Trump's approval ratings are the highest they've been in his entire career, and it's not because he's a bad president. It's because he is a good president. Democrats keep claiming that we're in a constitutional crisis, but they haven't learned their lesson yet. They kept saying during the last election cycle that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy. Now, when that particular line failed to work, they've transmuted it into a Constitutional crisis.
00:00:00.000Democrats keep claiming that we're in a constitutional crisis.
00:00:03.000They haven't learned their lesson yet.
00:00:05.000They kept saying during the last election cycle that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy.
00:00:09.000You heard this over and over and over.
00:00:10.000Republicans, Trump, they were a threat to democracy.
00:00:12.000Everything Trump did was a threat to democracy.
00:00:15.000Meanwhile, they were weaponizing the Department of Justice to go after President Trump.
00:00:18.000Joe Biden was thinking of new ways nearly every day to violate the Constitution.
00:00:22.000Well, now, when that particular line didn't work, the threat to democracy line, they've transmuted it into a constitutional crisis.
00:00:29.000You 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.
00:00:43.000No 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.
00:00:52.000There's a brand new poll out from the UK Daily Mail.
00:00:54.000And it shows his approval rating at 53%.
00:00:59.000That 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.
00:01:14.000Democrats must be absolutely peeing their pants at this point.
00:01:37.000Democrats 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.
00:01:47.000The deep state that Donald Trump complained about during his first term.
00:01:51.000The 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.
00:02:02.000But 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.
00:02:21.000The elected president going to unelected bureaucrats and telling them not to spend taxpayer money.
00:02:25.000That is one of the least fascistic things I've ever heard in my entire life.
00:02:29.000It turns out that fascism is about centralization of power in one man or in an oligarchy who then take more control over the people.
00:02:37.000I have yet to hear of a fascist movement that delegates more power back out to the people away from a centralized bureaucracy.
00:02:45.000I've never heard of anything remotely like that.
00:02:47.000Please, name the last fascist movement.
00:02:48.000That minimized the power of the executive in Americans' lives.
00:02:52.000You're going to have to figure this one out.
00:02:54.000But Democrats don't want to figure that one out, so they're just going to keep shouting nostrums.
00:02:57.000Well, yesterday, President Trump kept the momentum going.
00:03:00.000According 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.
00:03:10.000Ahead of that signing, Trump was joined in the Oval Office by Elon Musk, and it was highly entertaining.
00:03:17.000So, first, Trump had in Musk and Elon likes to bring around his son X. Like, everywhere.
00:03:22.000When 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.
00:03:29.000I will say, I love the normalization of kids in public life.
00:03:39.000As they get older, I'm going to start bringing them to events so they can experience them and learn.
00:03:44.000This is how kids learn, is by following their parents around.
00:03:46.000Between 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.
00:05:34.000Why would even Congress want to do that?
00:05:36.000Now, Congress, if we do need a vote, I think we'd get a very easy vote because we have a track record now.
00:05:42.000We've already found billions of dollars of abuse, incompetence, and corruption.
00:05:48.000Okay, so he's right about this, by the way.
00:05:50.000If 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.
00:05:59.000Speaking of waste, fraud, and abuse, the White House on Tuesday evening, according to the Washington Post, So, the guy's name was Paul Martin.
00:06:15.000He 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.
00:06:25.000The 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.
00:06:36.000And the reason presumably he was fired is he leaked all of this to the media.
00:06:39.000He put out this report publicly and Trump says we are not a leaky administration.
00:06:44.000Plus, 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.
00:06:52.000But 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.
00:07:07.000And I think this is what Democrats are having such a tough time with.
00:07:10.000President Trump has actually changed in many ways.
00:07:14.000One 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.
00:07:25.000And 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.
00:07:37.000Now, the reality is no one perceives that to be the case.
00:07:39.000Donald Trump is running the presidency.
00:08:12.000But beyond that, everyone also understands that in the end, if Trump says no, Elon doesn't have any power to cut.
00:08:18.000Trump's going to be the one who has to actually implement the recommendations that are being made by Doge.
00:08:22.000It is Trump empowering Musk, not the other way around.
00:08:24.000And so Musk, in solidarity with Trump in the Oval Office, in lockstep, arm in arm, is a major thing.
00:08:32.000It 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.
00:08:39.000But in the end, he is the decision maker.
00:08:42.000Well, Trump feels liberated as president, but in your own life, are you feeling buried under credit card bills, personal loans, medical debt?
