial problems.

00:28:38.000 Obviously, they have a big real estate problem on their hands.

00:28:41.000 They have a demographic problem on their hands.

00:28:44.000 There 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.

00:28:55.000 If that happens, are they more or are they less likely to make a move?

00:28:59.000 The 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.

00:29:07.000 The 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.

00:29:19.000 Chinese military aircraft now enter Taiwan's air defense identification zone more than 245 times a month, compared to fewer than 10 times per month.

00:29:28.000 Five years ago, according to Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense, aircraft also crossed the Taiwan Strait median line roughly 120 times a month.

00:29:36.000 In 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.

00:29:44.000 With access to nearby ports, Chinese ships could move into a blockade posture in a matter of hours.

00:29:50.000 And forward deployment of vessels allows for faster coordination of airstrikes.

00:29:53.000 Meanwhile, Chinese leader Xi Jinping...

00:30:04.000 U.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.

00:30:14.000 And 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.

00:30:24.000 China alienated a lot of the allies the United States would need to call on.

00:30:28.000 And there remain open questions about what the United States would do in case of a Chinese move against Taiwan.

00:30:34.000 China's banking on that.

00:30:36.000 There's a lot of push right now.

00:30:38.000 Russia is pushing in Ukraine.

00:30:40.000 They're trying to prey on these sort of isolationist instincts in the Trump administration.

00:30:44.000 They're trying to string along the Trump administration at the same time, upping the military ante.

00:30:50.000 China.

00:30:51.000 is obviously banking on the fact that the United States is looking for an off-ramp with China.

00:30:55.000 I do not think that China took, for example, the Trump administration's refusal to actually impose the TikTok ban as a sign of friendship.

00:31:02.000 They 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.

00:31:15.000 And then meanwhile, the Iranians seem to be openly strengthening their position in negotiations.

00:31:20.000 They 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.

00:31:29.000 Totally insane.

00:31:30.000 Iran's skies are open.

00:31:31.000 Iran is an extraordinarily weakened country.

00:31:34.000 Its proxy forces have been devastated by Israel.

00:31:36.000 Its economy is on a razor's edge.

00:31:38.000 The Ayatollahs are unpopular in their own country.

00:31:41.000 Why in the world would the United States be seeking an off-ramp faster than the Iranians? 1.00

00:31:46.000 By what stretch of the imagination?

00:31:48.000 It 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.

00:31:57.000 The United States' core demand by President Trump, again, is the same president.

00:32:00.000 President Trump was right in Trump 1.0.

00:32:02.000 He said the Iran deal, the JCPOA, cut by Barack Obama, was the worst deal in American history.

00:32:08.000 He was not wrong about that.

00:32:09.000 He said it over and over and over.

00:32:11.000 Why?

00:32:12.000 The JCPOA essentially granted Iran a clear pathway to a nuclear bomb while allowing them to use funding.

00:32:17.000 For their ballistic missile development, for the funding of their proxy terrorist groups all over the region, ranging from the Houthis to Hamas to Hezbollah.

00:32:25.000 It was an awful, awful deal, which is why President Trump pulled out of it.

00:32:28.000 Why would he seek to re-enter such a deal?

00:32:31.000 Simply to what?

00:32:32.000 Placate 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?

00:32:43.000 Please explain to me the chain of events.

00:32:43.000 On what planet?

00:32:45.000 Please explain the chain of causation.

00:32:47.000 Right there.

00:32:49.000 Again, 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.

00:32:59.000 What's being conveyed by the Iranians is that they are not making any sort of real concessions with regard to their nuclear program.

00:33:05.000 So here is President Trump over the weekend saying that the United States talks of Iran have been good.

00:33:09.000 Very importantly, we had some very good talks with But I think we could have some good news on the Iran front.

00:33:23.000 Likewise with Hamas on Gaza.

00:33:28.000 We want to see if we can stop that.

00:33:30.000 And Israel, we've been talking to them, and we want to see if we can stop that whole situation as quickly as possible. 0.94

00:33:37.000 But having to do with nuclear, we've had some very, very good talks with Iran.

00:33:45.000 Okay, 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.

00:34:08.000 He says Tehran has not accepted the proposal due to concerns rooted in past experiences.

00:34:13.000 He said the Omanis told us stop enrichment now for six months and then resume it again.

00:34:16.000 But Iran has not yet accepted this offer because based on past experience, there's the likelihood of further excessive demands from the other side.

00:34:22.000 So in other words, the Omanis are trying to push the Iranians into a six-month pause. 0.61

00:34:28.000 Why?

00:34:28.000 What would a six-month pause do?

00:34:29.000 Number one, it would open up the Iranian economy.

00:34:31.000 Number two, it would allow them to rebuild all of their air defense systems that Israel couldn't actually strike their nuclear facilities.

00:34:36.000 And number three, it would push toward a JCPOA 2.0.

00:34:42.000 Apparently, 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.

