Gavin Newsom is back, and he says that he wants to see more trans kids. Is that good for his 2028 hopes? Plus, President Trump is suffering some speed bumps on the economy, and the Indiana GOP is rejecting his plan for congressional redistricting first in less than two weeks on Christmas Day.
00:00:06.000Plus, 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.
00:00:16.000Episodes one and two of the Penn Dragon cycle rise of the Merlin begins streaming for Daily Wire plus all access members.
00:00:54.000And the moment Rise of Merlin hits your screen, you're going to understand exactly why we went this big.
00:00:59.000So right now, Democrats are looking at 2028 and they see Republican vulnerability.
00:01:04.000What 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.
00:01:13.000And they think that perhaps they can reverse the tides, that perhaps they can take the White House in 2028 with somebody like Gavin Newsom.
00:01:20.000Well, 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.
00:01:30.000So DEI, you're hearing all about equity in the run-up to the 2024 election.
00:01:35.000It was the centerpiece of the Joe Biden campaign in 2020.
00:01:39.000It was again the centerpiece of the Kamala Harris campaign, the late breaking Kamala Harris campaign in 2024.
00:01:45.000You do not hear Democrats talking about equity each and every day the way that they were before.
00:01:49.000They instead are talking about, for example, affordability.
00:01:52.000The same thing is true with regard to radical trans issues.
00:01:56.000The politics on transgenderism are awful for Democrats.
00:02:00.000The 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.
00:02:14.000That 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.
00:02:26.000And that was the general perception among Americans and it drove huge numbers for President Trump.
00:02:31.000The single most effective ad of the 2024 campaign was on this issue from the Trump campaign.
00:02:37.000It suggested that Kamala was for they, them.
00:02:41.000And 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.
00:02:56.000Can you trust people who just tell you such a basic lie that boys can be girls?
00:03:02.000And so Democrats have decided that they were going to put that on the back burner.
00:03:05.000One of those Democrats was Gavin Newsom.
00:03:07.000So 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.
00:03:15.000And Newsom admitted that boys should not be playing in girl sports.
00:03:18.000And he admitted that there was unfairness to all of that.
00:03:21.000Well, now Gavin Newsom, believing that he is the frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic nomination, is being asked questions by members of the Democratic base.
00:03:30.000And so he did a podcast with Ezra Klein of the New York Times, in which he was asked about his take on trans politics.
00:03:35.000And 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?
00:03:49.000So he ended up swiveling back into what is in fact a losing strategy for Democrats.
00:03:55.000Here was the California governor proclaiming that he wants to see more trans kids.
00:04:26.000There'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.
00:04:32.000But 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.
00:04:43.000And I just think that's not a bigoted position.
00:04:48.000And 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.
00:04:56.000I mean, you want to talk cancel culture.
00:04:58.000I've lived it on that issue alone, despite a record of 30 years.
00:05:02.000And people are willing to say, I'm done.
00:05:07.000And 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.
00:05:16.000And they both dropped out because we couldn't figure out a way to make it fair.
00:05:20.000And it was so unfair to both their families.
00:05:37.000There 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.
00:05:49.000So 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.
00:05:57.000That creates a real awkwardness for the Democratic Party.
00:06:00.000Well, this broke into the open because this led off a debate with Elon Musk.
00:06:06.000All righty, coming up, Elon Musk fires back at Gavin Newsome and it turns into a real firefight first.
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00:08:39.000Okay, Elon Musk commented on Gavin Newsom's post.
00:08:43.000And then Gavin Newsom's press office replied, Correct.
00:08:46.000We're sorry, your daughter hates you, Elon.
00:09:00.000When I discuss these issues, I try not to get personal on these issues.
00:09:04.000The 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.
00:09:11.000And I hate politics that eventually is just reduced to my feelings about members of my own family.
00:09:19.000I remember a few years ago, this is a story I really haven't frequently told.
00:09:23.000A few years ago, I spoke at the University of British Columbia up in Canada, and it was about this issue.
00:09:29.000And a person got up who identified as trans.
00:09:32.000It was a man who believed that he was a woman.
00:09:35.000And he got up and he started asking a question and he started personalizing the question.