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00:10:48.000So Musk had himself a good time in the Oval Office.
00:10:51.000He started off by talking about cutting the budget and he said, listen, to do that requires a couple of things, competence and caring.
00:10:58.000At 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?
00:11:41.000There's going to be a lot of muscle and bone that gets cut or broken before it is healed.
00:11:46.000And this is sort of the way that Musk works.
00:11:48.000So, for example, Musk was questioned by the media in this Oval Office.
00:11:52.000It is amazing how transparent this administration is, by the way.
00:11:55.000Joe Biden would not do a press conference for three and a half years because Joe Biden was not competent.
00:12:00.000Because Joe Biden was not mentally there.
00:12:02.000Donald Trump is speaking to the press every single day.
00:12:05.000Elon 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.
00:12:20.000That 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.
00:12:30.000Ms. Mas, you said on X that an example of the fraud that you have cited was $50 million of condoms was sent to Gaza.
00:12:40.000But after fact-checked this, apparently Gaza in Mozambique, and the program was to protect them against HIV. So can you correct the statements?
00:13:10.000We will make mistakes, but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes.
00:13:15.000So, 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.
00:13:43.000You keep saying people didn't vote for me.
00:13:44.000People literally voted for Donald Trump knowing that Elon Musk was going to be part of the cutting effort.
00:13:50.000It is not as though Donald Trump hit the ball here.
00:13:52.000Again, 7 in 10 Americans believe that Donald Trump is keeping his promises right now, which is a historic number.
00:13:58.000I mean, at this rate, the way that Donald Trump is moving, and again, it's unbelievable.
00:14:02.000We're three weeks into his presidency.
00:14:04.000If 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.
00:14:14.000Here's Elon Musk saying, listen, people voted for this.
00:14:16.000You keep pretending like people didn't vote.
00:14:18.000People never voted for any of these bureaucrats, but they voted for this.
00:14:22.000You couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from the public.
00:14:25.000The public voted—we have a majority of the public voting for President Trump.
00:15:11.000If 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?
00:15:24.000If 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.
00:15:52.000So 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.
00:15:56.000They should actually have to work literal salt mines.
00:15:58.000But here's Elon pointing out a thing, and it turns out this is true.
00:16:05.000And 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.
00:16:38.000And 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.
00:16:46.000And 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.
00:17:04.000Why are we hand-filing retirement files?
00:17:07.000Again, like some sort of dystopian sci-fi picture from 1956. This is ridiculous.
00:17:12.000The Department of Government Efficiency put out these pictures.
00:17:15.000It's Iron Mountain, which is an actual document processing company.
00:17:19.000Federal employee retirements are processed using paper by hand in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania.
00:17:25.000700 plus mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process 10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes.
00:17:32.000The retirement process takes multiple months.
00:17:35.000Now, in the modern world, you know how you could retire today?
00:17:37.000By hitting a button, like one button, less than a second, done.
00:17:42.000That's how you should be able to retire.
00:17:43.000Because you can do literally, I can order anything I want from Amazon with the click of a button.
00:17:48.000It doesn't take me more than about five seconds.
00:17:50.000And yet retirement is supposed to take months because you have to have...
00:17:53.000Some 60-year-old schlub wandering around in the limestone mines of Pennsylvania or something?
00:18:02.000So Musk was also questioned about supposed conflicts of interest because, of course, he has his own business interests.
00:18:06.000And he says, listen, I'm pretty much the most public person there is.
00:18:09.000And if you have questions, feel free to ask them.
00:18:11.000I 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...
00:18:18.000Those have been used as tools by many of the people in the bureaucracy in order to hold up people.
00:18:24.000This is what happened during Trump administration number one.
00:18:26.000I 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.
00:18:38.000And so what Trump is saying is, I'm not going to do that.
00:18:50.000What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency?
00:18:56.000Well, we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible.
00:18:59.000In fact, our actions, we post our actions to the Doge handle on X and to the Doge website.
00:19:06.000So all of our actions are maximally transparent.
00:19:09.000In 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.
00:19:19.000You know, the kind of things we're doing are, I think, very, very simple and basic.
00:19:24.000So, 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.
00:19:31.000That includes, apparently, the Department of Defense.
00:19:33.000Secretary 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.
00:19:42.000Here was Secretary of Defense Hegseth this morning.
