The fallout continues from President Trump's State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, and it s getting worse than it was supposed to be. The Daily Wire's Peter Bergen and Mary Margaret Olhan break down what they saw in the aftermath of the speech.
00:00:00.000Well, folks, controversy over Doge, turmoil over the economy, new movement on Ukraine, a lot going on.
00:00:06.000As always, if you're not a Daily Wire Plus member, now would be the time to join the fight.
00:00:09.000Get exclusive breaking stories from our investigative journalism team, the stories the mainstream media will not cover.
00:00:14.000Enjoy ad-free, uncensored Daily Wire shows, plus live chat in the app with other members, and yes, even moi.
00:00:19.000Access exclusive Daily Wire documentaries, movies, and series.
00:00:22.000Stay ahead with breaking news and instant reactions.
00:00:24.000Be the first to know what's happening at The Daily Wire.
00:00:26.000Head on over to dailywire.com right now and become So the fallout continues from President Trump's address to a joint session of Congress the other night.
00:00:35.000Again, I was there and it was an amazing experience.
00:00:37.000The enthusiasm in the room from the Republicans was off the charts and the radical depression into which Democrats have sunk is quite real.
00:00:45.000They are so disorganized, so unable to come to any sort of answer for President Trump's steamroller and sort of juggernaut of an early administration that it felt disorganized.
00:00:57.000It felt as though a bunch of spoiled college students couldn't get it together.
00:01:01.000And instead, they decided to sit on their hands.
00:01:03.000And so it was a big optic win for President Trump, which he is going to need because we are now about to enter the most tumultuous period of President Trump's presidency.
00:01:11.000I say most tumultuous because the first month, the president has a lot of political capital to spend.
00:02:06.000And I hope he got his cowboy hat because I bought him a brown one from Texas.
00:02:11.000But I'm not sure if they got it out the thing that were to check it because the dog had to sniff it and stuff like that.
00:02:18.000So, again, this is a very big win for President Trump.
00:02:21.000Not only that, it was a big loss for the Democrats.
00:02:23.000So Caroline Levitt, the excellent White House press secretary, in the White House press room yesterday, she trashed the Democrats over their reactions to the State of the Union.
00:02:32.000The only people you can clap for are the Ukrainians, but like literally every other thing.
00:02:37.000Cancer-ridden children, victims of illegal immigrant crime, girls who've been hit in the face and suffered brain damage because a man hit a volleyball.
00:03:00.000The Daily Wire was founded 10 years ago by Ben Shapiro.
00:03:04.000The Daily Wire now has over 1 million paid subscribers, a monthly network reach of 138 million, and has evolved into a leading conservative multimedia giant.
00:03:14.000They are now the fifth largest podcast network in the world, and home to some of the top-ranked shows.
00:03:19.000With that, I will take your questions, and Mary, Margaret, why don't you kick us off?
00:03:25.000So I have two questions, if that's okay.
00:03:27.000The first on last night, and the second on May.
00:03:29.000You talked about behavior from Democrat lawmakers, a lot of disruptions, and I just wanted to kind of go back to that.
00:03:37.000We saw Democrat lawmakers not stand for Lake and Riley, for Peyton McNabb, for the son of a slain police officer and 13-year-old cancer survivor.
00:03:45.000What are the optics of that nationally, just in terms of not just the people who were in the room last night, but across the nation?
00:03:52.000And also, was President Trump expecting this type of behavior when he was crafting his speech?
00:03:57.000So I gave a quote to one of the media outlets in this room yesterday that Democrats behaving like children would be the least surprising thing of the night.
00:04:04.000And unfortunately, that quote did turn out to be true.
00:04:07.000I think the president and everyone, frankly, was surprised by the Democrats refusing to stand for not the president's policies, because frankly, we expected that, but for the everyday Americans who President Trump was shining a light on their stories.
00:04:21.000Mark Fogle, for instance, an American school teacher who was detained by the Russians.
00:04:58.000It is a beautiful day at the White House today.
00:05:00.000And yes, I was in the new media seat in the briefing room yesterday and got not just one, actually, but two questions from there.
00:05:06.000And for the people in the audience who might not understand what that means, the briefing room is full of seats, but most of them are occupied by legacy media outlets.
00:05:13.000And a couple weeks ago, Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt announced that...
00:05:17.000Some reporters who had been starting to cover the White House recently, including myself, would have access to the quote-unquote new media seat, which is to the left of the podium, and it's usually occupied by her staff.
00:05:28.000But it's right up there by the front row where a bunch of the most prominent White House reporters are, so it gives you really good access.
00:05:34.000So I was excited to be there yesterday, excited to hear Caroline tell the room, and the whole nation actually, how much...
00:05:41.000Influence and how big the Daily Wire has become, because we are one of the most leading conservative news outlets in the world, not just the nation.
00:05:51.000I asked her about the disruptive behavior from Democrats yesterday, a few days ago actually, at the joint address that President Trump delivered.
00:05:58.000And I also asked her about what's going on in Maine, where the governor is refusing to comply with Donald Trump's executive orders.
00:06:07.000And she did give cogent answers to both.
00:06:09.000She's very, very good at her job, obviously.
00:06:12.000And what has been the mood around the White House surrounding President Trump's speech?
