The Ben Shapiro Show - The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!

00:00:00.000 Democrats keep claiming that we're in a constitutional crisis.

00:00:03.000 They haven't learned their lesson yet.

00:00:05.000 They kept saying during the last election cycle that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy.

00:00:09.000 You heard this over and over and over.

00:00:10.000 Republicans, Trump, they were a threat to democracy.

00:00:12.000 Everything Trump did was a threat to democracy.

00:00:15.000 Meanwhile, they were weaponizing the Department of Justice to go after President Trump.

00:00:18.000 Joe Biden was thinking of new ways nearly every day to violate the Constitution.

00:00:22.000 Well, now, when that particular line didn't work, the threat to democracy line, they've transmuted it into a constitutional crisis.

00:00:29.000 You see, it is now a constitutional crisis if the elected president of the United States appoints a person to go through all of the executive branches of government, all various agencies, and root out waste, fraud, and abuse.

00:00:41.000 Now, this is a constitutional crisis.

00:00:43.000 No one thinks this is a constitutional crisis, which is why Donald Trump's approval ratings remain in the mid-50s at this point, the highest they've been in his entire career.

00:00:52.000 There's a brand new poll out from the UK Daily Mail.

00:00:54.000 And it shows his approval rating at 53%.

00:00:58.000 53%.

00:00:59.000 That includes 57% of men, 49% of women, 51% of people aged 18 to 29, and 59% of people aged 30 to 49. In fact, the people who are least likely to support President Trump at this point are the older folks, the 65 pluses.

00:01:14.000 Democrats must be absolutely peeing their pants at this point. 0.80

00:01:19.000 Because here's the thing.

00:01:20.000 Most Americans look at what Trump is doing, particularly with Elon Musk.

00:01:23.000 And his revolutionary approach to government, which again, should just be common sense.

00:01:27.000 Send somebody in to audit all these various agencies.

00:01:29.000 Figure out where the money is being wasted and then don't waste our taxpayer money.

00:01:33.000 This should just be basic common sense.

00:01:35.000 This should be a 100% issue.

00:01:37.000 Democrats are freaking out because, as we've discussed, the reality is the Democrats have built an entire bureaucratic system designed to do their will, whether they are in power or out of power.

00:01:47.000 The deep state that Donald Trump complained about during his first term.

00:01:50.000 He was talking about... 0.91

00:01:51.000 The deep state thwarting his will on everything from foreign to domestic policy or militarizing itself against his presidency by putting together ridiculous nonsense like the Mueller report.

00:02:02.000 But the reality is the deep state, meaning a permanent bureaucratic structure designed to funnel taxpayer money to allies of Democrats in and out of government, that has been a century-long project and Donald Trump is systematically dismantling it.

00:02:15.000 And the American people are for this.

00:02:16.000 If Democrats try to claim that that's a constitutional crisis...

00:02:20.000 A threat to democracy.

00:02:21.000 The elected president going to unelected bureaucrats and telling them not to spend taxpayer money.

00:02:25.000 That is one of the least fascistic things I've ever heard in my entire life.

00:02:29.000 It turns out that fascism is about centralization of power in one man or in an oligarchy who then take more control over the people.

00:02:37.000 I have yet to hear of a fascist movement that delegates more power back out to the people away from a centralized bureaucracy.

00:02:45.000 I've never heard of anything remotely like that.

00:02:47.000 Please, name the last fascist movement.

00:02:48.000 That minimized the power of the executive in Americans' lives.

00:02:52.000 You're going to have to figure this one out.

00:02:54.000 But Democrats don't want to figure that one out, so they're just going to keep shouting nostrums.

00:02:57.000 Well, yesterday, President Trump kept the momentum going.

00:03:00.000 According to the Washington Post, President Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order that calls on federal agencies to work with Doge in a bid to cut their existing workforce and limit future hiring.

00:03:10.000 Ahead of that signing, Trump was joined in the Oval Office by Elon Musk, and it was highly entertaining.

00:03:17.000 So, first, Trump had in Musk and Elon likes to bring around his son X. Like, everywhere.

00:03:22.000 When we went to Auschwitz together, he brought his son X. Because his basic principle is, I'm bringing my kid everywhere, and since I'm the richest person in the world, I can.

00:03:29.000 I will say, I love the normalization of kids in public life.

00:03:33.000 I think it's wonderful.

00:03:34.000 I bring my kids virtually everywhere.

00:03:37.000 I have four of them.

00:03:38.000 They're constantly with me.

00:03:39.000 As they get older, I'm going to start bringing them to events so they can experience them and learn.

00:03:44.000 This is how kids learn, is by following their parents around.

00:03:46.000 Between J.D. Vance bringing his kids on foreign trips and Elon Musk bringing his kid around, you're seeing a lot of kids in American public life.

00:03:53.000 And again, these images matter.

00:03:54.000 We talked about this yesterday.

00:03:56.000 Imagery matters.

00:03:57.000 The image of a Secretary of Defense who's working out with the troops.

00:04:00.000 Or the image of a national security advisor striding into NATO meetings.

00:04:04.000 Or the images of Elon Musk with his sort of young tech protégés going into various government agencies and clearing them out.

00:04:12.000 Or children in public places.

00:04:13.000 All of these things have an impact.

00:04:15.000 On how human beings feel and how they think.

00:04:18.000 And it makes a big difference.

00:04:19.000 So here's President Trump praising Elon Musk's son X, which is hilarious.

00:04:24.000 X, are you okay?

00:04:26.000 This is X. And he's a great guy.

00:04:30.000 High IQ. He's a high IQ individual.

00:04:37.000 And by the way, you gotta love the sort of juxtaposition of the dress.

00:04:41.000 Meaning, Elon, for those who can't see, is wearing a sort of typical tech bro outfit.

00:04:45.000 He's wearing kind of like jeans and a t-shirt and then a black coat over it.

00:04:47.000 And his son is dressed in the nines.

00:04:49.000 Looking great over there.

00:04:52.000 Meanwhile, President Trump says, listen, we've already found billions in abuse, incompetence, corruption.

00:04:56.000 Who's going to take the other side of this argument?

00:04:58.000 Why are Democrats taking the other side of this argument other than they are wedded to every penny of spending and more?

00:05:03.000 There was President Trump yesterday.

00:05:06.000 Senator Rand Paul today said that doge cuts will ultimately need a vote in Congress.

00:05:10.000 Do you agree with that?

00:05:11.000 Is that the plan?

00:05:12.000 I really don't know.

00:05:12.000 I know this.

00:05:13.000 We're finding tremendous fraud and tremendous abuse.

00:05:17.000 If I need a vote of Congress to find fraud and abuse, it's fine with me.

00:05:22.000 I think we'll get the vote.

00:05:23.000 Although there'll be some people that wouldn't vote.

00:05:26.000 And how could a judge want to hold us back from finding all of this fraud and finding all of this incompetence?

00:05:33.000 Why would that happen?

00:05:34.000 Why would even Congress want to do that?

00:05:36.000 Now, Congress, if we do need a vote, I think we'd get a very easy vote because we have a track record now.

00:05:42.000 We've already found billions of dollars of abuse, incompetence, and corruption.

00:05:48.000 Okay, so he's right about this, by the way.

