The Ben Shapiro Show - Trump and Musk Bring The CHAINSAW

00:00:00.000 Well, President Trump's leverage play continues to work.

00:00:03.000 Canada has now caved.

00:00:04.000 President Trump tried to push a 25% tariff against Canada.

00:00:08.000 Canada immediately suggested that they were going to tariff American goods.

00:00:12.000 That would have been much worse for them than for us in any trade war between the United States and Canada.

00:00:16.000 Canada is going to lose instead.

00:00:18.000 Justin Trudeau has bent the knee to President Trump.

00:00:21.000 He announced that Canada would appoint a fentanyl czar, list cartels as terrorists, and launch a joint strike force with the United States to combat organized crime, fentanyl trafficking, and money laundering.

00:00:30.000 Also announced that he would be deploying 10,000 personnel to the northern border as well.

00:00:35.000 So yesterday, as we talked about, Mexico caved and said that they would send 10,000 National Guard troops to America's southern border to police for fentanyl and to police for illegal immigration.

00:00:44.000 And now Canada is doing the same instead.

00:00:47.000 The sweeping tariffs that Trump was proposing have been put on hold for 30 days, presumably to reach a further agreement.

00:00:54.000 Meanwhile, Beijing is attempting to figure out how to end around the tariffs that President Trump just put on them.

00:00:59.000 He put a 10% tariff on Chinese goods.

00:01:02.000 Beijing is hitting back by announcing a quote unquote broad package of economic measures targeting the United States.

00:01:07.000 The fresh duties were announced by China's Ministry of Finance.

00:01:10.000 They levy a 15% tax on certain types of coal and liquefied natural gas and a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery, large displacement cars, and pickup trucks.

00:01:19.000 Now, the problem with all of that is that China is not a massive consumer, for example, of American crude oil.

00:01:25.000 We have plenty of markets all over the world that are perfectly willing to take our liquefied natural gas.

00:01:31.000 The Ministry of Commerce and China's Customs Administration also announced new export controls immediately effective on more than two dozen metal products and related technologies, including, for example, tungsten, a mineral typically used in industrial and defense applications, as well as tellurium, which can be used to make solar cells.

00:01:46.000 This is according to CNN. Now, here is the thing.

00:01:48.000 Again, the United States, if we need those sorts of materials, can go elsewhere for those sorts of materials.

00:01:53.000 There's not a lot of sting in these Chinese retaliatory measures.

00:01:56.000 So the notion that this is going to radically alter the American economy in any way is unlikely.

00:02:02.000 Prices will go up in certain areas of the American economy, but unlike tariffs on, say, Mexico or Canada, where Mexico and Canada, Canada's an ally, and Mexico's at least titularly an ally, China is an actual geopolitical enemy of the United States.

00:02:16.000 And so actually having a trade war with China, even if it does some economic damage to the United States, will do much worse economic damage to China.

00:02:25.000 Will President Trump get some sort of concessions that allow him to walk back the tariffs?

00:02:30.000 We'll find out, but they're going to have to be some pretty significant concessions.

00:02:33.000 And President Trump is moving faster than any president of my lifetime to do things.

00:02:37.000 It is astonishing.

00:02:39.000 Astonishing.

00:02:39.000 I've never seen an administration move this quickly to do as many different things as the Trump administration is doing right now.

00:02:46.000 Whether you're talking about walking back support for the UNRWA, whether you're talking about ending support nationwide for the transing of the children, whether you are talking about ending DEI initiatives all over the country, whether you're talking about reconstituting the Defense Department.

00:03:00.000 By the way, recruitment immediately has skyrocketed since the appointment of Pete Hegseth to Secretary of Defense.

00:03:05.000 We're talking about getting wins at the Panama Canal.

00:03:08.000 Where the Panamanian government has now announced it is not going to take place in the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative anymore.

00:03:14.000 This administration is pushing so hard, so fast, on so many fronts, that it's very, very difficult for any opposition to truly form around any one issue.

00:03:23.000 The best that Democrats have done so far is trying to mobilize around the end of USAID. Now, USAID is an agency that was originally brought into being by...

00:03:36.000 Foreign aid initiatives of Congress and then put into power by an executive order by JFK all the way back during the middle of the Cold War.

00:03:44.000 And USAID, which is designed originally, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was designed essentially as a way of spreading America's foreign policy tentacles all over the world.

00:03:55.000 I mean, that was the explicit purpose.

00:03:56.000 It wasn't just to do nice things.

00:03:57.000 It was to do nice things and also to support institutions in various countries that were going to be a bulwark against communism.

00:04:04.000 That's what USAID was for.

00:04:06.000 And since the end of the Cold War, USAID has been transformed into trans pride flags in Africa.