00:06:16.000I mean, I actually was at the White House kind of walking around simultaneously yesterday with Matt Walsh.
00:06:20.000We got to visit and hang out in the White House comms office a little bit.
00:06:23.000People seem pretty high about President Trump's speech as well.
00:07:39.000I was able to travel on Air Force One last weekend.
00:07:42.000As part of the travel pool and what that means is I was part of a group of reporters who went on Air Force One and kind of tracked the president's movements over the weekend.
00:07:51.000Now he went golfing at Trump International Golf Course in Palm Beach on both Saturday and Sunday.
00:07:56.000He was meeting with prominent people including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his wife.
00:08:01.000He had lunch with them and golfed with them.
00:08:03.000And I'm told he was actually doing some speech prep for the Joint Address.
00:08:06.000So we weren't able to ask him questions, but that proximity is still really important.
00:08:11.000And one thing that I thought was super interesting was that when we got on the plane, we saw all these massive boxes being loaded onto Air Force One.
00:08:18.000And it was later revealed to us by Stephen Chung, who's one of Trump's advisors, that those boxes were full of the president's personal property that had been taken from him by the FBI during the Mar-a-Lago raid.
00:08:29.000So they were loaded onto Air Force One and they traveled with us back to Palm Beach.
00:08:33.000And we were told that these were personal items.
00:09:02.000Again, gigantic failure by Democrats, and President Trump did something quite brilliant in the speech.
00:09:06.000I talked to many people in the White House yesterday, and they said that the most brilliant thing in the speech, which was President Trump deliberately calling out the Democrats and saying, they won't clap for anything I'm about to say.
00:09:15.000It put them in such a difficult position because then if they clapped for what he was saying, they might prove him wrong, but they'd be clapping for what he said.
00:09:22.000And if they didn't clap for what he was saying, then they look like jackass because many of the things that he was saying were totally unifying and apolitical.
00:09:28.000Like, for example, renaming a national park after a 12-year-old who was murdered by illegal immigrants.
00:09:33.000Like, how exactly is that something you don't clap for?
00:09:36.000How do you not clap for the kid getting into West Point?
00:09:38.000These are things that happened in the speech, and Democrats couldn't clap because Trump had trapped them between a rock and a hard place.
00:09:43.000That was an excellent piece of strategy by President Trump.
00:09:46.000Again, he actually thought of that and put it in the speech himself, apparently.
00:09:50.000Democrats, the smarter ones, understand that they are wrong-footed.
00:09:54.000David Axelrod, who, of course, was the top advisor to Barack Obama when he was running for president in 2008, ripped into the Democrats for their optic failures.
00:10:23.000I will say, I thought Democrats, I think there were times when they should have risen.
00:10:27.000I think what Al Green did was despicable.
00:10:31.000Okay, so, again, Axelrod is living in the world of reality, but many Democrats are not.
00:10:36.000Smart Democrats are going to have to start living in the world of reality if they actually wish to win back the presidency or the Congress or the Senate of the United States.
00:10:44.000Top Senate Democrats, this would be Blumenthal, Dick Durbin, Cory Booker, even they were saying, yeah, our behavior in there was not particularly good.
00:10:52.000We need to start actually offering some solutions here instead of just holding bingo signs or Brazilian steakhouse signs to bring more steak.
00:11:01.000I wouldn't have necessarily done all the things that were done, but I understand the emotion.
00:11:09.000He's offering showmanship and bluster and bullying.
00:11:13.000We need to provide real solutions and avoid taking a bait.
00:11:25.000Look, I believe firmly that that should be a room of decorum.
00:11:31.000These are Democrats who at least are smart enough to read the tea leaves a little bit.
00:11:34.000And then there are the Democrats who, of course, are not.
00:11:36.000Like, for example, Democratic Representative Latifah Simon from California who claimed that Al Green, he's the 77-year-old gentleman who rose to scream at President Trump about Medicaid while shaking his cane at him and then was removed by the sergeant-at-arms in a bizarre move.
00:11:51.000Here is a congresswoman suggesting that the reason Al Green was removed was, wait for it, wait for it.
00:11:56.000It wasn't because he was yelling at Trump for, like, solidly minutes on end.
00:12:26.000I was watching something in a history class of racists yelling at an elderly black man challenging the president of the United States not to cut medical care for the sick.
00:12:41.000Okay, these folks are so off their rocker.
00:12:44.000And they're off their rocker on the easiest issues in the world.
00:12:47.000I mentioned yesterday that the most obvious issue Democrats should clearly drop just for pragmatic reasons.
00:12:53.000I mean, for moral reasons they should because it's absolute insanity and idiocy.
00:12:56.000But for pragmatic reasons, they also should, because most Americans recognize that it's idiocy, is the boys-can-be-girls routine.
00:13:01.000But it was just a couple of days ago where Republicans pushed a bill to bar transgender women and girls, meaning like boys and men, from school sports teams designated for female students.
00:13:14.000The measure stalled in the Senate on a party-line 51-45 vote.
00:13:18.000Every single Democrat in the Senate voted against that bill.
00:13:27.000Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said, quote, what Republicans are doing today is inventing a problem to stir up a culture war and divide people against each other and distract people from what they're actually doing.