00:09:40.000He started saying, well, you know, my family treats me as though I'm a girl.
00:09:43.000And 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.
00:09:55.000And this person kept insisting, no, you know, I know that I'm a woman because my family treats me as a woman.
00:10:00.000And I kept saying, please, I don't want to talk about how your family treats you because that's about your family.
00:10:06.000It'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.
00:10:14.000And 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.
00:10:26.000They do not believe that you are a girl.
00:10:44.000I 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.
00:10:53.000Not 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.
00:11:00.000Okay, because when you merge the personal and the political in this way, it gets really ugly really quickly.
00:11:06.000So Gavin Newsom's press office going after Elon Musk's child is truly ugly stuff, really, really ugly stuff.
00:11:14.000So 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.
00:11:22.000I love Xavier very much and hope he recovers.
00:11:24.000My daughters are Azure, Exa, she goes by Y, and Arcadia.
00:11:30.000Now, the fact that Newsom's office went that low is really quite disgusting.
00:11:37.000That's really quite terrible from Gavin Newsome.
00:11:42.000And it just goes to show the Democrats are going to run headlong into their own radicalism on this issue.
00:11:47.000Now, again, they might do what Abigail Spanberger did in Virginia.
00:11:50.000They might try to avoid the issue altogether.
00:11:51.000Gavin Newsom seems like he's trying to avoid the issue altogether.
00:11:54.000But 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.
00:12:06.000Instead, they would, of course, like to talk about the economy.
00:12:10.000They'd like to talk about their new issue of affordability because they sense vulnerability there.
00:12:15.000And this brings us to President Trump's ratings on the economy.
00:12:18.000So, right now, President Trump's ratings on the economy are particularly weak.
00:12:22.000He's down to something like 31% approval rating when it comes to his economic ratings, which, of course, makes Democrats incredibly happy.
00:12:28.000And 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.
00:12:45.000When people say that they want inflation to go down, they don't mean that they want inflation at a 2% rate.
00:12:50.000They mean they want prices to actively go down.
00:12:52.000And that sort of gap between what they want and what can actually be achieved is a very, very real gap.
00:12:57.000Nonetheless, it is having consequences for President Trump.
00:13:01.000The 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.
00:13:09.000She 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.
00:13:18.000President Trump got a small bump recently as he paid more attention to the economy, at least in one poll.
00:13:22.000His approval figure rose from 38% to 41% in a Reuters-Ipsos survey out this week.
00:13:28.000But his overall rating remains low when it comes to the cost of living at 31%.
00:13:32.000He'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.
00:13:42.000Well, says Kristen Soltis-Anderson, for one thing, we should view all of this in the context of the current political climate.
00:13:48.000Job approval has typically been a strong signal of the country's political mood, with poor approval numbers often resulting in bad election outcomes.
00:13:54.000But lower job approval numbers are arguably simply the norm these days.
00:13:58.000Presidents don't get much of a honeymoon.
00:13:59.000It'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.
00:14:09.000Job approval percentages instead tend to remain in a narrow band, with partisans largely dug in and unwilling to move.
00:14:15.000Voters seem less eager to give a thumbs up to a president for whom they did not vote almost regardless of the circumstances.
00:14:21.000So, a job approval of 42% might not seem like a five-alarm fire to President Trump, but affordability is sliding away from President Trump.
00:14:30.000Only 15% of respondents said in a Fox News poll last month that they think that President Trump's economic policies have helped them personally.
00:14:39.000So, it'll be interesting to see what sort of consequences this has.
00:14:43.000President Trump yesterday acknowledged that his polling numbers were a bit of a problem.
00:14:48.000And he said, quote, I inherited a mess from the Biden administration, the worst inflation in history, the highest prices our country has ever seen.
00:14:54.000In other words, affordability just 13 months ago was a disaster for the American people, but now it's totally different.
00:15:01.000Energy, oil, and gasoline are hitting five-year lows.
00:15:03.000The stock market today just hit an all-time high.
00:15:05.000Tariffs are bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars, and we are respected as a nation again.
00:15:08.000When will I get credit for having created, with no inflation, perhaps the greatest economy in the history of our country?
00:15:13.000When will people understand what is happening?