00:04:12.000 USAID has been turned into boondoggle projects that are designed to pay millions or billions of dollars to left-wing NGOs, both in the United States and outside the United States, and keep up an entire employment line for people who are out of power.

00:04:26.000 So when Republicans are in power, USAID is still paying a bunch of blue organizations to keep the trains running on time and to make sure that the money continues to flow to various organizations abroad that are willing to spread social leftism, not just anti-Chinese or anti-Russian or anti-America's enemies move, not just anti-Chinese or anti-Russian or anti-America's enemies move, as you might expect if you were pursuing actual hard-nosed American foreign policy.

00:04:49.000 Again, soft power can be a very good thing.

00:04:51.000 The idea of USAID is not wrong.

00:04:53.000 The idea that you want to find non-governmental organizations in, for example, countries that are teetering between China and the United States and support those non-governmental organizations to make that country more pro-America, that's not a bad idea.

00:05:05.000 The problem is that the USAID infrastructure has been hijacked by the radical left.

00:05:10.000 This is a point that President Trump made yesterday, slamming USAID and saying, listen, it didn't have to become a cutout for left-wing ideology, but it did, and that's not my fault, that's your fault.

00:05:21.000 The first term, though, USAID was something that you liked in some respects.

00:05:25.000 I love the concept of it.

00:05:27.000 Yeah, sure.

00:05:28.000 I love the concept, but they turned out to be radical left lunatics.

00:05:32.000 And the concept of it is good, but it's all about the people.

00:05:37.000 So he is right about that.

00:05:39.000 Again, the fact is that what the left has done with so many institutions, and USAID is just one of them, is taken the original purpose of the institution and then gutted it and worn the face around like Hannibal Lecter.

00:05:49.000 That is exactly what they have done with the university systems in the United States.

00:05:53.000 They did it with the objective press in the United States.

00:05:55.000 And they did it with USAID. USAID has been participating in so much waste and fraud over the course of time.

00:06:04.000 As Daniel Greenfield of the David Horowitz Freedom Center points out, USAID has sent $9.3 billion to Islamic terrorist states collectively responsible for killing over 3,000 American soldiers.

00:06:14.000 There's an enormous number of terrible organizations supported by USAID.

00:06:20.000 That was a point that was being made by Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary.

00:06:23.000 Here she was yesterday talking about examples of waste and abuse inside USAID. - Here's the reason why Elon Musk and others Because if you look at the waste and abuse that has run...

00:06:35.000 Through USAID over the past several years, these are some of the insane priorities that that organization has been spending money on.

00:06:42.000 $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia's workplaces.

00:06:47.000 $70,000 for a production of a DEI musical in Ireland.

00:06:52.000 $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia.

00:06:56.000 $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.

00:06:59.000 I don't know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don't want my dollars going towards this crap.

00:07:04.000 And I know the American people don't either.

00:07:05.000 And that's exactly what Elon Musk has been tasked by President Trump to do, to get the fraud, waste, and abuse out of our federal government.

00:07:12.000 Of course, she is totally right about all of that.

00:07:15.000 Now, I will say that there is a wing of the Republican Party.

00:07:18.000 That wishes to use the fact that these institutions have been so thoroughly corrupted to basically go totally isolationist, which again, as I said yesterday, is a mistake.

00:07:26.000 Two things can be true at once.

00:07:27.000 USAID has become a totally corrupted institution.

00:07:31.000 Also, that doesn't mean that the best strategy for the United States is to retreat from the world entirely and simply grant that vacuum to, for example, the Chinese or the Russians or the Iranians.

00:07:41.000 With that said, Elon Musk, who had basically been put in temporary charge of the USAID, he said yesterday that there basically is nothing left at USAID that's worth saving.

00:07:53.000 As we dug into USAID, it became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it, but we have actually just a ball of worms.

00:08:02.000 There is no apple.

00:08:04.000 You've just got to basically get rid of the whole thing.

00:08:06.000 It's beyond it's beyond repair.

00:08:08.000 So really none of this could be done without the full support of the president.

00:08:11.000 I went went over it with him, you know, in detail.

00:08:14.000 And he agreed with that we should we should shut it down.

00:08:18.000 I actually checked with him a few times.

00:08:21.000 Are you sure?

00:08:22.000 Like, yes.

00:08:22.000 So we're shutting it down.

00:08:24.000 So the budget of USAID is somewhere between 40 and 50 billion dollars.

00:08:28.000 It is a very, very large governmental program.

00:08:31.000 So, when people say things like, well, it's only 1% of the American budget.

00:08:33.000 That's true, but that's just because our budget is way, way, way too large.

00:08:36.000 That doesn't mean we should be wasting Tons of money on interests that are antithetical to American interests abroad.

00:08:44.000 Again, the spreading of social leftism in Zimbabwe should not be the goal of American foreign policy.