00:13:35.000And then he said the bill was, quote, unquote, totally irrelevant to 99.9% of all people across the country.
00:13:40.000Well, if it's irrelevant, then why don't you just vote in favor of it?
00:13:52.000But there were two big issues in the last election cycle where they just looked befuddlingly insane.
00:13:56.000They're ones that are clearly just political games that are bad for the country, like leaving the border open or blowing money into an inflationary economy.
00:14:05.000And then there's stuff that's just bleep lunacy, like bad bleep lunacy.
00:14:10.000Those are things like boys are girls and also maybe Hamas isn't that bad.
00:14:13.000Those are like things where people look at them and they go, you must be out of your mind, like totally crazy.
00:14:18.000And Democrats keep doubling down on the crazy.
00:14:20.000They're going to have to recover some semblance of sanity if they wish to move forward.
00:14:25.000Now, meanwhile, the president of the United States has planned to cut into USAID spending.
00:14:32.000Doge basically wiped out about $50 billion in USAID spending, saying that this does not comport with American standards of foreign policy.
00:14:40.000And so a temporary federal freeze, an impoundment was essentially put on those funds.
00:14:45.000And a district court judge then put a freeze on the freeze.
00:14:48.000And said, no, no, no, the money has to go out the door.
00:14:50.000And this raises a very serious constitutional issue, as we've discussed.
00:14:54.000That constitutional issue is whether a district court judge has the capacity to simply shut down a presidential nationwide action.
00:15:00.000Can one low-level district court judge actually do that?
00:15:03.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
00:17:06.000They're breathable, they're comfortable, and the best part, they are woven with the finest 100% organic cotton on earth, crafted by artisans who earn the pay and respect they deserve.
00:17:13.000So, not only do you sleep better, you can feel good about your purchase as well.
00:17:16.000Now would be your chance to change the way you sleep with Bowl& Branch.
00:17:19.000Get 15% off, plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bowlandbranch.com slash ben.
00:17:25.000That's Bowl& Branch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D. Well, yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States, on a 5-4 vote, essentially remanded the case back to the district court and said we need clarification as to why and how you are actually doing this.
00:17:48.000So, according to the Supreme Court majority opinion, it was a 5-4 decision that was joined on the right side of the aisle.
00:17:56.000By Justices Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett.
00:18:01.000This order essentially said that the District Court for the District of Columbia had issued a temporary restraining order enjoining the government from enforcing directives pausing disbursements of USAID assistance funds.
00:18:13.000The present application did not challenge the government's obligation to follow that order.
00:18:17.000The District Court ordered the government to issue payments for a portion of the paused disbursements, those owed for work already completed.
00:18:24.000So this doesn't apply, by the way, to forward-looking monies.
00:18:27.000This is to, like, there was an invoice because the work was already done.
00:18:30.000Does the federal government have to pay the bill?
00:18:32.000The chief justice entered an administrative stay shortly before the 1159 deadline and then referred the application to the court.
00:18:40.000But when the application was denied, it doesn't mean that's the end of the story.
00:18:43.000The district court needs to now clarify what obligations the government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order.
00:18:50.000With due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timeline.
00:18:52.000So again, sort of unclear the scope of this.
00:18:55.000It is remanding back to the district court to figure out exactly what it is that they are saying has to be paused and what doesn't have to be paused.
00:19:03.000Are they saying that the part that has to go out is the part that's already been paid for?
00:19:06.000Or are they saying that literally you can't pause federal spending at all?
00:19:10.000And so we're going to need clarification on that.
00:19:12.000This drew a very, very marked dissent.
00:19:31.000And for me, it goes Clarence Thomas and then Samuel Alito.
00:19:34.000So Justice Alito, who is terrific, wrote the following, quote, Does a single district court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the government of the United States to pay out and probably lose forever $2 billion taxpayer dollars?
00:19:47.000The answer to that question should be an emphatic no, but a majority of this court apparently thinks otherwise.
00:19:53.000Just as the leader not pulling any punches.
00:19:56.000He says in capsule form, this is what happened.
00:19:58.000Respondents are a group of American businesses and nonprofits that receive foreign assistance funds from the State Department and USAID. They brought suit and claimed the current administration's temporary pause of foreign assistance payments is unlawful.
00:20:10.000The district court issued a temporary restraining order requiring the government to then halt the funding pause, meaning spend the money.
00:20:16.000After issuing the TRO, the district judge grew frustrated with the pace at which the funds were being dispersed.
00:20:20.000On February 25th, he issued a second order requiring the government to pay out approximately $2 billion.
00:20:25.000The judge brushed aside the government's argument that sovereign immunity barred this enforcement order.
00:20:29.000He took two steps that would prevent any higher court from reviewing or possibly stopping the payments.
00:20:33.000First, he labeled the order as a non-appealable TRO. And second, he demanded that the money be paid within 36 hours.
00:20:40.000Alito says this left the government little time to try to obtain some review of what it regarded as a lawless order.
00:20:44.000The government moved for a stay pending appeal in the district court.
00:20:46.000The judge then shrugged off the government's sovereign immunity claim and ignored the government's representation that most of the money in question could probably not be recovered once actually dispersed.
