Trump's interview on Sean Hannity, a new report from The Atlantic, and much, much more. Also, the death of the Bebb family in Ukraine, and a new executive order from President Trump on transparency and government accountability.
00:00:01.000We're going to get to the Trump-Elon interview on Sean Hannity's show.
00:00:04.000We're also going to be talking about negotiations over Ukraine, which are getting quite fraught.
00:00:09.000And, of course, Hamas has now announced that the Bebas family is dead, which many people had suspected, but is going to be a sort of earth-shattering piece of news over in Israel.
00:00:17.000But begin today with a fascinating realization by Derek Thompson over at The Atlantic, talking about the radical shift that has happened with young people in the United States as far as their voting patterns.
00:00:29.000What he finds is that COVID and BLM basically shoved an entire generation of people to the right.
00:00:34.000For decades, America's young voters have been deeply and famously progressive.
00:00:38.000In 2008, a youth quake sent Barack Obama to the White House.
00:00:41.000In 2016, voters ages 18 to 29 broke for Hillary Clinton by 18 points.
00:00:45.000In 2020, they voted for Biden by 24 points.
00:00:48.000But in 2024, Donald Trump closed most of the gap, losing voters under 30 by a 51 to 47 margin.
00:00:55.000In one recent CBS poll, Americans under 30 weren't just evenly split between the parties.
00:01:00.000They were even more pro-Trump than boomers over the age of 65. So what exactly is happening?
00:01:06.000Well, Derek Thompson suggests that essentially this is a reaction to the government overreach during COVID, that the bizarre institutional failures during COVID, ranging from the suggestion that you got to riot in the streets if you had the proper political credentials and COVID wouldn't attack you, to the idea that kids had to be locked out of schools, shoved an entire generation of young people to the right.
00:01:29.000But this does demonstrate, again, this is the warning, that people are incredibly variable and vacillating when it comes to their politics.
00:01:38.000Exogenous events can shove entire generations of people one way or another.
00:01:41.000And this has happened several times over the course of my lifetime.
00:01:44.000I remember after 2001, a whole new security boom happened in which people, particularly suburban moms who had traditionally voted Democrat, suddenly were voting Republican.
00:01:53.000And then COVID, apparently, shoved a bunch of young people.
00:01:56.000Wokeness shoved a bunch of young people to the right.
00:02:00.000That is a good reminder to everyone in politics that while you think that the pendulum will never shift back over to the other side, it absolutely will.
00:02:07.000And so two things ought to be taken from that.
00:02:09.000One, you ought to be very careful in how you use your political power.
00:02:14.000That doesn't mean you shouldn't move fast and break things.
00:02:16.000It means that you should be very careful that you don't set into motion a tripwire that is going to blow you up.
00:02:23.000And number two, it means that you actually do have to move with alacrity while I got to power because the left always does and the right rarely does.
00:02:29.000This is one of the differences between MAGA and prior conservative Republican movements.
00:02:33.000Prior Republican movements have taken that first bit of advice.
00:02:39.000But they've neglected that if you don't break enough things, there's sort of a perfect midpoint here, that if you don't actually move fast enough and break enough things, well then you don't get enough done.
00:02:48.000And the left comes back in and when they get in power, they move fast and they break things.
00:02:52.000Barack Obama was not shy about using his power in 2009-2010 in order to shove forward Obamacare and a vast expansion of the federal government.
00:03:00.000President Trump is doing precisely the opposite.
00:03:02.000So, yesterday, President Trump set about issuing a number of new executive orders.
00:03:07.000Some of them are incredibly consequential.
00:03:10.000One of them is just a reinstatement of his stated purpose, which is to create more governmental transparency.
00:03:18.000An executive order titled Radical Transparency About Wasteful Spending, quote, The United States government spends too much money on programs, contracts, and grants that do not promote the interests of the American people.
00:03:27.000For too long, taxpayers have subsidized ideological projects overseas and domestic organizations engaged in actions that undermine the national interest.
00:03:33.000The American people have seen their tax dollars used to fund the passion projects of unelected bureaucrats rather than to advance the national interest.
00:03:40.000The American people have a right to see how the federal government has wasted their hard-earned wages.
00:03:44.000President Trump therefore directed the heads of the executive departments to take all appropriate actions to make public, to the maximum extent permitted by law, the complete details of every terminated program, canceled contract, terminated grant, or any other discontinued obligation of federal funds.
00:03:58.000Again, this is all part and parcel of the sort of doge approach to American government.
00:04:02.000As part of that, President Trump also issued an executive order yesterday, quote, ensuring accountability for all agencies.