00:34:51.000 He said, quote, there will be a deal, and Iran will enrich at a level one step above the JCPOA.

00:34:57.000 I mean, that's unbelievable.

00:34:59.000 That's basically Iran spitting in the eye of the Trump administration.

00:35:03.000 While President Trump is saying the negotiations are going well, something is not being conveyed to President Trump.

00:35:06.000 I don't know who's talking to President Trump.

00:35:08.000 I don't know what the Whitcoff team is doing in these negotiations.

00:35:11.000 I 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.

00:35:18.000 You 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?

00:35:30.000 I 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.

00:35:37.000 Meanwhile, the Iranians are saying, we won't do a deal unless we're nuclear capable.

00:35:42.000 And the president will never accept a nuclear-capable Iran. 0.86

00:35:45.000 He will never accept them having nuclear weapons and building the capacity to that.

00:35:50.000 The 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.

00:36:00.000 So 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. 0.77

00:36:13.000 Okay, so is that the position of the Trump administration, or is there going to be a giant cave?

00:36:18.000 We don't know yet, and the Iranians don't know yet either, which is why they're pushing. 1.00

00:36:20.000 By 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.

00:36:38.000 Those 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.

00:36:45.000 Well, President Trump, I don't believe he will cut a deal.

00:36:47.000 I 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.

00:36:53.000 I don't think President Trump is going to cave on Taiwan.

00:36:56.000 I don't think that's President Trump's way.

00:36:57.000 I 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.

00:37:08.000 In public statements.

00:37:10.000 Because, again, the United States has spent the last 20 years being non-credible in its threats.

00:37:15.000 The Trump administration was credible during Trump 1. Joe Biden was not credible in his threats.

00:37:19.000 Barack Obama set red lines and then immediately obliterated them as soon as they met with the light of day.

00:37:25.000 President Trump 2.0 does not need to be like Barack Obama or like Joe Biden.

00:37:30.000 He came into office promising precisely the opposite.

00:37:34.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:38:35.000 Meanwhile, on trade policy, the Trump administration continues to sort of try things out and then see how they work.

00:38:41.000 So over the weekend, the president of the United States threatened Tim Cook, suggesting that Apple needed to manufacture the iPhone in the United States.

00:38:51.000 It was sort of a bizarre statement, considering the fact that the United States is not going to be a salutary place to it.

00:38:59.000 If you want the iPhone to cost you $5,000, that's a really good way to do it.

00:39:03.000 Cook had tried to shift production away from China and toward India, which would be really, really good.

00:39:06.000 The United States needs to foster better economic connections with India, a rising power that is a bulwark against both Pakistan and China.

00:39:13.000 And so it would be good if Apple made more connections with Modi's India.

00:39:17.000 That would be an excellent, excellent proposition.

00:39:19.000 President Trump, of course, has suggested instead that there needs to be a reshoring of manufacture of iPhones in the United States.

00:39:27.000 Apparently, 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.

00:39:38.000 The 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.

00:39:48.000 Now, we should point out at this point, that's not going to cause Apple to reshorts production in the United States.

00:39:54.000 Because the differential in cost between producing an iPhone in India and producing an iPhone in the United States is way bigger than 25%.

00:40:00.000 So all you will do is ramp up the amount of money it costs the American consumer to buy an iPhone.

00:40:04.000 He's not going to reshore because of that.

00:40:07.000 The costs are just too great.

00:40:08.000 Again, 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.

00:40:20.000 So is that a good move?

00:40:22.000 Probably not.

00:40:24.000 I'm not sure exactly why we are attempting to cudgel Apple into doing such things.

00:40:29.000 Again, getting them out of China, good. 0.99

00:40:31.000 Suggesting that we're going to have unionized factories in the United States screwing in the screens to iPhones.

00:40:38.000 No, that is not going to happen.

00:40:40.000 Also, the sort of tariff war is, in fact, leading to selective inflation in product prices in certain areas.

00:40:46.000 According 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...

00:40:56.000 Last month, CEOs from some of the nation's biggest retailers warned President Trump his trade policies could disrupt supply chains.

00:41:03.000 Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested that the foreign countries and producers would bear the cost of the tariffs.

00:41:10.000 And then Walmart warned that it would raise prices.

00:41:12.000 And 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.

00:41:19.000 So apparently Ralph Lauren, Walmart, Mattel.

00:41:22.000 Volvo, Subaru, Ford, Nike, Adidas, all of them are talking about now increasing prices.

00:41:28.000 And those increases in price are going to make it hard for the Federal Reserve to, for example, lower interest rates.

00:41:33.000 The mortgage rates are currently still riding up around 7%.

00:41:35.000 So it's going to be very difficult to unlock the real estate market with the interest rates that high at this point in time.

00:41:43.000 However, President Trump did announce that he would be delaying another proffered tariff.

00:41:49.000 So President Trump, over the weekend, Threaten the Europeans with a 50% tariff.

