As more Epstein files drop, some of the biggest conspiracy theorists are ensnared in the scandal itself. Plus, we get to Marjorie Taylor Greene rebelling against the President of the United States, and the stock market takes a tumble. What comes next?
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00:00:42.000Well, there's something very fishy about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
00:00:46.000And no, of course, I'm not talking about just the scandal itself, which, of course, remains incredibly fishy.
00:00:51.000We don't know where Jeffrey Epstein got his gigantic oodles of money in the first place.
00:00:56.000We don't know whom he was trafficking to, if anyone besides himself.
00:01:00.000We don't know a lot of things about Jeffrey Epstein.
00:01:03.000But what I mean here is that the response to Jeffrey Epstein has been quite fascinating.
00:01:06.000Many of the figures who have been largely associated with the question asking about Jeffrey Epstein, it turns out that some of them are, in fact, associates of Jeffrey Epstein.
00:01:15.000And this is where things start to get weird in conspiracy land because conspiracy land suggests that they're the people who are in on it, and then there are the people who are outside attempting to crack the code on the conspiracy.
00:01:26.000But when you are talking about a hoax, and here we're not saying that everything associated with Jeffrey Epstein is a hoax.
00:01:32.000I'm talking about the political op directed at President Trump specifically regarding Jeffrey Epstein.
00:01:38.000One of the ways you can tell when people are quote unquote in on the hoax is when they themselves were close associates of the person at issue.
00:01:45.000And now they've decided to try and weaponize that same person as a weapon against the people who they are targeting.
00:02:00.000So I've known Steve for 13 years or so.
00:02:02.000And, you know, I knew him back when he was at Breitbart and I was at Breitbart as well.
00:02:06.000And we'll say that he's not the easiest human being, to put it mildly.
00:02:11.000Steve Bannon has a long history of attempting to associate himself with more powerful people, glomming onto them, and then sort of making his way up the chain.
00:02:18.000So a bit of career background on Steve Bannon, at least politically.
00:02:22.000He made a documentary about then Congresswoman Michelle Bachman.
00:02:26.000After that documentary was made, he then used that as a sort of entree card to make a documentary about Sarah Palin.
00:02:32.000After that documentary was made, he then used that as an entree card to make a documentary about Andrew Breitbart.
00:02:37.000He used that documentary in order to become a prominent person at Breitbart itself when Andrew unfortunately passed away.
00:02:44.000And then he used that position in order to leverage a position for himself in the first Trump administration.
00:02:49.000He, of course, ended up being ousted by the first Trump administration.
00:02:52.000President Trump calls him sloppy Steve rather famously.
00:02:55.000He then went through a period in the wilderness where he was associating with some rather shady figures.
00:03:00.000He ended up doing a very short stint of jail time.
00:03:04.000And now, of course, he has his show, The War Room, where the media call him up routinely for quasi-leaks because I'm not sure how really empowered his access is to the administration, but they're constantly using him, the media, as a sort of window into the dark side of the Trump administration, which is, of course, something that Steve really loves.
00:03:22.000Now, the reason that Steve has become an issue is because Steve, along with many other people who are attempting to wrest control of the MAGA movement away from President Trump, their assumption is that President Trump is in the waning days of his political power, that President Trump is now close to being, if he is not already, a lame duck.
00:03:38.000And that means that the future of the Republican Party is going to be fought in an internasine war.
00:03:44.000And that's going to involve a war of all against all, people who have different perspectives on foreign policy, different perspectives on economics.
00:03:51.000And Steve believes, presumably, that he is going to have a heavy voice in deciding the future of the MAGA movement without President Trump.
00:04:04.000President Trump, as I have said before, is Swede generous.
00:04:07.000It is the president of the United States who decides the direction of MAGA.
00:04:11.000And every attempt, every attempt to intellectualize or philosophize President Trump, to turn his impulses, to turn his instincts into a coherent political program, those have all failed.
00:04:23.000Because again, the president holds a bunch of different conflicting thoughts at the same time.
00:04:27.000And then he tends to come down on the side of pragmatic populism.
00:04:31.000And by this, I mean that he will try things.
00:04:33.000And if they don't work, he will then move away from them.
00:04:37.000And so any attempt to peg President Trump to a quote-unquote MA ideology is destined to fail because President Trump could at one point articulate a version of MAGA in which support for Ukraine is bad.
00:04:49.000And then when Russia is intransigent, he could articulate a version of MAGA in which support for Ukraine is good, just to take an obvious example.
00:04:56.000He could do the same thing with support for particular business people.
00:05:00.000He can flip on a dime because President Trump, again, is not just the leader of MAGA.
00:05:06.000There is no MAGA aside from President Trump.
00:05:08.000He's very much like Barack Obama in this way.
00:05:10.000Barack Obama was able to kind of gloss over all of the various divisions inside the Democratic Party without necessarily a cohesive program.
00:05:17.000Now, Obama was much more intellectually consistent and ideological in his approach than Donald Trump has been.