00:04:08.000The goal here is to re-enshrine the unitary executive theory of the federal government.
00:04:14.000If you go back to the Constitution, there is no unelected fourth branch of government that is sort of half run by Congress and half run by the executive.
00:04:20.000If Congress delegates power to the executive, it is now the job of the executive to perform those powers, which means that if you have an executive branch agency, that executive branch agency is headed by the President of the United States.
00:04:32.000This, of course, is the point of this particular executive order.
00:04:35.000Quote, previous administrations have allowed so-called independent regulatory agencies to operate with minimum presidential supervision.
00:04:41.000These regulatory agencies currently exercise substantial executive authority without sufficient accountability to the president and through him to the American people.
00:04:49.000Moreover, these regulatory agencies have been permitted to promulgate significant regulations without review by the president.
00:04:54.000Therefore, in order to improve the administration of the executive branch and to increase regulatory officials accountability to the American people, it shall be the policy of the executive branch to ensure presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch.
00:05:06.000And again, this is a restatement of the constitutional principle that the president runs the executive branch.
00:05:13.000And so all of the sort of pseudo-shock that you are seeing from Democrats on this particular point is because they had always assumed that an independent agency means it's run by Democrats.
00:05:22.000They had always assumed that career bureaucrat means Democrat.
00:05:28.000It was permanent political appointees who were supposedly insulated from any Republican president who would take power.
00:05:33.000And Trump is saying, nope, that's not the way this is going to work.
00:05:35.000As part and parcel of that, President Trump announced on Truth Social last night, quote, And again, there's a lot of hue and cry over this, but this is not, in fact, a rarity.
00:05:55.000Barack Obama, when he came into office, cleared out the justice system of a bunch of people who were appointed by George W. Bush.
00:06:03.000of career bureaucrats in these particular agencies, including the DOJ, is not a rarity.
00:06:07.000It is a regular part of American government.
00:06:09.000It's only Republicans who are chided about this.
00:06:12.000Well, one of the driving forces behind the sort of radical transparency slash and burn approach that Trump has taken so far is, of course, Elon Musk.
00:06:20.000Elon has really contributed a huge amount to the government so far, again, with zero pay.
00:06:26.000And he has done so because he feels that it is necessary, presumably, to cut the regulatory burdens on the American people and on business.
00:06:33.000To get rid of the wasteful spending, the waste fraud and abuse, and to reorient the American people toward the idea that they don't actually need the government to take care of all of their problems.
00:06:41.000And President Trump, to his great credit as a human being, has allowed Elon to take sort of a front-leading role in doing all this.
00:06:48.000Now, that is smart politics by President Trump, because it means that Elon is both going to get the credit and also mostly take the slings and arrows, which is what has happened so far.
00:06:57.000Also, President Trump does not actually have to fear...
00:07:00.000For any reason, that Elon Musk is a threat to him.
00:07:03.000Because Elon, of course, can't run for president.
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00:10:43.000So again, the dynamic is pretty important here because President Trump likes to get along with the people that he works with.
00:10:49.000And one of the things about Musk is that Musk isn't a Trump sycophant.
00:10:52.000So one thing that President Trump actually does not like is people who are too sycophantic toward him.
00:10:57.000And you can see this with a number of his former staffers.
00:10:59.000There's sort of a fine line with President Trump between not offending President Trump, President Trump does not like to be insulted, for example, but also not just bending the knee to him at every possible turn.
00:11:10.000He likes a little bit of independence.
00:11:12.000That dynamic is good between Trump and Musk, despite all the attempts to divide them.
00:11:16.000Here was Elon Musk talking about Trump derangement syndrome in one of the more colorful moments of the interview.
00:11:21.000They call it like Trump derangement syndrome.
00:11:23.000And I don't you know, you don't realize how real this is until like it's you can't reason with people.
00:11:29.000So like I was at a friend's birthday party in LA, just a birthday dinner.
00:11:33.000And it was like a nice, quiet dinner and everything was everyone was behaving normally.
00:11:36.000And I have to mention this before the election, like a month or two before I have to mention the president's name.
00:11:41.000And it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained like methamphetamine and rabies.
00:11:50.000Guys, like you can't have like a normal conversation.
00:11:53.000And it's like it's like they become completely irrational.
00:11:57.000Now, hilariously, many members of the left took this particular clip and went nuts on it.
00:12:01.000Why is Elon making weird hand motions again, guys?
00:12:04.000Stop focusing on Elon's hand motions and start focusing on the fact.