00:41:53.000 He said, they're not negotiating fast enough.

00:41:54.000 And so we're just going to dump a 50% tariff on them.

00:41:56.000 The stock futures immediately dumped.

00:41:59.000 And so then he walked it back.

00:42:00.000 He said, we'll wait until July 9th to try and negotiate something.

00:42:03.000 Okay, well, you know, better.

00:42:07.000 She just called me, as you know.

00:42:09.000 and she asked for an extension on the June 1st date.

00:42:13.000 And she said she wants to get down to serious negotiation because I They have to do that.

00:42:23.000 And we had a very nice call, and I agreed to move it.

00:42:27.000 I believe July 9th would be the date.

00:42:30.000 That was the date she requested.

00:42:32.000 Could we move it from June 1st to July 9th?

00:42:34.000 And I agreed to do that.

00:42:36.000 And she said we will rapidly get together and see if we can work something out.

00:42:42.000 Okay, so that is a good thing.

00:42:45.000 Better that he should delay it so we can actually get a good deal.

00:42:47.000 That was the promise.

00:42:48.000 The promise was tariff war would lead to better deals.

00:42:50.000 We're still waiting for many of those better deals to materialize.

00:42:53.000 And we've gotten to kind of where we needed to get to with China, sort of.

00:42:57.000 We're down at a 30% tariff rate on Chinese goods.

00:43:00.000 China has dropped its tariff rate on American goods to 10%.

00:43:03.000 We need to radically lower our other tariffs on all the countries surrounding China so as to help box them in using our trade measures. 1.00

00:43:10.000 Stephen Moore, who's a financial advisor to the president, an economic advisor, he celebrated the olive branch by the Europeans.

00:43:18.000 Look, I do think this is an olive branch by the Europeans and Ursula to come to the negotiating table, which is what Trump wanted.

00:43:26.000 And 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.

00:43:46.000 Again, he's right about that.

00:43:51.000 That is a good thing.

00:43:52.000 Getting the Europeans to the table would definitely be a good thing.

00:43:54.000 We also need the Europeans to actually shift their trade away from China.

00:43:57.000 If 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. 0.74

00:44:12.000 Speaking of a win for the Trump administration, this is, in fact, a good thing.

00:44:15.000 I 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.

00:44:23.000 U.S. Steel is not an American-owned company.

00:44:25.000 It is not an American government-owned company.

00:44:27.000 It 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.

00:44:36.000 U.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.

00:44:47.000 Nipon wants to come in, change over the management structure, make it significantly more cost-effective.

00:44:53.000 That is, in fact, a good thing.

00:44:55.000 That is not a bad thing.

00:44:56.000 Capital from Nipon coming in and fixing U.S. Steel so it doesn't lose employees and market Here's President Trump saying so.

00:45:04.000 You announced on Friday about U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel.

00:45:08.000 What will the ownership structure look like?

00:45:10.000 What made you think?

00:45:12.000 It'll be controlled by the United States.

00:45:14.000 Otherwise, I wouldn't make the deal.

00:45:16.000 I went to the unions, to all of the local unions.

00:45:19.000 They all wanted it.

00:45:21.000 And I'm doing it because all of the congressmen came in, about five of them.

00:45:26.000 And the others, I understand, are in concurrence.

00:45:29.000 And they asked that I do it.

00:45:31.000 Everybody seems to want it.

00:45:33.000 And we'll see.

00:45:34.000 I mean, you know, we'll see what the final is.

00:45:36.000 But they're going to invest billions of dollars in steel, and it's a good company.

00:45:41.000 Nissan's a very good company.

00:45:43.000 But it's an investment, and it's a partial ownership.

00:45:43.000 We'll see.

00:45:49.000 Okay, so again, that is a good thing.

00:45:51.000 We have to see what the details of the deal look like.

00:45:53.000 But 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.

00:46:01.000 Unless there is some sort of national security issue involved, which there simply is not with regard to U.S. Steel.

00:46:06.000 And 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.

00:46:14.000 Meanwhile, on the economic front, the situation continues to be a little bit fraught with regard to the so-called Big Beautiful Bill.

00:46:21.000 It has now passed the House.

00:46:23.000 It is in the Senate.

00:46:24.000 Unclear exactly what's going to happen in the Senate.

00:46:27.000 Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.

00:46:30.000 Has pointed out that there are serious problems with the bill from the Senate perspective.

00:46:33.000 It doesn't cut the deficit enough, doesn't cut the debt enough.

00:46:37.000 And again, he's not wrong about this.

00:46:38.000 America does have a giant ticking time bomb that is the national debt.

00:46:42.000 The bill does cut some deficit.

00:46:47.000 The idea that we're increasing the deficit with the bill assumes sort of, it's sort of an accounting conversation.

00:46:53.000 Is the amount of money the United States is set to take in based on the tax rates currently?

00:46:58.000 Or based on the reversion to the pre-Trump tax rates.

00:47:02.000 If 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.

