The Ben Shapiro Show - Chip and Joanna Gaines SELL OUT?

00:00:00.000 Tons coming up on today's show.

00:00:01.000 Chip and Joanna Gaines in serious trouble with their Christian audience, and for a pretty good reason, plus big wins for President Trump on the economy. 0.79

00:00:09.000 And we'll talk about the latest in the ongoing Epstein saga.

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00:00:53.000 There's a basic rule of thumb when it comes to judicial appointees.

00:00:56.000 And that basic rule of thumb for people who are originalists or conservatives is that if you don't have a track record as an originalist or a conservative, and then you enter the bench, there's a good shot that very, very soon you will swivel to the left.

00:01:09.000 And that is also true in the world of the universities and it's true in the world of Hollywood.

00:01:14.000 If you go to Hollywood and you don't have a very clear, long-standing track record as, for example, a religious conservative who stood stalwart in the face of left-wing aggression, there's a good shot that pretty quickly you are going to cave.

00:01:28.000 At some point, you're going to cave because the pressure to be eaten up by the social values of the left in Hollywood is so extreme.

00:01:35.000 And that apparently is what has happened with the Chip and Joanna Gaines show, Back to the Frontier.

00:01:42.000 So according to Breitbart.com, there's a brand new show called Back to the Frontier on HGTV.

00:01:49.000 Chip and Joanna Gaines, of course, present themselves as devout Christians, and a lot of their fans are Christian and faith-based.

00:01:55.000 But the new series features a gay couple with adopted children.

00:02:00.000 And a lot of people are upset with the Gaines because of this.

00:02:03.000 They're saying, okay, hold up a second.

00:02:05.000 You purport to be religious Christians.

00:02:07.000 And this is a show that I would normally watch with my family.

00:02:09.000 But now here you are normalizing what is, by any sort of traditional Christian theology, sinful behavior. 0.54

00:02:17.000 Now, again, you don't have to believe any of this if you're a secular person.

00:02:20.000 If you're not a Christian, maybe this doesn't matter to you.

00:02:23.000 But the reality is that people who are traditionally faithful to scripture believe that man, woman, children is the basic standard for how families form and should be the basic standard for how families form.

00:02:37.000 And so for Christians who have made their money on Christians being loyal to their show to actually now start infusing their shows with left-wing social values is a problem. 0.74

00:02:47.000 Here is the preview.

00:02:51.000 Coming up this season.

00:02:57.000 It is beautiful.

00:03:01.000 A journey into the past.

00:03:03.000 You gotta get it out of control.

00:03:05.000 But life on the frontier.

00:03:07.000 What should we do to make this more fun for us?

00:03:09.000 Quit.

00:03:10.000 Quitting is not an option.

00:03:12.000 It was never easy.

00:03:13.000 It'll be okay.

00:03:14.000 All right.

00:03:15.000 On eat attitude.

00:03:16.000 Only moping.

00:03:18.000 Family tides are tested.

00:03:21.000 I just made food for everyone and they just put their plates here.

00:03:23.000 Like, go wash the dishes made.

00:03:25.000 Community is challenged.

00:03:27.000 You guys do your dining next.

00:03:29.000 I will speak up for one set of my neighbors.

00:03:32.000 The other ones, I plead the fifth.

00:03:35.000 Can they make it as 1880s homesteaders?

00:03:41.000 So, as you can see, again, this is a Max original, and the idea is that they're going to replicate the conditions of homesteading back on the range, back in the 1880s or something.

00:03:50.000 The gay couple is named Joe Riggs and Jason Hanna, and they told the Dallas Morning News they felt the show was an opportunity to put ourselves out there and help normalize families like ours, which, of course, is the goal whenever Hollywood does something like this.

00:04:01.000 The goal, of course, is to essentially say that all forms of family are morally the same, which is a very Hollywood value.

00:04:08.000 And this goes all the way back to the early 1990s and Mrs. Doubtfire, when you had Robin Williams lecturing the American public that all forms of families were essentially morally equivalent.

00:04:18.000 And they said, quote, when families like ours are visible, it opens doors for others to feel safe, loved, and validated.

00:04:23.000 Visibility isn't just about being seen.

00:04:25.000 It's about making sure no one feels alone.

00:04:27.000 So Chip Gaines was inundated with complaints from his fan base because, of course, the Chip and Joanna Gaines fanbase is biblically loyal.

00:04:33.000 And so what they're saying is, listen, obviously this phenomenon exists in life.

00:04:38.000 Gay marriage is legal in the United States, but that doesn't mean that you, as a creator, a person that we trust with our time and maybe put our kids in front of the TV to watch your shows, ought to be mainlining left-wing social values into your shows.

00:04:50.000 So Chip Gaines then basically called all those people intolerant, quote, talk, ask questions, listen, maybe even learn.

00:04:56.000 Too much to ask of modern American Christian culture. 0.67

00:04:58.000 Judge first, understand later or never.

00:05:00.000 It's a sad Sunday when non-believers have never been confronted with hate or vitriol until they are introduced to a modern American Christian. 0.66

00:05:07.000 Okay, Madude.

00:05:10.000 Just going to put it out there that this is about the worst approach that you can take to your fan base.

00:05:14.000 About the worst approach.

00:05:15.000 I mean, put aside the morality of what he's saying, which is insipid.

00:05:18.000 It turns out that traditional morality does draw lines between certain behavior and other behavior.

00:05:23.000 It doesn't mean you have to treat people badly.

00:05:24.000 It doesn't mean that you have to be insulting or awful to them.

00:05:28.000 But obviously, if you are a traditional religious person and you believe that traditional marriage is the way that God intended for the world to work and nature designed the world to work, if that is what you believe, then you should stand by that even when it is politically unpopular.

00:05:43.000 Again, that doesn't even mean that you can't have friends who are violating what you think of as faith standards.

00:05:50.000 Because as pretty much all Judeo-Christian teaching teaches, everybody sins.

00:05:55.000 Sin is a normal way of the world.

00:05:57.000 That does not mean that the sin itself becomes normalized and is treated as okay or as totally normalized, which is exactly, of course, what the show is designed to do.

00:06:06.000 And of course, many of the followers of Chip and Joanna Gaines are not only upset with the fact that the show is featuring this sort of stuff, they're upset with the fact that Chip is now sneering at them, that he's looking down his nose at them and suggesting that the real problem here is not that he has violated his own faith standards by promulgating a set of values that is un-Christian, but that he believes that Christians themselves, by objecting to that promulgation, are thus demonstrating that they're intolerant, avicious, and mean.

00:06:33.000 Objecting to the normalization of what Christians or Jews or anyone else considers to be sinful, that is not mean or intolerant.

00:06:43.000 That is just saying there is a standard, and the standard should be something that if you purport to be an upholder of that standard, you should abide by.

00:06:50.000 John MacArthur passed away the other day.

00:06:52.000 This is something that Reverend MacArthur was extremely big on.

00:06:55.000 The idea that God's standard, again, this is within the context of Christianity, obviously.

00:07:00.000 If Chip and Joanna Gaines were just a secular couple who had never purported to be Christian and they were making a show like this in Hollywood, no one would care.

00:07:07.000 Nobody would bat an eye.

00:07:08.000 Because the expectation is different when you say that you are an adherent to a particular philosophy or a particular ideology.

00:07:14.000 And this is true politically as well, by the way.

00:07:16.000 If you say that you are an adherent to a thing and then you are disloyal to that idea, you should be called out for that.

00:07:22.000 You should be.

00:07:23.000 If you never say that you're an adherent to that idea and then you're not adherent to that idea, well, how can we hold you responsible for that?

00:07:30.000 But Chip and Joanna Gaines have made their money off American Christians who believe that Chip and Joanna Gaines are some of them.

00:07:35.000 My friend Matt Walsh tweeted out, maybe you should endeavor to understand the basic moral teachings of your own alleged religion before you give lectures to other people about their lack of understanding, which seems like a pretty solid take.

00:07:48.000 The response, which is to lecture Christians, that they are not being Christian enough by accepting and promulgating and normalizing behavior they consider to be sinful, that is a pretty insane perspective for the Gaines to take.