00:12:07.000That he's going into every government agency and finding hundreds of millions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:12:11.000That seems a little more important than these sort of bizarre hand motions that he makes when he is talking about Trump derangement syndrome.
00:12:17.000Musk and Trump did talk about the media's attempts to divide them one from the other.
00:13:00.000They're actually bad at it because if they were good at it, I'd never be president.
00:13:05.000Elon himself obviously went out of his way to point out that he and Trump were friendly.
00:13:09.000He was very praiseworthy of President Trump and Trump was praiseworthy of him.
00:13:12.000This dynamic is the thing that the media are having a very difficult time with because historically speaking, the best way to divide Trump from his advisors is to basically suggest that they have ambitions on the presidency or on controlling Trump.
00:13:23.000But Trump clearly does not feel controlled by Elon.
00:13:26.000Trump feels like they're working in tandem together and that he is, in fact, Elon's superior, which is a pretty good feeling, right?
00:13:31.000If you're the president of the United States and you're direct inferior, the person who reports to you, is the richest person on Earth who launches things into space and owns the most lucrative car company in existence, that seems like that's pretty flattering to President Trump, actually.
00:15:22.000So what we're doing here is one of the biggest functions of the Doge team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out.
00:15:32.000Okay, so President Trump yesterday, he did another separate press conference in which he talked about some of the idiotic spending that he was targeting.
00:15:49.000$19 million for biodiversity conservation in Nepal.
00:15:55.000$2 million to develop sustainable recycling models to increase socioeconomic cohesion among marginalized communities in Kosovo and Eskali and in Egypt.
00:16:13.000I could, by the way, I could read this all day long, I could go on all day long, and you'll see hundreds of billions of dollars, and we're doing it.
00:16:24.000Okay, so, one of the things that Trump and Musk are now proposing is the possibility of what they call Doge rebate checks, which is all the money that they are saving, goes back to the taxpayer in the form of actual direct payments.
00:16:36.000And something that Elon posted yesterday on X, that he would check with the president.
00:16:40.000On the possibility of sending out Doge dividend checks.
00:16:43.000This was suggested by the Azoria CEO and co-founder James Fishback, who said, we wanted to help make Doge real for millions of Americans.
00:16:50.000They deserve a portion of the savings.
00:16:51.000Doge will deliver under President Trump's leadership.
00:16:56.000Now, the opposing side, people who don't like these sorts of cuts, they are looking for any point of opposition.
00:17:02.000They've tried, as we have seen over the past few weeks, to blame, for example, air crashes on cuts to the FAA or Doge going into the FAA. They've yet to actually make that connection.
00:17:11.000There are certain areas where Americans have direct interface with the federal government.
00:17:15.000Those areas usually come in the form of direct payments, like Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid.
00:17:20.000Those are the ways that people tend to interface with the federal government.
00:17:23.000Otherwise, in your daily life, you're really not interfacing with the federal government.
00:17:26.000If you're interfacing with the government, it's usually the local government, right?
00:17:29.000You're interfacing with the cops or with...
00:17:30.000Maybe the post office, but you don't really go to the post office all that often anymore.
00:17:35.000So you just don't have that many sort of moments where you interface with the federal government and then are annoyed by a cut to the federal government.
00:17:42.000Because the reality is the vast majority of stuff that the federal government does is done indirectly.
00:17:48.000So, for example, if you're looking at the Department of Education, there are subsidizing loans that go through a whole series of machinations and then end up with the universities in the form of...
00:17:59.000The sort of direct interface that you have on a daily basis with the feds is usually relatively limited.
00:18:07.000So, given that fact, Democrats, if they're looking for kind of stories to focus in on, things they can say that are getting broken by the move fast and break things philosophy of the Trump administration, they have to focus in on parks and museums and that sort of thing.
00:18:22.000Because, again, those are the only place where you might actually drive up and be told no.
00:18:29.000You just don't have that many opportunities in your normal life.
00:18:32.000That is why there's been outsized focus over the course of the last 48 hours on the supposed shutdown of the national parks.
00:18:38.000So according to the Associated Press, the Trump administration has fired about a thousand newly hired National Park Service employees who maintain and clean parks, educate visitors, and perform other functions as part of its broad-based effort to downsize government.
00:18:50.000The firings, which weren't publicly announced, but were confirmed by Democratic senators and House members, come amid what has been a chaotic rollout of an aggressive program to eliminate thousands of federal jobs.
00:18:58.000Adding to the confusion, the Park Service now says it is reinstating about 5,000 seasonal jobs that were initially rescinded last month as part of a spending freeze ordered by President Trump.