00:47:12.000 If 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.

00:47:27.000 That's the real question.

00:47:28.000 If you're a real fiscal hawk, you still are going to say that this bill is not cut enough that includes an enormous amount of pork.

00:47:33.000 And that's true.

00:47:33.000 There's an enormous amount of pork in this bill.

00:47:35.000 That is the position of Senator Johnson.

00:47:37.000 Here he was.

00:47:39.000 My campaign promise in 2010 and every campaign after that was to stop mortgaging our children's future.

00:47:45.000 It's immoral.

00:47:46.000 It's wrong.

00:47:46.000 It has to stop.

00:47:47.000 And so he may not be worried about that.

00:47:50.000 I am extremely worried about that.

00:47:52.000 That is my primary goal running for Congress.

00:47:56.000 This is our moment.

00:47:57.000 We've witnessed an unprecedented level of increased spending, 58% since 2019, other than World War II.

00:48:05.000 This is our only chance to reset that to a reasonable pre-pandemic level of spending.

00:48:10.000 And again, I think you can do it and the spending that we would eliminate, people wouldn't even notice.

00:48:15.000 But you have to do the work, which takes time.

00:48:17.000 That's part of the problem here is we've rushed this process.

00:48:21.000 We haven't taken the time.

00:48:22.000 We'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.

00:48:30.000 Completely 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.

00:48:39.000 Okay, but that $22 trillion in additional deficit, as Senator Johnson correctly points out, that is attached to Social Security and Medicare in the main.

00:48:49.000 Those are the chief drivers of America's national debt.

00:48:51.000 And no one, as I've said a thousand times, is actually at this point willing to seriously consider cutting entitlements.

00:48:57.000 Rand Paul, of course, has been very consistent on this throughout his career.

00:49:00.000 Here's the senator from Kentucky making much the same point.

00:49:03.000 This year in September, when our fiscal year ends, the deficit will be about $2.2 trillion.

00:49:08.000 Now, people used to always say, the Republicans would say, well, that's Bidenomics, that's Biden's spending levels.

00:49:13.000 When 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.

00:49:22.000 And people are going to wake up in about two months and say, how come the deficit's still $2.2 trillion?

00:49:27.000 Where did the savings go?

00:49:29.000 People are going to be very disappointed, conservatives, and I'm the one ringing the alarm saying they're not doing anything.

00:49:35.000 They're not sending us a rescission package.

00:49:37.000 They're not cutting spending.

00:49:38.000 Somebody has to stand up and yell, the emperor has no clothes.

00:49:42.000 And everybody's falling in lockstep on this.

00:49:45.000 Pass the big, beautiful bill.

00:49:46.000 Don't question anything.

00:49:48.000 Well, conservatives do need to stand up and have their voice heard.

00:49:51.000 you Thank you.

00:49:53.000 Okay, now, the real question here is not really about the principle.

00:49:57.000 On principle, obviously, Senator Paul and Senator Johnson are right.

00:50:00.000 The question is about pragmatism.

00:50:02.000 And here are the choices.

00:50:03.000 The American people are not ready to restructure entitlements.

00:50:05.000 They're almost never ready to restructure entitlements.

00:50:08.000 That's just the reality of the situation.

00:50:10.000 So the two choices are you let the taxes increase, like 70%, or you don't let the taxes increase.

00:50:17.000 Those are really the two choices on the table.

00:50:19.000 That's the point being made by a Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.

00:50:23.000 Well, I agree wholeheartedly with what my dear friend Rand Paul said.

00:50:26.000 I love his conviction and I share it.

00:50:29.000 The national debt is the greatest threat to our national security, and deficits are a serious problem.

00:50:34.000 What I think Rand is missing on this one is the fact that we are quite serious about this.

00:50:39.000 This is the biggest spending cut, Shannon, in more than 30 years.

00:50:43.000 We're going to cut over $1.5 trillion in spending, and it's a big leap forward.

00:50:50.000 The last time we had a spending cut was three decades ago, and it was only $800 billion.

00:50:54.000 Even adjusted for inflation, this is the biggest spending cut, I think, in the history of government on planet Earth.

00:50:59.000 Thank you.

00:51:01.000 Okay, 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.

00:51:08.000 What they mean is they are cutting the trajectory of future increase.

00:51:11.000 That'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.

00:51:20.000 You're still going into debt.

00:51:21.000 Hey, so let's just be clear about what we're talking about right here.

00:51:23.000 But here is the reality.

00:51:24.000 Neither party is willing to face up to what it will actually require in order for us to bend the cost curve in a very serious way.

00:51:32.000 Neither party is willing to do this.

00:51:33.000 And 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.

00:51:40.000 So Jack Lew, who of course is the former Treasury Secretary under Joe Biden.

00:51:45.000 Here he was suggesting that what we actually have to do is raise the taxes and then carefully restructure entitlements.

00:51:51.000 Weird, because you guys never talk about carefully restructuring entitlements when you have the capacity to do so.