00:19:44.000We welcome Doge to the Pentagon, and I hope to welcome Elon to the Pentagon very soon, and his team working in collaboration with us.
00:19:53.000There are waste, redundancies, and headcounts in headquarters that need to be addressed.
00:20:34.000You 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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00:22:44.000Again, that's GCU. Well, meanwhile, again, Democrats keep claiming constitutional crisis over and over and over.
00:22:58.000The constitutional crisis, if it exists at all, which it doesn't, is being caused by federal judges issuing nationwide injunctions.
00:23:05.000So, for example, yesterday, a federal judge named John Bates agreed to a request from Doctors of America for a temporary restraining order nationally.
00:23:19.000Well, the judge wants them to restore webpages and data that had been deleted in compliance with Trump's executive order related to gender ideology.
00:23:28.000So, 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.
00:23:43.000So, apparently, this judge is now attempting to force the federal government to keep up a bunch of dumb data about gender ideology.
00:24:52.000CNN having to cover Elon's trollery is pretty high level.
00:24:56.000Meanwhile, 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.
00:25:05.000In any case, Joy Reid says that Democrats should actually stop all legislation.
00:25:16.000Let me ask you this, because the Democrats are in the minority, so you have only so much leverage.
00:25:20.000Have 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.
00:25:54.000You guys are doing an amazing, amazing job.
00:25:56.000Meanwhile, 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.
00:26:06.000He 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.
00:26:16.000There'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.
00:26:27.000Some 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?
00:27:05.000Please explain how Elon Musk going and recommending cuts inside the executive branch is a constitutional crisis that is going to end democracy in America.
00:27:13.000Do you mean that there is tension between the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of the government?
00:27:18.000As written in the Constitution, that's crazy talk.
00:27:21.000Here's Caitlin Collins at CNN. They can't say threat to democracy anymore, so they just shifted it over to constitutional crisis.
00:27:29.000We 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.
00:27:39.000Now, 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.
00:27:54.000And 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.
00:28:04.000Now, 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.
00:29:03.000What if I told you that that was a thing?
00:29:04.000But here is the MSNBC legal analyst, Danny Savala, panicking, running into walls.
00:29:11.000History'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.
00:29:22.000And while it's probably apocryphal that Jackson said he has his order, meaning the Supreme Court, let's see them enforce it.
00:29:28.000It's a scary quote, if true, because it's really an unspoken thing that the courts don't really have their own.
00:29:38.000Meanwhile, President Trump is like, what are you even talking about?
00:30:42.000We're going to have to grow our way out of many of these problems while simultaneously cutting all the waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:30:47.000And the Trump administration is focused on both of those things.
00:30:51.000Again, 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.
00:31:02.000Well, that fight against inflation is not yet won.
00:31:04.000Remember, you kept hearing that it was over.
00:31:08.000The economy was on a solid footing now.
00:31:10.000That was his entire campaign and Kamala Harris's campaign, and it turns out that was a lie.
00:31:14.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the fight against inflation continued to face headwinds in January, with consumer prices rising more than expected.
00:31:21.000The Labor Department on Wednesday reported consumer prices in January rose 3% from a year earlier.
00:31:25.000That marked a pickup from December when prices rose 2.9% from a year earlier.
00:31:30.000Stock futures turned down after the report was released and bond yields jumped.
00:31:33.000The uptick in prices comes as newly sworn in President Trump vows to lower prices for Americans.
00:31:38.000Higher housing costs are helping to fuel the rise along with auto insurance and airfare as well as grocery prices.
00:31:43.000Prices were up 0.5% from the prior month.
00:31:47.000Core prices, which doesn't count food and energy prices, actually rose 3.3% over the year and 0.4% over the month.
00:31:54.000Egg 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.
00:32:05.000There's talk that maybe the federal reserve should actually increase the interest rates at this point in order to continue to quash inflation.
00:32:11.000It'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.
00:32:18.000But the only way that inflation is going to be brought down in the end is by More productivity.
00:32:25.000The 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.
00:32:34.000Basically, inflation is always too much money chasing too few goods.
00:32:38.000If 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.
00:32:50.000And that is what the administration is pursuing.
00:32:53.000That 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.
00:33:07.000The leaps and bounds that AI is taking, utterly extraordinary, truly extraordinary.
00:33:11.000If you are playing around with, say, perplexity AI or Grok or ChatGPT, the quality of the AI is so unbelievably high.
00:33:19.000I 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.