00:20:55.000So he writes, to start, it is clear the district court's enforcement order should be construed as an appealable preliminary injunction, not a mere TRO. A temporary restraining order does not apply here because it is not temporary.
00:21:24.000He says the order did not merely restrain the government's challenged action in order to preserve the status quo.
00:21:29.000It acts as a mandatory injunction requiring affirmative action by the government.
00:21:32.000So the Court of Appeals had jurisdiction.
00:21:34.000He said even if the majority is unwilling to vacate the district court's order.
00:21:38.000It should at least stay the district court's enforcement order until the government is able to petition for a writ of certiorari, meaning like the Supreme Court takes up the full case.
00:21:46.000He is right about all of this, of course.
00:21:48.000He says, Self-aggrandizement of its jurisdiction is not one of them.
00:22:09.000So, again, this raises questions as to why Justice Roberts did what he did or why Amy Coney Barrett did what she did.
00:22:16.000It's not as extreme an order as it originally seems from the Supreme Court.
00:22:19.000That basically says any district court judge anywhere can put a nationwide temporary restraining order on the federal government for any reason whatsoever.
00:22:26.000But, as Justice Alito says, if the effect of the order is to force the federal government to disperse funds it can't get back before the adjudication at the Supreme Court level, Then that is a massive problem.
00:22:37.000And Justice Alito is right about all of that.
00:22:40.000But again, you were expecting a lot of this sort of stuff to happen.
00:22:42.000I mean, the reality is that because President Trump is moving fast and breaking things, there's going to be a lot of legal action.
00:22:47.000Most of that legal action is going to read down to the benefit of the Trump administration.
00:22:52.000So the Trump administration has now been ordered to reinstate thousands of fired U.S. Department of Agriculture workers as well.
00:23:00.000The chair of a federal civil service board ruled on Wednesday that thousands of fired workers at the Department of Agriculture must get their jobs back for at least the next month and a half.
00:23:08.000The ruling said the recent dismissals of more than 5,600 probationary employees may have violated federal law and procedures for carrying out layoffs.
00:23:15.000But that is not going to resolve all of this because, again, the administration, as Politico reports, may have further options to place the reinstated workers on administrative leave or fire them again as part of a formal reduction in force.
00:23:28.000So basically, there are all these sort of laws and regulations in place designed to ensure the continued peonage of all of these various federal jobs, that people be stuck in these jobs basically forever.
00:23:40.000One of those procedures is an administrative review before anybody gets fired.
00:23:44.000They're saying that that didn't happen.
00:23:46.000And so you have to replace people in these jobs because there's a Merit Systems Board that has to review the issue.
00:23:54.000Okay, now, again, that's not a permanent end to what Trump is trying to do inside the USDA. All of these road bumps are to be expected at this point.
00:24:01.000But in the end, one of the things that's going to have to happen is actual congressional movement to re-enshrine what Doge is attempting to do.
00:24:08.000The executive branch can do many things in terms of firing people.
00:24:11.000And, by the way, there will be negative headlines that attend to many of these firings.
00:24:15.000So, for example, lots of headlines today about the fact that some of these firings are affecting veterans.
00:24:20.000So there's a whole article from the Associated Press today suggesting that it's a great tragedy that veterans are losing their jobs.
00:24:27.000Number one, nobody, including veterans, has a right to a job from the federal government.
00:24:32.000You do have veterans benefits that attend to your service time, but nobody has a right to a federal taxpayer job.
00:24:37.000With that said, it would be a very smart move for the Trump administration to launch an initiative to help people who are veterans get jobs in the private sector if they end up being fired in the public sector, right?
00:24:46.000That would be just a smart political move, and I think the Trump administration will probably do something Like that.
00:24:51.000But in the end, most of the big things that the Trump administration is trying to do, again, this is the hard part.
00:24:58.000This is where I say, like, the first 30 days are now over, and now you hit the hard part of the presidency.
00:25:03.000You need Congress to do a lot of these things.
00:25:06.000And so yesterday, Elon Musk went to the Hill, and he had a meeting with House Republicans to discuss what Doge was doing.
00:25:12.000According to the Washington Post, While supportive of Doge's cost-cutting mission, some Republican lawmakers have begun to express concern over Musk's methods of laying off federal employees en masse and then pursuing large budget cuts without congressional input.
00:25:23.000However, with that said, House lawmakers have been talking pretty seriously about the possibility of rescission.
00:25:31.000That is a process whereby the government of the United States, the Congress of the United States can, with 51 votes, vote to rescind some of its funding.
00:25:44.000Musk and the Republicans were talking about this as proposed by Rand Paul.
00:25:47.000Rand Paul is a consistent deficit hawk.
00:25:50.000According to NBC News, they discussed a rescission package that the White House could send to Congress to codify doge cuts through a measure that can get around the 60-vote hurdle in order to get around legal challenges to the administration's power to act unilaterally.
00:26:02.000Many of the challenges currently happening are people suing and saying the executive branch can't make these cuts.
00:26:07.000These spending initiatives were put forward by Congress.
00:26:11.000Well, there is a process called rescission.
00:26:13.000It's been attempted in the past, a little hard to do, but it could theoretically be done with 51 votes, where the Congress says, we're going to now rescind certain aspects of spending.