00:19:08.000So, just to be clear, they are getting rid of 1,000 new employees who were just hired like a moment ago, but they are reinstating...
00:19:18.000So you really should not have a staffing shortage at the national parks, just on the basis of those numbers.
00:19:24.000Seasonal workers are routinely added during warm weather months to serve more than 325 million visitors who descend on the nation's 428 parks, historic sites, and other attractions every year.
00:19:34.000Parks advocates say that permanent staff cuts will leave hundreds of national parks understaffed and facing tough decisions about operating hours, public safety, and resource protection.
00:19:51.000You're talking about, on average, by the way, they just said 428. 428 national parks and areas under the governance of this particular agency.
00:20:34.000Every time there was a government shutdown, he would put out a bunch of pylons around the World War II Memorial and say, you can't walk here because of the federal government shutdown.
00:20:42.000I'd be like, well, why can't I walk there?
00:20:57.000And by the way, if you are a regular visitor to national parks, and I've gone to several national parks with my kids and with my wife, when you go to a national park, the interface that you have with the employees at the national park, unless you're taking a guided tour, is typically...
00:21:11.000You paying for parking at the opening.
00:21:15.000Producer Zach goes to the national parks.
00:21:19.000And so I'm now going to ask Producer Zach to tell me in my ear, how often do you interface with federal employees at the national parks?
00:21:26.000Or is it mostly like you arrive and then you have to pay for parking?
00:21:29.000And maybe, maybe they have like a gift shop.
00:21:32.000And then you basically just go explore the park on your own.
00:21:34.000Yeah, it's pretty much just the people who take my parking money.
00:21:36.000It's the people who take the parking money.
00:21:37.000It's the people who take the parking money.
00:21:38.000So first of all, you can cut all those people by just having an automatic parking meter like every other parking lot in America, which has had an automatic parking meter since 1972. You don't actually need, I mean, like, I like those people, they're nice people, but you don't actually need those people standing there and telling you it's five bucks to enter the national park, to go to the Everglades or something.
00:21:56.000So this idea that you're talking about like a wildly...
00:22:01.000You have to shut down hundreds of acres because you don't have the dude who's taking the parking ticket at the front.
00:22:18.000It's, oh my god, we're going to shut down the one place you interface with the federal government in order to show you the cuts to the federal government can impact even you.
00:22:38.000But again, this is the sort of thing that happens every time.
00:22:41.000Every time there is any level of funding gap in the government, from a government shutdown to what Doge is doing, the left immediately claims millions will die.
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00:26:01.000Again, the goal of the Trump administration is not to create bad headlines.
00:26:04.000That means that when it comes to things like the firefighters, I guarantee you within two days, there'll be a rehiring of many of these firefighters.
00:26:11.000Because President Trump doesn't want the bad headlines on that sort of stuff.
00:26:14.000But the people who are like, oh my God, I can't visit Yellowstone anymore.
00:26:18.000They're only shutting down Yellowstone in order to make you say that.
00:26:22.000You want to talk about actual deep state and media intervention?
00:26:32.000Okay, and they're doing this with like everything.
00:26:34.000They're doing this with the FAA. Preemptive panic over everything.
00:26:37.000So, the Washington Post has a piece today, quote, A team from billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX rocket company will help envision ways to overhaul the nation's aging air traffic control systems, beginning with a visit to the Federal Aviation Administration's Command Center on Monday, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
00:26:52.000SpaceX rocket launches are regulated by the FAA. The agency has alleged the company violated safety rules in the past.
00:27:06.000Probably SpaceX is just going to randomly blow crap up on the tarmac, you know, because they can.
00:27:11.000Does anyone truly believe that it is worse for SpaceX, one of the most technologically sophisticated companies on planet Earth, to have its employees taking a look at the FAA, which is using computers that are like Apple computers from 1997?
00:27:27.000By the way, The FAA has not laid off massive numbers of workers.
00:27:31.000It has laid off roughly 400 probationary employees.
00:27:34.000That represents a small fraction of the agency's workforce of almost 47,000 frontline workers like air traffic controllers and radar technicians are spared.
00:27:43.000So they're all preemptively freaking out about cuts to the FAA that don't actually exist.
00:27:49.000This is why, again, what Trump and Musk are doing here is deeply, deeply important.
00:27:54.000And it is extending, by the way, over to the contracting rules for federal contracting.
00:28:00.000So one of the things that the Biden administration did is they said, if you wish to have a company that gets a grant from the federal government or does business with the federal government, you have to abide by DEI.
00:28:09.000According to The Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is directing federal agencies to no longer consider a company's diversity, equity and inclusion practices when deciding whether to procure its goods or services.
