The Ben Shapiro Show - Gavin Newsom Wants to Trans The Kids

00:00:00.000 All righty, folks.

00:00:00.000 Gavin Newsom is back and he says that he wants to see more trans kids.

00:00:05.000 Is that good for his 2028 hopes?

00:00:06.000 Plus, President Trump suffering some speed bumps on the economy and the Indiana GOP rejecting his plan for congressional redistricting first in less than two weeks on Christmas Day.

00:00:16.000 Episodes one and two of the Penn Dragon cycle rise of the Merlin begins streaming for Daily Wire plus all access members.

00:00:23.000 Here's the truth.

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00:00:33.000 Well, we built this company to do the stuff that no one else would.

00:00:37.000 And we're doing the same with entertainment.

00:00:38.000 It's the most audacious entertainment play in the history of independent conservative media.

00:00:43.000 By far, no close competitors.

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00:00:59.000 So right now, Democrats are looking at 2028 and they see Republican vulnerability.

00:01:04.000 What they see is a 2024 election that while it was fairly solid as a win for Republicans in the Electoral College, was a pretty narrow win in the popular vote.

00:01:13.000 And they think that perhaps they can reverse the tides, that perhaps they can take the White House in 2028 with somebody like Gavin Newsom.

00:01:20.000 Well, what Democrats have been doing in order to shift away from their 2024 failing strategy is they've been taking the least popular parts of their agenda and they have been moving those to the back burner.

00:01:30.000 So DEI, you're hearing all about equity in the run-up to the 2024 election.

00:01:35.000 It was the centerpiece of the Joe Biden campaign in 2020.

00:01:39.000 It was again the centerpiece of the Kamala Harris campaign, the late breaking Kamala Harris campaign in 2024.

00:01:45.000 You do not hear Democrats talking about equity each and every day the way that they were before.

00:01:49.000 They instead are talking about, for example, affordability.

00:01:52.000 The same thing is true with regard to radical trans issues.

00:01:56.000 The politics on transgenderism are awful for Democrats.

00:02:00.000 The vast majority of Americans believe that boys are boys and girls are girls and boys cannot become girls and attempts to brainwash children into the idea that they are in fact members of the opposite sex or even could be members of the opposite sex is perverse.

00:02:14.000 That telling a young kid that you might have a girl brain and a boy body is not only Gnostic and scientifically nonsensical, it is very, very wrong to do that to children.

00:02:26.000 And that was the general perception among Americans and it drove huge numbers for President Trump.

00:02:31.000 The single most effective ad of the 2024 campaign was on this issue from the Trump campaign.

00:02:37.000 It suggested that Kamala was for they, them. 0.94

00:02:39.000 President Trump is for you.

00:02:41.000 And again, if you talked to people in minority communities that swiveled from Democrat to Republican, this was a major issue because the trans issue, well, of course, affecting a fairly small percentage of the population, went to root truths of our society.

00:02:56.000 Can you trust people who just tell you such a basic lie that boys can be girls?

00:03:01.000 And the answer is no.

00:03:02.000 And so Democrats have decided that they were going to put that on the back burner.

00:03:05.000 One of those Democrats was Gavin Newsom.

00:03:07.000 So a few months ago, Gavin Newsom was doing a podcast with the late Charlie Kirk in which Charlie was pressing Gavin Newsom on trans politics.

00:03:15.000 And Newsom admitted that boys should not be playing in girl sports.

00:03:18.000 And he admitted that there was unfairness to all of that.

00:03:21.000 Well, now Gavin Newsom, believing that he is the frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic nomination, is being asked questions by members of the Democratic base.

00:03:30.000 And so he did a podcast with Ezra Klein of the New York Times, in which he was asked about his take on trans politics.

00:03:35.000 And now that Newsom believes that he has to win primaries in the Democratic Party, as he prepares for that 2028 run, he will be forced to answer questions about things like, where is he on transgenderism, particularly with regard to minors?

00:03:49.000 So he ended up swiveling back into what is in fact a losing strategy for Democrats.

00:03:55.000 Here was the California governor proclaiming that he wants to see more trans kids.

00:04:01.000 Contradictions, bring it on.

00:04:04.000 Contradictions, but that I think I can explain.

00:04:06.000 Perhaps evolutions that we didn't get into trans sports.

00:04:09.000 That's an issue no one wants to hear about because 80% of people listening disagree with my position on this.

00:04:14.000 But it comes from my heart, not just my head.

00:04:18.000 It wasn't a political evolution.

00:04:20.000 The position being that I don't think it's I want to see trans kids. 1.00

00:04:24.000 I have a trans godson.

00:04:26.000 There's no governor to sign more pro-trans legislation than I have, and no one has been a stronger advocate for the LGBT two minutes.

00:04:32.000 But you have to accommodate the reality of those whose rights are being taken away as we advance the rights of the trans community in terms of the fairness of athletic competition.

00:04:43.000 And I just think that's not a bigoted position.

00:04:48.000 And it's an example of some of the things I've been saying about being judgmental, dismissing people, throwing that person out of the party.

00:04:56.000 I mean, you want to talk cancel culture.

00:04:58.000 I've lived it on that issue alone, despite a record of 30 years.

00:05:02.000 And people are willing to say, I'm done.

00:05:04.000 Friendships I lost on that position.

00:05:07.000 And that position, by the way, came to me two years prior, where I had to try to accommodate for a trans athlete and another athlete that were in the state finals and track and figure the field.

00:05:16.000 And they both dropped out because we couldn't figure out a way to make it fair.

00:05:20.000 And it was so unfair to both their families.

00:05:22.000 Broke my heart.

00:05:23.000 Okay, so that is Gavin Newsom trying to have every side of every issue.

00:05:26.000 But the key there is that he says he wants to see trans kids.

00:05:30.000 Okay, the normie position is that there is no such thing as a trans kid.

00:05:34.000 There are kids who may have gender dysphoria.

00:05:36.000 That is a different thing.

00:05:37.000 There is no such thing as a kid who is a boy in a girl's body or upon whom we should be performing hormonal therapies and surgeries that are utterly unscientific and permanently damaging to the human body.

00:05:49.000 So when Gavin Newsom says, I want to see trans kids, there's no governor that's done more pro-trans legislation than I have when he says that sort of stuff.

00:05:57.000 That creates a real awkwardness for the Democratic Party.

00:06:00.000 Well, this broke into the open because this led off a debate with Elon Musk.

00:06:06.000 All righty, coming up, Elon Musk fires back at Gavin Newsome and it turns into a real firefight first.

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00:08:39.000 Okay, Elon Musk commented on Gavin Newsom's post.

00:08:43.000 And then Gavin Newsom's press office replied, Correct.

00:08:46.000 We're sorry, your daughter hates you, Elon. 0.59

00:08:49.000 Which, by the way, is insane. 0.74

00:08:52.000 I mean, it's insane.

00:08:54.000 To get personal on these sorts of issues is really, really bad.

00:08:58.000 Like truly bad.

00:09:00.000 When I discuss these issues, I try not to get personal on these issues.

00:09:04.000 The reason I try not to get personal on these issues is because once you're into the emotional valence of somebody's family, you have a problem.

00:09:11.000 And I hate politics that eventually is just reduced to my feelings about members of my own family.

00:09:19.000 I remember a few years ago, this is a story I really haven't frequently told.

00:09:23.000 A few years ago, I spoke at the University of British Columbia up in Canada, and it was about this issue.

00:09:27.000 It was about the trans issue.

00:09:29.000 And a person got up who identified as trans.

00:09:32.000 It was a man who believed that he was a woman.

00:09:35.000 And he got up and he started asking a question and he started personalizing the question.

00:09:40.000 He started saying, well, you know, my family treats me as though I'm a girl.