00:08:02.000 Now, again, the Gaines have been under fire for a long time because the way that Hollywood works is that if you are a traditional Christian, they immediately call you a bigot homophobe.

00:08:09.000 This is their thing.

00:08:10.000 And if you can't stand up to that pressure, then you're likely to cave to that pressure and then become part of the sort of left-wing media Borg.

00:08:17.000 That is the thing that happens.

00:08:19.000 The Gaines, as Breitbart reports, were accused of being anti-LGBTQ in the past.

00:08:23.000 And at that time, they insisted the accusations were far from the truth.

00:08:28.000 Joanna Gaines told the Hollywood Reporter at the time, sometimes I'm like, can I just make a statement?

00:08:31.000 The accusations that get thrown at you, like you're racist or you don't like people in the LGBTQ community, that's the stuff that really eats my lunch because it's so far from who we really are.

00:08:39.000 That's the stuff that keeps me up.

00:08:40.000 But let's be clear, the slide from you should be nice to people who, even people you believe are committing a sin, to promulgating the sin, normalizing the sin, changing the standard, that is the move that Christians object to.

00:08:54.000 That is the move that religious people object to.

00:08:58.000 Again, take it to a Judaic context so I can speak for my own religion.

00:09:02.000 There are plenty of people, many, many people I know who violate what I think are the traditional standards of Shabbat, right?

00:09:08.000 What we do on Sabbath, what you are supposed to do on Sabbath.

00:09:11.000 For example, you're not supposed to drive on Sabbath according to traditional Judaism because you have to create fire in order to do that, right, with the internal combustion engine.

00:09:19.000 And I know tons and tons of Jews with whom I'm incredibly friendly, some of my family members.

00:09:23.000 I know a lot of people who do that sort of thing, drive on Sabbath.

00:09:27.000 Do I love them?

00:09:28.000 They're friends and family.

00:09:28.000 Of course.

00:09:29.000 Do I think it's okay for them to do that?

00:09:32.000 Both those things can be held in your mind at the same time.

00:09:32.000 No, I don't.

00:09:35.000 And if we're to be honest with each other as a civilization and as human beings, we should be able to be honest about what we perceive to be the actual moral standards that are being violated.

00:09:44.000 And just because you have friends who violate the moral standard doesn't mean that the moral standard ought to be obliterated because then there's no moral standard at all.

00:09:51.000 And niceness is not a moral standard.

00:09:54.000 Niceness, civility, it's a good thing, but it isn't a moral standard in the same way that a hard and fast rule about human behavior is because it's mushy.

00:10:04.000 Niceness used as sort of the only moral standard does not bear scrutiny.

00:10:08.000 It does not bear weight.

00:10:10.000 It is not a weight-bearing moral concept.

00:10:12.000 Niceness, it's too vague.

00:10:14.000 Civility is a standard of behavior.

00:10:16.000 It is not a gigantic moral standard upon which you can base a civilization.

00:10:21.000 And so what Chip and Joanna Gaines are doing here, and I understand why Christians are so angry at them, and they should be very, very angry at them for this, frankly. 0.99

00:10:27.000 Because again, if you are tasked with upholding a standard, you should uphold that standard.

00:10:32.000 And if you betray the standard, you should be called out for that.

00:10:34.000 That is true politically.

00:10:35.000 It is true with regard to religion. 0.64

00:10:37.000 It's true with regard to life more generally.

00:10:40.000 So again, I think they owe their fans a major, major apology.

00:10:43.000 And I talk about this cultural issue because I do think that it undergirds so much of politics and undergirds so much of our social life together.

00:10:51.000 Because two things can be true at once, as always.

00:10:53.000 One, you can hold a strong moral standard, a standard that matters.

00:10:57.000 And two, you should be tolerant toward people in terms of how you treat them, treat them nicely, who don't abide by your moral standard so long as they are not actively hurting anybody else.

00:11:06.000 That does not mean the moral standard itself should change because a change to the overall moral standard does affect the overall society.

00:11:14.000 That is how normal people and religious people ought to interact with the world.

00:11:18.000 Already coming up, some big wins for President Trump on the economy, plus everything Epstein related, all your updates.

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00:13:32.000 Okay, meanwhile, President Trump is winning some pretty big economic victories.

00:13:37.000 Yesterday, the president of the United States announced a bunch of economic wins.

00:13:42.000 He announced that Indonesia had agreed to a tariff deal.

00:13:46.000 According to Breitbart.com, Indonesia has now agreed to a 19% tariff on its imported goods into the United States.

00:13:52.000 While the United States will not pay any tariffs in the Indonesian market and will have full access to it, according to the president, President Trump said, I spoke to the really great president, very popular, very strong, smart.

00:14:02.000 This is how President Trump gauges the people with whom he negotiates.

00:14:05.000 And we made the deal.

00:14:06.000 We have full access to Indonesia, everything.

00:14:08.000 As you know, Indonesia is very strong on copper, but we have full access to everything.

00:14:12.000 Particularly, he's interested in apparently Indonesia's rare earth minerals.

00:14:16.000 That is a way of directing away from reliance on Chinese rare earth minerals.

00:14:20.000 He said, we will pay no tariffs.

00:14:21.000 So they're giving us access into Indonesia, which we never had.

00:14:24.000 That's probably the biggest part of the deal.

00:14:26.000 The other part is they're going to pay 19% and we are going to pay nothing.

00:14:30.000 Now, again, I had suggested that before August 1st, there were likely to be a spate of trade deals that were done.

00:14:36.000 Because if we hit August 1st, that is his sort of drop-dead date when we get a snap back to the original Liberation Day tariff rates, which are extremely, extremely high.

00:14:45.000 Meanwhile, negotiations continue with Canada.

00:14:47.000 Prime Minister Mark Carney, according to Politico, has acknowledged publicly for the first time that the deal he is negotiating with the United States is almost certain to come with some tariffs.

00:14:56.000 Before Carney's admission, Canadian officials had consistently held out hope for a nearly tariff-free relationship as part of a new trade and security agreement.

00:15:04.000 The precise terms of Canada's negotiating position remain unclear, but President Trump acknowledged at the G7 leaders' summit in Alberta last month that Kearney's offer differed from the president's pro-tariff preference.

00:15:15.000 And now Kearney is recognizing that he is going to have to do some tariffs because President Trump still likes tariffs.

00:15:20.000 However, I do think that some sort of tariff deal will end up being negotiated with Canada as well.

00:15:24.000 This is the reason, by the way, why, for example, the S ⁇ P 500, despite all of this sort of tariff talk, has been in pretty solid territory for the last several weeks.

00:15:35.000 The markets are not being tremendously broiled by President Trump's tariff talks.

00:15:39.000 The common understanding is that the worst excesses of any sort of tariff regime are likely to be avoided by the presidents of the United States in some sort of final tariff negotiation here.

00:15:51.000 Meanwhile, President Trump did a big event yesterday in Pennsylvania where he announced massive new investments into AI and energy.

00:15:59.000 Here he was yesterday.

00:16:01.000 We're here today because we believe that America's destiny is to dominate every industry and be the first in every technology.

00:16:09.000 And that includes being the world's number one superpower in artificial intelligence.

00:16:13.000 And we are way ahead of China.

00:16:15.000 I have to say, we're way ahead of China. 0.92

00:16:17.000 And the plants are starting up, the construction's starting up.

00:16:21.000 Okay.

00:16:22.000 And again, I think this is the big question is can we stay ahead of China? 0.99

00:16:26.000 As we'll talk about in a little while, there's some pretty interesting controversy over the kinds of microchips that should be available to the Chinese via NVIDIA.

00:16:33.000 Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, has suggested that China should be able to get a certain supply of microchips.

00:16:39.000 They're sort of second-order microchips.

00:16:41.000 His basic claim is that if we make China path-dependent on our microchips, that's better because then it's going to be easier to control their growth in the AI space.

00:16:49.000 Plus, it's going to provide a profit boost to NVIDIA and other American microchip companies.

00:16:54.000 President Trump also announced that we are making massive investments in energy yesterday.

00:16:59.000 The investments being announced this afternoon include more than $56 billion in new energy infrastructure and more than $36 billion in new data center projects.