00:05:50.000 If you think that you can't get through the Senate and the House a bill that cuts waste, fraud, and abuse, if Democrats try to filibuster that, that is a losing proposition for them.

00:05:59.000 Speaking of waste, fraud, and abuse, the White House on Tuesday evening, according to the Washington Post, So, the guy's name was Paul Martin.

00:06:15.000 He was appointed by President Joe Biden in December 2023. He was informed of his dismissal through an email from Trent Morse, the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel.

00:06:25.000 The termination of Martin follows his office's publication of a widely read report warning more than $489 million in food assistance was at risk of spoilage or potential diversion after the Trump administration implemented its aid freeze and stop work order.

00:06:36.000 And the reason presumably he was fired is he leaked all of this to the media.

00:06:39.000 He put out this report publicly and Trump says we are not a leaky administration.

00:06:43.000 We are not going to do that anymore.

00:06:44.000 Plus, it is weird that the USAID inspector general was able to come up with on short notice a report talking about millions of dollars worth of food spoilage.

00:06:52.000 But had nothing to say about $2.1 billion flowing into, for example, the Gaza Strip so that Hamas could continue to fund its terror war against Israel and murder its own people in the streets.

00:07:02.000 And so, again, they're moving fast.

00:07:05.000 They are breaking things.

00:07:06.000 So Elon was in the Oval Office.

00:07:07.000 And I think this is what Democrats are having such a tough time with.

00:07:10.000 President Trump has actually changed in many ways.

00:07:14.000 One of the ways he has changed is President Trump, because he was going to run for re-election and then because he lost and then he was running again, There's always a certain level of insecurity that kind of surrounded President Trump.

00:07:25.000 And what that meant is that the easiest way to cede all sorts of chaos with President Trump was to imply or state outright that somebody else was actually the president or somebody else was running Trump.

00:07:37.000 Now, the reality is no one perceives that to be the case.

00:07:39.000 Donald Trump is running the presidency.

00:07:42.000 No one is running Donald Trump.

00:07:43.000 Donald Trump is coming up with his own ideas.

00:07:45.000 Donald Trump is making the decisions.

00:07:47.000 Everyone knows this.

00:07:48.000 Americans understand this.

00:07:49.000 Which is why all the polling data shows 7 in 10 Americans think he is a strong president.

00:07:54.000 Not because they think Elon is the secret president.

00:07:56.000 And again, much of the media coverage is designed at sort of irritating Trump by claiming that Elon is sort of the shadow president.

00:08:02.000 But everyone, including Trump, knows that's not the case.

00:08:05.000 Number one, Elon doesn't have any independent political aspirations.

00:08:08.000 Elon is incapable of running for president.

00:08:10.000 He wasn't born in the United States.

00:08:12.000 But beyond that, everyone also understands that in the end, if Trump says no, Elon doesn't have any power to cut.

00:08:18.000 Trump's going to be the one who has to actually implement the recommendations that are being made by Doge.

00:08:22.000 It is Trump empowering Musk, not the other way around.

00:08:24.000 And so Musk, in solidarity with Trump in the Oval Office, in lockstep, arm in arm, is a major thing.

00:08:32.000 It is a signifier that Trump is comfortable in his own skin as president, that he doesn't feel threatened by people who are around him, that he's willing to take advice.

00:08:39.000 But in the end, he is the decision maker.

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00:10:48.000 So Musk had himself a good time in the Oval Office.

00:10:51.000 He started off by talking about cutting the budget and he said, listen, to do that requires a couple of things, competence and caring.

00:10:58.000 At a high level, what are the two ingredients that are really necessary in order to cut the budget deficit in half from $2 trillion to $1 trillion?

00:11:10.000 And it's really two things.

00:11:12.000 Competence and caring.

00:11:15.000 And if you add competence and caring, you'll cut the budget deficit in half.

00:11:19.000 And I fully expect to be scrutinized and get a daily proctology exam, basically.

00:11:26.000 And again, Like, where is it?

00:11:29.000 Who argues with that?

00:11:30.000 Who's going to argue with that?

00:11:32.000 Now, is it going to be enough to recommend billions of dollars in cuts from the executive agencies in waste, fraud, and abuse?

00:11:38.000 Is it all fat?

00:11:39.000 Or is there some muscle?

00:11:40.000 Is there some bone?

00:11:41.000 There's going to be a lot of muscle and bone that gets cut or broken before it is healed.

00:11:46.000 And this is sort of the way that Musk works.

00:11:48.000 So, for example, Musk was questioned by the media in this Oval Office.

00:11:52.000 It is amazing how transparent this administration is, by the way.

00:11:55.000 Joe Biden would not do a press conference for three and a half years because Joe Biden was not competent.

00:12:00.000 Because Joe Biden was not mentally there.

00:12:02.000 Donald Trump is speaking to the press every single day.

00:12:05.000 Elon Musk, supposedly at the head of a shadow government, is speaking to the press virtually every day when he's not on X 24 hours a day tweeting out his various thoughts.

00:12:14.000 But Musk is being transparent here.

00:12:16.000 He says, listen, I'm going to make mistakes in the stuff that I tweet out.

00:12:19.000 But the point is...

00:12:20.000 That I would rather make the mistakes and correct them than simply leave this behemoth staggering along the tundra only to die later and rot away.

00:12:30.000 Ms. Mas, you said on X that an example of the fraud that you have cited was $50 million of condoms was sent to Gaza.

00:12:40.000 But after fact-checked this, apparently Gaza in Mozambique, and the program was to protect them against HIV. So can you correct the statements?

00:12:51.000 It wasn't sent to Hamas, actually.

00:12:53.000 It was sent to Mozambique, which makes sense why condoms were sent there.

00:12:56.000 and how can we make sure that all the statements that you said were correct so we can trust what you say?

00:13:03.000 Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected.

00:13:07.000 So nobody's going to bat a thousand. 0.94

00:13:10.000 We will make mistakes, but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes.

00:13:15.000 So, you know, if the I'm not sure we should be sending 50 million dollars worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly, I'm not sure that's something Americans would be really excited about.

00:13:25.000 Correct.

00:13:26.000 Correct.

00:13:27.000 Again, what is amazing about all this is the Democrats keep declaring a constitutional crisis over doing sort of baseline governance.

00:13:35.000 This should be baseline governance.

00:13:37.000 So Musk was asked about the supposed constitutional crisis inherent in all of this.

00:13:42.000 Listen, people voted for a forum.

00:13:43.000 You keep saying people didn't vote for me.

00:13:44.000 People literally voted for Donald Trump knowing that Elon Musk was going to be part of the cutting effort.

00:13:50.000 It is not as though Donald Trump hit the ball here.

00:13:52.000 Again, 7 in 10 Americans believe that Donald Trump is keeping his promises right now, which is a historic number.

00:13:58.000 I mean, at this rate, the way that Donald Trump is moving, and again, it's unbelievable.

00:14:02.000 We're three weeks into his presidency.

00:14:04.000 If Donald Trump keeps even remotely moving at this rate, he is going to be the most transformative president in American public life since LBJ, maybe since FDR, if we keep going at this rate.

00:14:14.000 Here's Elon Musk saying, listen, people voted for this.

00:14:16.000 You keep pretending like people didn't vote.