00:09:43.000 And I said, you know, I would really appreciate if we could keep this on the level of the philosophical and the issue-based because your interpersonal relations, once we get into critiquing interpersonal relations, this is going to get very personal very quickly.

00:09:55.000 And this person kept insisting, no, you know, I know that I'm a woman because my family treats me as a woman.

00:10:00.000 And I kept saying, please, I don't want to talk about how your family treats you because that's about your family.

00:10:06.000 It's not about the broader issue, which is the question of public policy and how we ought to deal with these issues as a general society.

00:10:12.000 And the person wouldn't stop.

00:10:14.000 And so finally, I said, the reason that your family is saying to you that you are a woman and confirming you in your delusion is because they are afraid that you will do something bad to yourself, not because they actually believe that you are a woman.

00:10:26.000 They do not believe that you are a girl.

00:10:28.000 They know that you are not.

00:10:30.000 They are trying to humor you because they're afraid of what will happen if they do not.

00:10:33.000 And this person got extremely emotional and rushed out of the room.

00:10:36.000 Now, obviously, that was sort of a perfect YouTube clip.

00:10:40.000 The reason you've never seen that on YouTube is because I went to the organizers of the event.

00:10:43.000 This is in front of 2,000 people.

00:10:44.000 I went to the organizers of the event and I asked them to remove that from the tape because I knew that this person was going to be damaged by that tape that was going to hurt this person.

00:10:53.000 Not only that, I then found friends of the person and asked this person to come to breakfast the next morning to make sure this person was okay.

00:11:00.000 Okay, because when you merge the personal and the political in this way, it gets really ugly really quickly.

00:11:06.000 So Gavin Newsom's press office going after Elon Musk's child is truly ugly stuff, really, really ugly stuff.

00:11:14.000 So Elon Musk then tweeted back: I assume you're referring to my son Xavier, who has a tragic mental illness caused by the evil woke mind virus you push on vulnerable children.

00:11:22.000 I love Xavier very much and hope he recovers.

00:11:24.000 My daughters are Azure, Exa, she goes by Y, and Arcadia.

00:11:27.000 And they do indeed love me very much.

00:11:30.000 Now, the fact that Newsom's office went that low is really quite disgusting.

00:11:37.000 That's really quite terrible from Gavin Newsome.

00:11:42.000 And it just goes to show the Democrats are going to run headlong into their own radicalism on this issue.

00:11:47.000 Now, again, they might do what Abigail Spanberger did in Virginia. 0.86

00:11:50.000 They might try to avoid the issue altogether.

00:11:51.000 Gavin Newsom seems like he's trying to avoid the issue altogether.

00:11:54.000 But if he is dragged back into discussing this issue, and if Democrats keep making this a moral litmus test as to whether boys can be girls, especially minors, then they're going to be in for a world of hurt.

00:12:06.000 Instead, they would, of course, like to talk about the economy.

00:12:10.000 They'd like to talk about their new issue of affordability because they sense vulnerability there.

00:12:15.000 And this brings us to President Trump's ratings on the economy.

00:12:18.000 So, right now, President Trump's ratings on the economy are particularly weak.

00:12:22.000 He's down to something like 31% approval rating when it comes to his economic ratings, which, of course, makes Democrats incredibly happy.

00:12:28.000 And as we've been discussing all week long on this issue, it turns out that there is, in fact, a bifurcation between the performance of the stock market or the performance of the employment market, at least the data that we have, and Americans' feelings about that, much of which is indeed embedded because of inflation over the course of the last five years.

00:12:45.000 When people say that they want inflation to go down, they don't mean that they want inflation at a 2% rate.

00:12:50.000 They mean they want prices to actively go down.

00:12:52.000 And that sort of gap between what they want and what can actually be achieved is a very, very real gap.

00:12:57.000 Nonetheless, it is having consequences for President Trump.

00:13:01.000 The pollster, Kristen Soltis-Anderson, friend of the show, she has a piece in the New York Times talking about President Trump's poor approval numbers.

00:13:09.000 She says this: What's crucial to understand about Mr. Trump's poor approval numbers is that unlike during his last term in the White House, people now disapprove of him because of the economy, not in spite of it.

00:13:18.000 President Trump got a small bump recently as he paid more attention to the economy, at least in one poll.

00:13:22.000 His approval figure rose from 38% to 41% in a Reuters-Ipsos survey out this week.

00:13:28.000 But his overall rating remains low when it comes to the cost of living at 31%.

00:13:32.000 He's now traveling the country on an affordability messaging tour and can't help but revert to his insistence on his success against the evidence.

00:13:40.000 So, how ominous is this?

00:13:42.000 Well, says Kristen Soltis-Anderson, for one thing, we should view all of this in the context of the current political climate.

00:13:48.000 Job approval has typically been a strong signal of the country's political mood, with poor approval numbers often resulting in bad election outcomes.

00:13:54.000 But lower job approval numbers are arguably simply the norm these days.

00:13:58.000 Presidents don't get much of a honeymoon. 0.99

00:13:59.000 It's no longer commonplace for a president to begin with job approval around 70% and then end his term 30 or 40 points lower, as Jimmy Carter did today.

00:14:09.000 Job approval percentages instead tend to remain in a narrow band, with partisans largely dug in and unwilling to move.

00:14:15.000 Voters seem less eager to give a thumbs up to a president for whom they did not vote almost regardless of the circumstances.

00:14:21.000 So, a job approval of 42% might not seem like a five-alarm fire to President Trump, but affordability is sliding away from President Trump.

00:14:30.000 Only 15% of respondents said in a Fox News poll last month that they think that President Trump's economic policies have helped them personally.

00:14:39.000 So, it'll be interesting to see what sort of consequences this has.

00:14:43.000 President Trump yesterday acknowledged that his polling numbers were a bit of a problem.

00:14:48.000 And he said, quote, I inherited a mess from the Biden administration, the worst inflation in history, the highest prices our country has ever seen.

00:14:54.000 In other words, affordability just 13 months ago was a disaster for the American people, but now it's totally different.

00:14:59.000 Prices are coming down fast.

00:15:01.000 Energy, oil, and gasoline are hitting five-year lows.

00:15:03.000 The stock market today just hit an all-time high.

00:15:05.000 Tariffs are bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars, and we are respected as a nation again.

00:15:08.000 When will I get credit for having created, with no inflation, perhaps the greatest economy in the history of our country?

00:15:13.000 When will people understand what is happening?

00:15:15.000 When will polls reflect the greatness of America at this point in time and how bad it was just one year ago?

00:15:20.000 Again, I think that there is truth to that.

00:15:22.000 However, when the president goes out on the road and he talks about how you really don't need to buy toys for your kids because we need steel, Americans inherently hear a trade-off that they either don't want to make or feel they shouldn't have to make.

00:15:36.000 Caroline Lovett at the White House was asked about President Trump's comments on that matter yesterday.

00:15:42.000 Isn't it good look for him to be telling parents, oh, you kill, you should only buy, you know, two or three dollars for your kids when he's one of the wealthiest people in the country or even.

00:15:53.000 Do you think the people in that room in Pennsylvania who the president was speaking to don't know the president's a billionaire?

00:15:58.000 I think that's a very well-established fact.

00:16:01.000 And actually, I think it's one of the many reasons they re-elected him back to this office because he's a businessman who understands the economy and knows how to fix it.

00:16:09.000 And he's doing it right now, just like he did in his first term.

00:16:12.000 So, by the way, agree with many of the things that President Trump is doing on the economy.

00:16:16.000 But when you tell the American people that the tariff regime, which does, in fact, in the short term, increase prices while lowering economic activity, when you tell them that it's bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars and then tell them also you're not going to be able to afford to buy your kid a second dollar for Christmas, that is not going to be a popular economic pitch.