00:17:10.000 And a lot more than that are going to be announced in the coming weeks, not even months, I think we could say weeks.

00:17:16.000 President Trump was in Pittsburgh at the time, praising companies for investing more than $90 billion in data centers and other energy projects in Pennsylvania, aimed at accelerating the development of AI.

00:17:27.000 And of course, Pittsburgh is an amazing story here because Pittsburgh used to be a town that made steel.

00:17:33.000 And now Pittsburgh is largely healthcare and tech, which demonstrates the viability of a capitalist economy.

00:17:38.000 In a capitalist economy, jobs shift from industries that are dying or being outproduced into new industries.

00:17:44.000 And that allows the growth of those areas and, in fact, the revitalization of those areas.

00:17:50.000 For all of those who are sort of attached to the idea that whatever a town did in the past is the thing the town must do in the future, that is not a proper way to approach economics.

00:17:58.000 And President Trump is acknowledging that implicitly with this event organized by Senator David McCormick of Pennsylvania.

00:18:04.000 So with all of that said, the event yesterday in Pennsylvania was in fact a big success.

00:18:09.000 As I mentioned, Senator McCormick put it together.

00:18:11.000 Senator McCormick is great.

00:18:12.000 We campaigned with him in Pennsylvania before the last election happened.

00:18:15.000 He brought together President Trump and executives from technology and fossil fuel companies, including Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Google, ExxonMobil, and Westinghouse.

00:18:24.000 And at the event, the private equity from Blackstone, according to the New York Times, announced that it would invest $25 billion in new data centers and energy infrastructure, including natural gas power plants.

00:18:33.000 Google said it would invest another $25 billion in data centers and announced a separate $3 billion plan to upgrade two of Pennsylvania's existing hydroelectric dams to produce more electricity.

00:18:43.000 A lot of this is being done in competition with China.

00:18:46.000 You heard President Trump say that with regard to AI.

00:18:48.000 Officials say winning the AI race with China is absolutely necessary because, number one, China is, in fact, a national security threat to the United States. 0.76

00:18:56.000 And two, China's, maybe their only hope of out-competing the United States is to overtly win the AI race, which is living off the data of everybody in a centralized fashion. 0.83

00:19:06.000 AI is bizarrely centralized in a way that no other economic tool ever has been.

00:19:11.000 The internet is wildly decentralized.

00:19:13.000 The same is true for laissez-faire economics in general, wildly decentralized.

00:19:18.000 The basic idea of AI, of course, is that it's a centralization of all information, and then it spits out a sort of godlike answer to questions.

00:19:25.000 If China were to win that race, not only could they propagandize to the rest of the world, they could Also, presumably live off of the decentralized informational environment and then produce answers for their own economy that might be wildly effective.

00:19:39.000 AI could make centralized government significantly more effective, is sort of the idea here.

00:19:42.000 So, that is why controversy, as I mentioned earlier, has broken out around NVIDIA and the United States lifting its restrictions on chip sales to China with regard to NVIDIA.

00:19:52.000 But it is worth noting that the China-specific AI chip is known as the H20.

00:19:57.000 That, in fact, is a significantly less powerful chip than the chip that's being used in the United States, known as the H100.

00:20:04.000 Howard Luttnick, the commerce secretary, said that China was trying to copy our technology.

00:20:09.000 And in the race for AI supremacy, they're behind us, but they're working with the central government out to get us.

00:20:13.000 That, of course, is true. 0.83

00:20:15.000 Junsen Huang had suggested that selling chips to China is vital to NVIDIA's future because the country is home to 50% of the world's AI developers.

00:20:23.000 And China also spends more on chips than any other market in the world.

00:20:26.000 So he's saying it's going to help NVIDIA.

00:20:28.000 Okay, but that still means that there isn't national security threat.

00:20:32.000 The idea here is make China dependent on the H-20, which is a less powerful chip, but more powerful than anything China has, but less powerful than anything the United States is currently using.

00:20:42.000 I could certainly hear arguments both ways on this.

00:20:44.000 Meanwhile, as we say, the economy is sort of holding steady at this point.

00:20:50.000 President Trump should stop messing around with it.

00:20:52.000 President Trump should stop sticking his fingers in the pie with regard to the economy at this point.

00:20:57.000 That is why when the president is railing against Jerome Powell and saying that he should lower the rates, most people who are investors just want everything to be copacetic.

00:21:06.000 They just want everything to be left alone.

00:21:08.000 Some predictability in the markets would be great because if there is predictability, I know what the environment is next month, next year.

00:21:13.000 That means it's easier for me to invest my money mid to long term.

00:21:16.000 Here's the president going after Jerome Powell again.

00:21:20.000 Exactly as anticipated.

00:21:22.000 Very low inflation.

00:21:24.000 So what you should do is lower the rate.

00:21:26.000 The Fed should lower the rate immediately.

00:21:30.000 Well, this is something that Jamie Diamond of J.P. Morgan is pointing out is actually a bad economic idea.

00:21:38.000 He said, I think the independence of the Fed is absolutely critical.

00:21:41.000 He said, playing around with the Fed can have adverse consequences, the absolute opposite of what you might actually be hoping for.

00:21:46.000 And Diamond, of course, is somewhat allied with the President of the United States in terms of his deregulatory attitude.

00:21:53.000 And as per Jamie Dimon, who correctly suggested the president should not fire Jerome Powell, President Trump has now come out and said he's not going to fire Jerome Powell.

00:21:59.000 Again, Scott Besson being correct about this.

00:22:02.000 Do you have plans or if you're back considering firing Jerome Powell?

00:22:08.000 What's your justification if you're thinking about this to do this?

00:22:11.000 He's always been too late.

00:22:13.000 Hence his nickname too late.

00:22:15.000 He should have cut interest rates a long time ago.

00:22:18.000 Europe has cut him 10 times in the short period of time.

00:22:21.000 We cut him none.

00:22:23.000 The only time he cut him was just before the election to try to help Kamala or Biden, whoever the hell it was, because nobody really knew.

00:22:33.000 Obviously, that didn't work, but he tried to cut him for the Democrats, Kamala.

00:22:38.000 And how did that work out?

00:22:41.000 You'll tell me.

00:22:42.000 It didn't work out too well.

00:22:43.000 But I think he does a terrible job.

00:22:46.000 He's costing us a lot of money.

00:22:48.000 And we fight through it.

00:22:50.000 It's almost the country's become so successful that it doesn't have a big impact.

00:22:55.000 But it does hurt people wanting to get a mortgage.

00:22:59.000 People want to buy a house.

00:23:02.000 He's a terrible Fed chief.

00:23:04.000 I was surprised he was appointed.

00:23:06.000 I was surprised, frankly, that Biden put him in and extended him.

00:23:12.000 But they did.

00:23:14.000 So, no, we're not planning on doing anything.

00:23:17.000 Treasury Secretary Scott Besant reiterated that message in a television interview on Tuesday.

00:23:22.000 Besent characterized Trump's recent criticism as working the refs.

00:23:25.000 Again, Scott Besant is the guy who is holding the economy together at this point.

00:23:28.000 I've been saying this for months.

00:23:30.000 The Treasury Secretary, leave it in his hands.

00:23:31.000 Everything will be okay.

00:23:32.000 Because Scott Besant understands how the economy works.

00:23:35.000 The president made an excellent pick in the Treasury Secretary and allowing him to sort of run this process.

00:23:41.000 That is why the markets are essentially sanguine, despite all of the sort of variegated rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration.

00:23:49.000 Alrighty, coming up, President Trump has now made some strong moves on Ukraine.

00:23:52.000 They are, in fact, the right moves.

00:23:53.000 And your Epstein updates first.

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00:26:04.000 Joining me on the line is Professor Jason Furman.

00:26:06.000 He's professor of economics at Harvard University, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

00:26:11.000 Previously, he actually served as the chair of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors.

00:26:15.000 Professor Furman, thanks so much for taking the time.

00:26:17.000 Really appreciate it.

00:26:18.000 Great to be with you.

00:26:21.000 So I want to start by asking about your sort of take on the broader economy right now.

00:26:27.000 There's a lot of roiling undercurrents regarding inflation.

00:26:30.000 It seems like job growth has slowed, but the investment community seems to still think that the trajectory is upward.