00:05:24.000But all attempts to sort of boil Trump down into a philosophical or ideological package, which can then be transferred over to another candidate, whether that candidate is JD Vance or whether it is Ted Cruz or whether it is Steve Bannon or whether it is somebody else, that is bound to fail because President Trump is too big for that.
00:05:41.000You can't just take what he is, sort of shrink wrap it, put it in an ideological box, and then hand it over to the next guy.
00:05:50.000So one of the things that Steve Bannon has been trying to do for years is claim that he's sort of the intellectual mover and shaker behind MAGA, which of course is really silly.
00:05:58.000There is no shadow president to President Trump.
00:06:00.000There is no one who is defining his program except for President Trump.
00:06:04.000The reason I bring this up is because Steve Bannon, among many other people, being opposed to some elements of Trump's agenda and trying to run a sort of bizarre op inside the Republican Party to remove support from Trump and move it over to his version of MAGA, he, among other people, has been quite vocal about the so-called Epstein scandal.
00:06:26.000Well, it turns out, again, that so much of what is happening right now is just fibbery.
00:06:31.000According to the UK Guardian, hundreds of texts over almost a year show MAGA influencer Steve Bannon and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein workshopping legal and media strategies to protect Epstein from the legal and publicity quagmire that enveloped him in the last year of his life.
00:06:45.000The texts released by the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday show that as early as June 2018, the pair were devising responses to the gathering storm of public outrage about Epstein's criminal history, his favorable treatment by the justice system, and his friendships with powerful figures in business, politics, and academia.
00:07:13.000Okay, we're not talking about Donald Trump hobnobbing with Jeffrey Epstein in the late 90s.
00:07:18.000We're not talking about going to parties with Jeffrey Epstein at Mar-a-Lago in 2004.
00:07:24.000We are talking about 10 years after it was obvious to everyone that Jeffrey Epstein was, in fact, a pedophile.
00:07:31.000That 10 years after that, he was acting not just as a sort of friend, but as a confidant and as a PR advisor, which says something about somebody.
00:07:40.000If you are acting as a confidant and PR advisor to a convicted sex offender like Jeffrey Epstein, who is well known to be into underage girls, if that is, I don't know what that says about you or why you should have any level of authority in any future Republican Party.
00:07:58.000The texts released by the House Oversight Committee show as early as 2018 that they were devising responses to the gathering storm of public outrage about Epstein's criminal history, his favorable treatment by the justice system, and his friendships with powerful figures in business, politics, and academia.
00:08:13.000Bannon conspiratorially described the renewed scrutiny of Epstein as a sophisticated op.
00:08:17.000And over time, he counseled Epstein in his adversarial responses to media outlets, the justice system, and his victims.
00:08:24.000All the while, both men were also strategizing how best to promote Bannon's right-wing populist agenda and the political fortunes of its standard bearer, Donald Trump.
00:08:32.000Bannon's identity in the threads, according to The Guardian, cited in this reporting, is clear from contextual clues, including his documented activities at the time, details of his business and media pursuits, and other disclosures.
00:08:43.000In one document, the senator's phone number is not redacted.
00:08:45.000It's the same number linked to Bannon in a legal case against Trump advisor Roger Stone.
00:08:52.000The men were discussing Epstein's problems even before he came to broader public awareness as a notorious sex criminal without connections to the Trump administration.
00:09:00.000Bannon left the Trump White House in late summer 2017, and by 2018, he was hanging out and texting with Jeffrey Epstein about how to rehab Jeffrey Epstein.
00:09:08.000On June 22nd, 2018, days after Jeffrey Epstein had been the focus of an anti-Trump protest at a Trump speech, the men began discussing the scandal that was beginning to loom over Epstein.
00:09:17.000At first, they treated it as a publicity problem, with Bannon seeing it as an orchestrated campaign.
00:09:22.000Bannon asked Epstein, who is running this op on you?
00:09:47.000It's wild because I am the one able to take him down.
00:09:51.000In early February 2019, Bannon opened an exchange on the developing story by linking to an item at the controversial news site, Zero Hedge, that quoted then-Republican Senator Ben Sass on the matter.
00:10:01.000And he asked Bannon on advice for how to respond.
00:10:04.000Continue to ignore, attack, op-ed, not my skill set.
00:10:12.000Okay, so again, they were having these back and forth in which he was attempting to guide Epstein.
00:10:16.000And we know for a fact that there are hours and hours of tape between Epstein and Bannon that have not yet been released, which is strange, is it not?
00:10:25.000Bannon said, should it be an interview format interviewed by or just me speaking to the camera?
00:10:40.000It means that certain people are less trustworthy than others in political media.
00:10:45.000And the fact that Steve Bannon has spent, again, his entire career trying to find more powerful people to quote unquote advise and glom onto in order to advance his own agenda.
00:10:56.000And that didn't even stop at the doorway of Jeffrey Epstein.
00:10:59.000It says something about him and about his attempts to hijack the MAGA movement beyond President Trump.
00:11:05.000All righty, coming up more on the Epstein op.