00:16:34.000 I don't care who says it, Republican or Democrat.

00:16:37.000 And if President Trump is relying on another lowering of the interest rates in order to inject more liquidity into what is already a hot economy, he is right.

00:16:44.000 It's a hot economy.

00:16:45.000 We're running at 3% inflation or so.

00:16:48.000 We have a 4.4% unemployment rate.

00:16:50.000 And the stock market, Dow Jones, is going to break 50,000 under his administration.

00:16:56.000 That is a hot economy.

00:16:57.000 We don't actually need more liquidity.

00:16:58.000 We need fewer regulations and fewer barriers to entry.

00:17:02.000 The focus on the central bank seems to me at mistake.

00:17:06.000 Here's Caroline Lovitt on the interest rates.

00:17:09.000 I think the president has been quite clear about what he believes the Fed should be doing, which is lowering interest rates.

00:17:15.000 I know there was a quarter point reduction this past week, and the president was pleased to see that, but he thinks more should be done.

00:17:22.000 So, again, I disagree.

00:17:24.000 I think that the interest rates are probably where they need to be, and we need to let the economy settle just a little bit.

00:17:29.000 Some predictability would be good at this point.

00:17:32.000 However, the president's not great approval ratings on the economy.

00:17:35.000 Democrats are seeing an opening here, and they are pile driving him with regard to, again, the term that they use, affordability.

00:17:42.000 The nice thing about it is it's totally fungible, as we've discussed.

00:17:44.000 If you said inflation, then you'd have a statistical metric by which to measure success.

00:17:48.000 When you say affordability, that's a feeling.

00:17:50.000 And sometimes I feel things are affordable.

00:17:52.000 Sometimes I feel they aren't.

00:17:53.000 Very rarely do I feel things are affordable.

00:17:55.000 Very few people tend to feel that things are generally affordable.

00:17:58.000 That is particularly true when Democrats stack the deck, as they have with regard to Obamacare and health insurance subsidies.

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00:20:03.000 So Democrats have come up with a winning strategy with regard to Obamacare.

00:20:07.000 Create a program that is bound to fail.

00:20:09.000 And then when it fails, claim that Republicans are standing in the way of fixing it if they don't pour hundreds of billions of dollars into it.

00:20:17.000 That is, in fact, the plan.

00:20:19.000 By the way, the end point of that is what it always was, which is universal health care.

00:20:22.000 And if it continues to fail and continues to fail and continues to fail, then you take the vast majority of Americans who are not on public health insurance, who in fact have private insurance plans, and then you say the only way to fix the system is for the government to take it over wholesale.

00:20:36.000 At least Senator Patty Murray of Washington, Democrat, she at least is honest enough to admit this. 0.57

00:20:40.000 Here she was on the floor of the Senate yesterday saying that actually, no matter what we do with Obamacare, we need universal health care.

00:20:48.000 We still need universal health care in America.

00:20:51.000 We have needed it for a very long time.

00:20:54.000 It is what I've always been fighting for.

00:20:56.000 And whatever happens in the next few days, I'm going to keep pushing for reforms that make high-quality health care that's actually affordable a reality for every American.

00:21:09.000 Okay, so again, this is what Democrats actually want. 0.66

00:21:11.000 But in order to get there, they need a program that eventually becomes non-feasible and requires gigantic infusions.

00:21:20.000 They created Obamacare, and then they created gigantic subsidies, and then they had those subsidies set to expire.

00:21:26.000 And then when they expire, they blame the Republicans for it.

00:21:28.000 That is the plan.

00:21:29.000 It is a politically useful plan for them, for sure.

00:21:32.000 Right now, there is a stalemate in the Senate where Democrats refused to go along with the Republican plan, Republicans refused to go along with the Democratic plan.

00:21:40.000 According to the Wall Street Journal yesterday, a Democratic effort to extend expiring health care subsidies drew some Republican votes, but failed on Thursday to advance in the Senate.

00:21:48.000 Meanwhile, a GOP approach also failed, leaving no clear path in Congress for aiding millions of Americans facing soaring Affordable Care Act insurance costs next year.

00:21:55.000 The Democratic proposal would have extended the enhanced COVID-era's ACA subsidies for three years.

00:22:00.000 That bill was backed by 51 senators, including several Republicans, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Josh Hawley of Missouri, with 48 opposed.

00:22:10.000 So a majority do support the extension of the health care subsidies, but that's short of the 60 votes needed to advance under the Senate's filibuster rules.

00:22:18.000 Republicans then put forward an alternative health care bill that would not extend the subsidies, but would instead offer federal funds to some households to put toward out-of-pocket insurance costs.

00:22:28.000 The Republican proposal failed with 51 in favor and 48 opposed.

00:22:33.000 Senator Ram Paul of Kentucky sided with Democrats in voting against the measure because, again, Senator Paul doesn't like any government spending.

00:22:41.000 The lack of progress means that open enrollment closes December 15th for plans starting on January 1st.

00:22:47.000 And so households are now being forced to sign up for coverage with sharply higher costs with no guarantee that Congress will act to restore subsidies and bring the price tag down.

00:22:55.000 This, of course, is what Democrats want.

00:22:58.000 Senator Majority Leader John Thune criticized the Democratic bill as a continuation of the status quo and an attempt to disguise the real impact of Obamacare's spiraling health care costs.

00:23:08.000 Thune said that after the vote, some Republicans want to talk with the Democrats, but we'll see if they have an audience.

00:23:14.000 Josh Halley said that he voted to advance both of them because he said, listen, anything that will bring down the costs is something that we should do, just electorally speaking.

00:23:21.000 He said, I want to see big changes to both of them, but my view is we've got to do something.

00:23:26.000 According to the White House, the president is working with his own health policy team as well as Republicans on Capitol Hill to find a solution.

00:23:34.000 Here was the White House press secretary explaining it yesterday.

00:23:38.000 He has made unprecedented progress towards lowering health care costs in this country and drug prices.

00:23:44.000 He's secured numerous most favored nation drug price deals with many more to come.

00:23:48.000 As you know, the One Bay Beautiful bill, the Working Family Tax Cut, significantly expanded access to health savings accounts for those on Obamacare.

00:23:57.000 Again, a Democrat written program and approved program, which has led to higher health care costs in this country.

00:24:04.000 So it goes back to the issue of affordability.

00:24:07.000 Democrats are now pretending they want a solution to this issue, but they created the problem.

00:24:12.000 The president and Republicans are currently coming up with creative solutions and ideas to lower health care costs for the American people.

00:24:20.000 Okay, so, yeah, again, she's not wrong about this, but if people don't feel the health care costs lowering, it's not really going to matter very much.

00:24:27.000 ABC's Mary Bruce pushed Caroline Levitt about all this.

00:24:30.000 And this is a clever trap for Democrats.

00:24:31.000 And it's why the Republican position initially with regard to all of these things is that you have to replace them.

00:24:37.000 You have to.

00:24:38.000 You have to bite the bullet and you have to replace them.

00:24:40.000 You can't just wait for Democrats to put you in the political vice that is expiring subsidies and then blaming it on you.

00:24:48.000 The president is prepared to take action on health care and he wants Republicans on the Hill to do the same.

00:24:54.000 As you have seen, Senate Republicans put forth their own legislation earlier this week.

00:24:58.000 As for the subsidies that are set to expire, I would like to remind you and everybody at home why this is on the brink of happening.

00:25:07.000 Democrats wrote Obamacare.

00:25:09.000 They passed it without a single Republican vote and then they ballooned it with these expensive COVID subsidies that completely distorted the health insurance market.