00:26:37.000 Where do you think things are right now?

00:26:40.000 Things are a bit weaker than they had been in terms of growth.

00:26:44.000 It looks like it'll be one to one and a half percent in the first half of this year as opposed to the two and a half percent we had last year.

00:26:52.000 And things are a bit higher in terms of inflation.

00:26:54.000 The inflation rate is edging towards 3%.

00:26:57.000 I think it's likely to go above 3% as more of the tariffs kick in.

00:27:03.000 Prior to this, we were on track to 2%, which is what the Fed wants.

00:27:06.000 So nothing dramatic, no dramatic recessions, no dramatic hyperinflations, but things moving in a meaningfully wrong direction.

00:27:18.000 So when we talk about the tariffs and the impact of the tariffs, obviously you're starting to see that priced in now.

00:27:22.000 There seems to be this sort of bipartisan addiction to the idea that the laws of economics don't apply.

00:27:27.000 We saw it during the Biden administration with regard to massive spending and modern monetary theory and this sort of magical thinking that we could continue to endlessly spend and this would have no impact on inflation at any point.

00:27:39.000 And then, of course, that was proved false.

00:27:41.000 And now Americans seem to be broadly engaged in the magical thinking that we can endlessly spend, go into endless debt, and this will never have any sort of long-term impact on either growth or inflation or mandate massive increases on taxes.

00:27:55.000 Now, obviously, you're part of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors.

00:27:58.000 There's been sort of a shift now in the tone of a lot of people on both the left and the right with regard to the danger of the national debt.

00:28:05.000 What do you make of that?

00:28:07.000 Yeah, I agree with your framing there.

00:28:10.000 I was a critic of what President Biden did.

00:28:13.000 He did too much in 2021, but, you know, you were coming out of COVID.

00:28:18.000 Maybe you could understand it.

00:28:19.000 I didn't, but maybe you could.

00:28:21.000 But then he continued to give away, for example, hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan relief in 2022 when inflation was raging.

00:28:29.000 And by the way, it wasn't even obviously legal to do something like that.

00:28:34.000 So we entered this year with a deficit relative to the size of our economy larger than any time in our history, except World War II, the financial crisis, and COVID.

00:28:43.000 And there's no excuse for it at all.

00:28:46.000 Now the Republicans just passed a law and Donald Trump signed it that's going to take Joe Biden's deficit and either keep it the same or make it even a bit larger.

00:28:56.000 And, you know, even less reason for that now.

00:29:01.000 When we talk about that and the big beautiful bill, I think one of my objections is here, there's sort of the hypocrisy objection, which is many of the same people who are happy to spend two years ago are suddenly very upset about spending today.

00:29:11.000 And that's sort of the usual in politics is that the parties flip positions with regard to spending when they're the ones who are in control of the wallet.

00:29:17.000 At the same time, it seems to me that the reality is that it really isn't even, and I don't mean to put our politicians off the hook here because I think that many of them are terrible.

00:29:25.000 The American people are not prepared for the kinds of things that are going to be necessary in order to actually bring our national debt under control.

00:29:31.000 They're just not.

00:29:32.000 The American people are not willing to make the sorts of changes to their long-term Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid programs that would be necessary in order to put us on a fiscally sustainable track.

00:29:42.000 And unless you're willing to put in place high tax rates for everyone above the very lowest income earners in the United States, you're not going to tax your way out of this.

00:29:50.000 And so it seems to me that we are cruising for a bruising long term and that the American people might just have to fly over the fiscal cliff like Thelma and Louise before we realize that austerity measures are necessary to restructure some of these entitlement programs.

00:30:04.000 Yeah, look, I worry about that.

00:30:06.000 It's not something as an economist, I would recommend.

00:30:09.000 But one way that countries get their fiscal house in order is people stop lending to them at a reasonable interest rate.

00:30:15.000 They have some sort of mini economic crisis and that forces them to act.

00:30:20.000 And that's happened in countries around the world for centuries.

00:30:25.000 The better way to deal with this, and I'm not predicting this, it'll happen, is both Social Security and Medicare run out of money less than a decade from now.

00:30:35.000 The last time this happened was Social Security, the two parties got together, Ronald Reagan and then representing the Democrats in Congress, Tip O'Neill, they did a bipartisan Social Security reform.

00:30:46.000 It added about 60 years to the life of Social Security.

00:30:50.000 And to me, that's the model to do again.

00:30:52.000 So I'd much rather it be an accounting event that forces action rather than an actual market event, which is genuinely costly, that forces action.

00:31:03.000 And that Social Security trust fund running out, that's a good accounting event to force action.

00:31:10.000 You know, one of the things that I think is so astonishing about the way our politics does work is that the minute anyone starts suggesting any of these solutions, they're immediately demagogued.

00:31:17.000 I mean, truly demagogued in a very serious way.

00:31:19.000 I'm old enough to remember when George W. Bush was proposing that our social security accounts essentially be turned into health savings accounts.

00:31:25.000 And if we had actually done that at the time, it would have done an awful lot toward changing the structure of social security in a fiscally positive way, because of course, we would have tied what we were putting into social security to the markets, which have now risen multiple fold and would have probably risen more if we had had that much money flowing into the markets at the time via those sorts of accounts.

00:31:43.000 He was demagogued as killing grandma, even though he was talking about changing the system mainly for people who were 40 years old at the time.

00:31:50.000 This is why I fear that the possibility of a sort of bipartisan solution here, absent some real economic spur, is really, really low.

00:31:59.000 The politics just don't match up with what the economics suggests need to be done.

00:32:04.000 Yeah, look, I mean, we just saw the Republican Party unwilling to touch Social Security and Medicare.

00:32:12.000 In one sense, I don't blame them.

00:32:14.000 They would have been completely demagogued by the Democrats if they had.

00:32:18.000 But in another sense, I do blame them.

00:32:20.000 Those are the two biggest government spending programs.

00:32:22.000 And if you claim to care about government spending or you claim to care about the debt, to take those off the table, you're taking Off the table, an awful lot of how to solve it.

00:32:33.000 So, how do you square those two?

00:32:35.000 Well, you know, one thing could be, you know, I'm in favor of the Republicans going on a death march and just, you know, being kamikazes and making whatever steps in those programs and losing the next election.

00:32:47.000 Another choice would be to do things together.

00:32:50.000 And by the way, that means you don't get everything.

00:32:52.000 Ben, if you and I sat down to reform Social Security, I'd come in wanting to do more of it with tax increases than benefit cuts.

00:32:58.000 You'd probably come in wanting more benefit cuts than tax increases.

00:33:03.000 We'd have to find something in the middle there.

00:33:06.000 So people do need to be willing to give up some of what they want.

00:33:10.000 But it really is a hard thing to do all on your own unless you want to commit suicide.

00:33:16.000 So meanwhile, it seems to be that both parties are relying on a bit of an economic moonshot in AI.

00:33:22.000 The idea seems to be that our GDP growth is going to be somewhere between what the Obiden administration was suggesting actually was going to be somewhere between 1% and 2% for the next 10 years or so, which actually is relatively low growth.

00:33:33.000 That was their projection and sort of their optimistic scenario.

00:33:36.000 Right now, the Trump administration came in trying to say we're going to get 3%, 4% GDP growth.

00:33:40.000 As you say, it is coming in lower partially as a result of the ballast that the tariffs are putting on the economy right now.

00:33:46.000 But everybody seems to be putting an awful lot of faith in the productivity jumps that are going to occur because of AI.

00:33:51.000 Billions and billions of dollars are being poured into AI right now.

00:33:54.000 Beating the Chinese, obviously, is a huge factor in this. 1.00

00:33:57.000 But part of it is also the idea that worker productivity is going to go up with AI.

00:34:02.000 It's not going to eliminate large swaths of the jobs market.

00:34:05.000 It seems to me that there are a few problems with this theory.

00:34:08.000 One is that the disconnect between the use of AI on a wide scale and what AI can do is going to take a while to bleed into the market the same way that the internet had to bleed into the market.

00:34:17.000 Back in 1999, 2000, when pets.com was valued at higher than the moon, the kind of problem was that, of course, pets.com was not worth all of that.