00:28:19.000According to an announcement from the General Services Administration, that new policy reverses a Biden administration initiative that asked the government to weigh a company's internal DEI practices as one of many factors when considering whether to purchase that company's products or services.
00:28:31.000The GSA is also ending federal efforts to get rid of plastic straws in favor of the worst thing ever invented, paper straws which do not work, turn into pulp and make your drink taste like trash.
00:28:41.000And all of this is going to be popular stuff.
00:28:45.000So, the Trump administration thus far is finding that balance between Being careful enough not to, for example, mass fire all the FAA employees.
00:28:53.000And also, moving fast enough to actually break many of the things that need to be broken.
00:28:58.000Now, the other big story of the day from the Trump administration is the ongoing negotiations over the end of the Ukraine war.
00:29:05.000And there are some slightly different messages that are emerging from Trump world over these negotiations.
00:29:12.000On the one hand, you have people like, for example, the special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, who's now arrived in Kiev.
00:29:19.000Who says, quote, we understand the need for security guarantees.
00:29:21.000We're very clear about the importance of the sovereignty of this nation and the defense of this nation as well.
00:29:26.000Which, of course, is a very pro-Ukraine message.
00:29:28.000And then there's some of the messaging that's being put out by President Trump himself.
00:29:33.000So according to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. and Russia agreed to appoint teams to negotiate a settlement of the war in Ukraine.
00:29:40.000Mike Walls, the National Security Advisor, he says, we are now talking to the Russians.
00:29:44.000We are also talking to the Ukrainians.
00:29:48.000If you're going to bring both sides together, you have to talk to both sides.
00:29:52.000And we'll continue to remind everyone, literally, within minutes of President Trump hanging up with President Putin, he called and spoke with President Zelensky.
00:30:05.000So shuttle diplomacy has happened throughout history.
00:30:09.000We are absolutely talking to both sides.
00:30:12.000The Secretary of State just met with...
00:30:14.000President Zelensky, days ago, along with the vice president, seven cabinet members in Europe at the same time, really showing the importance of engaging our allies.
00:30:25.000Mike Walls added that the goal here is to just get to the end of this war, like continued death and destruction.
00:30:30.000That's not in the interest of the United States or anybody else.
00:30:33.000The president has stated his desire, his determination to end this war, to end the killing that is going on.
00:30:42.000The death and destruction that is happening as this war, you know, goes on and on month after month after month in the killing fields of eastern and southern Ukraine is unacceptable.
00:30:55.000It is not in the interest of either country.
00:30:58.000It's not in the interest of the world and certainly not in the interest of the United States and Europe.
00:31:09.000That, you know, the Europeans are complaining about not being part of the negotiations.
00:31:12.000Guys, you could have involved yourselves at any point over the last four years.
00:31:16.000For three and a half years while this conflict has raged, or three years while it's raged, no one else has been able to bring something together like what we saw today because Donald Trump is the only leader in the world that can.
00:31:46.000It's something the world should be thanking President Trump for doing.
00:31:49.000As we discussed yesterday on the show, one of the goals of the Trump administration in this negotiation is to get the Europeans to actually involve themselves in the process.
00:32:29.000UK has mentioned it, but yeah, well, if we have a peace deal, I think having troops over there from the standpoint of Europe, we won't have to put any over there because, you know, we're very far away.
00:32:41.000But having troops over there would be fine.
00:33:20.000The negative read is that President Trump is getting some of this stuff wrong.
00:33:24.000That includes some of the demands that he is now making on Ukraine, which are harsher than the demands that he is currently making on Russia.
00:33:30.000Now again, from a pragmatic point of view, perhaps the idea here is that it's harder to bring Russia to the table than it is to bring Ukraine to the table after all.
00:33:36.000The United States has the ability to cudgel Ukraine.
00:33:40.000The United States is giving billions and hundreds of billions of dollars in aid.
00:33:43.000The United States has power over enormous swaths of the European continent.
00:33:46.000And it's hard to get Russia to come to the table, and so you have to make more concerns.
00:33:50.000Maybe that's the pragmatic concern here.
00:33:52.000However, negotiating from a position of weakness with regard to Putin is likely to result in a worse deal in the end, unless you think that basically the terms of the deal are already set and we're all just dancing to the tune until the clock runs out, essentially, at which point everybody knows what happens.
00:34:06.000There are security guarantees to Ukraine, including money flying to Ukraine, European peacekeepers in the region, Russia keeping Donbass in Crimea.
00:34:13.000And so here's President Trump saying some stuff about Ukraine.