00:25:18.000 And then they doubled down, extending those subsidies and setting their own expiration date right now in 2025, which the administration is obviously well aware of.

00:25:28.000 And we are working, the president is working with his health care policy team here at the White House, as well as Republicans on Capitol Hill to find a solution.

00:25:36.000 Again, the reality here is that Republicans should come up with a plan just on a practical political level that extends some of the subsidies for a year or at most two years and then has a transitional plan away from the subsidies.

00:25:47.000 That includes more deregulation and more health insurance options.

00:25:51.000 That can include health savings accounts.

00:25:52.000 It doesn't have to be limited to health savings accounts.

00:25:55.000 There are many things that Avic Roy, for example, has discussed as a possibility in terms of lowering health insurance costs.

00:26:01.000 You need more competition.

00:26:01.000 You need more catastrophic health care plans that are available.

00:26:04.000 In many areas, there's only one plan available, and it's just through Obamacare because Obamacare made it very, very difficult to be essentially accredited to be part of Obamacare in the first place.

00:26:15.000 Democrats, of course, are enjoying this.

00:26:16.000 They create the crisis.

00:26:18.000 And now they're doing the meme.

00:26:19.000 They're doing the meme where the guy shoots the guy on the couch and then says, who would have done this?

00:26:23.000 Democrats created the problem, but apparently it's the Republicans' fault.

00:26:26.000 Here's Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader.

00:26:30.000 Republicans just blocked the Democrats' bill for a clean, simple extension of the ACA tax credits.

00:26:38.000 The last chance they had to ensure people's premiums do not skyrocket in the coming months.

00:26:46.000 Democrats did the work, but now Republicans chose the consequences.

00:26:51.000 Now Republicans have all but guaranteed that tens of millions of people will see their premiums double or triple or more next year.

00:27:01.000 Republicans now own America's health care crisis.

00:27:05.000 And not only that, according to Senator John Osoff in Georgia, he says that senators will now decide if people live or die.

00:27:11.000 By the way, this sort of language is not useful.

00:27:13.000 Bernie Sanders has been doing it for years.

00:27:15.000 The idea is that if you don't want his specific solution to American health care, that thousands will die.

00:27:23.000 Whenever you suggest that the political policies pursued by your opposition on matters of economics are death issues, like life and death issues, you're raising the stakes pretty dramatically.

00:27:36.000 And again, in the era where we talk about raising that temperature and the possibility of political violence, I just don't think this is useful or good.

00:27:45.000 This is life or death.

00:27:47.000 People will die.

00:27:52.000 This is one of the most consequential votes this Senate will take all year.

00:27:59.000 By saying yay or nay to the clerk of the Senate later today, senators will decide whether people live or people die.

00:28:09.000 Senators will decide whether Georgians and folks across the country are financially ruined or have a shot.

00:28:17.000 Half a million Georgians, it's projected, will lose their coverage altogether.

00:28:23.000 Now, again, this is an issue that Osoff is speaking up about because he sees political advantage.

00:28:27.000 He is up for reelection in 2026 in Georgia, which is indeed a red state.

00:28:32.000 There are two Georgia Republicans who are seeking to run against him.

00:28:36.000 One of them is U.S. Representative Mike Collins.

00:28:38.000 The other is a former football coach named Derek Dooley.

00:28:41.000 So it'll be interesting to see what the polling looks like for Osoff.

00:28:44.000 That is the reason why he is jumping on this issue.

00:28:47.000 Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, he says that the reason that they are not supporting some sort of just increased subsidy is because the goal isn't to help out the 7% of Americans who are reliant on the subsidies.

00:28:59.000 It's to reduce healthcare costs across the board.

00:29:02.000 We're working on a panic legislation that will reduce premiums for all Americans, not just 7% of them.

00:29:09.000 And I've been talking to every one of these colleagues in the tough districts about that.

00:29:13.000 So stay tuned.

00:29:14.000 There's more to come.

00:29:15.000 Okay, but one of the realities, one of the hard realities of a legislature that is national in scope is that there are a lot of Republicans in purple districts who are going to have to go back and answer to their constituents and might lose their seats.

00:29:26.000 And the same thing is true in the Senate.

00:29:29.000 And we are seeing this across the country.

00:29:31.000 Presidents in their second term rarely have coattails for the rest of their party.

00:29:35.000 And so this is why one of the big controversies that emerged over the course of the last week was the question of redistricting, congressional redistricting in Indiana.

00:29:44.000 Alrighty, coming up, the Indiana GOP bucks President Trump.

00:29:47.000 What's going on there first?

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00:30:49.000 So in Indiana, there is, in fact, a Republican state legislature.

00:30:53.000 Nonetheless, Indiana rejected a plan to congressionally redistrict.

00:30:59.000 Right now, there are seven congressional districts in Indiana that are Republican and two that are Democrat.

00:31:03.000 President Trump wanted Indiana's state legislature to redistrict, thus creating nine seats for Republicans as opposed to seven.

00:31:10.000 Nonetheless, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Indiana Senate rejected a congressional redistricting plan in a rebuke to President Trump, who had a pressure campaign put on Republican lawmakers.

00:31:20.000 The state senate denied the new map by a vote of 31 to 19.

00:31:23.000 21 senators from the Republican majority and all 10 Senate Democrats voted down the proposal.

00:31:30.000 Texas, of course, is going along with President Trump.

00:31:34.000 But Republican state Senator Greg Good, who voted against the new map, said, Friends, we're better than this.

00:31:39.000 Are we not?

00:31:42.000 Some Republican lawmakers against the redistricting reported swatting incidents at their home after they voiced opposition.

00:31:48.000 And why are they worried?

00:31:49.000 Well, if you're a Republican in a state legislature, you're not redistricting your own congressional district and the state legislature.

00:31:56.000 You're not redistricting your own district.

00:31:58.000 You're redistricting the federal district.

00:32:00.000 And so if the voters of Indiana feel like you're doing something unfair, you may lose your seat.

00:32:04.000 Indiana has historically been, it's a red, but it's kind of purpley state.

00:32:08.000 And so that is a concern for members of the Indiana state legislature.

00:32:12.000 This came, by the way, after Heritage Action wrote on X, quote, roads will not be paved.

00:32:18.000 Guard bases will close.

00:32:19.000 Major projects will stop.

00:32:20.000 These are the stakes, and every no vote will be to blame.

00:32:22.000 President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state.

00:32:30.000 Now, again, it's unclear to me that that actually is something that President Trump threatened.

00:32:36.000 Threatening, by the way, to withdraw funding from a state for not engaging in the political act of redistricting in favor of the president's party is indeed pretty wild stuff.

00:32:47.000 It's one thing to pressure state legislatures to do things. 0.94

00:32:50.000 It's another to say that the citizens of that state should suffer from the withdrawal of benefits in cases of failure to do something as purely political as redistricting.

00:33:00.000 President Trump, of course, was duly angry.

00:33:03.000 He said, listen, we just lost two seats in Indiana.

00:33:07.000 But there are many countervailing factors here, including the fact that it turns out that state legislators actually have the interests of their own constituents they have to worry about.

00:33:16.000 Not all party issues are national.

00:33:20.000 Well, we won every other state.

00:33:21.000 That's the only state that's funny because I won Indiana all three times by a landslide, and I wasn't working on it very hard.

00:33:29.000 It would have been nice.

00:33:30.000 I think we would have picked up two seats if we did that.

00:33:33.000 Meanwhile, he vowed revenge on an Indiana Republican who helped to kill the gerrymandering bill.

00:33:40.000 I wasn't very much involved, but there's a man named Bray as a, I guess, head of the Senate.

00:33:46.000 Was that Bray Fitz?

00:33:49.000 Bray?