00:51:57.000 I think this is the opposite of what you do if you really want to reduce the deficit.

00:52:01.000 If you really want to reduce the deficit, you have a bipartisan conversation about the difficult choices.

00:52:06.000 It doesn't mean cutting taxes.

00:52:08.000 is it means raising taxes doesn't mean So in reality, again, all my sympathies are with Senator Johnson and with Senator Paul.

00:52:28.000 The American people are not ready for this.

00:52:29.000 They just aren't.

00:52:30.000 Donald Trump ran on the proposition that the American people are not ready for this.

00:52:33.000 He'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.

00:52:40.000 That's one of the reasons why he has been so successful in a sort of populist vein.

00:52:44.000 Because it turns out that one of the best ways to win office is to promise everybody the moon.

00:52:48.000 Lower taxes and high entitlement spending is in fact a quite popular position in the United States.

00:52:55.000 Democratic position, which is higher taxes and much, much higher social spending.

00:53:00.000 That 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.

00:53:08.000 So 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.

00:53:16.000 That's what's going to happen.

00:53:16.000 10 years from now, 15 years from now, major austerity measures are in the offing.

00:53:22.000 That's just the reality.

00:53:24.000 Joining 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.

00:53:32.000 Senator Johnson, thanks so much for the time.

00:53:34.000 Really appreciate it.

00:53:35.000 Morning, Ben.

00:53:36.000 Thanks for having me on.

00:53:38.000 So let's talk about the problems with the big, beautiful bill.

00:53:41.000 Obviously, House Speaker Mike Johnson is very high on this.

00:53:44.000 Obviously, there are others in Congress who are as well.

00:53:46.000 The 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.

00:54:04.000 What do you say to that argument?

00:54:06.000 It's concluded.

00:54:08.000 Let's try and simplify this.

00:54:10.000 Over the next 10 years, again, I'm not saying CBO is perfect, but I would say this is a rosy scenario out of CBO.

00:54:17.000 They're projecting $89 trillion of spending over the next 10 years and a deficit of $22 trillion.

00:54:25.000 So Biden left us averaging $1.9 trillion in deficit spending per year.

00:54:30.000 CBO 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.

00:54:44.000 That's going to nip off about $4 trillion off of that CBO rosy scenario.

00:54:50.000 So now you're up to $2.6 trillion per year.

00:54:54.000 We are seeing the bond markets already react.

00:54:56.000 If the interest rates go up to just midway between a 50-year average versus where we're at right now.

00:55:02.000 That adds another $4 trillion.

00:55:04.000 If we go up to 5.3%, which is pretty close to 50-year average, add about $8 or $9 trillion to that 10-year deficit figure.

00:55:11.000 So now you're up over $3 trillion per year deficit.

00:55:15.000 And the Big Beautiful Bill does nothing to alleviate that.

00:55:18.000 They're talking about $1.5 trillion in spending cuts.

00:55:23.000 Again, some of those are fake.

00:55:24.000 Some of them are pushed off.

00:55:25.000 They'll never occur.

00:55:26.000 We're going to add about $300 billion in spending.

00:55:28.000 So that's at most 1.2.

00:55:32.000 Again, it just doesn't meet the moment.

00:55:33.000 It doesn't even come close to addressing what should be our primary goal is reduce the deficit over time, not increase it.

00:55:41.000 So Senator Johnson talking about reducing the deficit over time and reducing the national debt over time.

00:55:45.000 As the big drivers of the national debt and the deficit continue to be our massive entitlement program, Social Security and Medicare.

00:55:52.000 Those are the third rail of American politics.

00:55:54.000 Nobody wants to touch them.

00:55:55.000 Anybody who does touch them is immediately electrocuted.

00:55:58.000 President Trump did run in 2016 on the idea that he really was not going to fundamentally change Social Security and Medicare.

00:56:04.000 Is 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?

00:56:13.000 First of all, let me correct you.

00:56:15.000 what's really driving the increase, the massive increase in deficit spending is pandemic spending.

00:56:21.000 So if you exclude Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid, there are Again, that's excluding Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

00:56:37.000 That's just all the other total outlays.

00:56:39.000 Again, we wanted a spending spree from $4.4 trillion in 2019 to $6.5 trillion.

00:56:44.000 We never looked back.

00:56:45.000 We kept borrowing.

00:56:46.000 We kept spending at that level.

00:56:47.000 Next year, we're looking to spend about $7.3 trillion.

00:56:50.000 So if you would go line by line, that's what I've been arguing.

00:56:53.000 We need a budget review panel.

00:56:54.000 We need to do what Doge has done looking at these contracts.

00:56:56.000 We need to go through more than 2,000 lines of the federal budget, line by line.

00:57:01.000 Again, you can exclude Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid.

00:57:04.000 I 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.

00:57:16.000 But leave that aside, there's literally hundreds of billions of dollars in both other mandatory.