00:15:15.000When will polls reflect the greatness of America at this point in time and how bad it was just one year ago?
00:15:20.000Again, I think that there is truth to that.
00:15:22.000However, 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.
00:15:36.000Caroline Lovett at the White House was asked about President Trump's comments on that matter yesterday.
00:15:42.000Isn'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.
00:15:53.000Do you think the people in that room in Pennsylvania who the president was speaking to don't know the president's a billionaire?
00:15:58.000I think that's a very well-established fact.
00:16:01.000And 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.
00:16:09.000And he's doing it right now, just like he did in his first term.
00:16:12.000So, by the way, agree with many of the things that President Trump is doing on the economy.
00:16:16.000But 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.
00:16:34.000I don't care who says it, Republican or Democrat.
00:16:37.000And 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.
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00:20:03.000So Democrats have come up with a winning strategy with regard to Obamacare.
00:20:07.000Create a program that is bound to fail.
00:20:09.000And 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.
00:20:19.000By the way, the end point of that is what it always was, which is universal health care.
00:20:22.000And 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.
00:20:36.000At least Senator Patty Murray of Washington, Democrat, she at least is honest enough to admit this.
00:20:40.000Here she was on the floor of the Senate yesterday saying that actually, no matter what we do with Obamacare, we need universal health care.
00:20:48.000We still need universal health care in America.
00:20:51.000We have needed it for a very long time.
00:20:54.000It is what I've always been fighting for.
00:20:56.000And 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.
00:21:09.000Okay, so again, this is what Democrats actually want.
00:21:11.000But in order to get there, they need a program that eventually becomes non-feasible and requires gigantic infusions.
00:21:20.000They created Obamacare, and then they created gigantic subsidies, and then they had those subsidies set to expire.
00:21:26.000And then when they expire, they blame the Republicans for it.
00:21:29.000It is a politically useful plan for them, for sure.
00:21:32.000Right 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.
00:21:40.000According 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.
00:21:48.000Meanwhile, 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.
00:21:55.000The Democratic proposal would have extended the enhanced COVID-era's ACA subsidies for three years.
00:22:00.000That 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.
00:22:10.000So 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.
00:22:18.000Republicans 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.
00:22:28.000The Republican proposal failed with 51 in favor and 48 opposed.
00:22:33.000Senator Ram Paul of Kentucky sided with Democrats in voting against the measure because, again, Senator Paul doesn't like any government spending.
00:22:41.000The lack of progress means that open enrollment closes December 15th for plans starting on January 1st.
00:22:47.000And 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.
00:22:55.000This, of course, is what Democrats want.
00:22:58.000Senator 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.
00:23:08.000Thune said that after the vote, some Republicans want to talk with the Democrats, but we'll see if they have an audience.
00:23:14.000Josh 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.
00:23:21.000He said, I want to see big changes to both of them, but my view is we've got to do something.
00:23:26.000According 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.
00:23:34.000Here was the White House press secretary explaining it yesterday.
00:23:38.000He has made unprecedented progress towards lowering health care costs in this country and drug prices.
00:23:44.000He's secured numerous most favored nation drug price deals with many more to come.
00:23:48.000As you know, the One Bay Beautiful bill, the Working Family Tax Cut, significantly expanded access to health savings accounts for those on Obamacare.
00:23:57.000Again, a Democrat written program and approved program, which has led to higher health care costs in this country.
00:24:04.000So it goes back to the issue of affordability.
00:24:07.000Democrats are now pretending they want a solution to this issue, but they created the problem.
00:24:12.000The president and Republicans are currently coming up with creative solutions and ideas to lower health care costs for the American people.
00:24:20.000Okay, 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.
00:24:27.000ABC's Mary Bruce pushed Caroline Levitt about all this.
00:24:30.000And this is a clever trap for Democrats.
00:24:31.000And it's why the Republican position initially with regard to all of these things is that you have to replace them.
00:25:09.000They passed it without a single Republican vote and then they ballooned it with these expensive COVID subsidies that completely distorted the health insurance market.
00:25:18.000And 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.
00:25:28.000And 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.
00:25:36.000Again, 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.
00:25:47.000That includes more deregulation and more health insurance options.