00:14:18.000 People never voted for any of these bureaucrats, but they voted for this.

00:14:22.000 You couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from the public.

00:14:25.000 The public voted—we have a majority of the public voting for President Trump.

00:14:33.000 We won the House.

00:14:34.000 We won the Senate.

00:14:37.000 The people voted for major government reform.

00:14:42.000 There should be no doubt about that.

00:14:43.000 That was on the campaign.

00:14:45.000 The president spoke about that at every rally.

00:14:48.000 The people voted for major government reform, and that's what people are going to get.

00:14:52.000 They're going to get what they voted for.

00:14:54.000 That makes perfect sense.

00:14:55.000 And, Elon points out the same thing we've been pointing out, bureaucrats are not elected.

00:15:00.000 Bureaucrats making rules and spending money they were not allocated on random nonsense that they feel it is a priority to waste money on.

00:15:07.000 That is not how government ought to work.

00:15:09.000 Here's Elon.

00:15:11.000 If there's not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?

00:15:24.000 If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don't live in a democracy.

00:15:36.000 We live in a bureaucracy.

00:15:37.000 He is right about all this.

00:15:39.000 Now, Elon took the opportunity to mention some of the sort of waste, fraud, and abuse inherent in the system.

00:15:44.000 And he mentioned this crazy story about how essentially retirement forms are processed by the federal government.

00:15:51.000 From a limestone mine.

00:15:52.000 So first of all, it's disappointing to me because if we are going to put government employees anywhere, it should absolutely be a salt mine.

00:15:56.000 They should actually have to work literal salt mines.

00:15:58.000 But here's Elon pointing out a thing, and it turns out this is true.

00:16:02.000 This is not a mistake by Elon.

00:16:03.000 This is actually true.

00:16:05.000 And then we're told, this is actually a great anecdote, because we're told that the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000.

00:16:13.000 We're like, well, why is that?

00:16:16.000 Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper.

00:16:21.000 It's manually calculated, then written down on a piece of paper.

00:16:24.000 Then it goes down a mine.

00:16:26.000 And I'm like, what do you mean a mine?

00:16:28.000 Like, yeah, there's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork.

00:16:34.000 And you look at a picture of this mine.

00:16:36.000 We'll post some pictures afterwards.

00:16:38.000 And this mine looks like something out of the 50s because it was started in 1955. So it looks like it's like a time warp.

00:16:46.000 And then the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government.

00:16:57.000 By the way, he's right about this.

00:16:58.000 Here is a picture put out by Doge of the limestone mine.

00:17:02.000 Insane.

00:17:02.000 This is crazy.

00:17:04.000 This is crazy.

00:17:04.000 Why are we hand-filing retirement files?

00:17:07.000 Again, like some sort of dystopian sci-fi picture from 1956. This is ridiculous. 0.91

00:17:12.000 The Department of Government Efficiency put out these pictures. 0.71

00:17:15.000 It's Iron Mountain, which is an actual document processing company.

00:17:19.000 Federal employee retirements are processed using paper by hand in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania.

00:17:25.000 700 plus mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process 10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes.

00:17:32.000 The retirement process takes multiple months.

00:17:35.000 Now, in the modern world, you know how you could retire today?

00:17:37.000 By hitting a button, like one button, less than a second, done.

00:17:42.000 That's how you should be able to retire.

00:17:43.000 Because you can do literally, I can order anything I want from Amazon with the click of a button.

00:17:48.000 It doesn't take me more than about five seconds.

00:17:50.000 And yet retirement is supposed to take months because you have to have...

00:17:53.000 Some 60-year-old schlub wandering around in the limestone mines of Pennsylvania or something?

00:17:59.000 It's absolutely insane.

00:18:02.000 So Musk was also questioned about supposed conflicts of interest because, of course, he has his own business interests.

00:18:06.000 And he says, listen, I'm pretty much the most public person there is.

00:18:09.000 And if you have questions, feel free to ask them.

00:18:11.000 I think one of the reasons why Trump and the rest of his team are not super interested in these sort of conflict checks is because...

00:18:18.000 Those have been used as tools by many of the people in the bureaucracy in order to hold up people.

00:18:24.000 This is what happened during Trump administration number one.

00:18:26.000 I have personal friends who are forced to spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers because they were tangentially associated with the Trump administration and then they were roped into the Mueller report kind of stuff.

00:18:38.000 And so what Trump is saying is, I'm not going to do that.

00:18:41.000 I'm not going to do that.

00:18:42.000 And as for Musk, again, the most public person in the world except for Donald Trump.

00:18:48.000 Here's Musk talking about it.

00:18:50.000 What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency?

00:18:56.000 Well, we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible.

00:18:59.000 In fact, our actions, we post our actions to the Doge handle on X and to the Doge website.

00:19:06.000 So all of our actions are maximally transparent.

00:19:09.000 In fact, I don't think there's been, I don't know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization.

00:19:19.000 You know, the kind of things we're doing are, I think, very, very simple and basic.

00:19:24.000 So, one of the things that is being done is that Doge is now being allowed into pretty much every government agency to look for waste, fraud, and abuse.

00:19:31.000 That includes, apparently, the Department of Defense.

00:19:33.000 Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that Doge should be welcomed into the Department of Defense to basically audit the Defense Department and find golden toilet seats and the like.

00:19:42.000 Here was Secretary of Defense Hegseth this morning.

00:19:44.000 We welcome Doge to the Pentagon, and I hope to welcome Elon to the Pentagon very soon, and his team working in collaboration with us.

00:19:53.000 There are waste, redundancies, and headcounts in headquarters that need to be addressed.

00:19:58.000 There's just no doubt.

00:20:00.000 Look at a lot of the climate programs that have been pursued at the Defense Department.

00:20:04.000 The Defense Department is not in the business of climate change, solving the global thermostat.

00:20:09.000 We're in the business of deterring and winning wars.

00:20:12.000 So things like that, we want to look for to find efficiencies and many others, the way we acquire weapons system procurement.

00:20:18.000 There's plenty of places where we want the keen eye of Doge, but we'll do it in coordination.

00:20:23.000 We're not going to do things that are to the detriment of American operational or tactical capabilities.

00:20:29.000 By the way, got to love PDAG's ethic.

00:20:32.000 I mean, that is exactly right.

00:20:34.000 You mean like a war machine that wins wars and kills bad guys as opposed to a giant, toxic, global warming propaganda fest filled with DEI nonsense?

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00:22:44.000 Again, that's GCU. Well, meanwhile, again, Democrats keep claiming constitutional crisis over and over and over.

00:22:58.000 The constitutional crisis, if it exists at all, which it doesn't, is being caused by federal judges issuing nationwide injunctions.

00:23:05.000 So, for example, yesterday, a federal judge named John Bates agreed to a request from Doctors of America for a temporary restraining order nationally.

00:23:17.000 Why?

00:23:19.000 Well, the judge wants them to restore webpages and data that had been deleted in compliance with Trump's executive order related to gender ideology.

00:23:28.000 So, the judge ruled, quote, the removal of the webpages and datasets creates a dangerous gap in the scientific data available to monitor or respond to disease outbreaks, deprives physicians of resources that guide clinical practice, and takes away key resources for communicating and engaging with patients.