00:33:51.000 And I mean, I'm sure that whenever his primary is, it's, I think, in two years, but I'm sure he'll go down.

00:33:58.000 He'll go down.

00:33:59.000 I'll certainly support anybody that wants to go against it.

00:34:03.000 Now, again, the reason for this is because Indiana has always considered itself a sort of friendly state and suggested that they were not particularly interested in engaging in what is highly partisan activity.

00:34:19.000 They said that it would create chaos.

00:34:22.000 They cited huge expenses in ensuring voter registration systems would be updated.

00:34:27.000 And again, this is a mid-decade redistricting.

00:34:31.000 So while I would have voted, and well, I think Republicans should have voted for the redistricting, this is indeed a sort of bellwether for Republican support on the state legislative and on the federal legislative level for President Trump's agenda.

00:34:44.000 And it's why if the president wishes to be able to cram down his agenda, he's going to need to increase his popularity ratings.

00:34:50.000 Because if those coatels do not exist, you're not going to get legislators to vote for your more controversial agenda items.

00:34:55.000 Meanwhile, by the way, I will say that President Trump did do something that I think is really good yesterday if it's effective.

00:35:00.000 He signed an executive order to curtail state AI laws, according to the Wall Street Journal.

00:35:04.000 The order would allow the DOJ to punish states with rules deemed restrictive for AI in a move to bring the U.S. under one federal standard.

00:35:12.000 There have been over a thousand AI bills proposed at the state level.

00:35:15.000 Congressional Republicans had sought to pass a moratorium on state laws in both the tax bill that passed in July and in the defense bill that passed, but it was not included in the end.

00:35:26.000 And one of the goals here is to ensure that AI companies are not going to be regulated to death.

00:35:33.000 So, again, that is a good thing that President Trump is trying to do.

00:35:36.000 Whether it's going to hold up legally in court is another question.

00:35:40.000 Well, meanwhile, the president does have more successful parts of his administration, at least in terms of polling.

00:35:46.000 The most successful part continues to be his immigration enforcement regime.

00:35:50.000 Caroline Lovitt over at the White House, she pointed out yesterday that the apprehensions on the border are at historic lows.

00:35:56.000 And that, of course, is because the administration has made clear: if you show up, we're turning you away.

00:35:59.000 It turns out that all the Biden lies about how they needed additional legislation to shut down illegal immigration, that was not true.

00:36:06.000 Here's Caroline Levitt at the White House yesterday.

00:36:08.000 At this point, in 10 months under President Trump's unmatched leadership, we've seen less apprehensions overall than we saw in just one month under Joe Biden.

00:36:17.000 Again, let me repeat: in 10 months under President Trump, we've seen less apprehensions at the southern border than we saw in one month under the previous president.

00:36:27.000 Okay, so she was right about all that.

00:36:29.000 Yesterday, it was kind of amazing how Democrats continue to take the wrong side of this issue.

00:36:33.000 So, yesterday, there's a pretty insane confrontation that happened between one Democrat from Rhode Island named Representative Seth Magazineer, cool name, who cited cases of veterans and military families facing removal or prolonged detention.

00:36:48.000 He asked Christy Noam about whether there were veterans and military families facing removal or prolonged detention, and Noam said no veterans had been deported.

00:36:56.000 Magziner then pulled up one veteran, Seijun Park, over Zoom.

00:37:00.000 Well, there's only one problem: that person was not deported.

00:37:03.000 In June, this person was a green card holder who had drug possession charges and failure to appear in court.

00:37:11.000 And he was issued a removal order because of the drug possession charges and failure to appear in court.

00:37:17.000 And so he ran away.

00:37:19.000 So, no, that's not actually a deportation.

00:37:21.000 That is a person who engaged in allegedly criminal conduct. 0.92

00:37:24.000 But Democrats continue to be clown themselves on this issue. 0.98

00:37:27.000 It really is kind of insane. 0.96

00:37:28.000 Here is Dan Goldman, representative from New York, going after Christy Noam over deporting asylum seekers.

00:37:33.000 Immigrants with ongoing asylum applications are legally in this country.

00:37:40.000 There are individuals in this country that have applications that they are legally here because it's a lawful pathway, right?

00:37:46.000 It's a lawful platform.

00:37:47.000 Okay, so if your department then deports anyone with an ongoing asylum application, you are violating the law, correct?

00:37:58.000 Joe Biden left us with Joe Biden.

00:38:00.000 I'm asking you a specific question.

00:38:02.000 If your department deports anyone with an ongoing asylum application, you are violating the law.

00:38:10.000 Is that correct?

00:38:11.000 It was greatly violated when they allowed people to come up with asylum applications.

00:38:17.000 Why are you filibustering?

00:38:18.000 Why can't you answer the question?

00:38:19.000 It's a simple question.

00:38:21.000 Okay.

00:38:21.000 And the answer to the question is that the entire definition of asylum was so broadened under Joe Biden that the idea that if you came in now and you're applying for asylum based on zero credible claim, that's the problem.

00:38:37.000 She, of course, agrees that asylum is a legal pathway to gain citizenship.

00:38:42.000 But the point is that when you broaden the claim for asylum itself, when you change the definition to include people who ought not have asylum, well, that violates the law as well.

00:38:52.000 That is a violation of the law.

00:38:53.000 Christy Noam did get into another tete-tete yesterday on the Hill with Benny Thompson.

00:38:58.000 This is pretty incredible.

00:39:00.000 The congressperson suggested that a shooting attack in Washington, D.C. against the National Guard, in which one person was killed and one severely wounded, was quote-unquote an unfortunate incident, and Christy Noam is having none of it.

00:39:10.000 Madam Secretary, you and the gentleman from CTNCTC reference the unfortunate accident that occurred with the National Guardsman being killed.

00:39:24.000 You think that was an unfortunate accident?

00:39:26.000 I mean, there's a terrible.

00:39:27.000 No, wait, look, I'll get it straight.

00:39:30.000 Then you can.

00:39:30.000 He shot our National Guardsman in the head.

00:39:33.000 Well, yeah, that'd be correct. 0.99

00:39:35.000 Man, oh, the beclowning. 0.98

00:39:37.000 Oh, the massive, massive beclowning. 0.98

00:39:39.000 My goodness.

00:39:40.000 Well, meanwhile, on foreign policy, things are getting spicy.

00:39:43.000 So the president of the United States has now authorized more seizures of tankers, apparently.

00:39:49.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration's seizure of a tanker full of Venezuelan crude hits Nicolas Maduro much harder than airstrikes on alleged drug boats.

00:39:58.000 It raises an existential crisis for a regime that runs on oil revenue.

00:40:02.000 While the United States has accused Maduro of leading a drug trafficking cartel, oil money is far more important to the Venezuelan leader, his inner circle, and the country itself.

00:40:10.000 Crude sales have long represented more than 90% of Venezuela's export income.

00:40:14.000 You noted this yesterday.

00:40:16.000 And close Maduro allies have faced accusations of skimming from billions in additional oil revenues.

00:40:21.000 More tanker seizures or even the threat creates an escalating series of crises, forcing Venezuela to deeply discount its oil to its handful of buyers, including China, and spend more of its dwindling foreign reserves to stop spiraling inflation.

00:40:34.000 Apparently, the tanker that was seized was carrying roughly $80 million worth of oil.

00:40:38.000 Wow.

00:40:39.000 Equivalent to 5% of what Venezuela spends monthly on imported goods, raising the prospects of shortages as well.

00:40:46.000 Because if they don't export the oil, then they don't have money to buy things.

00:40:52.000 U.S. officials said on Wednesday there would be more ship seizures.

00:40:57.000 President Trump has also been hitting Venezuela with sanctions.