00:57:21.000 As well as discretionary spending that exceeds what we spent in 2019 fully inflated by population growth and inflation.

00:57:27.000 You go back, by the way, to Bill Clinton's total outweighs.

00:57:31.000 I don't think we were spending too little in 1998 or Barack Obama in 2019.

00:57:36.000 You can save even more hundreds of billions of dollars, but you have to do the work.

00:57:40.000 It's going to take the time.

00:57:41.000 That was always the flaw of the one big, beautiful bill.

00:57:44.000 It's going to be rushed.

00:57:45.000 It's going to use the same old technique, exempt most things, focus on a couple programs.

00:57:49.000 Come 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.

00:57:54.000 No, you completely missed the moment, completely inadequate.

00:58:00.000 So 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?

00:58:09.000 Because obviously, to I think everybody else, we remember 2019, it wasn't a year when we weren't spending lots of money.

00:58:14.000 We were still spending lots of money.

00:58:15.000 And 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.

00:58:24.000 So what would that actually look like in practice?

00:58:27.000 Well, it would look like the more than an inch thick budget that I've already produced that does just that.

00:58:32.000 It goes line by line.

00:58:33.000 It pluses up what we spent in 2019 based on population inflation, then compares it to current spending.

00:58:39.000 Now, again, if you're in business, this will literally be a five-minute conversation with my managers.

00:58:43.000 Say, listen, you guys, I told you you could increase your budget.

00:58:45.000 Based on inflation, the number of customers you serve, you're 10% over that.

00:58:49.000 Cut it. 0.63

00:58:50.000 Literally, a five-minute conversation, I'd walk away.

00:58:51.000 If they didn't do it, I'd fire them.

00:58:53.000 We ought to be able to do the same thing now.

00:58:54.000 There are some sensitivities there.

00:58:56.000 There are some programs that you can't touch that one.

00:58:59.000 We need to examine all of these things.

00:59:02.000 Again, 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.

00:59:10.000 But you've got to do the work.

00:59:11.000 You've got to go through that detail.

00:59:13.000 Nobody's willing to do that work.

00:59:14.000 Nobody's willing to take the time.

00:59:17.000 So, Senator Johnson, when we look at the constituency of the Senate, obviously the Republicans have a majority, but it's a fairly narrow majority.

00:59:23.000 You have a somewhat fractious caucus, obviously.

00:59:26.000 You 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.

00:59:37.000 How do you cobble together a majority just on a pragmatic level?

00:59:40.000 For a better version of the big, beautiful bill that you're talking about.

00:59:43.000 Well, first of all, it takes leadership.

00:59:45.000 It 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.

00:59:55.000 You'll lay out exactly what caused it.

00:59:57.000 You'll lay out the facts.

00:59:58.000 This is a budget process.

00:59:59.000 We ought to be talking about numbers.

01:00:01.000 The only number we ever heard of in the House was $1.5 trillion, and then $4 or $5 trillion increase to debt ceiling.

01:00:07.000 Completely divorced from the context and the reality of the situation.

01:00:10.000 It's very possible to do.

01:00:12.000 Again, I actually look at numbers.

01:00:14.000 You go back to President Obama, came into office.

01:00:17.000 We had been spending about $3 trillion.

01:00:19.000 He bumped up to $3.5 trillion.

01:00:21.000 We had a $1.4 trillion deficit, $1.3 trillion the next year, $1.3 trillion.

01:00:25.000 But then the Tea Party movement, that came in and constrained him.

01:00:28.000 For five years, we held spending flat at $3.5 trillion.

01:00:33.000 It didn't increase.

01:00:34.000 And he left office, quite honestly, with an average Trump increased that to over $800 billion in his first three years.

01:00:46.000 Then, of course, he had the pandemic, $3.1 trillion.

01:00:49.000 It should have ended there.

01:00:50.000 Biden should have said, OK, we spent enough on COVID.

01:00:53.000 Let's return to pre-pandemic level spending.

01:00:55.000 And we wouldn't be in this fix.

01:00:57.000 But no, Biden kept throwing fuel on the flames.

01:00:59.000 That's what caused, sparked 40-year high inflation.

01:01:02.000 And that's why we're in this enormous mess right now.

01:01:04.000 Got to lay out the facts.

01:01:05.000 You have to lay out the figures.

01:01:06.000 You 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.

01:01:16.000 And that's what's happening.

01:01:16.000 That's what happened in the House.

01:01:19.000 Senator 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.

01:01:29.000 They knew that there were, in fact, adverse events related specifically to things like myocarditis.

01:01:33.000 And 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.

01:01:42.000 Why don't you talk about what exactly that study found?

01:01:44.000 Well, first of all, understand this is just the tip of the iceberg.

01:01:47.000 It's been difficult to get the documents out of HHS, even though Bobby Kennedy completely wants to provide radical transparency.

01:01:55.000 You still have the bureaucracy in place.

01:01:57.000 I think we've had records destroyed, but we're starting to get some documentation.