00:33:30.000And in less than a second, it spelled out all of the main points of the interview.
00:33:43.000The reason Europe is way behind is because Europe is always the safety-focused Helicopter parent of business.
00:33:51.000They'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.
00:33:59.000Meanwhile, the United States has always been the innovative country that says, okay, we're going to let you play.
00:34:04.000And so the AI competition right now is between a heavily subsidized, lying government in China.
00:34:11.000It 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.
00:34:20.000It's not nearly as cheap as they were saying, and they were hijacking NVIDIA chips and using sophisticated chips to actually build their own.
00:34:27.000But the real competition right now is between the United States, China, and Europe is, like, still using an abacus.
00:34:35.000And this is something J.D. Vance was pointing at.
00:34:37.000He said, listen, we're going to keep developing AI, and if you keep trying, I couldn't help but think of the conference today.
00:34:54.000If 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.
00:35:19.000And 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.
00:35:39.000Goldman Sachs has now abandoned its IPO diversity pledge.
00:35:44.000It's abandoning all of its DEI nonsense.
00:35:46.000According 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.
00:35:55.000That 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.
00:36:07.000Because it turns out that actually many of the most important businesses in the world do not have quote-unquote diverse boards.
00:36:17.000And 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.
00:36:28.000Meritocracy has positive externalities for everyone else.
00:36:38.000If you reward people based on group status, that has negative externalities.
00:36:41.000It hurts everybody who's not a member of that group.
00:36:44.000If 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.
00:37:22.000I mean, I'd like to see them do it across the board.
00:37:24.000I'd like to see less left-wing propaganda on Disney.
00:37:26.000I'd love to see the Star Wars properties restored to their former place of glory.
00:37:30.000Lori and Kathleen Kennedy put out by the side of the road with the rest of the recycling.
00:37:34.000However, according to Axios, Disney is now changing its DEI programs to focus more closely on business outcomes.
00:37:40.000As part of the shift, sources tell Axios Disney is moving and changing the content disclaimers that started releasing around certain titles in 2020.
00:37:46.000Those 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.
00:37:59.000In a note to employees sent Tuesday morning, Chief Human Resources Officer Sonia Coleman outlined ways Disney's DEI efforts will change.
00:38:05.000Beginning this fiscal year, Disney will replace the diversity and inclusion performance factor used to evaluate executive compensation with a new talent strategy.
00:38:15.000Disney 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.
00:38:23.000The company has now rebranded its business employee resource groups to belonging employee resource groups.
00:38:30.000The transformation is meant to highlight the focus on BERGs and strengthening the employee community and workplace experience.
00:38:36.000Disney is also updating the language of the content advisories that run before certain titles on its streaming services.
00:38:42.000Again, this is all because Disney decided that they were going to move to the left politically.
00:38:47.000And it turns out parents didn't like that crap.
00:38:51.000Disney's reputation score among Republicans has been jumping because of these moves, compared to 2023. According to the Axios Harris 100 brand reputation poll.
00:39:01.000So its score jumped from 61.03 in 2023 to 67.9 in 2024, which is, in fact, a significant jump.
00:39:12.000Because, you know, again, they're getting rid of all this.
00:39:15.000Meanwhile, PBS has shuttered its DEI office.
00:39:20.000The 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.
00:39:27.000The staff members who served in that office are now leaving PBS. We'll continue to adhere to our mission and values.
00:39:33.000PBS will continue to reflect all of America and remain a welcoming place for everyone.
00:40:40.000Meanwhile, 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.
00:41:14.000Separately, 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.
00:41:27.000And 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.
00:41:37.000Meanwhile, the actual big headline from yesterday was that Mark Fogel was freed by Russia.
00:41:43.000So Mark Fogel had essentially been kidnapped by the Russians.
00:41:48.000The Russians have been taking American hostages.
00:41:50.000They've been condemning people to penal servitude.
00:41:52.000For minor crimes, this is true of Brittany Reiner, the WNBA player.
00:41:56.000The 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.
00:42:03.000According 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.
00:42:14.000President 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.
00:42:21.000Fogle, for his part, was obviously grateful and celebratory about all this.
00:42:26.000He kissed the ground when he reached the United States.
00:42:27.000He was at the White House drinking a Pennsylvania brew at the White House.
00:43:44.000Presumably, 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.
00:43:58.000Remember that Joe Biden did not get out Mark Fogel.
00:44:01.000In fact, even Obama's ambassador to Russia was celebrating Mark Fogel's prison release yesterday.