00:34:26.000 And there had to be a winnowing in the internet market before the internet really could increase worker productivity in a very, very serious way.

00:34:32.000 It seems to me there's going to be a delay effect here, even if AI does what people say it's going to do.

00:34:36.000 And second, there's going to be some pretty major social transitions that take place around AI.

00:34:40.000 And underestimating that, I think, would be a mistake, both politically and economically.

00:34:46.000 Yeah, I broadly agree with you.

00:34:48.000 I mean, first of all, on this topic, the future, the future of AI, one has to be pretty uncertain.

00:34:53.000 So could we wake up and get an extra 1.5% a year on our growth rate because of it, get our growth rate up to 3%, 4%?

00:35:00.000 I think that's possible.

00:35:03.000 But to me, that feels like the very, very, very good case scenario.

00:35:07.000 And you don't want to plan your entire country around the very, very good case scenario.

00:35:12.000 You want to plan around the central, maybe even want to plan around actually the bad scenario and make sure that what you're doing works out in the bad scenario.

00:35:22.000 And the reason why I think that central scenario and the bad scenario is so low is two of the reasons you just said.

00:35:29.000 It'll take a while to figure this out, a while for it to disperse throughout the economy, that there'll be some social reactions.

00:35:37.000 It also is the case that economically you would predict if AI is very successful, you'd probably end up with higher interest rates as a result because it would increase economic demand, increase productivity that tends to be associated with higher interest rates.

00:35:51.000 And so our fiscal sustainability would be helped by the higher growth, but some of that, not all, but some of it would be potentially offset by the higher interest rates that would come with that higher growth.

00:36:04.000 So back on the debt for a second, because obviously that is sort of the giant elephant in the room that both parties have an interest in ignoring until it stomps on everybody.

00:36:12.000 But when we look at the debt, one of the arguments made is that the American dollar is still the best bet on the block, that in the end, the American government is still the best bet.

00:36:19.000 The American economy is still the best bet.

00:36:21.000 And so the possibility that people will stop buying our bonds, they don't really have an alternative, that we're still, comparatively speaking, the tallest short person, even if we start to really screw our economy with the amount of debt that we've created for it.

00:36:35.000 What do you make of that argument?

00:36:36.000 What is the biggest threat to America's debt in terms of investment?

00:36:40.000 Is that investment going to shift to alternative forms of currency?

00:36:43.000 Is that investment going to shift to other countries?

00:36:45.000 What do you see as the biggest threat?

00:36:47.000 Yeah, so I distinguish here between the known known about debt and then the unknown unknown.

00:36:53.000 The known known is somewhat bad, but not horrible.

00:36:56.000 So for each percentage point our debt goes up as a share of GDP, our interest rates probably go up like three basis points.

00:37:05.000 So over the next decade, that might mean mortgage rates go up a percentage point because of our debt.

00:37:11.000 That's not horrendous.

00:37:13.000 That's not a crisis.

00:37:14.000 That's not like everyone would notice.

00:37:17.000 But I don't think everyone wants their mortgage rate going up by a percentage point.

00:37:20.000 So it's not a good thing, but it's a known known and it's linear.

00:37:25.000 Then there's the people lose faith in the United States.

00:37:29.000 They dramatically move out of the dollar.

00:37:31.000 The currency collapses.

00:37:33.000 You have a crisis, etc.

00:37:35.000 I don't know what the odds of that are.

00:37:37.000 We're in an unprecedented place for our country.

00:37:40.000 We haven't seen things like this before in history.

00:37:43.000 So there's not really any basis for saying.

00:37:46.000 We've seen countries with lower debt levels go into crises because people just lost faith in them.

00:37:52.000 We've seen countries with higher debt levels avoid crises.

00:37:55.000 So all I can tell you on that crisis risk is it's higher than it should be, and it is a possibility.

00:38:02.000 But what I'm certain about is that we are going to have at least modestly higher interest rates in a way that's harmful for investment and harmful for homeowners.

00:38:12.000 Well, that's Jason Furman, professor of economics at Harvard University.

00:38:15.000 Professor Ruley, thank you so much for your time.

00:38:17.000 Appreciate the insight.

00:38:19.000 Oh, happy to join you anytime.

00:38:21.000 Meanwhile, with regard to Ukraine, President Trump has authorized NATO to essentially buy on behalf of Ukraine a bunch of American weapons.

00:38:30.000 And that makes perfect sense considering that Vladimir Putin is not stopping anytime soon.

00:38:35.000 According to the New York Post, Russia launched further brutal drone attacks on Ukraine overnight on Monday, wounding a 14-year-old girl and deliberately targeting a university in a stunning act of rebellion against President Trump's threats of fresh sanctions and weapons deliveries to Ukraine.

00:38:47.000 Five killed, at least 43 injured in attacks across Ukraine, according to the Kyiv Independent.

00:38:53.000 Separate attacks struck.

00:38:55.000 Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhia, according to the Kyiv Independent.

00:39:00.000 Putin is not stopping anytime soon.

00:39:02.000 And President Trump did his credit.

00:39:04.000 He said, Listen, I changed my mind.

00:39:05.000 And the reason that I changed my mind is because Melania kept pointing out to me that every time I would say I had a great conversation with Vladimir Putin, she would say, cool, cool.

00:39:13.000 Also, Kiev's on fire.

00:39:16.000 My conversations with him are always very pleasant.

00:39:19.000 I say, isn't that a very lovely conversation?

00:39:22.000 And then the missiles go off that night.

00:39:24.000 I go home, I tell the first lady, you know, I spoke to Vladimir today.

00:39:28.000 We had a wonderful conversation.

00:39:30.000 She said, oh, really?

00:39:32.000 Another city was just hit.

00:39:34.000 So it's like, look, he's, I don't want to say he's an assassin, but he's a tough guy.

00:39:43.000 Okay, so again, President Trump coming around to the right conclusion here.

00:39:46.000 And thanks to Melania for being a voice of reason in the room, honestly.

00:39:50.000 Meanwhile, President Trump said that Ukraine should not be targeting Moscow.

00:39:54.000 That came after a report that the president had actually asked Forzelensky to target Moscow.

00:40:00.000 Now, again, I don't think it's a bad thing for the president to have that level of strategic ambiguity.

00:40:06.000 I think it's actually quite good.

00:40:07.000 I think that Putin should be afraid of President Trump and what President Trump is going to do.

00:40:12.000 The White House insisted that the comments should not be taken out of context because he said that he's not on anybody's side.

00:40:19.000 He just wants this to come to the end.

00:40:20.000 Apparently, on a July 4th call with Zelensky said, Vladimir, this is to Zelensky, can you hit Moscow?

00:40:25.000 Can you hit St. Petersburg too?

00:40:26.000 Okay, it is good for Vladimir Putin to think that that's how President Trump is thinking.

00:40:30.000 That is a good thing.

00:40:32.000 Again, this goes back to a conversation that I've talked about before that I had with President Trump.

00:40:37.000 He was in a room at a fundraiser over at Trump Durrell, his hotel in Durrell, Florida.

00:40:44.000 And he was talking about the situation with Ukraine and Russia.

00:40:48.000 And he said, you know, when I was president, Vladimir Putin did not attack Ukraine.

00:40:52.000 You know why he didn't attack Ukraine? 0.93

00:40:54.000 Because I said, Vlad, Vlad, if you do that, I'm going to bomb the bleep out of you.

00:41:00.000 And President Trump said, and Vladimir Putin said, you know, Mr. President, you're not going to do that.

00:41:04.000 And I said, well, I might.

00:41:06.000 The point being, if the most powerful person on the planet is telling you with the most powerful military that things might go wildly wrong for you if you do this thing, you're not going to do it.

00:41:16.000 I like President Trump's approach to this.

00:41:18.000 I always have liked President Trump's approach to this.

00:41:20.000 Here he was saying, no, no, no, I didn't tell Vladimir Zelensky to bomb Moscow or anything.

00:41:28.000 No, he shouldn't target Moscow.

00:41:33.000 Okay, so again, this is not a bad approach.

00:41:37.000 I will say, again, the president is at odds with some of the people who thought that they were somehow the founders of MAGA, the creators of MAGA, the people who get to direct MAGA.