00:23:43.000 So, apparently, this judge is now attempting to force the federal government to keep up a bunch of dumb data about gender ideology. 0.67

00:23:52.000 This is the constitutional crisis? 0.85

00:23:55.000 That's the thing?

00:23:57.000 Again, the outrageous sort of reaction by the left to all of this, it truly is pretty amazing.

00:24:03.000 And I have to say that Elon Musk trolling the media on all this is also pretty amazing.

00:24:09.000 So, we've had the spectacle over the past 48 hours. 0.99

00:24:12.000 of major left-wing anchors saying the words big balls and hairy balls. 0.97

00:24:18.000 That is a thing that is now happening in our life. 0.99

00:24:20.000 Here is CNN's Dana Bash announcing that Elon Musk has changed his Twitter handle to hairy balls. 0.96

00:24:26.000 I'm not even kidding you. 0.97

00:24:28.000 This is the world we live in.

00:24:29.000 It is the most amusing timeline. 0.97

00:24:31.000 Now, the disruptor in chief, Elon Musk, who apparently has adopted the alias, at least he changed his social media handle to hairy balls. 0.81

00:24:41.000 Tweeted this morning, democracy in America is being destroyed by judicial coup. 0.79

00:24:46.000 An activist judge is not a real judge.

00:24:50.000 Well, oh my gosh.

00:24:51.000 I'm sorry.

00:24:52.000 CNN having to cover Elon's trollery is pretty high level.

00:24:56.000 Meanwhile, Joy Reid is very upset about big balls, as we've discussed before over at MSNBC. Again, Democrats apparently only like big balls if they're on the ladies. 1.00

00:25:05.000 In any case, Joy Reid says that Democrats should actually stop all legislation. 0.98

00:25:09.000 Until big balls can be subpoenaed. 0.92

00:25:12.000 Yes, this is... 0.96

00:25:13.000 Oh my goodness.

00:25:16.000 Let me ask you this, because the Democrats are in the minority, so you have only so much leverage.

00:25:20.000 Have you all essentially made it clear to Mike Johnson that until they allow you all to subpoena big balls and the normalized Indian hate guy, at least subpoena them and or subpoena Elon Musk, no votes on the budget.

00:25:36.000 No votes.

00:25:37.000 No Democratic votes at all to keep the government open.

00:25:40.000 That is leverage Democrats have, theoretically, right?

00:25:42.000 Are you all prepared to use it? 0.77

00:25:43.000 They must get to the bottom of big balls. 0.95

00:25:46.000 That's the thing they have to do.

00:25:48.000 They don't have to get a handle on big balls. 1.00

00:25:52.000 Slow clap for the Democrat media. 0.69

00:25:54.000 You guys are doing an amazing, amazing job.

00:25:56.000 Meanwhile, CNN's Anderson Cooper got miffed on air last night because Chris DiNuno, who is about as moderate a Republican as it is possible to find, governor of New Hampshire. 0.96

00:26:06.000 He suggested that Elon Musk wants to make cuts, and then they got into a discussion over the cuts, and Anderson Cooper calls him a d*** on air. 0.94

00:26:16.000 There's irony to that, because actually in this video, Chris Nuno is sitting next to Jeffrey Toobin, who is mostly famous for actually whipping out his d*** on air. 0.92

00:26:24.000 But here we go.

00:26:27.000 Some of the details that have come out, like the, you know, $59 million spent on luxury hotels, You're talking about the FEMA money that was abused for migrants?

00:26:38.000 That was FEMA money for migrants?

00:26:40.000 That's okay now?

00:26:40.000 No, I'm not saying it's okay.

00:26:42.000 I'm not saying it's okay.

00:26:43.000 Don't put words in my mouth.

00:26:43.000 So would you stop that?

00:26:45.000 Would you stop that process?

00:26:46.000 Don't be a...

00:26:47.000 Oh my gosh.

00:26:50.000 Well, things are going well for the Democrat media.

00:26:52.000 Meanwhile, Caitlin Collins at CNN mentions we are so close to a constitutional crisis.

00:26:55.000 Oh goodness, a constitutional crisis.

00:26:57.000 Really, where is it?

00:26:59.000 I'm missing it.

00:27:00.000 Really, where's the constitutional crisis?

00:27:03.000 I would love some details.

00:27:05.000 Please explain how Elon Musk going and recommending cuts inside the executive branch is a constitutional crisis that is going to end democracy in America.

00:27:13.000 Do you mean that there is tension between the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of the government?

00:27:18.000 As written in the Constitution, that's crazy talk.

00:27:21.000 Here's Caitlin Collins at CNN. They can't say threat to democracy anymore, so they just shifted it over to constitutional crisis.

00:27:27.000 It's really lazy.

00:27:29.000 We are three weeks into the second Trump presidency, three weeks, and tonight there are warnings that the U.S. is dangerously close to a constitutional crisis.

00:27:39.000 Now, the first shoe on this dropped when a federal judge today said the White House is defying his order to unfreeze billions of dollars in federal aid, marking the first time that we've had a judge expressly accuse the Trump administration of ignoring a court ruling.

00:27:54.000 And in a separate case today, federal employees here in Washington told a judge that the administration was defying another order by not reinstating workers who had been put on leave.

00:28:04.000 Now, this all has prominent Democrats and many of the nation's top constitutional scholars declaring that the U.S. is on the brink of a reckoning.

00:28:12.000 A reckoning.

00:28:13.000 Wow!

00:28:14.000 They found a constitutional scholar who will say that America's on the brink of a reckoning?

00:28:17.000 Wow, this sounds super scientific and legalistic to me.

00:28:20.000 It sounds exactly like that doomsday clock.

00:28:22.000 You know, these fake scientists, they have a thing called the doomsday clock, and every so often they move it a tick toward doomsday.

00:28:28.000 And we're the closest we've been to doomsday since, like, the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis.

00:28:34.000 Wow.

00:28:34.000 I mean, like, oh my gosh.

00:28:36.000 I think that, what are we going to do?

00:28:39.000 We're the closest we've been to doomsday since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and all this. 0.99

00:28:44.000 All this sort of fake expertise is really, really stupid. 0.99

00:28:48.000 But this is the line that they are pursuing. 1.00

00:28:51.000 MSNBCs.

00:28:52.000 Danny Savala says, you know, the president not following the court, that could be super-duper-duper scary.

00:28:56.000 What would you say if I told you there was a president who literally bragged about not following the court in relieving student loan debt?

00:29:02.000 And that was last year.

00:29:03.000 What if I told you that that was a thing?

00:29:04.000 But here is the MSNBC legal analyst, Danny Savala, panicking, running into walls.

00:29:11.000 History's lesson is, well, not a whole lot happens to a president or an administration who refuses to follow an order because we operate on this kind of trust that the president will do that.

00:29:22.000 And while it's probably apocryphal that Jackson said he has his order, meaning the Supreme Court, let's see them enforce it.

00:29:28.000 It's a scary quote, if true, because it's really an unspoken thing that the courts don't really have their own.

00:29:38.000 Meanwhile, President Trump is like, what are you even talking about?

00:29:55.000 You keep saying I'm defying courts.

00:29:57.000 What are you even saying?