00:26:22.000Senator Rand Paul said, quote, to me, it's ephemeral now, meaning all of these cuts.
00:26:28.000My message to Elon was, let's get over the impoundment idea, the idea that the federal government in the executive branch can simply stop the spending, and let's send it back as a rescission package.
00:26:37.000Then all we have to do is lobby to get to 51 senators or 50 senators.
00:26:41.000Plus, J.D. Vance breaking the tie to cut the spending.
00:26:45.000Musk apparently was surprised to learn there was even a pathway to do that.
00:27:32.000The Department of the Interior, led by Doug Burgum, is doing an excellent job with a lot of this sort of stuff.
00:27:37.000The permits are going to get a lot easier.
00:27:40.000This particular administration is very keen on unlocking America's energy resources, and that's very necessary.
00:27:45.000But congressional action is going to be the next step on a lot of this.
00:27:49.000This administration is moving incredibly fast, and so is this year.
00:27:52.000Two entire months of the new year are already behind us.
00:27:54.000I need to make sure that I'm maintaining my health, hitting the gym, spending time with the family, even with the crazy work schedule.
00:27:59.000When I was younger, I used to think I could just power through on willpower and caffeine.
00:28:03.000I learned pretty quickly peak performance requires peak nutrition, which means eating enough vegetables.
00:28:07.000That's why I'm so thankful to have Balance of Nature, which fits right into even the busiest of days.
00:28:11.000Imagine trying to eat 31 different fruits and veggies every single day.
00:28:14.000That sounds miserable and time-consuming.
00:28:15.000With Balance of Nature fruits and veggies, there's never been a more convenient dietary supplement to ensure you get a wide variety of fruits and veggies daily.
00:28:21.000Balance of Nature takes fruits and veggies, they freeze-dry them, they turn them into a powder, and then they put them into a capsule.
00:28:26.000You take your fruit and veggie capsules every day, and then your body knows precisely what to do with them.
00:28:30.000And by the way, it's kosher, so it's great for me.
00:28:36.000Use promo code SHAPIRO for 35% off your first order as a preferred customer.
00:28:40.000Plus, get a free bottle of fiber and spice.
00:28:42.000That's balanceofnature.com, promo code SHAPIRO. balanceofnature.com, promo code SHAPIRO. Get 35% off that first order as a preferred customer, and get a free bottle of fiber and spice.
00:28:52.000balanceofnature.com, promo code SHAPIRO. Also, After more than a year of war, terror, and pain in Israel, all of Israel is brokenhearted after learning of the horrific murders of the Bibas family who were held hostage in Gaza.
00:29:02.000We're talking about the murder of actual babies by the monsters of Hamas.
00:29:06.000Many people are still hurting throughout the Holy Land, where the need for aid continues to grow.
00:29:10.000The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews has support and will continue to support the families of hostages and other victims of the October 7th terror attacks.
00:29:17.000With your help, IFCJ has provided financial and emotional help to hostages and their families, and to those healing and rebuilding their broken homes and broken bodies.
00:29:24.000The real work, however, is just beginning.
00:29:26.000As antisemitism continues to rise around the world, the people of Israel, our Jewish brothers and sisters, need us now more than ever.
00:29:31.000Your gift today helps provide critically needed support to families in Israel whose lives continue to be destroyed by terror and uncertainty as Israel remains surrounded by enemies.
00:29:39.000Give a gift to bless Israel and her people.
00:29:53.000Now, one area where there could be serious drag in the economy, and again, I'm going to warn about this because economic reality is economic reality regardless of who is the president of the United States.
00:30:02.000A giant regime of increased tariffs will harm the American economy.
00:30:07.000There are areas of the American economy where businesses will be reshored.
00:30:11.000Protectionism does reshore businesses in the affected area.
00:30:14.000However, the broader costs of gigantic tariff wars across the planet are to shrink the market for American goods, increase the price for American consumers, undermine the value of U.S. dollar as foreign reserve currency, and lead our allies to make trade deals with each other but not us or with our enemies.
00:30:33.000They are not, in fact, good or easy to win.
00:30:35.000Now, again, if President Trump is throwing out his willingness to do tariffs as a way of leveraging down tariffs, meaning that he is basically saying, listen, I'm willing to do whatever it takes.
00:30:50.000There's an off-ramp, and the off-ramp is you lower your tariffs and we lower our tariffs.
00:30:53.000As I said yesterday, if President Trump's emphasis in the term retaliatory tariff is on retaliatory rather than tariff, then I'm fine with it.
00:31:01.000A retaliatory tariff would be designed to say that if you guys go down, we will also go down.
00:31:08.000However, comparative advantage is still an element of economics, and pretending that it is not is a fool's errand.
00:31:16.000Just because we can produce something in the United States, Does not mean that it is the best thing economically for it to be produced in the United States.
00:31:31.000It does mean products are going to get more expensive.
00:31:34.000Businesses are going to be underfunded.
00:31:36.000Our bonds are going to be less purchased on the open markets.
00:31:40.000There are going to be real, real problems here.
00:31:43.000So, one of the big questions right now with regard to the tariffs is what they will be.
00:31:46.000There's been a lot of sort of up and down, in and out.