00:11:08.000And it really is at this point an op led by many of the people who are literally involved with Jeffrey Epstein.
00:11:13.000Plus, we'll be joined by Scott Jennings, who has a brand new book out first.
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00:13:37.000So, here, for example, with Steve Bannon over the summer at TPUSA, when everybody else was also promoting these conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein, intelligence agencies, and all the, here's Jeffrey Epstein's friend and quasi-fixer Steve Bannon doing the exact same thing.
00:13:54.000Epstein is a key that picks the lock on so many things, not just individuals, but also institutions, intelligence institutions, foreign governments, and who is working with him on our intelligence apparatus and in our government.
00:14:10.000Now, in fact, that's not even restricted to Steve Bannon.
00:14:14.000We are now finding out, for example, that Stacey Plaskett, the U.S. Virgin Island non-voting delegate who's a Democrat, was messaging with Epstein in February 2019 while a hearing into Trump was ongoing.
00:14:25.000And she even asked Epstein for guidance in one message, according to the Washington Post.
00:14:29.000Her office confirmed to the paper that she had received texts from Epstein.
00:14:33.000Again, these sort of relationships that people had with Jeffrey Epstein, it's quite fascinating.
00:14:38.000He's on both sides of the aisle, obviously.
00:14:41.000And there is something dishonest about you having a close personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, and then turning around and spouting conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein that you could yourself easily weigh in on.
00:15:31.000Why doesn't he want them released when you don't want something like this released when even a whole lot of Republicans are calling for the release?
00:15:38.000His own party members, people ask the question: what's he hiding?
00:15:43.000Okay, but this raises a question for Democrats, which is what are Democrats hiding?
00:15:46.000So, one reporter asked, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who we'll get to in a minute, is going to face a primary challenger himself.
00:15:52.000The Democratic Party is coming apart at the seams.
00:15:55.000A reporter asked him, why exactly should Americans trust Democrats on Epstein when Democrats like Stacey Plaskett were texting Jeffrey Epstein?
00:16:05.000Why should Americans trust you and House Democrats on the Jeffrey Epstein files when one of your own, Congresswoman Plaskett, was found to be texting with Jeffrey Epstein during a hearing, getting information from him, using that in her questioning during a congressional hearing?
00:16:22.000And at one point, he tells her, good job.
00:16:24.000This is a bipartisan effort to make sure that consistent with what the survivors have requested, that this full and complete transparency in every single predator who may be in those Justice Department files doesn't escape accountability.
00:16:42.000Okay, so one of the things I noticed is you not answering the question, House Minority Leader, and the finger wagging about how you're full of transparency.
00:17:22.000So he then continued along these lines, the president.
00:17:25.000He said, you know, the reason why I don't want to talk about this?
00:17:27.000Because it's a distraction from the things that are going on in actual Americans' lives.
00:17:32.000All I want is I want for people to recognize the great job that I've done on pricing, on affordability, because we brought prices way down, but they're going way lower, on energy, on ending eight wars, and another one coming pretty soon, I believe.
00:17:49.000We've done a great job, and I hate to see that deflect from the great job we've done.
00:17:59.000So, you know, the president of the United States right there, again, he is not wrong, and he's also not wrong, that there is, in fact, a coalition of people who wish to take him down and degrade his presidency, and that spans from the left to the right.
00:18:12.000So, for example, Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, he's now claiming that Trump chickened out.
00:18:17.000Well, I mean, you can't really have it both ways here.
00:18:19.000Either President Trump desperately wanted to avoid transparency or he's perfectly willing to do transparency, but he's doing the thing you want, so you call him a chicken?
00:18:39.000Because as Democrats, we made clear from the very beginning, the survivors and the American people deserve full and complete transparency as it relates to the lives that were ruined by Jeffrey Epstein, who was a monster, and all of those folks who were dealing with him.
00:19:02.000Okay, so there he is saying Trump chickened out.
00:19:04.000Okay, so he's attacking Trump on Epstein.
00:19:08.000And the reason Thomas Massey is attacking Trump on Epstein is not because Thomas Massey is so deep in the weeds on Epstein and cares deeply about, I mean, he's right next to RoConna.
00:19:16.000RoConna, the Democratic congressman from California, who despises the president of the United States.
00:20:10.000There's a reason that CNN is now praising Marjorie Taylor Green.
00:20:12.000Marjorie Taylor Green was a joke and remains a joke today.
00:20:15.000The attempt to turn Marjorie Taylor Greene into some sort of honest, great intellect is like the perfect example of how strange new respect is earned simply by attacking President Trump.
00:21:00.000No one with half a brain believes this, but you're looking for a rationale for glazing Marjorie Taylor Greene because she opposes the president now.
00:21:09.000Jamie Raskin, who was a participant in the impeachment trial for President Trump on the Democratic side, Congressman from Maryland, says Marjorie Taylor Greene should join the Democratic Party now.
00:22:05.000I mean, I think he's wrong and I think his priorities are screwed up, but at least he'll say the quiet part out loud.