00:08:52.000 Flying progress flags outside the Vatican should not be a goal of American foreign policy and neither should supporting left-wing NGOs that are also supported by people like George Soros abroad.

00:09:01.000 That is a bad use of taxpayer dollars.

00:09:03.000 Whether or not it is a waste of taxpayer dollars is actually secondary to the fact that it's counterproductive for American interests abroad.

00:09:09.000 We should not be wasting tons of money, and you should not be giving all of your information to your internet service provider.

00:09:15.000 See, here's the thing.

00:09:15.000 Every time you hop on the internet, your service provider can see literally everything you do.

00:09:18.000 And get this.

00:09:19.000 In the United States, they can legally sell your entire browsing history.

00:09:22.000 Yeah, even that incognito browsing isn't so private after all.

00:09:25.000 Who would have thought?

00:09:26.000 That's why I started using ExpressVPN.

00:09:28.000 It's this brilliant app that encrypts everything I do online and routes it through secure servers.

00:09:32.000 Since I started using it, my internet provider can't see any of my browsing history, which means they've got nothing to sell because they've got nothing on me.

00:09:38.000 But here's what I really love about ExpressVPN.

00:09:40.000 It also hides my IP address, so those annoying data brokers can't build a profile about me to sell to advertisers.

00:09:45.000 Plus, it's incredibly user-friendly.

00:09:47.000 You don't have to be a tech wizard to use it.

00:09:48.000 it.

00:09:48.000 They've made it so simple, even your kids could figure it out.

00:09:50.000 All you have to do is tap one button and get protected.

00:09:53.000 They've got apps for all your devices.

00:09:54.000 It's rated number one by CNET, The Verge, and other major tech reviewers.

00:09:58.000 So if you want to start taking your online privacy seriously, don't wait.

00:10:01.000 Use my special link to get four extra months of ExpressVPN for free at expressvpn.com slash Ben.

00:10:07.000 That's expressvpn.com slash Ben.

00:10:10.000 Again, expressvpn.com slash Ben to get four extra months of ExpressVPN for free.

00:10:15.000 Also, let's talk about something that affects all of us responsible health professionals.

00:10:18.000 hardworking Americans.

00:10:19.000 Taxes.

00:10:20.000 Now that it's the new year and tax season is upon us, are you prepared for what's coming next?

00:10:23.000 Do you owe back taxes?

00:10:24.000 Are your tax returns still unfiled?

00:10:26.000 Did you miss the deadline to file for an extension?

00:10:28.000 As we head into the busy tax season, the IRS may be ramping up enforcement.

00:10:31.000 Let me tell you, they don't play around.

00:10:33.000 You could face wage garnishments, frozen bank accounts, even property seizures if you haven't taken action yet.

00:10:38.000 But here's the good news.

00:10:39.000 there is still hope.

00:10:40.000 Tax Network USA has been in the game for years.

00:10:42.000 They know exactly how to navigate the complex world of tax law.

00:10:44.000 They've helped taxpayers save over a billion dollars in tax debt, and they've filed over 10,000 tax returns.

00:10:49.000 That's billion with a B, folks.

00:10:51.000 They specialize in helping hardworking Americans like you reduce their tax burden.

00:10:55.000 So do not let the IRS catch you off guard.

00:10:57.000 Get ahead of this right now with Tax Network USA.

00:10:59.000 Their team of professionals will work tirelessly to protect your assets and find the best solution for your unique situation.

00:11:04.000 So here's what you actually need to do.

00:11:06.000 For a complimentary consultation, call today.

00:11:08.000 1-800-958-1000 or visit their website at tnusa.com slash Shapiro.

00:11:13.000 That's 1-800-958-1000 or visit tnusa.com slash Shapiro today.

00:11:19.000 Don't let the IRS take advantage of you.

00:11:20.000 Get the help you need with Tax Network USA. So what exactly happened here?

00:11:24.000 Well, the president deployed Elon Musk and Doge, the Department of Governmental Efficiency, to go into the headquarters over at USAID and begin digging through the personnel files and trying to figure out who was a waste of money.

00:11:35.000 Where was all the money going?

00:11:37.000 And the acting heads of USAID tried to resist, so President Trump fired them.

00:11:41.000 Now, a bunch of people on the left are very, very upset about all of this.

00:11:44.000 They're upset for a couple of reasons.

00:11:45.000 One, they're upset because they actually like the Pride Progress flag being flown in far-flung African nations with American taxpayer dollars.

00:11:53.000 They want America funding abortion abroad.

00:11:55.000 It's this sort of stuff that they are interested in.

00:11:57.000 So number one, on an ideological level, they support precisely the things the American taxpayers don't want to do.

00:12:02.000 But there's something else going on, too.

00:12:04.000 And that is...

00:12:05.000 USAID, like so many other federal government programs, is an absolute gravy train for Democratic allies.