00:31:49.000I mean, it's a rollercoaster with regard to this tariff regime.
00:31:51.000And that in and of itself, by the way, not good for the economy.
00:31:55.000What you want from the economy is, George Gilder described the economy, the economist George Gilder, he described the economy as essentially a phone line.
00:32:04.000A series of regulations, regulatory background, the tax regime, as essentially a phone line.
00:32:11.000You just want clarity and predictability.
00:32:13.000If you have extraneous information in your phone line, meaning static, it's very difficult to hear the actual information you want to hear, which is the person at the other end of the phone.
00:32:22.000Unpredictability is static in the phone line.
00:32:24.000And so when you are saying one day, we're doing tariffs, and the next day we're not doing tariffs, or we're going to do a tariff, and then we're going to blow a hole in the tariff with an exception for automakers, or maybe it's a retaliatory tariff, maybe we just love tariffs.
00:32:36.000When you do that sort of stuff, business people get a little skittish.
00:32:40.000Because how do you invest in building abroad if you think the tariffs are going to increase?
00:32:45.000And why would you invest building in the United States if you believe tomorrow President Trump is going to revoke those tariffs or the next administration will revoke those tariffs?
00:32:54.000Business is very much about investing for the future because it takes a while for things to materialize.
00:33:00.000This is why when Apple, for example, says they're going to spend $500 billion in the United States, they don't mean they're just going to take a bag of cash and drop it in the Federal Reserve today.
00:33:09.000They mean that over the course of years, they're going to spend on a variety of projects in the United States, the net cost of which will be $500 billion.
00:33:38.000Where the government could at any moment seize your assets.
00:33:41.000And investing in a country where the regulations change every five seconds, a tariff goes up, a tariff goes down, it's literally day by day, very difficult.
00:33:47.000People instead tend to withdraw their money from the economy and they tend to keep their powder dry.
00:33:52.000And that's what you're seeing, by the way, from, for example, Warren Buffett.
00:33:55.000The reason he's keeping his powder dry right now is because he doesn't know where this is going and he's figuring, hell, if the stocks go down in a month, then I'm going to be able to buy them up on the cheap.
00:34:05.000Well, meanwhile, the trade war that is currently being initiated with Canada.
00:34:09.000Now, President Trump has said that he wants a crackdown on the northern border in Canada.
00:34:34.000And by the way, it's going to keep Justin Trudeau in power.
00:34:37.000So President Trump had a conversation yesterday with the terrible leader of Canada, and then he put out a statement, quote, Justin Trudeau of Canada called me to ask what could be done about tariffs.
00:34:45.000I told him many people have died from fentanyl that came through the borders of Canada and Mexico, and nothing has convinced me that it has stopped.
00:34:51.000He said it's gotten better, but I said that's not good enough.
00:34:53.000The call ended in a somewhat friendly manner.
00:34:54.000He was unable to tell me when the Canadian election is taking place, which made me curious, like, what's going on here?
00:34:59.000I then realized he was trying to use this issue to stay in power.
00:35:03.000Except for the fact that actually it is good luck, Justin, because the reality is that Pierre Polyev, who's the leader of the Conservative Party and is excellent, a terrific leader, would be an amazing Prime Minister of Canada.
00:35:15.000Pierre Polyev has been sinking in the polls since the initiation of the trade war because people in Canada are associating Polyev with Trump, even though he says he doesn't like the tariffs and doesn't like what Trump is doing.
00:35:32.000That the grand total of fentanyl that was caught at the northern border in the last year was 43 pounds.
00:35:39.000By way of contrast, the amount of fentanyl that was caught at America's southern border was 22,000 pounds.
00:35:45.000So there may or may not be a major problem with fentanyl coming across our northern border.
00:35:50.000The United States should articulate to Canada what are the concrete steps that they want Canada to actually take to crack down on fentanyl trafficking across the border.
00:35:57.000We should actually make a significant ask and then get the ask.
00:37:06.000What are the deliverables so that the tariffs can go back down?
00:37:09.000And in fact, President Trump has already blown a hole in his own tariff regime because you can see that it's having a massive impact on trade with the United States.
00:37:19.000Yesterday, the White House announced a one-month reprieve from tariffs on Mexico and Canada for cars that comply with the USMCA. Again, the USMCA was negotiated by President Trump in his first term.
00:37:29.000It is a pretty good piece of agreement.
00:37:32.000The markets immediately rose because it turns out, you know what the markets don't like?
00:38:11.000But tariffs are a blunt instrument, and they're a blunt instrument that affects the American consumer and many American producers who import inputs into their product.
00:38:35.000The theory goes that basically President Trump is attempting to undermine trade regimes with the United States in order to essentially force the Federal Reserve to lower the interest rates, undermining the strength of the American dollar because President Trump likes a weaker dollar in comparison with other countries to rectify the trade imbalance.
00:38:57.000I don't think it's anything like that.
00:38:58.000I think President Trump has a very simple view of trade, and that very simple view is we don't like getting screwed.
00:39:08.000But if the idea here is that tariffs are going to make America wise, free, and beautiful on their own, that is a massive mistake that is going to come back to bite.
00:39:15.000And again, I don't think President Trump believes that.