00:22:10.000All these other people like, ah, President Trump, people around Trump, somebody is manipulating the Epstein, somebody.
00:22:19.000Again, the same people who are fellow traveling with Steve Bannon, a literal advisor to Jeffrey Epstein, complaining about President Trump.
00:22:26.000I think maybe you guys have another agenda.
00:22:29.000Alrighty, coming up, we're going to be joined by Scott Jennings.
00:22:31.000Plus, we will talk about the AI bubble.
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00:24:47.000Joining me on the line is Scott Jennings.
00:24:49.000He, of course, is a senior political contributor at CNN, host of the Scott Jennings show on Salem Radio.
00:24:54.000And he's the author of the brand new book, A Revolution of Common Sense: How Donald Trump Stormed Washington and Fought for Western Civilization.
00:26:05.000Now, Scott, one of the things that I find fascinating about President Trump, and I've been talking about this a lot, is that when people say MAGA is an ideological program, that's not true.
00:26:13.000President Trump is MAGA, and he is unbelievably pragmatic.
00:26:16.000He tends to take the 70 position on pretty much every 70-30 issue.
00:26:20.000And what that means is that he ends up oddly being a moderate in a world of polarized politics.
00:26:25.000That's what happened in the last election cycle.
00:26:27.000While the media want to portray him as some sort of wild-eyed fanatic, the reality is that they are significantly more fanatical in their politics than President Trump is in his day-to-day politics.
00:26:36.000Yeah, look, he would describe his decision-making as just trying to take the common sense issue.
00:26:41.000Now, he would also say, and I've asked him before, do you consider yourself to be a conservative?
00:26:45.000And he said, yeah, but most of the time, conservative is common sense, but I'm trying to do the common sense thing on most issues.
00:26:51.000So in the book, I write about DEI issues.
00:26:53.000I write about his taking on the transgender cult out there.
00:26:57.000I write about the straws, the paper straws.
00:26:59.000I mean, I was in the Oval Office today.
00:27:12.000And, you know, the last four years under Biden, we were sort of all walking around being forced to accept things that we knew were nonsense, but everybody was too afraid, I guess, out in the institutional world to say it.
00:27:22.000Trump comes in and takes the wet blanket off of America.
00:27:24.000And part of his political magic is just saying what everyone else is already thinking, but they're too afraid to do it.
00:27:32.000You know, Scott, one of the things that's been very weird to watch is obviously we're now seeing people inside the Republican Party acting as though the president is a lame duck.
00:27:40.000He still has three years left of his actual presidency.
00:27:43.000But there is this bizarre attempt by some to wrest away what they think is quote unquote, the legacy of MAGA from President Trump, as though MAGA exists apart and aside from President Trump.
00:27:54.000Well, what I make of it is that the isolationists in the Republican Party, who have always wanted Trump to be a pure isolationist, but who are sorely disappointed in it, are trying to move away from him or trying to destabilize his presidency.
00:28:08.000I trace it all back to the decision to strike Iran.
00:28:11.000When that happened, you had a number of people who've been in his orbit, who've been claiming to be his supporters, who were urging him not to do it.
00:28:57.000He's the strongest political figure, the strongest party boss we've had in modern American politics, and that's not changed today.
00:29:06.000You know, one of the things that, again, is fascinating is the attempt to sidetrack him with things like the Epstein scandal, which supposedly is about President Trump.
00:29:15.000And again, it is such an obvious op by so many of his political opponents to elevate this.
00:29:21.000When the Biden administration had full access to all of these files for four years, if they wanted to release some bad information about President Trump from the files, there's no doubt that absolutely would have happened and that the president of the United States at the time, Joe Biden, would have actually had the power to do that.
00:29:34.000They had no scruples about his tax returns leaking into public view, for example.
00:29:38.000It is amazing to me that there are so many members on the Republican side of the aisle who really are attempting to undermine his presidency by focusing in on Epstein.
00:29:46.000And again, this idea that there's something deep and dark hiding in the Epstein files, and that's what President Trump is bothered about.
00:29:53.000He's been saying, and people I've talked to who are very close with him have been saying, no, the real reason he doesn't really want all that out there is not because he is anti-transparency.
00:30:01.000It's because he doesn't feel like talking about dumb crap in the middle of a presidency that is still very active.
00:30:48.000We've learned a Democrat member of Congress, Stacey Plaskett, was being programmed to say things in committee hearings by Jeffrey Epstein.
00:30:55.000We've learned that Larry Summers was soliciting dating advice from Jeffrey Epstein.
00:31:00.000He's now having to step back from public life.
00:31:02.000There may be a number of figures on the left here who get ensnared in embarrassing situations here or worse, but I don't think it's going to be Donald Trump at all.
00:31:11.000Well, Scott, having spent so much time with the president, what do you think his top priorities need to be in the run-up to the midterm elections?
00:31:16.000Obviously, affordability is on everybody's mind.
00:31:18.000He has spelled out a few kind of ideas that he's thrown out there.