00:12:11.000 That's what it is.

00:12:12.000 It is a bunch of money that is being spent on various constituencies that Democrats cultivate and then use as the incoming State Department officials, for example, if Democrats win office.

00:12:22.000 It is not a coincidence that so many Democrats, both elected and unelected, worked at places like USAID or places funded by USAID. This giant grab bag of cash, which has essentially become a handout mechanism, For the left wing.

00:12:35.000 Of course they're angry that it is going away or at least being radically minimized.

00:12:39.000 So, what happened?

00:12:40.000 Apparently, on Sunday, two senior USAID officials were suspended for blocking Doge officials from a restricted area a day after the agency's website went offline and Elon Musk posted to X that USAID was beyond repair and needed to be shut down.

00:12:53.000 This is according to the UK Guardian, which, of course, is a very left-wing source from Great Britain.

00:12:57.000 Well, now, Marco Rubio has said that he is now the acting head.

00:13:02.000 of USAID, which of course makes sense.

00:13:04.000 One of the kind of points that the Democrats were making is Elon Musk has never been appointed to a government position.

00:13:11.000 He's sort of operating as an outside government advisor.

00:13:13.000 He doesn't take a salary from the government.

00:13:15.000 He doesn't work for the government.

00:13:16.000 We don't know if he has a security clearance.

00:13:17.000 So instead, Secretary of State Rubio, who was overwhelmingly confirmed by the Senate, and of course has passed every security clearance and used to sit in the Senate, he says, listen, I'm the acting head of USAID now.

00:13:27.000 And we're going to go through and we're going to make sure that all of the priorities of this administration are aligned with the spending at USAID. I'm the acting director of USAID. I've delegated that authority to someone, but I stay in touch with him.

00:13:39.000 And again, our goal was to go in and align our foreign aid to the national interest.

00:13:46.000 But if you go to mission after mission and embassy after embassy around the world, you will often find that in many cases USAID is involved in programs that run counter to what we're trying to do in our national strategy with that country or with that region.

00:13:59.000 That cannot continue.

00:14:01.000 USAID is not an independent, non-governmental entity.

00:14:04.000 It is an entity that spends taxpayer dollars and it needs to spend it, as the statute says, in alignment with the policy directives that they get from the Secretary of State, the National Security Council, and the President.

00:14:15.000 Okay, this is all perfectly obvious.

00:14:17.000 And basically what President Trump did is he used Doge as the crowbar to pry open USAID, and then once all of the rot was spilling out into the hallway, then he said to Rubio, okay, you go in and you take all the rot and clean it out.

00:14:30.000 So...

00:14:31.000 What Democrats are claiming is that USAID is going to be completely shut down.

00:14:34.000 Of course, Musk had said that.

00:14:34.000 You don't have to shut down the agency in violation of statute in order to achieve the same purpose.

00:14:40.000 You can simply clean it out, and that would be the best thing to do.

00:14:43.000 Again, the strategy seems to be, from the administration, move fast and break things.

00:14:47.000 Basically, all of these cuts, all of these attempts to bring a chainsaw to the party, that's exactly how Musk ran, for example, X. When Musk took over X, he fired pretty much everybody in the building.

00:14:57.000 He called in everybody, he fired them, and that broke a bunch of the systems.

00:15:00.000 And then he rebuilt and fixed the systems.

00:15:02.000 And that's precisely what he's doing.

00:15:04.000 He's actually running places like USAID the same way that he actually ran X. So, for example, he brought in with him, when Doge went into USAID, he brought in with him, according to Wired, six young men between the ages of 19 and 24 who, quote, have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Doge, tasked by executive order with modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and progress.

00:15:30.000 The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within Doge, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer.

00:15:34.000 Now, this, of course, is an issue of supposed consternation to the left.

00:15:38.000 Oh, my God, all these young people, young, brilliant people who are highly technologically qualified, making cuts and checking the work?

00:15:47.000 No.

00:15:47.000 Now, of course, if these people were on the left, it would be an unmitigated good.

00:15:50.000 It would be the next generation taking over, getting involved in public service.

00:15:54.000 But when it's people who are on the right, then, of course, they're evil nerds in the back closet.

00:15:59.000 Probably incels or something.

00:16:01.000 Even though what you're really seeing is a bunch of very effective young people who are doing a bunch of scut work that other people aren't willing to do.

00:16:07.000 The six men, according to Wired, are one part of the broader project of Musk allies assuming key government positions.

00:16:14.000 Already, Musk's lackeys, including senior staff from XAI, Tesla, and The Boring Company, have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management and General Services Administration and have gained access to the Treasury Department's payment system.

00:16:25.000 So, what exactly is the problem?

00:16:27.000 There seems to be a kind of missing link here in democratic logic.

00:16:33.000 And the missing link is this.