00:39:20.000I know the markets hope he doesn't believe that, which is why they rose yesterday on news that he is suspending.
00:39:26.000Meanwhile, there is some movement on Ukraine.
00:39:31.000Mike Walls, the national security advisor, yesterday, he suggested that there will be some good movement on Ukraine after Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, came to the United States.
00:39:40.000There, of course, is a giant blow up at the White House between Vladimir Zelensky and the president and the vice president.
00:39:45.000And then a couple of days ago, Vladimir Zelensky essentially gave up the ghost.
00:39:48.000He put out a statement saying that he wanted to do the rare earths mineral agreement with the United States, that he was looking forward to moving toward peace.
00:39:54.000Here was the NSA Mike Wallace explaining.
00:39:56.000I just got off the phone before I walked out here with my counterpart, the Ukrainian National Security Advisor.
00:40:03.000We are having good talks on location for the next round of negotiations, on delegations, on substance.
00:40:15.000Just in the last 24 hours since the public statement from Zelensky and then these subsequent conversations, which I'm going to walk inside and continue, I think we're going to see movement in very short order.
00:40:30.000Now, it is worthwhile to note here that the movement is all on the Ukrainian side.
00:40:34.000I've seen no movement whatsoever from the Russians, and it takes two to tango.
00:40:37.000The Russians keep saying that we want to do an agreement, but then when it comes down to sort of the hard-nosed negotiation of what an agreement looks like, they are currently turning down pretty much all of the prerequisites and necessities for any sort of peace agreement.
00:40:57.000So pushing the Ukrainians does not come without risk to the Ukrainians, clearly.
00:41:03.000The reason I say this is because literally yesterday, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who's essentially a cutout for Vladimir Putin in Belarus, Belarus is effectively a sort of satellite member of Russia, he warned the Kremlin, quote, will never accept a European troop deployment to Ukraine.
00:41:18.000In a wide-ranging interview with blogger Mario Nafal, who of course is very big on X, Lukashenko praised President Trump's forthright approach to Russia's war on Ukraine and suggested Putin was ready to make peace.
00:41:28.000However, He said any proposal would be unlikely to win Russian support if it included deployment of European forces into Ukraine.
00:41:34.000Quote, Russia will never agree to this.
00:41:36.000At least this is Russia's position today, especially since the leadership of the EU, primarily in the person of Germany and France, is taking a very aggressive position at the moment.
00:41:45.000The Belarusian leader also counterattacks by both Trump and Putin on the legitimacy of Vladimir Zelensky while offering Belarus as a location for peace negotiations.
00:41:58.000If Russia is unwilling to make an agreement that allows European boots on the ground, how in the world do you get to a national peace agreement?
00:42:05.000I've been saying since 2022, again, that an agreement looks like Russia keeps Donbass and Crimea.
00:42:12.000There are security arrangements with Ukraine that guarantee that this never happens again.
00:42:15.000That's the only thing that Ukraine will sign on to.
00:42:18.000If Russia refuses that, then why would Ukraine sign on to anything and any peace that would be forced by the West?
00:42:24.000It would be a sort of temporary respite before Russia rearms and then goes back in.
00:42:30.000That's what Ukraine is worried about, I don't think, unreasonably.
00:42:34.000Part and parcel of this is right now, again, the United States continues to ratchet up pressure on Ukraine as though it's Ukrainian intransigence that's responsible for all this.
00:42:42.000What I would love to hear is some move by Russia to explain exactly what they want.
00:42:47.000I want to hear from Vladimir Putin and from the Russians, what is it that would look like an off-ramp to you?
00:42:53.000Because so far, it's been everybody else projecting an off-ramp onto what Russia wants, including me.
00:42:57.000I'm telling Russia what it should get if we want to come to some sort of end to this thing.
00:43:02.000But if Russia refuses to take that, what does the off-ramp look like?
00:43:05.000Would Vladimir Putin actually accept Donbass and Crimea and real security arrangements, meaning European troops there that would trigger a larger regional war if Russia were to walk across the border?
00:43:15.000And if the answer to that is no, there's no agreement, it seems to me, to be made.
00:43:19.000So the United States keeps ratcheting up the pressure on Ukraine.
00:43:23.000John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA, said that they're cutting intelligence support to Ukraine.
00:43:26.000This, to me, I don't understand this part of the strategy.
00:43:30.000I don't understand the part of the strategy where we are denying Ukraine weaponry to at least maintain the current status in the war, to maintain the current lines.
00:43:39.000Again, if Russia feels like they have momentum and they can push further, why would they come to the table?
00:43:44.000If it takes two to tango, you have to simultaneously convince the Ukrainians to come to the table.
00:43:48.000By threatening things like, we might withdraw if you don't get a deal.
00:43:52.000But you also have to say to the Russians, if you don't come to the table, what happens?
00:43:58.000Where's that other half of the conversation?
00:43:59.000Withdrawing intelligence support to Ukraine, which is effectively designed to prevent Ukraine from making attacks inside Russia, which is a way of them, by the way, clawing back territory, which then they will presumably trade for some territory inside Ukraine.
00:44:13.000I want to see movement from the other side of the table.
00:44:16.000Has there been any movement from the other side of the table?