00:25:51.000That can include health savings accounts.
00:25:52.000It doesn't have to be limited to health savings accounts.
00:25:55.000There are many things that Avic Roy, for example, has discussed as a possibility in terms of lowering health insurance costs.
00:26:01.000You need more catastrophic health care plans that are available.
00:26:04.000In 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.
00:26:15.000Democrats, of course, are enjoying this.
00:26:19.000They're doing the meme where the guy shoots the guy on the couch and then says, who would have done this?
00:26:23.000Democrats created the problem, but apparently it's the Republicans' fault.
00:26:26.000Here's Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader.
00:26:30.000Republicans just blocked the Democrats' bill for a clean, simple extension of the ACA tax credits.
00:26:38.000The last chance they had to ensure people's premiums do not skyrocket in the coming months.
00:26:46.000Democrats did the work, but now Republicans chose the consequences.
00:26:51.000Now Republicans have all but guaranteed that tens of millions of people will see their premiums double or triple or more next year.
00:27:01.000Republicans now own America's health care crisis.
00:27:05.000And not only that, according to Senator John Osoff in Georgia, he says that senators will now decide if people live or die.
00:27:11.000By the way, this sort of language is not useful.
00:27:13.000Bernie Sanders has been doing it for years.
00:27:15.000The idea is that if you don't want his specific solution to American health care, that thousands will die.
00:27:23.000Whenever 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.
00:27:36.000And 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.
00:27:52.000This is one of the most consequential votes this Senate will take all year.
00:27:59.000By saying yay or nay to the clerk of the Senate later today, senators will decide whether people live or people die.
00:28:09.000Senators will decide whether Georgians and folks across the country are financially ruined or have a shot.
00:28:17.000Half a million Georgians, it's projected, will lose their coverage altogether.
00:28:23.000Now, again, this is an issue that Osoff is speaking up about because he sees political advantage.
00:28:27.000He is up for reelection in 2026 in Georgia, which is indeed a red state.
00:28:32.000There are two Georgia Republicans who are seeking to run against him.
00:28:36.000One of them is U.S. Representative Mike Collins.
00:28:38.000The other is a former football coach named Derek Dooley.
00:28:41.000So it'll be interesting to see what the polling looks like for Osoff.
00:28:44.000That is the reason why he is jumping on this issue.
00:28:47.000Speaker 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.
00:28:59.000It's to reduce healthcare costs across the board.
00:29:02.000We're working on a panic legislation that will reduce premiums for all Americans, not just 7% of them.
00:29:09.000And I've been talking to every one of these colleagues in the tough districts about that.
00:29:15.000Okay, 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.
00:29:26.000And the same thing is true in the Senate.
00:29:29.000And we are seeing this across the country.
00:29:31.000Presidents in their second term rarely have coattails for the rest of their party.
00:29:35.000And 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.
00:29:44.000Alrighty, coming up, the Indiana GOP bucks President Trump.
00:30:49.000So in Indiana, there is, in fact, a Republican state legislature.
00:30:53.000Nonetheless, Indiana rejected a plan to congressionally redistrict.
00:30:59.000Right now, there are seven congressional districts in Indiana that are Republican and two that are Democrat.
00:31:03.000President Trump wanted Indiana's state legislature to redistrict, thus creating nine seats for Republicans as opposed to seven.
00:31:10.000Nonetheless, 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.
00:31:20.000The state senate denied the new map by a vote of 31 to 19.
00:31:23.00021 senators from the Republican majority and all 10 Senate Democrats voted down the proposal.
00:31:30.000Texas, of course, is going along with President Trump.
00:31:34.000But Republican state Senator Greg Good, who voted against the new map, said, Friends, we're better than this.
00:32:20.000These are the stakes, and every no vote will be to blame.
00:32:22.000President 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.
00:32:30.000Now, again, it's unclear to me that that actually is something that President Trump threatened.
00:32:36.000Threatening, 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.
00:32:47.000It's one thing to pressure state legislatures to do things.
00:32:50.000It'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.
00:33:00.000President Trump, of course, was duly angry.
00:33:03.000He said, listen, we just lost two seats in Indiana.
00:33:07.000But 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.