00:16:35.000 All of these people, all of them work for the presidents of the United States.

00:16:39.000 Trump can fire Elon Musk at any time.

00:16:41.000 He can fire any of the people who are working for Elon Musk at any time.

00:16:44.000 He can simply stop granting them access to any of the government buildings.

00:16:47.000 He's the president of the United States.

00:16:49.000 President Trump can appoint Secretary Rubio, the head of USAID. These are executive branch agencies.

00:16:54.000 The way an executive branch agency works is everyone serves at the pleasure of the president of the United States.

00:16:59.000 That doesn't mean the president can violate statute, but he's not violating statute when he puts his own people in place at these agencies to ensure that his priorities are enacted via the statute.

00:17:10.000 Now, if you don't like that, there's a way that this could have been avoided, and that would have been not to create a massive administrative bureaucracy since the beginning of the 20th century.

00:17:19.000 The Democrats, in other words, centralized extraordinary power over the course of a century and a half in the executive branch.

00:17:25.000 And now they're just mad that the person in charge of the executive branch is using that power to carve away all of their permanent substructures.

00:17:33.000 What we are watching is a sea change in the way that government is done.

00:17:36.000 Not because Donald Trump is quote-unquote dictatorial or authoritarian, but because he is using precisely the same power every Democrat has used in order to carve away the permanent root of the Democratic Party.

00:17:49.000 Again, all these programs at USAID, most of these programs at USAID are boondoggles that are designed to help out Democratic allies and promote Democrat blue priorities, even when they're not in the government.

00:18:00.000 You want to look at something that is the definition of the deep state, a continuing, never-changing bureaucracy that consistently floods taxpayer money to a bunch of allies of the Democratic Party.

00:18:12.000 And Trump is saying, no, we are not going to do that.

00:18:14.000 Here's President Trump backing Elon Musk's program here and saying, listen.

00:18:18.000 He's good at cutting things.

00:18:18.000 That's why he's there.

00:18:19.000 He's a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs.

00:18:24.000 Elon can't do and won't do anything without our approval.

00:18:29.000 And we'll give him the approval where appropriate.

00:18:32.000 We're not appropriate.

00:18:33.000 We won't.

00:18:34.000 But he reports in and it's something that he feels very strongly about.

00:18:41.000 And I'm impressed because he's running, obviously, a big company.

00:18:44.000 It has nothing to do with there's a conflict that we won't let him get near it.

00:18:48.000 But he does have a good natural instinct.

00:18:50.000 He's got a team of very talented people.

00:18:52.000 We're trying to shrink government.

00:18:53.000 And he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else, if not better.

00:18:58.000 Again, notice some of the things that Trump is saying there.

00:19:00.000 He's saying, listen, if Musk proposes a cut and we don't want to do it, we just won't do it.

00:19:04.000 If we think that Musk is conflicted out on a particular issue, he won't be involved.

00:19:08.000 Right?

00:19:09.000 He's saying, Musk works for me.

00:19:11.000 I'm the president.

00:19:12.000 Musk is not the president.

00:19:13.000 And he works for me.

00:19:14.000 And he's doing good work.

00:19:15.000 And he's cutting.

00:19:16.000 And if that means some things get broken that we then have to patch back up, then that's what it will be.

00:19:21.000 Marco Rubio put out a note to senior Republican and Democratic lawmakers saying, quote, The Department of State and other pertinent entities will be consulting with Congress and the appropriate committees to reorganize and absorb certain bureaus, offices, and missions of the USAID. The White House put out a statement saying, quote, under President Trump, the waste, fraud, and abuse ends right now.

00:19:41.000 Now, again, Rubio has put in charge a person named Peter Morocco, who's the head of the State Department's Foreign Assistance Office, and also an unnamed person expected to be the USAID's deputy administrator to review agency activities and operations.

00:19:54.000 The review could eliminate certain aid programs or lead to the closure of certain missions around the world.

00:19:59.000 But many of these programs will indeed remain.

00:20:02.000 In fact, some of the humanitarian programs are already being preserved by the Trump administration.

00:20:08.000 So this idea that all of this is simply going away is not true.

00:20:13.000 Many of the programs are going to remain if they are useful to the United States.

00:20:18.000 But there are many things that are not useful to the United States, and there is no reason we should be funding them.

00:20:22.000 So the turmoil, in other words, you cannot shrink.

00:20:26.000 An agency that is a permanent part of the political substructure without turmoil.

00:20:30.000 That's just the way this is going to work.

00:20:32.000 Now, Democrats are freaking out about all of this.

00:20:35.000 Atul Gawande, who, of course, is an American surgeon, writer, is sort of a famous Harvard professor, and who has worked pretty closely with USAID. He put out a statement via Jen Griffin over at Fox News saying, quote, this is a gift to our enemies and competitors.

00:20:54.000 This pause is not a pause.