00:41:45.000 They do not.

00:41:46.000 That is not how this works.

00:41:47.000 That is never how it has worked.

00:41:49.000 As I've said on the program before, I've had many disagreements with President Trump and the things that he has done as presidents of the United States.

00:41:55.000 I'm not shy when I disagree with President Trump.

00:41:57.000 I criticize his tariffs on this program and his comments about the Fed moments ago, as you may have noticed.

00:42:03.000 However, I have also never claimed that I'm the leader of the movement he built because that's absurd.

00:42:07.000 He, of course, is the creator of MAGA.

00:42:09.000 He is the one who gets to define what MAGA is.

00:42:12.000 One of the people who can't seem to get this through her head is Marjorie Taylor Greene, the once obscure congresswoman from Georgia, who basically is famous because President Trump and others in his circle sort of plucked her out of obscurity and gave her a bunch more credit than she does.

00:42:26.000 And also because the left decided that they were going to attack her.

00:42:28.000 And we have an incredibly reactionary politics in which if the left attacks somebody, the right immediately rushes to make that person famous.

00:42:35.000 A dynamic that I find actually stunningly useless.

00:42:38.000 In any case, Marjorie Taylor Greene is now criticizing President Trump.

00:42:43.000 She said, by now, the neocons and establishment Republicans have hijacked MAGA.

00:42:47.000 President Trump should have some words for her, honestly.

00:42:50.000 As a reminder, in September 2023, I forced a separate vote on the 300 million in the DOD appropries for Ukraine.

00:42:56.000 Here's the vote record results.

00:42:57.000 Republicans, yay, 101 for funding to Ukraine.

00:43:00.000 Nay, 117 against funding to Ukraine.

00:43:02.000 Democrats, the supposed anti-war party, yay, 210 for funding to Ukraine.

00:43:06.000 Nay, zero against funding to Ukraine.

00:43:08.000 Funding war and foreign countries is not what we voted for. 0.72

00:43:10.000 And America still funds NATO.

00:43:12.000 So if NATO is buying American weapons, we are still paying for it.

00:43:14.000 Okay, first of all, we're not the only funders of NATO.

00:43:18.000 This has been one of President Trump's big pushes is to get the NATO countries to spend more of their GDP on national defense.

00:43:24.000 So they are, in fact, going to pay us for those weapons.

00:43:27.000 But beyond that, who the hell does she think that establishment Republicans have hijacked? 1.00

00:43:32.000 Do you mean the president has hijacked the movement that he built and of which you are an obscure member, Congresswoman?

00:43:36.000 Is that what you mean there?

00:43:38.000 I understand that your bizarre speculation about space lasers may make you think that you are the leader of the MAGA movement.

00:43:45.000 I'm just wondering what evidence you have that that is the case, particularly given the fact that Republicans now widely support the president's decisions on this particular matter.

00:43:56.000 Echelon Insights poll came out yesterday.

00:43:59.000 A new opinion poll on whether President Trump should send U.S. weapons system to Ukraine.

00:44:02.000 Support, 65%.

00:44:04.000 This is among Trump voters.

00:44:06.000 Oppose, 22%.

00:44:10.000 You're in the 22%, Congresswoman.

00:44:12.000 So I'm wondering just what you mean has hijacked MAGA.

00:44:15.000 This sort of obnoxious attempt to rewrite what MAGA is in favor of your own political priors is really sort of amazing.

00:44:24.000 It really, really is.

00:44:25.000 The same has held true, of course, in the Middle East, where you have a bunch of people on the sort of pseudo-MAGA right.

00:44:32.000 And I call them pseudo-MAGA, not because they're not supporters of the Trump administration or haven't been in the past, but because if you claim that you are the definer of MAGA and the president is not, you have made a category error.

00:44:42.000 A lot of those people, very critical of the president for striking Iran's nuclear program in what, again, I will aver is the single most courageous and effective American foreign policy action of my lifetime.

00:44:54.000 A single B-2 sordie that threw back the Iranian nuclear program by years at the very least, that cost zero American casualties in which Israel did all the heavy lifting for clearing the aerial pathways. 0.85

00:45:09.000 And somehow that was going to lead to World War III involving China, Iran, somehow Brazil and India, among other countries, according to these foreign policy geniuses, the pseudo-maga crowd. 0.99

00:45:20.000 Well, President Trump was right on that as well.

00:45:22.000 Iran is about to face stiff new sanctions, not just from the United States, by the way, but also from Europe.

00:45:28.000 According to Axios, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and the UK agreed in a phone call on Monday to set the end of August as the de facto deadline for reaching a nuclear deal with Iran.

00:45:39.000 If no deal is reached by that deadline, the three European powers plan to trigger that snapback mechanism that automatically reimposes all UN Security Council sanctions that were lifted under the original Barack Obama terrible deal.

00:45:51.000 The deal that, as President Trump said, was the worst deal in human history.

00:45:56.000 That snapback provision will expire in October.

00:45:58.000 The process of activating snapback takes 30 days.

00:46:01.000 The Europeans want to conclude the process before Russia assumes the UN Security Council presidency in October, which, by the way, again, I really hope if we're going to talk about audacious moves by the Trump administration, completely defunding and destroying the United Nations would be an excellent move.

00:46:14.000 If we're going to talk about audacious moves, I've said this for a long time.

00:46:17.000 We should exit the UN, tell them to find new ground, use the eminent domain to take over that building, destroy it and build a Trump Tower. 0.56

00:46:24.000 I frankly don't care what happens after we salt the earth beneath the UN. 0.99

00:46:27.000 The UN is a garbage organization and it always has been. 0.98

00:46:31.000 But beyond that, obviously the president is taking strong action against the Iranian regime. 0.98

00:46:37.000 They see it as leverage in the talks with Iran to activate that snapback. 1.00

00:46:42.000 And of course, President Trump is very frustrated that Iran isn't coming to the table because they're being idiots. 0.99

00:46:46.000 And they certainly should if they hope not to be hit with further economic sanctions. 0.98

00:46:51.000 By the way, once again, I will point out that for all of those who suggest that this was somehow a sort of wildly unpopular move, what President Trump did in Iran, that is not even remotely true.

00:47:02.000 There is zero evidence that that is the case, particularly among Republicans, particularly among Republicans.

00:47:08.000 So on the polling, 57% of Americans say that the bombing by the United States was justified.

00:47:13.000 57 yes, 35 no.

00:47:18.000 According to Republicans, justified the U.S. bond, this would be Operation Midnight Hammer, right?

00:47:23.000 This is the president's authorization of the B2 bombing.

00:47:26.000 Remember, pseudo-maga said it was going to start World War III and that Republicans were wildly opposed.

00:47:31.000 Republicans justified 93%.

00:47:35.000 93%.

00:47:37.000 Definitely not justified.

00:47:39.000 3%.

00:47:40.000 So just to get this straight, the pseudo-MAGA crowd who think that they know better than the presidents of the United States what MAGA policy should be on Ukraine and Iran.

00:47:49.000 Among MAGA voters, only 22% support them on the Ukraine thing and 3% support them on the Iran thing.

00:47:56.000 And yet somehow they believe that they are the definers of the Trump coalition in some way, which is frankly delusional.

00:48:04.000 I mean, like on every level, delusional.

00:48:06.000 And by the way, the MAGA coalition is still winning.

00:48:09.000 Harry Enton over at CNN is spelling out the fact that Democrats, despite the past track record of midterm elections going poorly for the party in power, actually Democrats have some really big problems in the upcoming 2026 elections.

00:48:22.000 The bottom line is this.

00:48:23.000 Democrats are behind their 2006 and 2018 paces when it comes to the generic congressional ballot.

00:48:30.000 What are we talking about here?

00:48:32.000 All right, the Democrats versus the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, the margins.

00:48:36.000 Look at where we are now.

00:48:37.000 Democrats are ahead, but by just two points.

00:48:39.000 Look at where Democrats were already ahead by in 2017.

00:48:42.000 They were behind by seven points.

00:48:44.000 How about 2005 on the generic congressional ballot?

00:48:46.000 Behind, excuse me, ahead by seven points, ahead by seven points.