00:33:59.000I'll certainly support anybody that wants to go against it.
00:34:03.000Now, 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.
00:34:22.000They cited huge expenses in ensuring voter registration systems would be updated.
00:34:27.000And again, this is a mid-decade redistricting.
00:34:31.000So 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.
00:34:44.000And 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.
00:34:50.000Because if those coatels do not exist, you're not going to get legislators to vote for your more controversial agenda items.
00:34:55.000Meanwhile, by the way, I will say that President Trump did do something that I think is really good yesterday if it's effective.
00:35:00.000He signed an executive order to curtail state AI laws, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:35:04.000The 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.
00:35:12.000There have been over a thousand AI bills proposed at the state level.
00:35:15.000Congressional 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.
00:35:26.000And one of the goals here is to ensure that AI companies are not going to be regulated to death.
00:35:33.000So, again, that is a good thing that President Trump is trying to do.
00:35:36.000Whether it's going to hold up legally in court is another question.
00:35:40.000Well, meanwhile, the president does have more successful parts of his administration, at least in terms of polling.
00:35:46.000The most successful part continues to be his immigration enforcement regime.
00:35:50.000Caroline Lovitt over at the White House, she pointed out yesterday that the apprehensions on the border are at historic lows.
00:35:56.000And that, of course, is because the administration has made clear: if you show up, we're turning you away.
00:35:59.000It turns out that all the Biden lies about how they needed additional legislation to shut down illegal immigration, that was not true.
00:36:06.000Here's Caroline Levitt at the White House yesterday.
00:36:08.000At 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.
00:36:17.000Again, 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.
00:36:27.000Okay, so she was right about all that.
00:36:29.000Yesterday, it was kind of amazing how Democrats continue to take the wrong side of this issue.
00:36:33.000So, 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.
00:36:48.000He asked Christy Noam about whether there were veterans and military families facing removal or prolonged detention, and Noam said no veterans had been deported.
00:36:56.000Magziner then pulled up one veteran, Seijun Park, over Zoom.
00:37:00.000Well, there's only one problem: that person was not deported.
00:37:03.000In June, this person was a green card holder who had drug possession charges and failure to appear in court.
00:37:11.000And he was issued a removal order because of the drug possession charges and failure to appear in court.
00:38:21.000And 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.
00:38:37.000She, of course, agrees that asylum is a legal pathway to gain citizenship.
00:38:42.000But 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.
00:39:00.000The 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.
00:39:10.000Madam Secretary, you and the gentleman from CTNCTC reference the unfortunate accident that occurred with the National Guardsman being killed.
00:39:24.000You think that was an unfortunate accident?
00:39:40.000Well, meanwhile, on foreign policy, things are getting spicy.
00:39:43.000So the president of the United States has now authorized more seizures of tankers, apparently.
00:39:49.000According 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.
00:39:58.000It raises an existential crisis for a regime that runs on oil revenue.
00:40:02.000While 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.
00:40:10.000Crude sales have long represented more than 90% of Venezuela's export income.
00:40:16.000And close Maduro allies have faced accusations of skimming from billions in additional oil revenues.
00:40:21.000More 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.
00:40:34.000Apparently, the tanker that was seized was carrying roughly $80 million worth of oil.
00:40:39.000Equivalent to 5% of what Venezuela spends monthly on imported goods, raising the prospects of shortages as well.
00:40:46.000Because if they don't export the oil, then they don't have money to buy things.
00:40:52.000U.S. officials said on Wednesday there would be more ship seizures.
00:40:57.000President Trump has also been hitting Venezuela with sanctions.
00:41:01.000Yesterday, 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.
00:41:12.000Scott 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.
00:41:21.000Three of the people sanctioned have been on the U.S. radar.
00:41:28.000Some of them are narcotics traffickers, allegedly.
00:41:32.000Two were known as the Narco nephews after they were arrested in Haiti and convicted in the United States in 2016.
00:41:38.000President Biden granted them clemency in October 2022 in a prisoner swap.
00:41:44.000The third nephew is tied to the state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, and was sanctioned by Treasury in 2017.
00:41:52.000Again, Joe Biden removed him from the sanctions list.
00:41:54.000And what a great president Joe Biden was.