00:20:55.000 It's a destruction of the agency.

00:20:56.000 Two weeks ago, I was combating diseases.

00:20:58.000 We had 21 serious outbreaks at the time worldwide.

00:21:00.000 Three are serious now.

00:21:01.000 An Ebola outbreak in the capital of Uganda.

00:21:03.000 Bird flu has broken out in 49 countries.

00:21:04.000 Our efforts to contain them have all been shut down.

00:21:07.000 We were on the verge of ending HIV, TB, and malaria.

00:21:09.000 That has all ended with this pause.

00:21:10.000 It is a gift to our enemies and competitors.

00:21:13.000 We're funding demining operations in Vietnam to allow farmers to get back to their fields so people can farm. 0.96

00:21:17.000 Now, here's the thing.

00:21:18.000 Do you think that all of these things are going to go away?

00:21:21.000 Do you think Marco Rubio wants headlines, or Trump wants headlines about how...

00:21:25.000 AIDS spikes in Africa because USAID funding has ended?

00:21:29.000 I have a feeling that Trump doesn't actually want those headlines.

00:21:32.000 So what is this going to be in the end?

00:21:33.000 It's going to be the same as all the other Trump programs.

00:21:35.000 It's going to be designed to achieve victories and to minimize defeats and costs.

00:21:39.000 He is utilitarian.

00:21:41.000 Everyone seems to be making the mistake at every aspect of this administration that Donald Trump is some sort of ideologue.

00:21:47.000 That he's going to do tariffs, not because he actually wants to pry concessions out of America's opponents or out of America's...

00:21:54.000 Firstwhile allies.

00:21:55.000 But that he's doing tariffs because he's ideologically wedded to tariffs and he will ride that bomb all the way down into the ground like Rip Torn in Dr. Strangelove.

00:22:03.000 Well, that's not the way he works.

00:22:05.000 And the same thing is true of USAID and the same thing is true of everything else.

00:22:08.000 President Trump is seeking victories and he's seeking to minimize defeat.

00:22:11.000 President Trump's winning continues, but in order for you to win at life, you have to plan.

00:22:15.000 Securing your family's future is the utmost important in today's world.

00:22:18.000 As someone who always advocates for smart financial planning, I can tell you, having the right life insurance coverage isn't just about peace of mind.

00:22:24.000 It's about giving your family some options if the unexpected occurs.

00:22:27.000 That's why I want to tell you about Policy Genius.

00:22:28.000 They're not an insurance company themselves.

00:22:30.000 They are the country's leading online insurance marketplace.

00:22:33.000 They let you compare quotes from America's top insurers, side-by-side, completely free.

00:22:37.000 Absolutely no hidden fees.

00:22:38.000 Their platform uses real licensed insurance experts who work for you, not the insurance companies you can find the best fit for your family.

00:22:44.000 With Policy Genius, you can find life insurance policies starting at just $292 per year for a million dollars in coverage.

00:22:50.000 Some options are 100% online and let you avoid those unnecessary medical exams.

00:22:53.000 The process is fast and simple.

00:22:55.000 Their licensed support team handles everything, answering questions, managing paperwork, advocating for you throughout the entire process.

00:23:00.000 Don't just take my word for it.

00:23:01.000 Thousands of satisfied customers have left five-star reviews on Google and Trustpilot.

00:23:05.000 No matter what stage of life you're in, Policy Genius helps you find the perfect coverage for your specific situation.

00:23:10.000 Secure your families tomorrow so you can have peace of mind today.

00:23:13.000 Head on over to policygenius.com slash Shapiro or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes.

00:23:17.000 See how much you could save.

00:23:19.000 That's policygenius.com slash Shapiro.

00:23:21.000 Also, after launching The Daily Wire, we knew the frustration of getting trapped in endless busy work, chasing down receipts, wrestling with expense reports.

00:23:28.000 So as a business owner, if you feel like your finance software isn't cutting it, let me tell you about something that's completely transformed how you and your business can actually handle finances.

00:23:35.000 Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket.

00:23:40.000 Here's what makes Ramp different.

00:23:42.000 You can issue cards to every employee with custom limits and restrictions, while their intelligent software automatically collects receipts and categorizes expenses in real time.

00:23:49.000 No more end-of-month chaos.

00:23:51.000 In fact, businesses using Ramp close their books eight times faster.

00:23:54.000 Here's the best part.

00:23:55.000 Ramp users save an average of 5% in their first year alone.

00:23:58.000 Plus, getting started is incredibly simple.

00:24:00.000 In just 15 minutes, you can set up your account, start issuing virtual and physical cards, whether you have five employees or 5,000.

00:24:06.000 And now, get $250 when you join Ramp.

00:24:08.000 Just go to ramp.com slash Shapiro.

00:24:11.000 That's ramp.com slash Shapiro.