00:29:57.000 Here's President Trump saying, can you give me an example of me defying the courts?

00:30:01.000 Like, one?

00:30:01.000 That'd be great.

00:30:02.000 If a judge does block one of your policies, part of your agenda, will you abide by that ruling?

00:30:09.000 Will you comply with that?

00:30:09.000 Well, I always abide by the courts and then I'll have to appeal it.

00:30:12.000 But then what he's done is he slowed down the momentum and it gives crooked people more time to cover up the books.

00:30:19.000 He's right about this.

00:30:20.000 But again, does this sound like a man who's on the verge of tyranny?

00:30:25.000 Of course not.

00:30:26.000 Of course not.

00:30:27.000 Now, listen, America is in a fairly serious economic situation, and the only answer to that is going to be cutting.

00:30:34.000 The waste and fraud in the federal government and eventually restructuring entitlement programs and production, economic growth.

00:30:41.000 Those are the only things.

00:30:42.000 We're going to have to grow our way out of many of these problems while simultaneously cutting all the waste, fraud, and abuse.

00:30:47.000 And the Trump administration is focused on both of those things.

00:30:51.000 Again, there are some systemic entrenched obstacles, including the national debt and including the fact that the Biden administration blew more money into the economy, fake money into the economy, through inflation, than any administration in modern history.

00:31:02.000 Well, that fight against inflation is not yet won.

00:31:04.000 Remember, you kept hearing that it was over.

00:31:06.000 It was all over, right?

00:31:07.000 Joe Biden had quashed inflation.

00:31:08.000 The economy was on a solid footing now.

00:31:10.000 That was his entire campaign and Kamala Harris's campaign, and it turns out that was a lie.

00:31:14.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the fight against inflation continued to face headwinds in January, with consumer prices rising more than expected.

00:31:21.000 The Labor Department on Wednesday reported consumer prices in January rose 3% from a year earlier.

00:31:25.000 That marked a pickup from December when prices rose 2.9% from a year earlier.

00:31:30.000 Stock futures turned down after the report was released and bond yields jumped.

00:31:33.000 The uptick in prices comes as newly sworn in President Trump vows to lower prices for Americans.

00:31:38.000 Higher housing costs are helping to fuel the rise along with auto insurance and airfare as well as grocery prices.

00:31:43.000 Prices were up 0.5% from the prior month.

00:31:47.000 Core prices, which doesn't count food and energy prices, actually rose 3.3% over the year and 0.4% over the month.

00:31:54.000 Egg prices increased more than 15%, the largest increase since June of 2015, and that is one of the big drivers of how expensive things are at the grocery right now.

00:32:05.000 There's talk that maybe the federal reserve should actually increase the interest rates at this point in order to continue to quash inflation.

00:32:11.000 It's a little bit early to blame President Trump for the inflation rates, given the fact that, again, he's been in office for a grand total of three weeks.

00:32:18.000 But the only way that inflation is going to be brought down in the end is by More productivity.

00:32:25.000 The only way inflation is going to be brought down in the end is by a more solid basis for the economy other than blowing money into it for the same product.

00:32:34.000 Basically, inflation is always too much money chasing too few goods.

00:32:38.000 If you create more goods, if your supply keeps up with your demand, if you create new innovative products, well, it turns out that prices tend to decrease through competition.

00:32:50.000 And that is what the administration is pursuing.

00:32:53.000 That is particularly true when it comes to AI. So yesterday, Vice President J.D. Vance was in Europe to speak about AI. And it is pretty incredible how Europe has basically blown it on AI. AI is the single most transformative technology of my lifetime other than the internet itself.

00:33:07.000 The leaps and bounds that AI is taking, utterly extraordinary, truly extraordinary.

00:33:11.000 If you are playing around with, say, perplexity AI or Grok or ChatGPT, the quality of the AI is so unbelievably high.

00:33:19.000 I was playing around with perplexity yesterday, and I took a link to a video on YouTube, like a three-hour interview with an author, and I said, please summarize the main points of this interview.

00:33:30.000 And in less than a second, it spelled out all of the main points of the interview.

00:33:35.000 I mean, really amazing.

00:33:36.000 It's like huge, time-saving, labor-saving innovations.

00:33:42.000 Europe is way behind.

00:33:43.000 The reason Europe is way behind is because Europe is always the safety-focused Helicopter parent of business.

00:33:51.000 They're always worried that the child is going to be on the swings and fall off and break the head, so they put a helmet on the kid and then say, don't go on the swings.

00:33:59.000 Meanwhile, the United States has always been the innovative country that says, okay, we're going to let you play.

00:34:03.000 We'll let you play.

00:34:04.000 And so the AI competition right now is between a heavily subsidized, lying government in China.

00:34:11.000 It turns out that a lot of the things that China was saying about DeepSeek, which is their own version of AI, about the cost, about the sophisticated chips that they were using or not using, a lot of that turned out to be a lie.

00:34:20.000 It's not nearly as cheap as they were saying, and they were hijacking NVIDIA chips and using sophisticated chips to actually build their own.

00:34:27.000 But the real competition right now is between the United States, China, and Europe is, like, still using an abacus.

00:34:35.000 And this is something J.D. Vance was pointing at.

00:34:37.000 He said, listen, we're going to keep developing AI, and if you keep trying, I couldn't help but think of the conference today.

00:34:54.000 If we choose the wrong approach on other things that could be conceived of as dangerous, things like AI, and choose to hold ourselves back, it will alter not only our GDP or the stock market, but the very future of the project that Lafayette and the American founders set off to create. but the very future of the project that Lafayette and Now, this doesn't mean, of course, that all concerns about safety go out the window, but focus matters.

00:35:19.000 And we must focus now on the opportunity to catch lightning in a bottle, unleash our most brilliant innovators, and use AI to improve the well-being of our nations and their peoples.

00:35:32.000 Innovation, productivity increases, right?

00:35:34.000 These are things that America is going to need and the rest of the world is going to need as well.

00:35:38.000 And businesses are recognizing this.

00:35:39.000 Goldman Sachs has now abandoned its IPO diversity pledge.

00:35:44.000 It's abandoning all of its DEI nonsense.

00:35:46.000 According to Bloomberg, Wall Street's leading investment bank had a policy that would only take a company public in the U.S. or Western Europe if it included two diverse board members, one of whom had to be a woman.

00:35:55.000 That rule had initially been put in place in 2020. As a result of legal developments related to board diversity requirements, we ended our formal board diversity policy, according to Tony Frato, a spokesperson for Goldman Sachs.

00:36:07.000 Because it turns out that actually many of the most important businesses in the world do not have quote-unquote diverse boards.

00:36:13.000 All they have is merit-driven boards.

00:36:16.000 That is good.

00:36:17.000 And by the way, those who stand up against merit, those who stand up against innovation, they're going to get run over and they should be run over because they're standing in the way of positive externalities for everyone else.

00:36:28.000 Meritocracy has positive externalities for everyone else.

00:36:31.000 No other system of rewarding talent.

00:36:36.000 It creates positive externalities.

00:36:38.000 If you reward people based on group status, that has negative externalities.

00:36:41.000 It hurts everybody who's not a member of that group.

00:36:44.000 If you reward people based on merit, that has positive externalities because the most meritorious are going to be more productive than any other group put in place.