00:31:22.000The truth is that some of this is just not in his hands because, you know, beyond things like not passing gigantic inflationary bills, there's not much that's in any president's hands, actually, with regard to the general overall global economy.
00:31:33.000What do you think the president needs to focus on?
00:31:35.000Well, I mean, look, the thing that dictates outcomes in elections is almost always the economy.
00:31:40.000And so, you know, to the extent that he's already put in motion his economic policies, you know, making permanent the tax cuts, deregulation, energy production, which by the way has lowered gas prices.
00:32:49.000You can't memory hole that four-year period where prices went to the moon.
00:32:53.000It's not like prices are going to go back to 2017 levels, but the rates of inflation here, I mean, it's laughable to hear a Democrat criticize him on grocery prices or anything else after what they did to the country.
00:33:04.000And I think reminding voters of that is a critical issue.
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00:35:02.000According to the Wall Street Journal, an intensifying sell-off across financial markets on Monday ensnared everything from gold to crypto to high-flying tech stocks, dragging the Dow Jones industrial average to its worst three-day stretch since President Trump's tariff turmoil in April.
00:35:16.000Investors in recent days have dumped assets in the lead up to key tests for whether the AI boom and economic growth that powered stocks to successive records in 2025 will continue into the new year.
00:35:25.000NVIDIA on Wednesday is set to report earnings in the latest snapshot for chip demand.
00:35:29.000September jobs data delayed during the government shutdown is also due out on Thursday.
00:35:34.000Monday's retreat came as Amazon is set to issue $15 billion in bonds, and it provided fresh evidence Wall Street is peeking under the hood of the expensive and sometimes circular deals underpinning one of the largest infrastructure buildouts in American history.
00:35:47.000Again, this is something that we've been talking about for a while.
00:35:50.000We talked a little bit last week about the circular deals that are now embedded in the economy, particularly with regard to the chip buildout.
00:35:59.000Warren Buffett's latest bet on a big tech firm wasn't enough to juice investors' optimism for other AI names.
00:36:04.000Berkshire Hathaway's multi-billion dollar purchase of Alphabet stock sent the Google parent 3.1% higher on Monday.
00:36:10.000Google, by the way, may be the only company that is in fairly good shape here.
00:36:14.000The rumors are that Gemini 3 is supposed to be unbelievable, which is their latest AI.
00:36:19.000With that said, even Google's Sindar PitchEye is saying that if the bubble bursts, it's going to hurt everybody.
00:36:25.000Given the potential of this technology, the excitement is very rational.
00:36:32.000It's also true when we go through these investment cycles, you know, there are moments we overshoot, right, collectively as an industry.
00:36:42.000We can look back at the internet right now.
00:36:44.000There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the internet was profound or did it drive a lot of impact.
00:36:53.000It's fundamentally changed how we work digitally as a society.
00:37:14.000Sam Altman of OpenAI, which is the company that may be the center of the bubble because OpenAI is privately traded.
00:37:21.000And so that means there are a lot of deals that are happening with OpenAI in which companies are essentially lending OpenAI money to buy chips on the other side, or they're investing in OpenAI.
00:37:31.000And then OpenAI is using that money in order to buy chips from NVIDIA.
00:37:35.000And then NVIDIA is lending more money to OpenAI and all the rest.
00:37:38.000Well, all the way back in August, he suggested that we may be in a bubble.
00:37:43.000Quote, when bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth.
00:37:46.000Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI?
00:37:54.000And again, that seems rational to me, but one of the key indicators that maybe we're in a bubble is that the institutional investors seem to be divesting themselves of stock in places like NVIDIA.
00:38:04.000That is true apparently for Peter Thiel report yesterday that Peter Thiel is dumping his stake in NVIDIA.
00:38:11.000Peter is, of course, an incredibly smart human being.
00:38:13.000And so you'd be well advised to follow his trading strategy rather than being the guy who's picking up the stock from Peter Thiel.
00:38:20.000Apparently, they sold off their entire stake in NVIDIA during the third quarter.
00:38:25.000Their fund sold around 537,000 shares in the AI chip frontrunner in the quarter.
00:38:30.000That stake would have been worth around $100 million.
00:38:33.000Now, again, that's not like a giant chunk of NVIDIA stock.
00:38:35.000NVIDIA is the highest valued company on planet Earth right now in the trillions of dollars, but it is an indicator.
00:38:41.000You sell when you think the market's high.
00:38:43.000You don't sell when you think it's going to keep going up.
00:38:46.000Meanwhile, over at Calci, one of our sponsors, the worries about the Federal Reserve deciding not to cut rates further, basically, I think there's enough liquidity in the economy.
00:38:57.000As I've been saying, I'm of the opinion the Fed is not going to cut rates in December because they're looking at this.
00:39:05.000There are not problems with obtaining liquidity.
00:39:07.000There's a problem of what to do with the liquidity.
00:39:10.000Right now, the Calci markets suggest 52% of people are saying that the Fed will maintain its current rate.
00:39:18.00049% of people are saying they will cut the rates.