00:24:13.000 R-A-M-P dot com slash Shapiro.

00:24:15.000 Cards issued by Sutton Bank member FDIC. Terms and conditions do apply.

00:24:19.000 Again, that's ramp.com slash Shapiro to get started.

00:24:21.000 The caterwauling from the left is not about...

00:24:25.000 The loss of HIV programs in Africa.

00:24:27.000 That is not what this is about.

00:24:29.000 It is about the fact that the plaything of the permanent Democratic Party, the administrative bureaucracy they built and have lavished with trillions of dollars over the course of decades, is now being redone by the Trump administration.

00:24:44.000 And they are freaking out about it.

00:24:47.000 And I gotta tell you, when some of the worst people freak out about a thing, I tend to like the thing.

00:24:50.000 So, for example, Representative Ilhan Omar.

00:24:53.000 She was out there yesterday complaining about the cuts to USAID. 0.66

00:24:57.000 And all I can say is Vilhan Omar is against it.

00:25:01.000 I'm for it.

00:25:01.000 A billionaire that hasn't been vetted, has not gone through confirmation, has not been elected by the American people, who we still do not understand what in the world he's doing, should not be telling American who we still do not understand what in the world he's doing, should not be Yes.

00:25:23.000 The building they work at.

00:25:25.000 What kind of country is this man turning our country into?

00:25:29.000 What kind of country are we becoming?

00:25:32.000 It is embarrassing to read the headlines about free America where one man is walking around like he is the boss of all of us and we don't know who put him in charge.

00:25:45.000 Well, you know who put Donald Trump in charge of the executive branch of the government?

00:25:49.000 We had an election and Trump won.

00:25:51.000 And now a bunch of people who work for Trump are doing the things that Trump wants them to do inside the executive branch of government.

00:25:56.000 You know who USAID does not actually work for?

00:25:59.000 Is Ilhan Omar.

00:26:00.000 Ilhan Omar is part of the legislative branch.

00:26:03.000 That legislative branch approves budgets.

00:26:05.000 And then, when it comes to the actual spending on these particular projects, that happens in the executive branch, where the president and secretary of state have enormous authority because Marco Rubio was confirmed and Donald Trump was elected, ripping on Elon for being Trump's hatchet man.

00:26:22.000 It's just a way of avoiding the reality, which is you lost the election.

00:26:25.000 You lost.

00:26:26.000 And the reason you're really angry is not, of course, because Donald Trump is making cuts to USAID. What you're really angry about is that the thing you guys have counted on forever, an endless funnel, fire hose, gushing, damn breaking river of money, is now being stopped from going to your friends while you are out of power.

00:26:47.000 That's why you're really, really angry.

00:26:49.000 Democratic representative.

00:26:52.000 Johnny Olszewski of Maryland.

00:26:54.000 He's trying to make the claim.

00:26:55.000 It's hilarious.

00:26:56.000 They know that most Americans don't actually want to spend the money that USAID is talking about spending, and they don't like these projects.

00:27:01.000 So what is he saying?

00:27:02.000 He's saying, well, actually, if they come after USAID, what will they come after next?

00:27:06.000 They're going to come after your freedom.

00:27:08.000 I'm going to need a logic here that connects, cuts to USAID to quote-unquote your freedoms.

00:27:16.000 We will do all that we can in Congress, but we need you, America.

00:27:21.000 To listen and to act.

00:27:23.000 Because today, it's USAID. Tomorrow, it's our healthcare.

00:27:28.000 It's Social Security.

00:27:30.000 It's our livelihoods.

00:27:31.000 It's our freedoms.

00:27:32.000 So stand up for USAID today, USAID today, so that we can stand up for all of our freedoms in the days ahead.

00:27:40.000 Okay, first of all, I do love the fact that Democrats label Social Security a freedom when it is actually an entitlement.

00:27:47.000 Second of all, Donald Trump is not touching entitlements.

00:27:50.000 He's said this over and over and over again.

00:27:52.000 In fact, he's trying to save money abroad so he can spend the money at home.

00:27:56.000 Chuck Schumer had, I think, the funniest take.

00:27:58.000 He's like, oh no!

00:27:59.000 What if they shut down the IRS? I don't know.

00:28:02.000 What if they shut down the IRS, Chuck?

00:28:03.000 I mean, obviously the American people do love the IRS. If there's one agency of the American government that the people just adore, it is the Internal Revenue Service that audits their restaurant receipts.

00:28:16.000 We also know this is just the beginning.

00:28:18.000 If Doge attacks USAID today, then you can be sure they'll move on to another target tomorrow.

00:28:25.000 Who knows?

00:28:26.000 Maybe it'll be the Postal Service or the IRS or even the Social Security Administration.

00:28:31.000 They could be next.

00:28:33.000 Or maybe our national security agencies.