00:41:01.000 Yesterday, the Trump administration imposed new sanctions on three nephews of Nicolas Maduro, as well as a businessman close to his regime and six companies shipping its oil.

00:41:12.000 Scott Besson said in a written statement, Nicolas Maduro and his criminal associates in Venezuela are flooding the United States with drugs that are poisoning the American people.

00:41:21.000 Three of the people sanctioned have been on the U.S. radar.

00:41:28.000 Some of them are narcotics traffickers, allegedly.

00:41:32.000 Two were known as the Narco nephews after they were arrested in Haiti and convicted in the United States in 2016.

00:41:38.000 President Biden granted them clemency in October 2022 in a prisoner swap.

00:41:44.000 The third nephew is tied to the state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, and was sanctioned by Treasury in 2017.

00:41:52.000 Again, Joe Biden removed him from the sanctions list.

00:41:54.000 And what a great president Joe Biden was.

00:41:56.000 My goodness.

00:41:58.000 There are going to be more sanctions where that came from as well.

00:42:03.000 So is the United States, by economic pressure, pushing for a coup in Venezuela?

00:42:07.000 Yes.

00:42:07.000 I mean, I think pretty clearly the answer is yes.

00:42:09.000 Meanwhile, President Trump is touting that drug trafficking via Venezuela, drug trafficking by sea, is down almost 100%.

00:42:18.000 If you look at the drug traffic, drug traffic by sea is down 92%.

00:42:24.000 And nobody can figure out who the 8% is because I have no idea. 0.77

00:42:28.000 Anybody getting involved in that right now is not doing well.

00:42:31.000 And we'll start that on land, too.

00:42:33.000 I mean, that, of course, is exactly, exactly right.

00:42:37.000 Now, again, all the measures that he is currently using against Venezuela are measures that should also be used against our other geopolitical opponents that include China and Russia.

00:42:47.000 And herein lies the problem.

00:42:48.000 It is very difficult to suss out the foreign policy of the administration on sort of a broad level.

00:42:54.000 It seems that generally the administration does pursue a peace-through strength Reaganite foreign policy, wherein we deter our geopolitical opponents through military strength and economic measures, and we help out our friends in order to deter our political opponents.

00:43:08.000 That is the sort of peace-through-strength model.

00:43:10.000 However, there is indeed a branch inside the Trump administration, either freewheeling or under President Trump's auspices, unclear which, that seems to want to carve out spheres of influence for our geopolitical opponents.

00:43:23.000 That includes Russia, for example.

00:43:26.000 So, President Trump yesterday said that he's talking with China and Russia about denuclearization.

00:43:30.000 Now, again, that might be a tactic.

00:43:32.000 That absolutely could be a tactic.

00:43:33.000 President Reagan used to talk the same way about denuclearization.

00:43:36.000 He famously suggested that he wanted all the countries on earth to get rid of their nuclear weapons.

00:43:41.000 Of course, that never happened because it turns out that America's geopolitical opponents have no such interests.

00:43:46.000 Here's President Trump saying something similar.

00:43:48.000 One of the things I talked to China about is the denuclearization of weapons.

00:43:54.000 So we'd like to see if we could stop that.

00:43:56.000 I've spoken to, I'm talking about nuclear weapons.

00:44:00.000 I've spoken to China about that.

00:44:01.000 I've spoken to Russia about that.

00:44:03.000 And I think it would be something that we would want to do and they would like to do.

00:44:07.000 And I think Russia would like to do. 0.51

00:44:09.000 Okay, but the question is whether any of that is going to be real, because again, these countries have their own separate interests.

00:44:15.000 Whenever you talk to people who are isolationist on foreign policy or who seem to think that we can just cut an easy deal with Russia or China, whenever you are making a deal, there are two sides at the table.

00:44:25.000 Russia has demonstrated zero interest in integrating into the so-called family of nations, being friendly toward the United States, not pursuing its own geopolitical cause, which is the cause of a Russian empire.

00:44:36.000 Again, that is the way that Vladimir Putin views his own country, is that it ought to be and must be, in order to survive in the world, an imperial state.

00:44:45.000 Alexander Dugan, often known as Putin's brain, has talked openly about this for years and years and years.

00:44:51.000 And we've talked extensively on the show about that philosophy.

00:44:55.000 China itself believes that if it is not growing in geopolitical power and might, then it is losing and it is failing.

00:45:02.000 And so recognizing the separate and oppositional interests of places like Russia and China is important to understanding just how we should pursue action in these places.

00:45:12.000 This is why, for example, I think that it is wrongheaded to give any sort of technological leg up to the Chinese. 1.00

00:45:20.000 The move by the administration to allow the selling of NVIDIA chips to the Chinese seems to be to be a mistake.

00:45:27.000 And again, I've seen some credible arguments otherwise saying, well, you know, the chips that we're shipping them are so far behind that it doesn't really matter.

00:45:32.000 We're going to remain well ahead of them and then they won't build their own tech stack.

00:45:36.000 The notion that the Chinese are not attempting to steal IP and cheat and that somehow they're going to be deterred from their mission, which is to overcome the United States by dependence on H-200 chips from NVIDIA. 0.73

00:45:48.000 That seems wrong-headed to me.

00:45:49.000 David McCormick, the senator from Pennsylvania, he's saying something of the same thing here.

00:45:55.000 I'm concerned.

00:45:58.000 I'm not clear on why that is the right path for us.

00:46:04.000 I want to be convinced because I keep asking the question.

00:46:07.000 The argument is, as I understand it, and I think Jensen's done a remarkable job and I've talked to him about this a number of times.

00:46:13.000 The argument is that this will somehow slow China's capacity to develop its own capability by giving them the most advanced chips.

00:46:23.000 I don't think that's been the, I don't think that's been the experience.

00:46:26.000 Okay, so I agree with him, obviously.

00:46:28.000 When it comes to Russia and Ukraine, where the United States is putting heavy pressure on Ukraine, the Ukrainians keep coming to the table with more concessions for the United States.

00:46:35.000 Where are the concessions from the Russians? 0.81

00:46:37.000 Where?

00:46:38.000 This war has been going on for three years at this point.

00:46:42.000 We have yet to see any serious concessions made by the Russians at all, or even any sign that they wish to make any concessions at all.

00:46:50.000 According to Politico, Ukraine's latest peace plan proposes a demilitarized free economic zone in the Donbass region where American business interests could operate.

00:46:58.000 That's an attempt to bring President Trump on board.

00:47:01.000 President Trump is aware of the latest 20-point plan Ukraine sent to the White House on Wednesday.

00:47:06.000 Ukrainian President Zelensky also spoke to reporters about the proposal on Thursday, suggesting that control of the buffer zone in eastern Ukraine still needs to be worked out, but that under the new proposal, troops from both Russia and Ukraine would be barred.

00:47:18.000 That, of course, marked a compromise from the original 28-point peace plan authored by the United States with Russian input under which Russian troops would control the region.

00:47:27.000 Zelensky noted that Ukraine would only withdraw its forces after receiving meaningful security guarantees from allies against future aggression from Moscow.

00:47:34.000 And again, this is the biggest issue.

00:47:36.000 It remains the biggest issue.

00:47:37.000 If the United States keeps pushing Ukraine, keeps pushing and pushing and pushing Ukraine to make concessions.

00:47:42.000 Why would the Ukrainians believe that if they make the concessions, the United States will stand by their side if the Russians attack?

00:47:49.000 If the Russians decide to renew, what in the behavior of this administration makes the Ukrainians believe that the United States will rush in armed to the teeth to help them if the agreement is violated?

00:48:03.000 It doesn't feel like this administration would.

00:48:07.000 It feels like they're looking for a way out.

00:48:08.000 And that is something that Putin, I think, has honed in on.