00:44:19.000Now again, I'll let the administration cook, but I would love to see some movement from Vladimir Putin to justify the kind of movement that is being pushed on the Ukrainians right now.
00:44:27.000Here is John Ratcliffe over at the CIA. President Trump had a real question about whether President Zelensky was committed to the peace process.
00:44:36.000I want to give you a chance to think about that.
00:44:38.000And you saw the response that President Zelensky put out a statement saying, I'm ready for peace.
00:44:43.000And I want Donald Trump's leadership to bring about that peace.
00:44:47.000And so I think on the military front and the intelligence front, the pause that allowed that to happen, I think, will go away.
00:44:55.000And I think we'll work shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine, as we have, to push back on the aggression that's there, but to put the world in a better place for these peace negotiations to move forward.
00:45:07.000Now, again, what Radcliffe is saying there is actually correct.
00:45:53.000I mean, again, I think that President Trump is very much on board with the Europeans taking the lead on this sort of stuff.
00:46:00.000Apparently, Germany is about to blow out its debt ceiling in an attempt to radically increase their defense spending, which, of course, is necessary in the face of Russian predation.
00:46:19.000Now the pressure needs to be on Vladimir Putin to come to the table.
00:46:23.000And the pressure that he's put on the Ukrainians has been accompanied by a radical revision upward of European security spending, which is good.
00:46:31.000And the end of this could be quite salutary from President Trump.
00:46:35.000And if so, he deserves an enormous amount of credit.
00:46:39.000If it does end the way that it could, that would be a very, very good thing.
00:46:43.000And meanwhile, speaking of foreign policy and the president of the United States, peace through strength.
00:46:47.000So the president of the United States yesterday put out an ultimatum to Hamas because Hamas is still holding American hostages and indeed holding probably 35 live hostages somewhere in that neighborhood.
00:46:57.000The president of the United States put out an ultimatum to Hamas in some of the strongest language he has yet issued.
00:47:04.000Quote, Shalom Hamas means hello and goodbye.
00:47:08.000Release all of the hostages now, not later, and immediately return all of the dead bodies of the people you murdered or it is over for you.
00:47:14.000Only sick and twisted people keep bodies and you are sick and twisted.
00:47:16.000I am sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job.
00:47:18.000Not a single Hamas member will be safe if you don't do as I say.
00:47:21.000I've just met with your former hostages whose lives you have destroyed.
00:47:23.000This is your last warning for the leadership.
00:47:25.000Now is the time to leave Gaza while you still have a chance.
00:47:27.000Also to the people of Gaza, a beautiful future awaits.
00:47:50.000The Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained in more detail President Trump's language here, although it didn't really require a lot of explication.
00:47:56.000This is the beautiful thing about President Trump.
00:47:58.000If you're ever wondering what he's thinking, you shouldn't.
00:48:16.000He's tired of watching these videos every weekend where hostages that are emaciated are released and bodies are turned over and sometimes it's the wrong bodies and this five here and three there and these games that are being played and he's lost his patience with it.
00:48:29.000He's been very clear about this in the beginning.
00:48:30.000He's created space and time for this to be solved and now it's time for seeing it come to an end.
00:48:53.000And so they better take that seriously.
00:48:55.000And again, that is that is excellent stuff there from the secretary of state and obviously from the president of the United States.
00:49:03.000And meanwhile, a breaking story courtesy of our reportorial team over at Daily Wire is pretty amazing story up.
00:49:09.000Apparently, it turns out that a former top aide to Kamala Harris is now under criminal investigation by the Trump administration.
00:49:15.000Apparently, this person tried to forge paperwork to take advantage of Elon Musk's fork-in-the-road buyout offer, according to Luke Rosiak and the team at Daily Wire.
00:49:24.000The probe is apparently going to explore whether high-level officials, potentially including Kamala Harris herself or Lena Kahn, Joe Biden's chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who's awful, conspired to embed a person named Nathaniel Siegel into a job at the FTC just before President Trump's inauguration.
00:49:37.000Apparently, that placement involved a series of maneuvers that appeared to have been designed to evade personnel and ethics regulations, hide that Siegel was a political appointee, and prevent the Trump administration from firing him.
00:49:48.000So basically, in short, this person was placed on the payroll at the FTC on the direct orders of Lena Kahn, even though he was missing essential paperwork, and...
00:49:57.000When the scheme began to unravel, Siegel tried to pull the ripcord by doctoring a document to try to secure the deferred resignation program buyout, despite the deadline having passed and Siegel not having received the offer in the first place, which would have assured him something like $200,000 in exchange for leaving the government.
00:50:13.000The official confirmed, according to the DOJ, that the department was taking a broad look at this story.
00:50:18.000Apparently, again, it was a bunch of sleight of hands that resulted in Siegel being hired just before the Biden administration left and then classified improperly as a tenured non-political All right, guys, coming up, we're going to get into some culture.
00:50:41.000Viola Davis has some thoughts on Black History Month that are sort of bizarre.
00:50:45.000Plus, Hamilton and Lin-Manuel Miranda, he says that they will no longer be performing at the Kennedy Center because of the evils of Donald Trump.
00:50:54.000In order to hear my thoughts on that, you do have to become a subscriber, and we have all sorts of great stuff, right?