00:34:16.000Again, I have some moral objections to the stuff that he is saying.
00:34:19.000About Ukraine here, because I don't think that it is true.
00:34:22.000So, for example, at one point during this press conference, he made the signally false statement that Ukraine started the war.
00:34:28.000Ukraine absolutely did not start the war.
00:34:30.000You can argue with Ukrainian policy toward both Europe and Russia over the period 2013 to 2022. But Russia invaded a sovereign country and tried to take Kiev and has killed tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people.
00:34:48.000Here's President Trump suggesting sort of the opposite, that somehow Ukraine is the problem here.
00:34:54.000Today I heard, oh, we weren't invited.
00:34:56.000Well, you've been there for three years.
00:35:01.000I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down.
00:35:30.000But Ukraine absolutely did not start the war, and Russia should have stopped this war at any point.
00:35:34.000President Trump then continued by suggesting that he wants elections in Ukraine.
00:35:37.000This has been in demand of the Russians, mainly because the Russians wish to intervene.
00:35:41.000It turns out it's very difficult to hold an election in wartime conditions where literally hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men are still on the front lines in Ukraine.
00:35:50.000That is a situation rife for election manipulation by the Russians, who, of course, are bordering on Ukraine and have many agents inside Ukraine as well.
00:36:00.000It is also noteworthy here that if you're going to call for new elections, perhaps Russia at some point should hold, you know, an actual decent election in which Vladimir Putin does not win 98% of the vote while throwing his opponents off third-story buildings.
00:36:12.000We're hearing that Russia wants to force Ukraine to hold new elections in order to sign any kind of a peace deal.
00:36:18.000Is that something that the U.S. would ever support?
00:36:22.000Well, we have a situation where we haven't had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law, essentially martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine, I mean, I hate to say it, but he's down at 4% approval rating.
00:36:38.000And where a country has been blown to smithereens, when they want a seat at the table, you could say the people have to, wouldn't the people of Ukraine have to say, like, you know, it's been a long time since we've had an election.
00:36:51.000That's something coming from me and coming from many other countries also.
00:36:55.000Okay, it is not coming from any other countries.
00:36:57.000I mean, the reality is, by the way, that Vladimir Zelensky's approval rating, and again, I think Zelensky has botched many things here, including his relationship with President Trump.
00:37:09.000The election was due in May of 2024. They are currently under martial law.
00:37:13.000Again, it is very difficult to hold an election in the middle of a gigantic existential war with your much larger neighbor.
00:37:20.000And if he's talking about how the people should really sound off on whether or not they like the war, you kind of have to have that on both sides.
00:37:27.000There needs to be an election in Russia as well.
00:37:29.000But Trump, I think that some of this is just personal peek at Zelensky.
00:37:39.000And again, I don't disagree with him on how Zelensky has approached both Biden and President Trump.
00:37:44.000But when he is ripping on Zelensky in the middle of the negotiation, that obviously is going to strengthen whatever hand Vladimir Putin thinks he has to play here.
00:37:51.000Here's Trump saying that Zelensky is not getting the job done.
00:37:55.000How would you counter the perception, because Russia's pushing for this obviously, they don't really hold true elections, that that would be a capitulation of some sort?
00:38:03.000How would you guard against potentially Russia installing a puppet government?
00:38:07.000And then finally, how would that new election have an impact on getting Zelensky to sign the rare earth minerals deal?
00:38:14.000Look, you have leadership, and I like him personally.
00:38:45.000He's going to say whatever he wants about Vladimir Zelensky.
00:38:47.000It makes no difference to the final status of negotiations.
00:38:49.000Because in the end, the United States' realist position in the world is that Russia should not take over Ukraine, and we should pay for as little of that as possible.
00:38:58.000There's the sort of personality clash possibility.
00:39:02.000Then, there's the strategic possibility that maybe there's actually something going on here in which Trump is basically dumping Zelensky under the bus here in order to achieve some sort of deal with the Russians.
00:39:11.000And then Zelensky can go back to his people and say, listen, I got undercut by the president who's openly attacking me in the middle of this.
00:39:16.000Now, that wouldn't be unprecedented either.
00:39:18.000And the fact is that we've actually seen something like that with regard to Joe Biden and Bibi Netanyahu in Israel.
00:39:24.000Joe Biden, in the middle of an existential war that Israel is fighting with its enemies, deployed all of his Democrats to basically call for a new election in Israel in which Netanyahu would be ousted.
00:39:33.000And Netanyahu used that as the basis for increasing his own popularity in Israel.
00:39:37.000So it's possible something like that could be going on, whether that is conscious or unconscious, between Trump and Zelensky.