00:44:06.000Here was President Obama's ambassador, Michael McFall, celebrating Fogel's prison release and thanking Trump for it.
00:45:23.000And 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.
00:45:30.000The Europeans are being asked to pick up more of the slack, as they should be.
00:45:33.000Ukraine 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.
00:45:42.000And the Russians are being told that they are not going to win Kyiv.
00:45:44.000That was always going to be the outline of a deal.
00:45:46.000I'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.
00:45:52.000It appears that is the direction that is currently being taken.
00:45:55.000According 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.
00:46:04.000A 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.
00:46:09.000Now 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.
00:46:16.000And Zelensky is still, despite his war powers, a democratically elected leader who is going to be subject to the voting population.
00:46:23.000If 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.
00:46:35.000If, however, Zelensky says, listen, I didn't want it.
00:46:37.000I want all that stuff back, but I was forced by everybody else to do the thing, that gives him an off-ramp.
00:46:42.000And some of us have been saying this for nigh on three years at this point.
00:46:47.000It'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.
00:47:41.000And meanwhile, speaking of foreign policy, things are ratcheting up again in the Gaza Strip.
00:47:47.000That is because Hamas had said that they were not going to release any more hostages this weekend.
00:47:51.000And 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.
00:47:58.000And 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.
00:48:05.000The Israeli government has now gone along with President Trump's demand.
00:48:08.000They're mirroring his demand correctly because his demand is right.
00:48:11.000This 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.
00:48:17.000On these matters, as always, President Trump in the Middle East tends to be right more often than any other politician.
00:48:23.000According 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.
00:48:32.000Hamas 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.
00:48:41.000The reason Hamas said they wanted to delay delivery of the hostages is because all the hostages look like Holocaust survivors.
00:48:47.000And they realize that there is serious PR blowback to their treatment of the hostages.
00:48:51.000So 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.
00:49:10.000Netanyahu issued an ultimatum of his own.
00:49:12.000He said, if Hamas does not return our hostages by Saturday at noon, the ceasefire will end.
00:49:16.000The IDF will resume intense fighting until the final defeat of Hamas.
00:49:21.000This, of course, was always going to happen.
00:49:23.000I said this from the beginning of this ceasefire deal.
00:49:26.000There was never going to be a good ceasefire deal, but Israel was always going back to war.
00:49:30.000Hamas was never going to be left in charge.
00:49:32.000Meanwhile, 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.
00:49:40.000He's saying, look, people who are there and suffering need to be let out.
00:50:54.000If you didn't have the October 7th catastrophe and it was a horrible catastrophe, then probably you wouldn't be talking about that.
00:51:02.000But the only thing I can say is this is going to bring stability and peace to the Middle East.
00:51:08.000And ultimately, when it's developed, which will be in quite a while from now, because we want to let things calm down.
00:51:17.000But when it's developed, it's going to bring tremendous numbers of jobs to the Middle East, including the people of your country.
00:51:23.000And hilariously, King Abdullah was forced to sit there and take this.
00:51:29.000and he too admitted that President Trump is bringing stability in the region.
00:51:33.000Mr. 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.
00:51:54.000So I'm very delighted to be here and as you said, sir, we've got some very interesting discussions ahead of us.
00:52:00.000And President Trump working his will in the Middle East.
00:52:05.000And as far as the notion that populations never move in the aftermath of losing a war, that obviously is untrue.
00:52:10.000Andrew Roberts, a very famous historian.
00:52:13.000It 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.
00:52:22.000And that is true everywhere from the end of World War II to the end of the Korean War.
00:52:27.000Quote, 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.
00:52:36.000North Korea lost territory in the armistice in 1953 and has been a pariah state ever since.
00:52:41.000When 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.
00:52:55.000Saddam Hussein's surprise attack on Kuwait was a similar example, where a country invades its neighbor suddenly and without provocation.
00:53:00.000After 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.
00:53:07.000In 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.
00:53:22.000Those 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.
00:53:31.000Once NATO finally took to the air an operations deliberate force to end the brutality, all three of those Serb leaders were imprisoned.
00:53:36.000Serbia's borders were decided by the West rather than by the Serbs.
00:53:40.000In other words, start a war, lose a war, lose.
00:53:42.000That is typically the way that war has worked.
00:53:44.000And 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.
00:53:54.000All right, coming up, Republicans are wrangling over the budget.