00:42:33.000I mean, that, of course, is exactly, exactly right.
00:42:37.000Now, 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.
00:42:48.000It is very difficult to suss out the foreign policy of the administration on sort of a broad level.
00:42:54.000It 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.
00:43:08.000That is the sort of peace-through-strength model.
00:43:10.000However, 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.
00:44:09.000Okay, but the question is whether any of that is going to be real, because again, these countries have their own separate interests.
00:44:15.000Whenever 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.
00:44:25.000Russia 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.
00:44:36.000Again, 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.
00:44:45.000Alexander Dugan, often known as Putin's brain, has talked openly about this for years and years and years.
00:44:51.000And we've talked extensively on the show about that philosophy.
00:44:55.000China itself believes that if it is not growing in geopolitical power and might, then it is losing and it is failing.
00:45:02.000And 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.
00:45:12.000This is why, for example, I think that it is wrongheaded to give any sort of technological leg up to the Chinese.
00:45:20.000The move by the administration to allow the selling of NVIDIA chips to the Chinese seems to be to be a mistake.
00:45:27.000And 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.
00:45:32.000We're going to remain well ahead of them and then they won't build their own tech stack.
00:45:36.000The 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.
00:46:28.000When 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.
00:46:35.000Where are the concessions from the Russians?
00:46:38.000This war has been going on for three years at this point.
00:46:42.000We 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.
00:46:50.000According to Politico, Ukraine's latest peace plan proposes a demilitarized free economic zone in the Donbass region where American business interests could operate.
00:46:58.000That's an attempt to bring President Trump on board.
00:47:01.000President Trump is aware of the latest 20-point plan Ukraine sent to the White House on Wednesday.
00:47:06.000Ukrainian 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.
00:47:18.000That, 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.
00:47:27.000Zelensky noted that Ukraine would only withdraw its forces after receiving meaningful security guarantees from allies against future aggression from Moscow.
00:47:37.000If the United States keeps pushing Ukraine, keeps pushing and pushing and pushing Ukraine to make concessions.
00:47:42.000Why would the Ukrainians believe that if they make the concessions, the United States will stand by their side if the Russians attack?
00:47:49.000If 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?
00:48:03.000It doesn't feel like this administration would.
00:48:07.000It feels like they're looking for a way out.
00:48:08.000And that is something that Putin, I think, has honed in on.
00:48:12.000Ursula 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.
00:48:24.000We'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.
00:48:31.000And then the next invasion came in 2022.
00:48:33.000Security guarantees play an enormous role.
00:48:36.000Now, 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.
00:48:44.000It's not an element of the United States geographically.
00:48:48.000In order for that to happen, however, Europe is going to have to reshape itself in a far more beneficial direction.
00:48:54.000And that is not relegated to Europe's take on immigration.
00:48:56.000The 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.
00:49:05.000If it were possible for him to be 150% right, statistically, he would be 150% right.
00:49:09.000The European immigration policy has been a full-scale disaster.
00:49:13.000But as the Wall Street Journal points out, there is another problem.
00:49:17.000The problem is economic stagnation in the EU.
00:49:21.000European voters have over and over and over again granted their governments vast powers for welfare state redistributionism, and it has hampered economic growth dramatically.
00:49:31.000According 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%.
00:49:48.000Gigantic 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.
00:50:01.000That number is 27% in the United States, which is why we have a robust economy.
00:50:07.000So that means that if the United States wishes for Europe to pursue better policy, that can't just be immigration policy or military spending.
00:50:14.000It has to be robust economic policy that very few people in Europe are actually pushing for.
00:50:20.000The far-right parties in Europe typically are kind of socialistic in their own economic autarkism.
00:50:26.000And that's something the United States really should be pushing back against.
00:50:29.000If Europe hopes to survive and thrive, it's going to, at some point, need to deregulate in massive ways.
00:50:35.000It's going to need to take that welfare state and put it off to the side.
00:50:38.000And 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.
00:50:50.000Obviously, Republicans are facing challenges across the country.
00:50:54.000There's some early bellwethers for 2026 that don't look great.
00:50:56.000One 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.
00:51:07.000Mayor Suarez, thanks so much for taking the time.