00:48:49.000 And now they're only ahead by two points.

00:48:51.000 Their lead is less than half, less than half of where it was in either 2017 or 2005 in July of those years, the year before the midterm election.

00:49:01.000 Yes, Donald Trump may be unpopular, but Democrats have not come anywhere close to sealing the deal at this particular point.

00:49:09.000 Okay, so again, that shows that Trump is actually more successful than his detractors are giving him credit for.

00:49:16.000 Okay, all of this is now culminating in, of course, more controversy over the Jeffrey Epstein case.

00:49:20.000 So President Trump came out today and he said, listen, Pam Botany should release whatever she thinks is credible.

00:49:26.000 Like the DOJ and the FBI, they've come to a conclusion.

00:49:28.000 She should be transparent and remove whatever she, and she should remove whatever is not credible and then release whatever is credible. 0.95

00:49:34.000 Fine.

00:49:34.000 She's given us just a very quick briefing.

00:49:38.000 And in terms of the credibility of the different things that they've seen, and I would say that, you know, these files were made up by Comey.

00:49:46.000 They were made up by Obama.

00:49:48.000 They were made up by the Biden information.

00:49:51.000 And we went through years of that with the Russia, Russia-Russia hoax, with all of the different things that we had to go through.

00:49:59.000 We've gone through years of it.

00:50:01.000 But she's handled it very well.

00:50:02.000 And it's going to be up to her.

00:50:04.000 Whatever she thinks is credible, she should release.

00:50:07.000 Yeah, that last line is the one that matters.

00:50:09.000 As far as the Comey and the Obama, I assume what he means here is that Jeffrey Epstein was prosecuted in 2019, and he went to jail in 2019, and then he ended up committing suicide in 2019 by the available medical reports and the conclusions of the FBI and the DOJ.

00:50:22.000 That was under Trump number one.

00:50:23.000 I assume he means here that Comey and Obama, that many of the files about Jeffrey Epstein were originally compiled under them.

00:50:30.000 That's the only way I can make sense of that particular thing that he is saying.

00:50:33.000 He doubled down on this today on Truth Social as well.

00:50:36.000 He says the radical left Democrats have hit paydered again, just like with the fake and fully discredited Steele dossier, the lying 51 intelligence agents, the laptop from hell, which the Dems swore had come from Russia.

00:50:46.000 No, it came from Hunter Biden's bathroom.

00:50:48.000 And even the Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia scam itself, a totally fake and made-up story used in order to hide crooked Hillary Clinton's big laws in the 2016 presidential election.

00:50:56.000 These scams and hoaxes are all the Democrats are good at.

00:50:59.000 It's all they have.

00:50:59.000 They are no good at governing, no good at policy, and no good at picking winning candidates.

00:51:03.000 Also, unlike Republicans, they stick together like glue.

00:51:07.000 Their new scam is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein hoax.

00:51:10.000 And my past supporters have bought into this hook, line, and sinker.

00:51:14.000 That's what he says. 0.92

00:51:15.000 They haven't learned their lesson and probably never will, even after being conned by the lunatic left for eight long years.

00:51:19.000 And here, I assume, he is talking about the Democratic theory that Jeffrey Epstein had files on President Trump, and that is what is leading President Trump to do a cover-up or something like that.

00:51:29.000 He says, I have had more success in six months than perhaps any president in our country's history.

00:51:33.000 And all these people want to talk about with strong prodding by the fake news and the success starved is the Jeffrey Epstein hoax.

00:51:38.000 Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats' work.

00:51:41.000 Don't even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success because I don't want their support anymore.

00:51:46.000 Thank you for your attention to this matter.

00:51:47.000 Make America great again.

00:51:49.000 And there he's basically saying, if you feel like you want to hang out in the fever swamps on this sort of stuff, you can.

00:51:54.000 But just to recognize that you are not part of the movement that is actually achieving victories at this point.

00:52:00.000 And you can understand President Trump's frustration.

00:52:02.000 He's had a wildly successful month on pretty much every available score.

00:52:06.000 And then the DOJ and the FBI come out with this joint statement, which lacked transparency.

00:52:11.000 Presumably, the reason he is saying that Pamboni should release more files or whatever is unredacted or whatever, whatever is credible, is because he wants to quiet people who are suggesting that there is some sort of massive ongoing cover-up of all of this.

00:52:23.000 But President Trump has been saying for actually a shockingly long time that there's a lot of phony stuff in the Epstein files, by which he means there's a bunch of non-credible accusation that was found by the intelligence agencies to be non-credible.

00:52:38.000 Would you declassify the Epstein files?

00:52:40.000 Yeah, yeah, I would.

00:52:42.000 I guess I would.

00:52:43.000 I think that less so because, you know, you don't know, you don't want to affect people's lives if it's phony stuff in there because there's a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.

00:52:54.000 Again, that was President Trump saying that a while ago.

00:52:56.000 I mean, that's nothing new here.

00:52:58.000 Speaker Johnson agrees with President Trump.

00:53:01.000 Of course, he says Pam Bondi should come out and she should explain the position she's taking.

00:53:06.000 It's a very delicate subject, but we should put everything out there and let the people decide it.

00:53:11.000 I mean, the White House and the White House team are privy to facts that I don't know.

00:53:15.000 I mean, this isn't my lane.

00:53:16.000 I haven't been involved in that.

00:53:18.000 But I agree with the sentiment that we need to put it out there.

00:53:21.000 And, you know, Pam Bondi, I don't know when she originally made the statement.

00:53:26.000 I think she was talking about documents, as I understood it.

00:53:28.000 They were on her desk.

00:53:29.000 I don't know that she was specific about a list or whatever, but she needs to come forward and explain that to everybody.

00:53:37.000 I would assume that Pam Bondi will do that. 0.99

00:53:39.000 And as I've been saying since the beginning, I think that she should do that.

00:53:42.000 Alan Dershowitz, who is a lawyer for Jeffrey Epstein, he has a piece of the Wall Street Journal trying to explain what he says is going on.

00:53:48.000 And he was closer to that case than I think pretty much anybody.

00:53:51.000 And again, here's the thing.

00:53:53.000 All the people who put their names on that DOJ FBI memo are people who went in believing and promulgating the idea that there was some sort of deep Jeffrey Epstein scam involving third parties.

00:54:05.000 Again, I think we ought to tease out the various theories here.

00:54:07.000 And if you want to listen to last week's show about this, I did a full-scale episode teasing out the various theories, what happened with Jeffrey Epstein, who is involved, who is not, what evidence there is for all of that.

00:54:15.000 We did like a full deep dive on this last week on the program.

00:54:18.000 I urge you to go listen to that episode again if you're looking for clarity about what the various accusations really are.

00:54:23.000 But Alan Dershowitz says, I was Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer.

00:54:25.000 He writes this in the Wall Street Journal.

00:54:26.000 I know the facts, some of which I can't disclose because it is privileged or subject to court-imposed sealing orders.

00:54:32.000 But what I can disclose makes several important things clear.

00:54:34.000 Epstein never created a client list.

00:54:36.000 The FBI interviewed alleged victims who named several clients.

00:54:39.000 These names have been redacted.

00:54:41.000 They should be disclosed, but the courts have ordered them sealed.

00:54:43.000 I know who they are.

00:54:44.000 They don't include any current office holders.

00:54:46.000 We don't know whether the accusations are true.

00:54:49.000 Now, again, that line is pretty important.

00:54:50.000 We don't know whether the accusations are true because the FBI and DOJ have a general policy that they don't air non-credible accusations or accusations they don't consider credible that have been unchecked by the media, for example, or unchecked by their intelligence agents.

00:55:05.000 The courts have also sealed negative information about some of the accusers to protect them.

00:55:09.000 Neither the Justice Department nor private defense lawyers are free to disregard court sealing orders.

00:55:13.000 The media can and should petition the courts for the release of all names and information so the public can draw its own conclusions.

00:55:18.000 There's also been speculation about incriminating videos taken by hidden cameras in Epstein's guest bedrooms, writes Dershowitz.

00:55:24.000 There are videotapes, but they are of public areas of his Palm Beach, Florida home.