00:39:43.000And then, finally, there's the possibility, which is that...
00:39:47.000Everybody's just kind of saying things, and in the end, none of it's really going to matter very much.
00:39:51.000Whatever the reality, Vladimir Putin is, in fact, a cruel dictator.
00:39:57.000He's a vicious dictator who kills his political opponents domestically and internationally.
00:40:03.000He's always been a territorial expansionist.
00:40:05.000Whether you're talking about Georgia, whether you're talking about Ukraine, whether you're talking about Crimea, he likes territorial expansion because the history of Russia is a history of a territorially expansionist power.
00:40:18.000For President Trump to put the blame on Ukraine, again, I am not in favor of that.
00:40:22.000I don't think that that's a good thing.
00:40:25.000Is that going to have any real effect?
00:40:26.000I think the real effect of that is going to be to scare the hell.
00:40:29.000It might actually have one more counterintuitive impact, which would be salutary, which is that it might force the Europeans to actually step up.
00:40:36.000If they don't like all the stuff that Trump is saying, any time in here, they can step up and say, listen, we're going to take the lead here.
00:41:12.000Are increasingly acknowledging a lack of competitive fire in both the economic and national security arenas, which has resulted in over-dependence on both U.S. companies to drive innovation and the U.S. government to defend Europe from Russia.
00:41:24.000So, if President Trump's language about Zelensky causes Europe to step into the gap, that is actually a very good thing for Europe, for Ukraine, and for the United States as well.
00:41:35.000All right, in just a moment, we'll get to the latest on the illegal immigration front.
00:41:39.000Plus, Hamas announces that they killed...
00:41:41.000A couple of babies, which is, of course, not a shock at all.
00:41:44.000If you were with us for election night or the inauguration, you already know the Daily Wire doesn't just show up.
00:41:49.000Now we are headed back to D.C. to do that at CPAC. Join me, along with Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan, and Jeremy Boring, all on stage live tomorrow night, February 20th.
00:42:48.000Illegal border crossings have plummeted even further in the first weeks of the Trump administration, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:42:53.000The Border Patrol made roughly 29,000 arrests in January, according to newly released government data that is down from 47,000 in December.
00:43:00.000Those arrest numbers continue to drop precipitously because no one is showing up at the southern border.
00:43:06.000President Trump calls it the Trump effect, and of course that is exactly right.
00:43:10.000The kind of notion that this is all a coincidence is clearly wrong.
00:43:14.000Meanwhile, Democrats are freaking out because it turns out that actually it's pretty popular for illegal immigrants not to mass immigrate to America.
00:43:22.000According to Politico, the close relationship between congressional Democrats and immigration advocacy groups has grown strained since last year's election as lawmakers shift rightward on border issues.
00:43:30.000Now those groups are asserting themselves as Republicans prepare to pursue a crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities.
00:43:35.000Failing to rally together in opposition to planned GOP legislation, they say, would risk a more profound break between the Democratic Party and its progressive base.
00:43:43.000They're now caught between a rock and a hard place, the rock of reality in which Americans really do not like illegal immigration, and the hard place of all of these interest advocacy groups that they have been feeding for literally decades, who now are angry at them.
00:43:57.000Again, this administration continues to be incredibly aggressive about its approach to all of these issues.
00:44:03.000Meanwhile, in other international news, horrifying news, Hamas has now announced, as was suspected, That it would release dead bodies, four dead bodies, in exchange for these four dead bodies.
00:44:19.000Israel is going to release all Palestinian women and minors under the age of 19 who were detained in Gaza after October 8th and who quote-unquote weren't involved in the fighting.
00:44:30.000When they say under 19, you're talking about 16, 17, 18-year-old people and recognize that in the Gaza Strip for Hamas, those are like military-age recruits.
00:44:43.000The bodies that are being released include the bodies of Shiri Bibas, who's 33, and her two children, Ariel and Kfir, who were four years old and nine months old when they were kidnapped, not by Hamas.
00:45:13.000That does not mean that Israel and any other military power shouldn't attempt to distinguish between members of Hamas and civilians.
00:45:19.000Israel has expended hundreds of its own soldiers in efforts to do precisely that, which is why it's achieved such a signally successful kill ratio in terms of terrorists killed to civilians killed in battle.
00:45:32.000With that said, the civilians in the Gaza Strip supported Hamas.
00:45:36.000They supported the agenda of Hamas for a year, for a year.
00:45:39.000The bodies of a mother, a toddler, and a baby were held as hostages in the Gaza Strip, and not one Palestinian turned over information to the Israelis.