00:36:53.000 And they're going to do more work.

00:36:55.000 And they're going to be better at that work.

00:36:57.000 Well, DEI is dying everywhere, not just at Goldman Sachs.

00:36:59.000 Disney is now moving away from its DEI efforts.

00:37:02.000 And that's because the American public did not like what they were seeing. 0.98

00:37:05.000 It is because the state of Florida said no to all of this trash. 0.87

00:37:08.000 It's because the Daily Wire announced that we would launch competition to their actual DEI nonsense. 0.82

00:37:13.000 That is why Disney is doing this.

00:37:15.000 They went woke and they went broke.

00:37:16.000 And now they're trying to revert back to normalcy.

00:37:19.000 And you know what?

00:37:19.000 Good for them.

00:37:20.000 Good for them.

00:37:21.000 I'm a forgiving man.

00:37:22.000 I mean, I'd like to see them do it across the board.

00:37:24.000 I'd like to see less left-wing propaganda on Disney.

00:37:26.000 I'd love to see the Star Wars properties restored to their former place of glory.

00:37:30.000 Lori and Kathleen Kennedy put out by the side of the road with the rest of the recycling.

00:37:34.000 However, according to Axios, Disney is now changing its DEI programs to focus more closely on business outcomes.

00:37:40.000 As part of the shift, sources tell Axios Disney is moving and changing the content disclaimers that started releasing around certain titles in 2020.

00:37:46.000 Those are those annoying placards that you see before Aladdin saying that this is fostering cultural stereotypes and negativity and racism right before they make money off of you watching Robin Williams voice the genie.

00:37:59.000 In a note to employees sent Tuesday morning, Chief Human Resources Officer Sonia Coleman outlined ways Disney's DEI efforts will change.

00:38:05.000 Beginning this fiscal year, Disney will replace the diversity and inclusion performance factor used to evaluate executive compensation with a new talent strategy.

00:38:14.000 Wow.

00:38:15.000 Disney is getting rid of its controversial Reimagine Tomorrow initiative and the corresponding website, which was used to highlight stories and talent from quote-unquote underrepresented communities.

00:38:23.000 The company has now rebranded its business employee resource groups to belonging employee resource groups.

00:38:30.000 The transformation is meant to highlight the focus on BERGs and strengthening the employee community and workplace experience.

00:38:36.000 Disney is also updating the language of the content advisories that run before certain titles on its streaming services.

00:38:42.000 Again, this is all because Disney decided that they were going to move to the left politically. 0.98

00:38:47.000 And it turns out parents didn't like that crap. 0.96

00:38:51.000 Disney's reputation score among Republicans has been jumping because of these moves, compared to 2023. According to the Axios Harris 100 brand reputation poll. 0.98

00:39:01.000 So its score jumped from 61.03 in 2023 to 67.9 in 2024, which is, in fact, a significant jump.

00:39:12.000 Because, you know, again, they're getting rid of all this.

00:39:15.000 Meanwhile, PBS has shuttered its DEI office.

00:39:17.000 PBS, of course, is publicly funded.

00:39:20.000 The public broadcaster said in a statement, quote, In order to best ensure we are in compliance with the president's executive order around DEI, we have closed our DEI office.

00:39:27.000 The staff members who served in that office are now leaving PBS. We'll continue to adhere to our mission and values.

00:39:33.000 PBS will continue to reflect all of America and remain a welcoming place for everyone.

00:39:36.000 Ah, nature is healing.

00:39:37.000 This is a joy.

00:39:38.000 Disney getting back to normal.

00:39:40.000 PBS getting back to normal.

00:39:41.000 It wasn't that tough, as it turns out.

00:39:43.000 All it took was Democrats losing an election.

00:39:46.000 Meritocracy must rule.

00:39:47.000 Which is why, frankly, I'm excited.

00:39:49.000 That there were people who were protesting the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, yesterday at a military installation in Germany.

00:39:57.000 This is great.

00:39:57.000 We can now identify their parents and kick them out.

00:40:00.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.

00:40:02.000 First, when you join Daily Wire Plus, it's not just a subscription, it is a statement.

00:40:05.000 A refusal to be spoon-fed.

00:40:06.000 The nonsense shoved down your throat by the media, Hollywood, and every self-righteous blue-haired activist with a TikTok account.

00:40:10.000 You've heard the lies.

00:40:11.000 You've seen the manipulation.

00:40:12.000 You know the game is rigged.

00:40:13.000 You refuse to be played.

00:40:15.000 Becoming a Daily Wire Plus member isn't just about access to content.

00:40:17.000 It's about standing up for truth in a world that treats truth like a disposable inconvenience.

00:40:21.000 It's about rejecting propaganda.

00:40:22.000 It's about demanding facts, logic, and reality when the culture wants you gaslit into submission.

00:40:27.000 So when you join, you know exactly what you're doing.

00:40:29.000 Backing a movement that doesn't just report on the culture but actually reshapes it.

00:40:32.000 Every dollar you spend goes directly into building the future because America's future isn't going to build itself.

00:40:36.000 Join the fight today.

00:40:37.000 Dailywire.com slash subscribe.

00:40:40.000 Meanwhile, Democrats are celebrating because a bunch of American students at a U.S. military installation in Germany walked out of their middle school on Tuesday as part of protests aimed at an official visit by the new Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth.

00:40:51.000 Why?

00:40:52.000 Because the Defense Department is killing DEI initiatives.

00:40:55.000 This is according to the Washington Post.

00:40:57.000 The students attend Patch Middle School in Stuttgart, Germany, and peacefully walked out of class for nearly an hour.

00:41:03.000 We used to just call that ditching class when I was in middle school, actually.

00:41:07.000 But this is a great way of figuring out which parents are the Wokies and then, you know, booting them out of the military, actually. 1.00

00:41:12.000 That seems like a good idea.

00:41:14.000 Separately, a small group of adults, dressed in civilian clothing, likely parents, gathered outside at Stuttgart and protested within view and earshot of Hegseth's delegation, booing and chanting DEI. Again, good luck to you.

00:41:24.000 Seriously, good luck to you. 1.00

00:41:25.000 Americans are not up for this crap. 1.00

00:41:26.000 They are not. 1.00

00:41:27.000 And the media covering this has like a front page story that you had a couple of dozen students out of something like 700 students at this middle school who walked out and whoop-de-doo, whoop-de-freaking-doo.

00:41:37.000 Meanwhile, the actual big headline from yesterday was that Mark Fogel was freed by Russia.

00:41:43.000 So Mark Fogel had essentially been kidnapped by the Russians.

00:41:48.000 The Russians have been taking American hostages. 0.87

00:41:50.000 They've been condemning people to penal servitude.

00:41:52.000 For minor crimes, this is true of Brittany Reiner, the WNBA player. 0.95

00:41:56.000 The difference is Joe Biden had to trade a Russian arms dealer to get her back, as opposed to Mark Fogle, who came back for nothing, actually.

00:42:03.000 According to the Washington Post, President Trump thanked Vladimir Putin on Tuesday night for releasing American teacher Mark Fogle, who was freed after three and a half years of Russian imprisonment on drug charges in an exchange earlier in the day.