00:39:21.000That is a dramatic jump from November 12th, when almost 75% of people were saying that they were going to cut the rates.
00:39:30.000And only a quarter of people were saying they weren't going to cut the rates.
00:39:32.000So, something is changing and something is changing pretty quickly here.
00:39:36.000Now, meanwhile, this is only exacerbating concerns about affordability because if people feel as though what's coming around the bend here is nothing good and they're already paying too much money, they're worried about what comes next.
00:39:47.000President Trump is out there touting his economic record yesterday.
00:39:51.000He was saying that the investments are coming in fast and furious.
00:39:54.000He did this at the McDonald's Impact Summit, where he opened, by the way, with a great joke about how a Frykook has become president because, of course, he had that very famous photo shoot where he was in the back room at a McDonald's cooking up the fries.
00:40:05.000Here he was yesterday talking about his economic strategy.
00:40:09.000We have over $17 trillion being invested in our country in nine months.
00:40:15.000It's now just about ready to crack 18.
00:40:18.000And by the end of one year, we will have about $20 to $21 trillion invested in our country.
00:40:25.000That's more by 10 times the highest amount ever invested in any country ever before.
00:40:40.000You can have a bunch of companies that come in and say they're going to put billions of dollars into the American economy and make big statements at the Oval Office about it.
00:40:48.000If that money never materializes or if it only materializes over the course of years, or as is the case, they're already planning to make those investments and now they're just announcing it publicly.
00:40:57.000That doesn't change the trajectory of the economy.
00:41:00.000The economy has worked better under President Trump than it did under Joe Biden for a few very simple reasons.
00:41:15.000Okay, the president was touting his tax cuts.
00:41:18.000The big problem with him touting the tax cuts is that, well, it's great that we maintained the same tax rates in the One Big Beautiful bill.
00:41:24.000That didn't fundamentally change the underlying substructure.
00:41:27.000There was uncertainty in the economy about whether taxes were going to go up.
00:41:31.000But once they just stayed where they were, that isn't actually quote unquote a tax break.
00:41:35.000It's a continuation of his very successful first-term policy in lowering taxes.
00:41:42.000While Democrats wanted to give Americans the largest tax hike in history in July, I proudly gave you the largest tax cuts in American history and signed the One Big Beautiful bill.
00:41:53.000I call it the Great Big Beautiful Bill into law.
00:41:56.000That includes no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors.
00:42:08.000It is a big deal, but does it fundamentally change the underlying systems in the United States to the extent that you're going to get more investment and more innovation, or does it just maintain what was?
00:42:18.000And at the same time that you're maintaining what was, which is a good thing, if you throw a bunch of sand into the gears with the tariffs, what you end up doing is creating confusion.
00:42:29.000And so people are taking the money that they have and they are stacking it.
00:42:31.000Again, it is not a coincidence that they are stacking their money, particularly in the markets at the upper end of the market in areas that are significantly less subject to tariff regulations like tech, like tech.
00:42:44.000The underlying fundamentals of companies that are, for example, manufacturing or service industry companies that require inputs from other countries, a lot of those companies don't know what's coming next.
00:42:57.000Now, President Trump is trying a bunch of short-term band-aids.
00:42:59.000This is always a bad indicator for an administration.
00:43:01.000When administrations have to rely upon short-term band-aids, they got a problem.
00:43:04.000Here's the president teasing the idea of giving $2,000 tariff rebates to people ahead of the midterms.
00:43:10.000Again, these sorts of short-term juiced stimulus packages, they tend to increase inflation and they don't really change people's overall lives for the better in any significant way in even the midterm.
00:43:25.000Hundreds of millions of dollars in tariff money.
00:43:27.000We're going to be issuing dividends later on, Somewhere prior to, you know, probably in the middle of next year, a little bit later than that, of thousands of dollars for individuals of moderate income, middle income.
00:43:43.000You know, we have a lot of money from tariffs.
00:43:46.000If we didn't have tariffs, this nation would be in serious trouble.
00:43:50.000Now, if you actually want to help Americans right now, particularly on, for example, student debt, where Americans took out hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, largely subsidized by the federal government, and now they can't pay it back.
00:44:01.000Joe Biden tried to do student debt relief.
00:44:04.000He tried to basically just say, you don't have to pay anything back from now on.
00:44:08.000It also creates an incentive trap, a disincentive for people to actually pay back their loans and all the rest.
00:44:17.000There has been some talk about shifting the burden of payments over to the colleges rather than to the taxpayer, basically saying that if people default, the colleges have to eat it if those colleges have been handing out crappy degrees, which, yeah, I'm kind of fond of that.
00:44:30.000I'd be interested in legislative solutions regarding that, at least on a going-forward basis.
00:44:36.000But the reality is that what the markets are looking for, as always, is simply some level of consistency, some level of consistency, some level of sustainability.
00:44:45.000And all these short-term band-aids are very unlikely to achieve that sort of thing.
00:44:49.000Meanwhile, President Trump can count on the Democrats continuing to be as crazy as humanly possible.