00:48:12.000 Ursula von der Leyen of the EU is not somebody that I find politically palatable, but she is not wrong when she says, I think it's important that this peace agreement does not sow the seeds for the next conflict.

00:48:22.000 I mean, we've seen this in 2014.

00:48:24.000 We've seen that the peace agreement and the security guarantees were not holding, were not robust enough, that the peace agreement was only giving time for Russia to regroup, reorganize.

00:48:31.000 And then the next invasion came in 2022.

00:48:33.000 Security guarantees play an enormous role.

00:48:36.000 Now, this does raise the question of Europe, because, of course, the president is right that Europe needs to take the lead when it comes to defending Ukraine.

00:48:43.000 Ukraine is a part of Europe.

00:48:44.000 It's not an element of the United States geographically.

00:48:48.000 In order for that to happen, however, Europe is going to have to reshape itself in a far more beneficial direction.

00:48:54.000 And that is not relegated to Europe's take on immigration.

00:48:56.000 The Vice President of the United States, of course, has been highly critical of Europe for its open immigration policy, and he is totally right about that, 100% right. 0.96

00:49:05.000 If it were possible for him to be 150% right, statistically, he would be 150% right.

00:49:09.000 The European immigration policy has been a full-scale disaster.

00:49:13.000 But as the Wall Street Journal points out, there is another problem.

00:49:17.000 The problem is economic stagnation in the EU.

00:49:21.000 European voters have over and over and over again granted their governments vast powers for welfare state redistributionism, and it has hampered economic growth dramatically.

00:49:31.000 According to the OECD, government social spending as a share of GDP, the United States is pretty high at 19.8%, but in France, it is 31%.

00:49:42.000 In Germany, it's 28%.

00:49:44.000 In the UK, it's 23%.

00:49:48.000 Gigantic welfare states, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board points out, require large tax bills to fund them, which is why government revenues reached 47% of GDP in France, 41% of GDP in Germany, 43% in Italy.

00:50:01.000 That number is 27% in the United States, which is why we have a robust economy.

00:50:07.000 So that means that if the United States wishes for Europe to pursue better policy, that can't just be immigration policy or military spending.

00:50:14.000 It has to be robust economic policy that very few people in Europe are actually pushing for.

00:50:20.000 The far-right parties in Europe typically are kind of socialistic in their own economic autarkism.

00:50:26.000 And that's something the United States really should be pushing back against.

00:50:29.000 If Europe hopes to survive and thrive, it's going to, at some point, need to deregulate in massive ways.

00:50:35.000 It's going to need to take that welfare state and put it off to the side. 1.00

00:50:38.000 And instead of the right in the United States, trying to reject European immigration openness, well, embracing European welfare statism, we should be rejecting both of those things.

00:50:50.000 Obviously, Republicans are facing challenges across the country.

00:50:54.000 There's some early bellwethers for 2026 that don't look great.

00:50:56.000 One of those that earlier this week, the city of Miami, for the first time in three decades, voted openly for a Democrat joining us on the line to discuss is the mayor of Miami, who is a Republican, Francis Suarez.

00:51:07.000 Mayor Suarez, thanks so much for taking the time.

00:51:08.000 Really appreciate it.

00:51:10.000 Yeah, good to be with you, Ben.

00:51:11.000 So obviously, Republicans just suffered an electoral defeat in Miami in the race to succeed you for the first time in three decades.

00:51:19.000 What do you think is happening?

00:51:22.000 Well, first, you have to demystify that headline a little bit, right?

00:51:24.000 As you know, we live in a world of sort of fake news.

00:51:27.000 And so you got to first parse that out.

00:51:31.000 It seems to come from this idea that the last Democrat elected was elected in 1985.

00:51:38.000 The problem with that math is that from 85 to 93, the mayor was an independent, right?

00:51:43.000 Not a Republican.

00:51:45.000 From 93 to 97, we had a Republican.

00:51:48.000 But then from 2001 to 2009, right in the middle of that, you had an independent Democrat, essentially a Democrat, because he was the guy who was a Democrat before he was mayor.

00:51:58.000 He was an independent for two terms.

00:51:59.000 And then he became the chair of the Democratic Party of Florida as the mayor.

00:52:03.000 So the guy was a Democrat, basically, right?

00:52:06.000 Masquerading as an independent for eight years.

00:52:08.000 So this idea that Miami now flipped after 30 years is a little bit of a misnomer.

00:52:15.000 And then you have to think the two Republicans, myself and my predecessor, my predecessor got elected by 75%.

00:52:21.000 I got elected by 80% and re-elected by 80%.

00:52:24.000 So, you know, I got re-elected by obviously a cross-section of people and parties.

00:52:28.000 So this was the first election that was partisan.

00:52:32.000 There's no doubt about that, right?

00:52:34.000 And the problem with it and the problem with a partisan race in Miami, if you're a Republican, is if you look at the party breakdown, Republicans are last out of the three major categories, right?

00:52:43.000 So you have Democrats are number one, MPAs are number two, and Republicans are number three.

00:52:48.000 It's not a huge margin, but it's a big enough market.

00:52:50.000 You know, it's significant enough that if you run a strictly partisan race, you're probably going to lose, right?

00:52:56.000 And that's essentially what happened.

00:52:58.000 And I think, you know, my viewpoint on it is if you're going to run a partisan race, you have to, you know, the military term is prep the battlefield, right?

00:53:06.000 You got to like have registration numbers that will support running a purely partisan race.

00:53:12.000 That's number one.

00:53:12.000 Number two, there is a disturbing trend in Miami and in America.

00:53:16.000 And I think this is part of what you want to talk about.

00:53:18.000 There's a Mamdanification of America. 1.00

00:53:20.000 There's no doubt about it.

00:53:22.000 And we saw that in Miami in the primary, which was plus 14 for Democrats.

00:53:27.000 Again, plus 14 is not the differential in registration, which means they got MPAs, right?

00:53:32.000 But the plus 14 in that category of people that voted, they were plus six for Mamdani.

00:53:39.000 Let me repeat that.

00:53:40.000 In Miami, Mamdani was plus six, okay, among people that voted in the primary.

00:53:45.000 That is disturbing.

00:53:46.000 That is disturbing at a very visceral level for me as a conservative Republican and Cuban, right?

00:53:54.000 It's visceral for me as a leader of a city that welcomes the people of the Jewish faith and protects them, in my opinion, like no other city in the planet.

00:54:06.000 So it is extremely, extremely disturbing.

00:54:09.000 And I think it highlights a broader problem.

00:54:11.000 And the problem is that, you know, socialism is the easiest selling politics.

00:54:16.000 You know what I mean?

00:54:16.000 You just take advantage of discontent, right?

00:54:18.000 You sow discontent, even if you're succeeding, even if everybody's succeeding, right?

00:54:22.000 Miami has the lowest unemployment in America under my watch, the highest median wage growth in America.

00:54:27.000 We've moved companies that, you know, that managed $13 trillion in AUM to our ecosystem in the last few years, 500% increase in the venture capital pipeline.

00:54:35.000 I mean, all these KPIs that are successful, lowest taxes ever, highest bond rating, highest reserves in history, lowest homicide rate almost in our entire history.

00:54:45.000 Last year we had 27.

00:54:46.000 We started recording them in 1946.

00:54:48.000 We had 31.

00:54:49.000 In 1980, we had 220.

00:54:51.000 And this year we're at 25.

00:54:52.000 So incredibly safe, incredibly prosperous.

00:54:55.000 But of course, what happens?

00:54:56.000 Democrats are focusing on the negative.

00:54:58.000 So the question, I guess, is you were able to win with this huge majority.

00:55:01.000 Your predecessor was able to win with a huge majority.