00:42:14.000 President Trump welcomed Fogle back by ushering him into the White House, and then he also invited him to stay the night in the Lincoln bedroom.

00:42:21.000 Fogle, for his part, was obviously grateful and celebratory about all this.

00:42:26.000 He kissed the ground when he reached the United States.

00:42:27.000 He was at the White House drinking a Pennsylvania brew at the White House.

00:42:33.000 Here it was yesterday.

00:42:35.000 I'm a middle class school teacher who's now in a dream world.

00:42:46.000 We're going to show you the Lincoln bedroom.

00:42:48.000 It's a very special place.

00:42:52.000 Appropriate for tonight.

00:42:53.000 Very appropriate.

00:42:55.000 And thank you all.

00:43:00.000 And I love our country.

00:43:03.000 And I'm so happy to be back here.

00:43:06.000 And I wish I could articulate it better.

00:43:13.000 You've done beautifully.

00:43:15.000 And he's got a great mother.

00:43:16.000 And when I saw the mother at a rally, she said, if you win, will you get my son out?

00:43:22.000 And I promise she's 95 years old.

00:43:25.000 And I said, we'll get him out.

00:43:27.000 And we got him out pretty quickly.

00:43:32.000 Apparently Steve Whitcoff, who is the Envoy to the Middle East was the broker of this particular agreement.

00:43:37.000 He had a three-and-a-half-hour meeting with Putin while in Moscow arranging Fogel's release.

00:43:40.000 Unclear what exactly the United States gave up to get Fogel back.

00:43:43.000 It wasn't nothing.

00:43:44.000 Presumably, it was some sort of criminal, but probably not on the level of the, you know, the merchant of death was the actual name of the person, the actual nickname of the person who was traded for Brittany Griner.

00:43:58.000 Remember that Joe Biden did not get out Mark Fogel.

00:44:01.000 In fact, even Obama's ambassador to Russia was celebrating Mark Fogel's prison release yesterday.

00:44:06.000 Here was President Obama's ambassador, Michael McFall, celebrating Fogel's prison release and thanking Trump for it.

00:44:11.000 Ambassador, you worked hard.

00:44:14.000 You wanted to see your friend, Mr. Fogel, released.

00:44:19.000 You know him.

00:44:20.000 You know his family.

00:44:21.000 I cannot imagine the relief that you and, of course, a lot of people who love him are feeling right now.

00:44:27.000 Tell us what you are feeling.

00:44:32.000 Hallelujah.

00:44:33.000 Fantastic news.

00:44:35.000 Praise be to President Donald Trump.

00:44:38.000 That's not a phrase I get to say very often.

00:44:40.000 I don't know the circumstances.

00:44:42.000 I don't know the deal.

00:44:44.000 We'll learn those later.

00:44:45.000 And I don't care.

00:44:47.000 Mark was in bad health.

00:44:49.000 He was wrongfully detained for years.

00:44:52.000 This is an American patriot.

00:44:54.000 This is a fantastic human being.

00:44:56.000 He was a teacher to one of my sons.

00:44:59.000 Integral member of our community in Moscow when I lived there.

00:45:03.000 And this is just fantastic news for anybody who cares about patriotic Americans.

00:45:10.000 The Biden administration had refused or delayed actually labeling Fogel as wrongfully detained during the administration.

00:45:17.000 Very, very late in the administration.

00:45:19.000 Trump moved quickly with lacrity to get...

00:45:22.000 Fogel outs. 0.94

00:45:22.000 That is a big win. 0.94

00:45:23.000 And again, this is part of a broader attempt to thaw relations, presumably, with the Russians in advance of some sort of deal to be cut over Ukraine.

00:45:30.000 The Europeans are being asked to pick up more of the slack, as they should be. 1.00

00:45:33.000 Ukraine is being told by the Trump administration that they are probably not going to get to keep Donbass and Crimea because they really have no military prospect of winning back those areas.

00:45:42.000 And the Russians are being told that they are not going to win Kyiv.

00:45:44.000 That was always going to be the outline of a deal.

00:45:46.000 I've been saying this since August of 2022, just months after the beginning of the war, is that this is the way the war was going to end.

00:45:52.000 It appears that is the direction that is currently being taken.

00:45:55.000 According to Politico, the strategy for Ukraine is quietly shifting in Europe to match the changing tone of the United States from a promise of unyielding support to an effort to bring Kiev to the bargaining table with a strong hand.

00:46:04.000 A new strategy will play out most clearly this week at the Munich Security Conference, one of the biggest gatherings of defense leaders in the world.

00:46:09.000 Now remember, this has to be done because Zelensky He's going to have to explain to his own people why he's not winning back everything.

00:46:16.000 And Zelensky is still, despite his war powers, a democratically elected leader who is going to be subject to the voting population.

00:46:23.000 If he goes back to that population, and again, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, wounded in Ukraine, going back and saying, listen, we have to get Crimea and Donbass to get to some sort of off-ramp here is not going to be a popular move.

00:46:35.000 If, however, Zelensky says, listen, I didn't want it.

00:46:37.000 I want all that stuff back, but I was forced by everybody else to do the thing, that gives him an off-ramp.

00:46:42.000 And some of us have been saying this for nigh on three years at this point.

00:46:47.000 It's a dramatic departure from the Biden era, according to Politico, when the meeting reinforced the U.S. and its allies had Ukraine's back for, as former President Joe Biden often said, as long as it takes.

00:46:55.000 But that was never a good policy.

00:46:56.000 Because if you say as long as it takes without any off-ramp, what's the off-ramp then?

00:47:02.000 Biden kept saying, we're going to do this until they reached their goals.

00:47:05.000 And then when asked what the goals were, they were never articulated.

00:47:08.000 I mean, a good war has an actual goal at the end of the war.

00:47:14.000 If you don't have a goal, it's very difficult to win.

00:47:16.000 How's victory even defined at that point?

00:47:20.000 Well, Trump campaign vowed to end the war in a day, but the conference is going to have Vice President Vance meeting with Zelensky.

00:47:29.000 Vice President Kamala Harris had gone to Bavaria to meet Zelensky three times.

00:47:33.000 But Europe is saying, we will for the moment take the lead if the Americans don't.

00:47:35.000 Good, fine, do it.

00:47:37.000 Seriously, do it.

00:47:38.000 All you guys, enjoy.

00:47:41.000 And meanwhile, speaking of foreign policy, things are ratcheting up again in the Gaza Strip.

00:47:47.000 That is because Hamas had said that they were not going to release any more hostages this weekend.

00:47:51.000 And President Trump responded by saying you should release all the hostages this weekend or Israel should go in and just clean the ground with you.

00:47:58.000 And now it was unclear whether the Israeli government was going to go along with that or try to, in some way, preserve the ceasefire deal.

00:48:05.000 The Israeli government has now gone along with President Trump's demand.

00:48:08.000 They're mirroring his demand correctly because his demand is right.

00:48:11.000 This should have been the approach of the Israeli government from literally the first day and the approach of the American government from the first day.

00:48:16.000 Trump is right.

00:48:17.000 On these matters, as always, President Trump in the Middle East tends to be right more often than any other politician.

00:48:23.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded that Hamas release Israeli hostages by noon Saturday or face a return to war.