00:55:27.000 Epstein reported the theft of money and a licensed firearm from a drawer in his living room, so the police installed the video camera.

00:55:33.000 I'm not aware of video cameras in guest bedrooms.

00:55:35.000 So again, the accusation has been that there are all sorts of tapes of Epstein clients, people he was associated with, and to whom he was trafficking, allegedly, young girls, and they were in bedrooms together, and he had tapes with that.

00:55:48.000 That's what he was blackmailing them with.

00:55:49.000 Epstein's lawyer, Dershowitz, is saying there's none of that.

00:55:51.000 That's not what the tapes are.

00:55:52.000 And in fact, by the way, that's what the FBI is saying also.

00:55:55.000 The FBI is saying that the tapes that they have come in two forms.

00:55:58.000 One is tape of the interior of the household that does not include the bedrooms.

00:56:01.000 And two is just child that Jeffrey Epstein had in his house and on his computer.

00:56:07.000 Open records, says Dershowitz, show an acquaintance between Epstein and Mr. Trump many years ago.

00:56:11.000 That relationship ended when Mr. Trump reportedly banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago long before becoming president.

00:56:16.000 I've seen nothing that would suggest anything improper or even questionable by Mr. Trump.

00:56:20.000 And again, this is one of Trump's big annoyances that people keep suggesting he's covering this up to protect himself.

00:56:24.000 And Dershowitz is saying from what?

00:56:26.000 It is clear from the evidence that Epstein committed suicide, says Dershowitz.

00:56:29.000 What isn't clear is whether he was assisted by jail personnel.

00:56:32.000 That seems likely to me based on the evidence of allegedly broken cameras, transfer of his cellmate, and the absence of guards during relevant time periods.

00:56:38.000 Okay, now that is like a theory that is creditable, right?

00:56:43.000 You could make the theory that Epstein killed himself, but that basically all the limitations that would have stopped him from killing himself were made available to him, right?

00:56:52.000 All those limitations were blown out of the water.

00:56:53.000 He was even extra blankets that day.

00:56:55.000 His roommate was removed.

00:56:57.000 And so maybe Epstein bribed guards in order to allow him to commit suicide.

00:57:00.000 By the way, you can acknowledge why he committed suicide.

00:57:03.000 He was about to spend the rest of his life in prison as in alleged child, which is not a good life, as it turns out.

00:57:10.000 Dershowitz says, I have absolutely no doubt that Epstein never worked for any intelligence agency.

00:57:15.000 If he had, he surely would have told me and his other lawyers who would have used that information to get him a better deal.

00:57:19.000 So by the way, this now makes the third source to say he was not working for an intelligence agency.

00:57:24.000 The FBI and DOJ say he was not working for an intelligence agency.

00:57:27.000 Israel's Mossad, right? 0.76

00:57:29.000 The former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, has said he was not working for an intelligence agency.

00:57:33.000 And Dershowitz is saying he is not working for an intelligence agency.

00:57:36.000 That's three.

00:57:38.000 On the other side, people saying he was working for an intelligence agency include the highly non-credible source, Ari Bemenachem, who claims that he was working for Mossad during a period where he almost certainly was not working for Mossad and who has put forward a bunch of other specious theories before.

00:57:54.000 And a secondhand comment supposedly made to Vicki Ward of The Daily Beast from Alex Acosta, the original prosecutor in the Epstein state-based case, who ended up denying that he ever made that comment.

00:58:06.000 So here on this hand, you have a bunch of very credible sources saying a thing.

00:58:11.000 And then on this hand, you have vague suspicion and a bunch of totally non-credible sources.

00:58:16.000 And by a bunch of, I really mean kind of one.

00:58:18.000 So that is the going theory.

00:58:21.000 And you can wait between those and make your own decision about which you think is more plausible.

00:58:26.000 Says Dershowitz, he wasn't satisfied with the so-called sweetheart deal he got, which required Him to spend one and a half years in a local jail and register as a sex offender.

00:58:33.000 My sources in Israel have confirmed to me he had no connection to Israeli intelligence.

00:58:36.000 That false story, recently peddled by Tucker Carlson, probably emanated from credible allegations that Robert Maxwell, father of Epstein's former girlfriend, Delaine Maxwell, worked with the Mossad.

00:58:45.000 Conspiracy stories attract readers, viewers, and listeners.

00:58:48.000 They are also fodder for political attacks.

00:58:50.000 The Epstein case has generated more than its share of such theories.

00:58:52.000 There's nothing more annoying to gossip mongers than when stubborn facts, or the absence of facts, get in the way of a juicy theory.

00:58:58.000 Sorry to disappoint you, but there is really nothing much to see here beyond what has already been disclosed.

00:59:04.000 And here is sort of the problem with the situation as it currently stands, is that nothing anyone says at this point is going to be able to disabuse people of the theory they have constructed in their own head.

00:59:13.000 Evidence is of no consequence at this point in time.

00:59:16.000 It really isn't.

00:59:16.000 That doesn't mean the Trump administration should not be fully transparent to the full extent of the law.

00:59:21.000 They, of course, should.

00:59:23.000 I think is what Dan Bongino was saying, and he was correctly pissed off about it, especially given the retailing of the idea that there was much more evidence out there than by Pam Bondi than she actually was able to substantiate.

00:59:35.000 However, once the transparency happens, once there is more released, once Pam Bondi goes out there and answers all the questions, once Dan Bongino is allowed to speak and all the rest, at that point, do you think any of the people who currently find themselves dissatisfied are going to suddenly be satisfied?

00:59:49.000 If the answer is no, then we should examine why, why new evidence or credible people saying credible things is not as important as the speculative.

00:59:57.000 And you will notice the very large crossover in this category between many of the people who are in the sort of the most passionate pseudo-maga category and the people who are claiming a cover-up here.

01:00:10.000 There is a very large crossover, and we ought to ask ourselves why that is.

01:00:13.000 Meanwhile, Democrats, of course, are being as absolutely cynical as possible about this.

01:00:19.000 They who had no interest in the Epstein case until literally this week are suddenly claiming that it's a giant cover-up by the Trump administration.

01:00:26.000 Representative Hank Johnson, last seen claiming that the island of Guam was going to tip over because it had too many people, actually created a song about the Epstein scandal.

01:00:35.000 And it's not a good song, I will say that.

01:00:39.000 Epstein died by suicide.

01:00:42.000 Believe that man, it's the found.

01:00:47.000 But where are they?

01:00:50.000 We're going along with what's been told.

01:00:53.000 We've had plenty of time, you're in control.

01:00:56.000 But they say you will withhold the Epstein with fine dreams sickle on a summer night in a full chair.

01:01:10.000 Yeah, what the Trump's hollering at the moon.

01:01:16.000 Release the Epstein file soon.

01:01:23.000 I would say stick to your day job, but I really would prefer he not stick to his day job because he's a congressperson.

01:01:28.000 So I'd really much prefer actually that he be a full-time musician, even though he is quite terrible at the music, apparently.

01:01:37.000 Senator Ed Markey also jumping on the bandwagon and claiming that now he wants all the ups.

01:01:41.000 Again, the Biden DOJ and FBI had all the files.

01:01:44.000 Not a single Democrat cared about it.

01:01:46.000 Now all of a sudden, Ed Markey is like, we must release all.

01:01:49.000 Okay, go for it, dude.

01:01:51.000 I think we should be releasing the files right now.

01:01:54.000 Donald Trump is reaping what he sowed, and we should have a debate in Congress on this issue and have these files released now.

01:02:04.000 We don't need to wait any longer.

01:02:06.000 We need to get the information right now.

01:02:09.000 His MAGA base is demanding a release of all of this information, and Democrats agree with Donald Trump's MAGA base.

01:02:21.000 So I'm just going to point out that if Ed Markey is agreeing with the MAGA base, then whenever people like Ed Markey or AOC or Elizabeth Warren find themselves in agreement with you, you might want to take a breath.

01:02:32.000 Just take a backpedal for just a second.

01:02:34.000 All righty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.

01:02:37.000 We'll get into action in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, where things are getting quite complicated.

01:02:41.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

01:02:43.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

01:02:44.000 Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - July 16, 2025

Chip and Joanna Gaines SELL OUT?

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