00:44:53.000Graham Plattner, who is the Nazi-tattooed candidate from Maine, who is essentially a cradle socialist, masquerading as a man of the people, as so many Democrats are.
00:45:08.000Here he was suggesting that if the Democrats gain control of government, they should pack the Supreme Court and change the systems of government.
00:45:15.000And the reason that Trump was elected is not just because of Trump.
00:45:17.000It's also because the Democrats have gone crazy.
00:45:21.000We're going to have to start treating the Supreme Court like the political action wing that it has become of conservative.
00:45:29.000It is not functioning as a constitutional body.
00:45:31.000And I firmly believe if we held Supreme Court justices to the same standard that we hold other federal judges, there's a compelling case for the impeachment and removal of at least two civilians of people.
00:45:44.000So, I mean, if they campaign on this, then Republicans actually do have a better shot in the midterms.
00:45:48.000The more crazy Democrats go, the more Republicans have a better shot.
00:45:52.000Speaking of which, Hakeem Jeffries is now apparently going to face a primary challenger.
00:45:55.000There's no one left enough for the Democratic Party at this point.
00:45:58.000According to Breitbart, a Brooklyn city councilman known for his ties to progressive movements has formally launched a campaign committee to challenge House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in the 2026 Democrat primary, mounting a rare intra-party bid against one of the highest-ranking Democrats in Congress.
00:46:12.000On Monday, November 17th, the FEC received a new statement of organization for a campaign committee titled Chi Osi for Congress.
00:46:19.000The filing confirms that Chi Ose, a 27-year-old Brooklyn councilman, intends to run in New York's 8th congressional district.
00:46:37.000Mamdani apparently discouraged OC from running.
00:46:40.000He's afraid that that's going to rip open the sort of gap that exists between DSA and the traditional Democratic Party.
00:46:49.000Apparently, again, he is an emissary of the radical left, and the radical left continues to eat the Democratic Party piecemeal.
00:46:57.000Meanwhile, mainstream Democrats are having some staffing problems.
00:47:01.000Apparently, Senator Tammy Duckworth's office, according to Breitbart, has now fired a staffer who was accused of pretending to be an attorney to free an illegal immigrant from ICE custody, according to a report.
00:47:10.000Fox News' Bill Malugan shared a letter that Duckworth directed at Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE.
00:47:16.000In that letter, Duckworth explained she was responding to Lyons' November 12th letter regarding interactions between her now former staffer and ICE officials.
00:47:24.000And she added that her office has terminated the employment of the staffer.
00:47:27.000But these are the kinds of people who are staffing up some of the congressional offices or people who masquerade as lawyers in order to apparently violate the law.
00:47:34.000Now, speaking of people, Democratic staffers violating the law, according to the New York Post, alleged Chinese mole, Linda Sun, brazenly forged then-Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul's signature in glowing missives sent to dignitaries from the Henan province in China, according to feds and documents presented at her bombshell trial.
00:47:51.000Jurors in Brooklyn federal court were shown copies of letters purportedly sent by Hochul on March 26th, 2018, inviting a six-member delegation from the province in central China to a meeting with then-Governor Andrew Cuomo.
00:48:03.000But the signatures were forged, apparently, by this person who was allegedly a Chinese spy.
00:48:10.000Sun was serving as Cuomo's director of Asian American Affairs and forged the governor's then-number two Hochul signature several times that year in an attempt to curry favor with Chinese officials.
00:48:27.000It's an unfortunate reality, but it is indeed a reality.
00:48:31.000And that spans apparently coast to coast from New York to California.
00:48:34.000Meanwhile, again, the question of which party is going to act in the interests of sanity remains an open one.
00:48:42.000So Democrats continue to fail to acknowledge that their radical wing is going to hurt them.
00:48:48.000Bill Maher had an interesting episode of Club Random with Patton Oswald, the comedian, and the voice of the rat from Ratatouille about the fact on left-wing extremism.
00:50:27.000So don't tell me that this power of the rotten dog is ready for a black woman.
00:50:33.000Don't tell me this country is ready for a woman.
00:50:37.000I mean, one of the things here, it's just incredible.
00:50:40.000Democrats are going to continue to label the American people racist and sexist and all the rest, even though President Trump won huge numbers of women, huge numbers of minorities.
00:50:50.000Now, that doesn't mean those people are going to stay in the Republican camp forever.
00:50:53.000And this is the problem for Republicans.
00:50:55.000When you look at the future, when you look at 2028, the question is not who can maintain Trump's coalition.
00:51:00.000Every politician must have their own coalition.
00:51:04.000No one is going to inherit all of Trump's voters.
00:51:06.000They'll inherit a large portion of Trump's voters if they're Republican, but not all of them.
00:51:11.000And you need more votes than President Trump won in this last election to win the next election because the voter base grows in every single election by a few million votes.
00:51:19.000And so the question is who can expand the coalition and how.
00:51:23.000That is the main thing that Republicans should be focused on when it comes to 2028 candidacies.
00:51:34.000One bad indicator for Republicans, Harry Enton is pointing out that President Trump's poll numbers among Latinos have taken a serious nosedive.