00:55:03.000 What did Republicans do wrong that they weren't able to run a bipartisan race?

00:55:08.000 Because obviously Democrats have been moving further to the left, but that theoretically should open more room for Republicans to run in the center.

00:55:14.000 So what can Republicans do better as they look forward, particularly, as you mentioned, in areas that are kind of purplish?

00:55:20.000 Because you're right, Miami is not a heavy red area, traditionally speaking.

00:55:23.000 It would be kind of middle of the purple.

00:55:26.000 Well, I think you cannot run a strictly partisan race in a city like Miami, right?

00:55:30.000 And I think that's essentially what the candidate did.

00:55:32.000 He started getting major endorsements from Republican senators from Texas.

00:55:37.000 You know what I mean?

00:55:38.000 Ted Cruz was, you know, I don't have anything against Ted Cruz, but Ted Cruz is not a Miamian. 1.00

00:55:42.000 He's a Cuban senator from Texas.

00:55:46.000 And that kind of focus, his campaign was run by outsiders who obviously don't understand Miami.

00:55:51.000 I think if you really look at the phenomenon of Trump, it's kitchen table issues, right?

00:55:57.000 He was able to get working class people to vote Republican.

00:56:01.000 And when I ran for president, briefly, right, my focus was three things: get more Hispanics because Hispanics are trending more conservative.

00:56:11.000 Get more urban voters, right?

00:56:13.000 You don't have to win Philadelphia, but if you do 10 points better in Philadelphia, you win Pennsylvania, right?

00:56:18.000 And get young voters, which believe it or not, Biden had actually crushed Trump in young voters in the first go-around.

00:56:26.000 So, you know, I think that is something, you know, to get independence, you've got to focus on kitchen table issues like affordable housing, quality of life, low taxes, low crime, and a vision for the future.

00:56:38.000 I don't think the candidate, the Republican candidate, did any of those things.

00:56:42.000 He focused on one very, very minor thing, which by the way, it's very hard to do, which is removing property taxes for the homestead, which is something that DeSantis has been talking about.

00:56:51.000 He was DeSantis supported and DeSantis run in terms of his campaign team.

00:56:58.000 And that's a very narrow issue in terms of the affordability conversation, right?

00:57:03.000 That's just for homeowners who happen to have a homestead, right?

00:57:05.000 And not have to pay taxes, which by the way, is great.

00:57:07.000 I support it, obviously.

00:57:08.000 I would love to, as a homeowner, I would love to not have to pay taxes on my homestead, right?

00:57:12.000 But it's not going to solve the affordability issue.

00:57:14.000 And I'm not saying that the government has to solve it, but certainly what Democrats do better than Republicans is they talk about it more and they talk about it.

00:57:21.000 You know, I don't think that necessarily means that they have good ideas.

00:57:24.000 I actually think their ideas are pretty terrible.

00:57:26.000 But the focus is on it.

00:57:29.000 And listen, people want solutions.

00:57:31.000 So if someone's talking about something and focusing on something, they're probably going to gravitate to that, especially since socialism, as you know, promises things that not only don't deliver, they actually make you go backwards, but they sound good in rhetoric.

00:57:44.000 So, Mayor Suarez, one of the issues that Republicans have as an issue coming up is that while President Trump did really, really well with Hispanic voters in the last election cycle, the polls since the election seem to be trending the other way.

00:57:55.000 It seems like there's a significant drop-off in support among Hispanics for the Republican Party.

00:58:00.000 Why do you think that's happening?

00:58:03.000 I think immigration is a big issue, you know, and I think I'm interested to see where the president ultimately lands on this issue.

00:58:11.000 Obviously, we've been seeing a lot of stuff on the enforcement side.

00:58:14.000 And I think people generally are supportive of that, right?

00:58:16.000 Like in the sense that we don't want to have a porous border.

00:58:19.000 We don't want people who are here illegally in our country who are committing crimes. 1.00

00:58:23.000 We don't want them.

00:58:24.000 And then, and then there's everything else, right?

00:58:26.000 And I think there has to be a coherent conversation on this issue that's in the best interest of our country, right?

00:58:34.000 My parents came here legally from Cuba at 12 and 7, right?

00:58:39.000 A lot of Cubans had, I call it super status for many, many years with the wet foot, dry foot policy that was actually implemented by Clinton initially, where they got automatic asylum if they touch land in the United States.

00:58:52.000 So I think there has to be a broader conversation based on metrics that talk about what is best for the country.

00:58:59.000 And what are the metrics that I would talk about?

00:59:01.000 Unemployment, right?

00:59:04.000 What are the workers that we need in particular industries? 0.53

00:59:06.000 I mean, there's some industries that are going to propel the economy of the future.

00:59:08.000 We need to make sure that we're competitive when it comes to that.

00:59:11.000 We have a declining birth rate like a lot of major industrialized countries around the world.

00:59:16.000 And then we need to focus on, in my opinion, and I think this is part of the Venezuela policy, creating prosperity in our hemisphere, because that will de-power China, number one, but it will also create less of an incentive for people to leave their home country.

00:59:30.000 Most people don't want to leave.

00:59:31.000 I mean, if their home country wasn't broken, they probably wouldn't leave their home country to begin with. 0.96

00:59:35.000 So I think there's a piece to be done on that front.

00:59:39.000 Well, Mayor Francis Juarez of Miami, really appreciate the time and the insight.

00:59:43.000 Thanks so much.

00:59:44.000 Ben, anytime.

00:59:45.000 Alrighty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.

00:59:47.000 We'll jump into that magical mailbag.

00:59:49.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

00:59:51.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

00:59:52.000 Use code Shapiro.

00:59:53.000 Check out for two months free on all annual plans.

00:59:55.000 Click that link in the description and join us.

00:59:59.000 Oh, this is an illusion.

01:00:01.000 An echo of a voice that has died.

01:00:06.000 And soon that echo will cease.

01:00:18.000 They say that Merlin is mad.

01:00:26.000 They say he was a king in Dovid.

01:00:29.000 The son of a princess of lost Atlantis.

01:00:32.000 They say the future and the past are known to him.

01:00:37.000 That the fire and the wind tell him their secrets.

01:00:41.000 That the magic of the hillfolk and druids come forth at his easy command.

01:00:48.000 They say he slew hundreds.

01:00:51.000 Hundreds, do you hear?

01:00:53.000 That the world burned and trembled at his wrath.

01:00:59.000 The Merlin died long before you and I were born.

01:01:05.000 Merlin Emirus has returned to the land of the living.

01:01:11.000 Vortigen is gone.

01:01:13.000 Rome is gone.

01:01:14.000 The Saxon is here. 0.76

01:01:17.000 Saxon Hengist has assembled the greatest war host ever seen in the island of the mighty. 0.84

01:01:22.000 And before the summer is through, he means to take the throne.

01:01:27.000 And he will have it.

01:01:28.000 If we are too busy squabbling amongst ourselves to take up arms against him, here is your hope.

01:01:34.000 A king will arise to hold all Britain in his hand.

01:01:38.000 A high king who would be the wonder of the world.

01:01:42.000 You to a future of peace.

01:01:49.000 There'll be no peace in these lands till we are all dust.

01:01:53.000 Men of the island of the mighty, you stand together.

01:01:58.000 You stand as Britons.

01:02:01.000 You stand as one.

01:02:05.000 Great darkness is falling upon this land.

01:02:10.000 These brothers are our only hope to stand against it.

01:02:14.000 Not our only hope.

01:02:16.000 They say Merlin slew 70 men with his own hands.

01:02:20.000 I could say he slew 500.

01:02:25.000 No man is capable of such a thing.

The Ben Shapiro Show - December 12, 2025

Gavin Newsom Wants to Trans The Kids

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