01:02:01.000 So what we were able to prove is that they were well aware.

01:02:03.000 Of the myocarditis signal.

01:02:05.000 Israel contacted them at the end of February.

01:02:07.000 We 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?

01:02:21.000 The answer is yes.

01:02:23.000 And they still didn't issue a warning on the Health Alert Network.

01:02:26.000 They did clinical considerations.

01:02:28.000 And even in those, they removed a sentence that cautioned doctors to Encourage people with myocarditis not to engage in physical activity.

01:02:38.000 So again, they completely downplayed.

01:02:40.000 I would say they hid the myocarditis signal.

01:02:42.000 But again, this is the tip of the iceberg.

01:02:44.000 I've been trying to get their analysis, their empirical basing analysis for years.

01:02:49.000 We're finally starting to get some of that trickling in.

01:02:51.000 We're starting to see that there were signals.

01:02:54.000 We've got to put these studies together to prove that.

01:02:56.000 But you're going to see, I think, more bombshells in terms of what they knew, what they hid.

01:03:01.000 And 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.

01:03:17.000 Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin doing yeoman's work with regard to budgetary issues and the like.

01:03:22.000 Senator Johnson, really appreciate the time and the insight.

01:03:25.000 Have a great day.

01:03:26.000 Meanwhile, President Trump is making strong moves against Harvard.

01:03:32.000 President 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.

01:03:42.000 The planned additional cuts represented what the administration's official called a complete severance of the government's longstanding business relationship with Harvard.

01:03:50.000 And that, again, is based on their unwillingness to change their order of business, their operations.

01:03:56.000 His suggestion is that they have violated the Civil Rights Act.

01:04:00.000 By essentially allowing a discriminatory atmosphere against Jews.

01:04:03.000 Now again, I've said it before.

01:04:05.000 If 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. 0.74

01:04:14.000 I've made that argument before.

01:04:16.000 I've made that argument for 20 years.

01:04:17.000 There are certain aspects of the Civil Rights Act, such as banning discrimination by governments, that are correct and good.

01:04:22.000 And then there's a bunch of stuff in there that really is a wild constitutional overreach.

01:04:28.000 And 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.

01:04:40.000 However, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

01:04:42.000 And 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.

01:04:52.000 But 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. 0.96

01:04:59.000 That is the point being made by President Trump.

01:05:02.000 On 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.

01:05:10.000 He 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.

01:05:18.000 What a great investment that would be for the United States and so badly needed.

01:05:21.000 The announcement didn't provide any further specifics, but.

01:05:31.000 That is not, in fact, like an earned entitlement mandated by law.

01:05:35.000 So he can simply say, listen, no further funding, no future funding.

01:05:38.000 And there can be an argument over whether the university's violation of the Civil Rights Act justifies particular types of action by the administration.

01:05:48.000 But the notion the federal government is bound and committed to continue funding Harvard University.

01:05:53.000 That is not true.

01:05:55.000 And this is one of the real problems for Harvard University.

01:05:58.000 They can complain all they want.

01:06:00.000 But if the federal government under President Trump decides, then no further money will flow to Harvard.

01:06:05.000 No further money will flow to Harvard.

01:06:08.000 Harvard 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.

01:06:17.000 So it'll be, by the way, You want to talk about genius populist moves?

01:06:22.000 Shifting money from Harvard University with its endowment of something like $150 billion.

01:06:29.000 Shifting that money over instead to trade schools is a wonderful populist move.

01:06:35.000 Truly, truly a smart populist move by the President of the United States.

01:06:38.000 And Harvard deserves every little bit of this.

01:06:40.000 All they had to do was negotiate with President Trump.

01:06:41.000 That's all they had to do.

01:06:42.000 And they wouldn't do it.

01:06:43.000 They decided they wanted to stand up on their hind legs and defend their discriminatory atmosphere.

01:06:49.000 An atmosphere they never would have allowed for any other minority group at Harvard University. 0.99

01:06:52.000 Never.

01:06:53.000 Not in a million years.

01:06:54.000 And so President Trump is using this as a club to clock them, as well they should be.

01:07:00.000 Speaking of which, President Trump is also now looking to actually make people pay their student loans.

01:07:08.000 So Joe Biden's proposition is essentially the American taxpayer should foot the bill for subsidizing all of these universities all over the United States.

01:07:16.000 Well, now President Trump is saying, no, no, no, you got to pay off your student loans.

01:07:20.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, borrowers have been required to repay their student loans for some months now.

01:07:24.000 But 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.

01:07:32.000 The collections process was standard before the pandemic.

01:07:35.000 So they're claiming this is something new.

01:07:37.000 This is how it used to work.

01:07:37.000 It isn't.

01:07:38.000 Now, 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.

01:07:59.000 Student loan balances from the federal student aid division, those loan balances typically go to majors that do not earn out.

01:08:08.000 That's why you can't get a private loan on those things.