00:48:32.000 Hamas had set off a rupture in the talks on Monday by saying it would postpone the release of three hostages scheduled to be freed this weekend to protest delays and deliveries of humanitarian goods.

00:48:40.000 But that's not what it was about.

00:48:41.000 The reason Hamas said they wanted to delay delivery of the hostages is because all the hostages look like Holocaust survivors.

00:48:47.000 And they realize that there is serious PR blowback to their treatment of the hostages.

00:48:51.000 So presumably they want several weeks to fatten them up so they don't look as though they're on the verge of death, the ones who are alive when they are, in fact, released.

00:48:58.000 Trump is saying, no, none of that.

00:49:00.000 Just let everybody out.

00:49:01.000 Do it now, or Israel has full reign to go back in and do whatever the hell they want. 0.76

00:49:05.000 Trump said, I don't think they're going to make the deadline personally.

00:49:07.000 I think they want to play the tough guy.

00:49:08.000 We'll see how tough they are.

00:49:10.000 Netanyahu issued an ultimatum of his own.

00:49:12.000 He said, if Hamas does not return our hostages by Saturday at noon, the ceasefire will end.

00:49:16.000 The IDF will resume intense fighting until the final defeat of Hamas.

00:49:21.000 This, of course, was always going to happen.

00:49:23.000 I said this from the beginning of this ceasefire deal.

00:49:26.000 There was never going to be a good ceasefire deal, but Israel was always going back to war.

00:49:30.000 Hamas was never going to be left in charge.

00:49:32.000 Meanwhile, President Trump had King Abdullah of Jordan to the White House yesterday, and he is not backing off of his position on the Gaza Strip.

00:49:40.000 He's saying, look, people who are there and suffering need to be let out.

00:49:44.000 That place can be cleared.

00:49:45.000 It can be turned into basically the Riviera on the Mediterranean, and it's going to bring jobs.

00:49:51.000 It's going to make life better for people.

00:49:53.000 Here's President Trump with his out-of-the-box proposal that continues to be the best available proposal.

00:49:57.000 No one else has one.

00:49:58.000 Let's hear it, guys.

00:49:59.000 Where's your proposal? 1.00

00:50:00.000 Because it turns out status quo ante was shit. 1.00

00:50:02.000 It was terrible. 0.99

00:50:03.000 So here's President Trump spelling out his proposal in front of King Abdullah of Jordan.

00:50:07.000 Now, Abdullah does not want this proposal to go forward.

00:50:10.000 Why?

00:50:10.000 Well, because he's afraid that many of those Palestinians will be pushed into Jordan.

00:50:15.000 Jordan's population is already 60 to 70 percent Palestinian.

00:50:18.000 The population of Jordan is extraordinarily radicalized because the Palestinians are an extraordinarily radical group of people. 0.99

00:50:24.000 They've been threatening the fall of the Hashemite dynasty. 0.99

00:50:27.000 The dynasty in Jordan is not Palestinian, although Queen Rania is.

00:50:32.000 And so they've been complaining about a lack of a Palestinian state while 70% of their population is Palestinian.

00:50:37.000 If the Jordanians actually wanted a Palestinian state, they could hold an election tomorrow.

00:50:41.000 The problem is, of course, that King Abdullah would then likely be hanging from a crane.

00:50:44.000 So that is the reason why they don't want more Palestinian refugees. 1.00

00:50:47.000 Trump, however, is saying, listen, if you're not going to take him, somebody should.

00:50:51.000 So here he was yesterday.

00:50:54.000 If you didn't have the October 7th catastrophe and it was a horrible catastrophe, then probably you wouldn't be talking about that.

00:51:02.000 But the only thing I can say is this is going to bring stability and peace to the Middle East.

00:51:08.000 And ultimately, when it's developed, which will be in quite a while from now, because we want to let things calm down.

00:51:17.000 But when it's developed, it's going to bring tremendous numbers of jobs to the Middle East, including the people of your country.

00:51:23.000 And hilariously, King Abdullah was forced to sit there and take this.

00:51:29.000 and he too admitted that President Trump is bringing stability in the region.

00:51:33.000 Mr. President, I truly believe that with all the challenges that we have in the Middle East that I finally see somebody that could take us across the finish line to bring stability, peace and prosperity to all of us in the region and it is, I think, our collective responsibility in the Middle East to continue to our collective responsibility in the Middle East to continue to work with you, to support you, to achieve those lofty goals.

00:51:54.000 So I'm very delighted to be here and as you said, sir, we've got some very interesting discussions ahead of us.

00:51:58.000 Very good.

00:51:59.000 Very good.

00:52:00.000 Thank you very much.

00:52:00.000 And President Trump working his will in the Middle East.

00:52:05.000 And as far as the notion that populations never move in the aftermath of losing a war, that obviously is untrue.

00:52:10.000 Andrew Roberts, a very famous historian.

00:52:13.000 It has a piece over the Washington Free Beacon spelling out that reality, which is that when you start a war and you lose a war, you tend to lose territory and your population tends to have to move.

00:52:22.000 And that is true everywhere from the end of World War II to the end of the Korean War.

00:52:27.000 Quote, after North Korea launched its vicious, unprovoked attack on South Korea in June 1950, it was punished so severely by the American-led United Nations force, it lost over a million dead.

00:52:36.000 North Korea lost territory in the armistice in 1953 and has been a pariah state ever since.

00:52:41.000 When the Argentinian military dictatorship suddenly invaded the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic in April 1982 and were utterly defeated 10 weeks later by Margaret Thatcher's task force, the entire junta in Buenos Aires was deposed from power.

00:52:52.000 Some were jailed.

00:52:53.000 Democracy returned to Argentina.

00:52:55.000 Saddam Hussein's surprise attack on Kuwait was a similar example, where a country invades its neighbor suddenly and without provocation. 0.89

00:53:00.000 After a defeat in war loses both the government, Saddam was hanged, and its sovereignty while the U.S.-led coalition attempted to rebuild the country.

00:53:07.000 In the collapsing former Yugoslavia of the early 1990s, Serb leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic, General Ratko Mladic, and Radovan Karadzic took the cold-blooded decision to invade neighboring Bosnia and conduct an appalling program of what came to be known as ethnic cleansing, which was mass murder.

00:53:22.000 Those critics of Donald Trump, who tritely referred to his population transfers under the Gaza plan as ethnic cleansing, ought to revisit what the phrase actually means in terms of horror, violence, and bloodshed.

00:53:31.000 Once NATO finally took to the air an operations deliberate force to end the brutality, all three of those Serb leaders were imprisoned.

00:53:36.000 Serbia's borders were decided by the West rather than by the Serbs.

00:53:40.000 In other words, start a war, lose a war, lose.

00:53:42.000 That is typically the way that war has worked.

00:53:44.000 And it's only when it comes to the Palestinians that magically the rules don't apply, which has less to do with the Palestinians, it seems, and more to do with the treatment of the Jews by the international community.

00:53:54.000 All right, coming up, Republicans are wrangling over the budget.

00:53:58.000 We'll get to what that means.

00:53:59.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

00:54:01.000 Use code Shapiro.

00:54:01.000 Check out for two months free on all your own plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - February 12, 2025

The Trump-Musk REVOLUTION Continues!

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