00:51:42.000That is largely because of the coverage around immigration.
00:51:46.000Again, when the president said deport all the illegal immigrants, I never thought that he meant that literally.
00:51:52.000I don't think anyone thought that he meant that literally because it was never going to happen.
00:51:55.000We weren't going to take 15 to 20 million illegal immigrants and simply deport them wholesale.
00:52:00.000What President Trump did that's popular when you break down his actual immigration policy, which is still one of his more popular policies.
00:52:07.000When you break down what he's actually doing, it's popular, but that's not the headline.
00:52:12.000Well, when we talk about winning the presidency in 2028, we should look back for a moment at how Republicans have done with the Latino-Hispanic vote.
00:52:20.000So I asked our sponsors a comment, a new web browser by Perplexity, to list the share of the Hispanic Latino vote won by each Republican presidential candidate since 1980.
00:52:28.000It was based on exit poll and major media data.
00:52:30.000Reagan won 37% in 1980 and 34% in 1984.
00:52:35.000Now, again, it was easier to win with those percentages when the country was significantly less Hispanic Latino.
00:52:40.000The percentage that you need to win of that vote in order to win the presidency has gone up because there are more Hispanic and Latino voters as a percentage of the population now than there were in 1980.
00:53:22.000And in 2024, he won somewhere between 42 and 46% and he won.
00:53:26.000Okay, so if you were to set some sort of benchmark here that doesn't really include the kind of flukey wins that Republicans achieved, 2000 and 2016 were both unbelievably close elections.
00:53:37.000Republicans ended up winning, but not very handily.
00:53:41.000And they clocked in somewhere between 32 and 28%, somewhere in that neighborhood.
00:53:47.000If Republicans wish to win the presidency and they wish to do so relatively handily, they need to win at a minimum 37 to 40% of the Hispanic vote.
00:54:00.000It seems to me that that is pretty clear, probably higher.
00:54:03.000And so if Republicans start losing those votes in massive numbers, because Democrats stop being quite so crazy on the social issues and they back off some of their nuttier positions on crime and they stop doing the DEI kind of nonsense with regard to racial set-asides and trans and BLM, if Democrats move back toward normality, they will win a larger share of the Latino-Hispanic vote.
00:54:25.000And Republicans are going to have to present something to Latinos and Hispanics in order to win.
00:54:29.000And again, that doesn't mean going soft on immigration.
00:54:31.000It just means actually enforcing the parts of immigration law that are the most popular to enforce.
00:54:36.000So right now, what he has done is he has shut the southern border, totally popular.
00:54:39.000There are very few people who object to this, including Democrats.
00:54:42.000And then there's deporting criminal illegal immigrants.
00:54:44.000Again, very few people object to that.
00:54:46.000And then there are the sort of large-scale raids that are making a lot of press right now.
00:54:50.000And that apparently is alienating people.
00:54:52.000Here's Harry Enton explaining from CNN.
00:55:39.000And so if we are talking about the president's plummeting poll numbers with Latinos, one of the things that Republicans need to be pointing to again and again and again is that Democrats are just against deporting even criminal, illegal immigrants.
00:55:51.000So North Carolina governor Josh Stein, who is very upset that the ICE agents are working in Charlotte, he's out there claiming the agents are targeting and racially profiling.
00:56:02.000We've seen masked, heavily armed agents in paramilitary garb driving unmarked cars, targeting American citizens based on their skin color, racially profiling and picking up random people in parking lots and off of our sidewalks, going after landscapers simply decorating a Christmas tree in someone's front yard.
00:56:24.000Okay, this right here is going to be the Democrat campaign.
00:56:26.000It's incumbent on President Trump and the administration to continue to show the faces of the criminal illegal immigrants that they are arresting and to publicize those extremely heavily.
00:56:38.000Everybody with any shred of common sense knows that that's a good idea, including, by the way, the UK.
00:56:44.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the UK government on Monday announced an overhaul of its immigration policy to deter asylum seekers from arriving on British shores, the latest European nation to tighten rules in response to growing dissatisfaction from voters at levels of illegal immigration.
00:56:57.000The Labor government of Prime Minister Kirstarmer announced a suite of policies, including changing laws to make it easier to expel migrants, quadrupling the length of time they have to wait to become permanent residents to 20 years and regularly reviewing whether their home countries have become safer and can take them back.
00:57:12.000Britain is also threatening countries, mainly in Africa, with restricting visas unless they accept illegal migrants and criminals back into their countries.
00:57:19.000So even Britain is now adopting the immigration policies of the president of the United States, which makes perfect sense because those are practical policies.
00:57:28.000That's the stuff that the Trump administration needs to be focusing on.
00:57:32.000And they can't allow the narrative to get away from them with, you know, colorful images about the suffering of Abuela being arrested in front of the Christmas tree.
00:57:42.000Alrighty, coming up, we'll get to the latest in the Middle East, a major move by the Trump administration with the acquiescence of the United Nations, actually.
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