01:08:11.000 So there'll be a jump in delinquency.

01:08:13.000 There'll be some people who get hit.

01:08:15.000 It 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.

01:08:30.000 Meanwhile, the New York Times has an amazing rundown on the Democratic inability to communicate with the normies.

01:08:36.000 It's an entire piece titled, Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward.

01:08:40.000 Shane Goldmacher writes, So, it's pretty amazing.

01:09:08.000 Six months after President Trump swept the battleground states, according to the New York Times, the Democratic Party is still sifting through the wreckage.

01:09:14.000 Its 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.

01:09:23.000 The stark reality is that the downward trend for Democrats stretches back further than a single election.

01:09:27.000 Republicans have been gaining ground in voter registration for years.

01:09:30.000 Working class voters of every race have been steadily drifting toward the GOP.

01:09:34.000 And Democrats are increasingly perceived as the party of college-educated elites.

01:09:37.000 The defenders of a political and economic system that most Americans feel is failing them.

01:09:41.000 Well, actually, they are seen as the defenders of a moral system that is failing them.

01:09:46.000 It is not just a political and economic system.

01:09:48.000 It 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.

01:10:02.000 This started under Barack Obama, and it never stopped.

01:10:05.000 The 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.

01:10:13.000 The 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.

01:10:22.000 Well, yes.

01:10:23.000 So hilariously, they're trying to figure out exactly how to deal with this.

01:10:28.000 Quote, 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.

01:10:41.000 And they point out, again, that they have lost men, like, across the board.

01:10:47.000 Across the board, they're losing men.

01:10:49.000 And they actually have no way of regaining those men.

01:10:53.000 This is hilarious.

01:10:55.000 Democratic donors and strategists are gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters.

01:11:00.000 Commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.

01:11:04.000 The prospectus for one new $20 million effort obtained by the Times aims to reverse the erosion of democratic support among young men, especially online.

01:11:12.000 It 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.

01:11:23.000 It recommends buying advertisements in video games.

01:11:26.000 Above all, it says, we must shift from a moralizing tone.

01:11:29.000 Well, 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.

01:11:37.000 It is not a sort of progressive redistributionism.

01:11:41.000 It 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.

01:11:54.000 Democrats have been too fond of using sociological Left-wing idiocies for too long to simply break out of it now.

01:12:01.000 It's going to be very difficult for them to break that particular addiction, for sure.

01:12:06.000 And by the way, the Democrats continue to move to the left.

01:12:09.000 According to a brand new primary poll, AOC would trounce Senator Chuck Schumer in the New York primary.

01:12:16.000 She leads Schumer 54-33 among likely Democratic voters in New York City.

01:12:23.000 That's unbelievable.

01:12:25.000 Because, of course, she is wildly to the left.

01:12:30.000 The numbers are troubling for Schumer, obviously, according to the New York Post.

01:12:36.000 It is amazing to watch as Schumer simply falls apart.

01:12:40.000 But this is the next wave of the Democratic Party.

01:12:41.000 This 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.

01:12:50.000 Yeah, good luck, guys.

01:12:52.000 What an uninspiring crew the Democrats are rolling out right now. 0.90

01:12:57.000 This, by the way, is the reason why Democrats tried to run a dead person in that last election cycle.

01:13:03.000 Alex 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.

01:13:20.000 Yeah, well done, guys.

01:13:22.000 He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years.

01:13:25.000 He'd only have to show proof of life every once in a while.

01:13:29.000 His aides could pick up the slack.

01:13:31.000 Who would have been running the White House in a second fine term? 0.99

01:13:34.000 This person went on to say that when you're voting for a president, you're voting for the aides around him.

01:13:39.000 But these aides were not even Senate-confirmed aides.

01:13:42.000 These are White House aides.

01:13:43.000 These were unelected people.

01:13:44.000 And 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.

01:14:03.000 Unbelievable.

01:14:04.000 By the way, Sam Harris.

01:14:05.000 Again, 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.

01:14:12.000 Well, it didn't work.

01:14:14.000 The American people weren't up for it.

01:14:18.000 But to close the loop on this whole scandal, even that is preferable to me and to, I think, many Democrats.

01:14:27.000 than having someone who we consider to be genuinely evil, genuinely 100% purposed to serving himself in the office of the presidency.

01:14:38.000 I would rather have a president in a coma where the duties of the presidency are executed by a committee of just normal people.

01:14:51.000 OK, 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.

01:14:58.000 It is because of that belief that the American people could not be leveled to, that they couldn't be told the truth.

01:15:04.000 It is precisely that reason why you have seen the rise of Donald Trump.

01:15:08.000 All right, folks, the show continues for our members right now.

01:15:11.000 We get into Rajiv Macron pushing Emmanuel Macron in the face on camera.

01:15:16.000 Which is about the most French thing I can think of.

01:15:17.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

01:15:19.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - May 27, 2025

Can Trump STOP World War III?

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