00:45:49.000While these people were alive, they were taken alive into Gaza.
00:47:54.000That is something that President Trump full well understands.
00:47:57.000And President Trump also understands that the great lie that there will ever be a two-state solution involving the sorts of people who kidnap babies and celebrate their kidnapping and cheer in the streets as the body of Shani Luke, the broken, murdered body of Shani Luke, is paraded through the streets of Gaza City.
00:48:14.000That that is not going to be a peaceful two-state solution in any way, shape, or form.
00:48:18.000Because one side is interested in peace and the other side is interested in murdering every Jew they can find and extirpating the state of Israel utterly.
00:48:24.000Meanwhile, some clouds on the horizon with regard to the economy.
00:48:29.000So inflation continues to hover around 3%.
00:48:32.000There are significant worries that it might go the wrong way.
00:48:34.000President Trump did, in fact, address this a little bit yesterday.
00:48:36.000He was talking about inflation during his interview with Elon Musk.
00:49:09.000Moving forward, it's going to be on his permanent record.
00:49:11.000So obviously, inflation is going to be an issue.
00:49:13.000There are a couple of ways of bringing down inflation.
00:49:16.000One way is through productivity growth.
00:49:17.000When you have brand new products and services and more competition, the prices are going to come down.
00:49:21.000That is something that President Trump is trying to do by having more companies founded in the United States, deregulating.
00:49:28.000Tariffs are probably not going to help that purpose.
00:49:30.000Tariffs at the best are going to be neutral in terms of pricing.
00:49:34.000They're certainly not going to lower prices.
00:49:36.000So when President Trump says that tariffs are somehow going to lead to an economic boon that somehow lowers inflation, he's playing a little bit with fire here, economically speaking, just in terms of the basic doctrine.
00:49:47.000Here's President Trump saying companies want to return to the United States specifically because of tariffs.
00:49:52.000I've been contacted by some of the biggest companies in the world.
00:49:56.000And because of what we're doing economically and through tariffs and taxes and incentives, they want to come back into the United States.
00:50:04.000And we'll be announcing various, very large companies, the biggest actually, and they'll be coming back having to do with chips and having to do also with cars and lots of other things.
00:50:15.000We're going to be announcing some very, very big, very big, momentous, I think, momentous decisions are being made by companies all around the world, the biggest, and they want to come back into the U.S. And by the way, it is true that as we become a more...
00:50:31.000Deregulatory environment with lower taxes.
00:50:33.000Businesses will want to come back here.
00:50:34.000But if the idea is that we reassure business because of tariffs, that also means that there is limited supply.
00:50:40.000Limited supply with retained demand tends to increase prices over time.
00:50:45.000So when President Trump is pledging more reciprocal tariffs, again, if he's doing this as a tactic, I've said this all along, tariffs as a tactic to get other countries to lower their tariffs, not a bad idea.
00:50:53.000Tariffs is sort of a panacea that that is not a great idea.
00:51:42.000And whatever they charge us, we're charging them.
00:51:45.000Again, not a bad idea to get them to lower their tariffs.
00:51:48.000If the idea is that somehow makes us stronger, economically speaking, that tends not to be true, which is why many Republicans are trying to curb Trump of some of the tariff talk.
00:51:55.000According to The Wall Street Journal, U.S. Trade Representative nominee Jamison Greer still doesn't have a slot for confirmation before the full Senate.
00:52:02.000commerce secretary nominee howard lutnik was confirmed last night but in their absence a singular figure has risen as leader of the traded agenda you'll remember him from trump number one that'd be peter navarro the president's special counselor on trade and manufacturing known for his pugnacious personality and maximalist approach to tariffs now again i think that the influence of navarro is in fact going to be sort of washed out in terms of the rest of the
00:52:25.000The rest of Trump's cabinet understands that meritless tariffs only increase prices in the United States and make things significantly less...
00:52:38.000However, we'll have to make sure that we keep an eye on that because the last thing we want is some sort of economic downturn under President Trump.
00:52:44.000Joy Behar, who is entirely an idiot, she is making a case about inflation, and right now it's a stupid case.
00:52:51.000But if the inflation remains this way for another year, then it's going to be hung around Trump's neck whether he likes it or not.
00:52:58.000There's incompetence and chaos going on, and we should not put up with it.
00:53:02.000And by the way, egg prices are supposed to come down, not airplanes.
00:53:06.000Okay, now again, that's a stupid take because the airplanes are not coming down because of President Trump, and the egg prices are up because of Joe Biden.
00:53:13.000But inflation is an all-purpose acid that eats through everything.