00:51:48.000But 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.
00:52:34.000And 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?
00:52:43.000So you have Democrats are number one, MPAs are number two, and Republicans are number three.
00:52:48.000It's not a huge margin, but it's a big enough market.
00:52:50.000You know, it's significant enough that if you run a strictly partisan race, you're probably going to lose, right?
00:52:58.000And 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?
00:53:06.000You got to like have registration numbers that will support running a purely partisan race.
00:53:46.000That is disturbing at a very visceral level for me as a conservative Republican and Cuban, right?
00:53:54.000It'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.
00:54:06.000So it is extremely, extremely disturbing.
00:54:09.000And I think it highlights a broader problem.
00:54:11.000And the problem is that, you know, socialism is the easiest selling politics.
00:54:16.000You just take advantage of discontent, right?
00:54:18.000You sow discontent, even if you're succeeding, even if everybody's succeeding, right?
00:54:22.000Miami has the lowest unemployment in America under my watch, the highest median wage growth in America.
00:54:27.000We'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.
00:54:35.000I 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.
00:54:56.000Democrats are focusing on the negative.
00:54:58.000So the question, I guess, is you were able to win with this huge majority.
00:55:01.000Your predecessor was able to win with a huge majority.
00:55:03.000What did Republicans do wrong that they weren't able to run a bipartisan race?
00:55:08.000Because obviously Democrats have been moving further to the left, but that theoretically should open more room for Republicans to run in the center.
00:55:14.000So what can Republicans do better as they look forward, particularly, as you mentioned, in areas that are kind of purplish?
00:55:20.000Because you're right, Miami is not a heavy red area, traditionally speaking.
00:55:23.000It would be kind of middle of the purple.
00:55:26.000Well, I think you cannot run a strictly partisan race in a city like Miami, right?
00:55:30.000And I think that's essentially what the candidate did.
00:55:32.000He started getting major endorsements from Republican senators from Texas.
00:55:46.000And that kind of focus, his campaign was run by outsiders who obviously don't understand Miami.
00:55:51.000I think if you really look at the phenomenon of Trump, it's kitchen table issues, right?
00:55:57.000He was able to get working class people to vote Republican.
00:56:01.000And when I ran for president, briefly, right, my focus was three things: get more Hispanics because Hispanics are trending more conservative.
00:56:13.000You don't have to win Philadelphia, but if you do 10 points better in Philadelphia, you win Pennsylvania, right?
00:56:18.000And get young voters, which believe it or not, Biden had actually crushed Trump in young voters in the first go-around.
00:56:26.000So, 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.
00:56:38.000I don't think the candidate, the Republican candidate, did any of those things.
00:56:42.000He 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.
00:56:51.000He was DeSantis supported and DeSantis run in terms of his campaign team.
00:56:58.000And that's a very narrow issue in terms of the affordability conversation, right?
00:57:03.000That's just for homeowners who happen to have a homestead, right?
00:57:05.000And not have to pay taxes, which by the way, is great.
00:57:08.000I would love to, as a homeowner, I would love to not have to pay taxes on my homestead, right?
00:57:12.000But it's not going to solve the affordability issue.
00:57:14.000And 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.
00:57:21.000You know, I don't think that necessarily means that they have good ideas.
00:57:24.000I actually think their ideas are pretty terrible.
00:57:31.000So 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.
00:57:44.000So, 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.
00:57:55.000It seems like there's a significant drop-off in support among Hispanics for the Republican Party.
00:58:24.000And then, and then there's everything else, right?
00:58:26.000And I think there has to be a coherent conversation on this issue that's in the best interest of our country, right?
00:58:34.000My parents came here legally from Cuba at 12 and 7, right?
00:58:39.000A 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.
00:58:52.000So I think there has to be a broader conversation based on metrics that talk about what is best for the country.
00:58:59.000And what are the metrics that I would talk about?
00:59:04.000What are the workers that we need in particular industries?
00:59:06.000I mean, there's some industries that are going to propel the economy of the future.
00:59:08.000We need to make sure that we're competitive when it comes to that.
00:59:11.000We have a declining birth rate like a lot of major industrialized countries around the world.
00:59:16.000And 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.