00:28:36.000 Not ours.

00:28:37.000 Not the IRS. No, that'd be terrible.

00:28:40.000 Meanwhile, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut.

00:28:42.000 I do love when Democrats scream and cry about constitutional crises after they...

00:28:47.000 Literally located all power in the executive branch and cheered as Joe Biden violated the Constitution repeatedly.

00:28:53.000 Now they're very upset about the Constitution.

00:28:56.000 So we will use every power that we have in our disposal in the United States Senate.

00:29:00.000 My colleagues will do the same thing in the House.

00:29:04.000 This is a constitutional crisis that we are in today.

00:29:08.000 Let's call it what it is.

00:29:12.000 The people get to decide how we defend.

00:29:15.000 The United States of America.

00:29:17.000 The people get to decide how their taxpayer money is spent.

00:29:22.000 Elon Musk does not get to decide.

00:29:24.000 Again, Elon Musk works for, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, the president of the United States who was elected.

00:29:31.000 He was elected.

00:29:32.000 And he actually has pretty significant plenary power over the defense of the United States.

00:29:37.000 That is one of the things that is most located inside the executive branch.

00:29:41.000 Chris Murphy.

00:29:42.000 Meanwhile, Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey doing the same routine.

00:29:44.000 So outraged.

00:29:45.000 So outraged.

00:29:46.000 Saying, I wanted to get in the USAID building, and I couldn't.

00:29:49.000 They wouldn't let me in.

00:29:49.000 Well, I have a question.

00:29:51.000 Do you work for the executive branch?

00:29:52.000 Because I noticed that you are a senator.

00:29:55.000 I certainly hope Congress takes action because what is happening here is illegal.

00:30:01.000 It is unacceptable to have a president try through executive power be able to reorganize or remove USAID. The fact that these employees are being demonized, you know, the fact that they're being called, you know, it's a criminal organization from Elon Musk, you know, the fact that they're being told not to show up, that the federal aid is being frozen, I mean, it's just such disrespect.

00:30:27.000 They deserve better.

00:30:28.000 They are public servants.

00:30:29.000 They swear an oath to serve this country.

00:30:31.000 And right now they are being treated as if they're the criminals.

00:30:34.000 Well, I mean, they actually work inside the executive branch.

00:30:38.000 If your boss doesn't want you there, you don't work there anymore.

00:30:41.000 The real reason for this, the gravy train has stopped flowing.

00:30:43.000 Now, meanwhile, hilariously, the federal government, as we know, put out a notice, an email to federal employees, millions of federal employees, saying to them, listen, if you want to come into work, You want to work for the president's agenda?

00:30:57.000 You want to be a member of the executive branch?

00:30:59.000 Great.

00:30:59.000 We'd love to have you.

00:31:00.000 If not, here's a buyout offer that pays you until September.

00:31:04.000 Apparently, according to Axios, about 20,000 federal workers have taken the buyout offer.

00:31:09.000 That is about 1% of the federal workforce.

00:31:12.000 The White House is targeting 5% to 10%.

00:31:14.000 The offer is open through Thursday.

00:31:17.000 So it could rise, despite the unions attempting to sort of cudgel everybody to stay.

00:31:22.000 The official...

00:31:24.000 According to Axios, we expect more to come.

00:31:26.000 If you see what's happening at USAID, it's just one piece of the puzzle.

00:31:29.000 In other words, many of these people are going to lose their jobs anyway.

00:31:32.000 So either take the buyout or you may find yourself on the breadline regardless.

00:31:36.000 The buyout offer entitles federal employees to stop working immediately and continue to be paid through September 30th.

00:31:43.000 The federal workforce's normal attrition rate is about 6% a year.

00:31:47.000 So perhaps some of those people were meaning to leave anyway.

00:31:50.000 But again, people are quitting because they are seeing that The cuts are coming with the chainsaw.

00:31:54.000 Speaking of which, according to Politico, President Trump is about to finalize an executive order to shutter the Department of Education, which has been a longtime Republican goal.

00:32:04.000 Again, one of the things about Trump that is truly an amazing, amazing thing.

00:32:07.000 There's so many promises that various politicians have made for decades.

00:32:10.000 Ronald Reagan pledged to shut down the Department of Education in the 1980s, like about the time I was a baby.

00:32:16.000 And Donald Trump is actually trying to do it.

00:32:19.000 He's actually taking seriously the promises that he made.

00:32:24.000 According to Politico, the Trump administration is finalizing plans to dismantle the Education Department through an executive order that would build on the president's campaign promise to hammer the longtime conservative target.

00:32:34.000 The order was expected to allow a two-part strategy for shuttering the agency, according to two people familiar with the plans.

00:32:40.000 It would direct the department to craft a plan to wind down its functions using its existing administrative authority.

00:32:45.000 But the order was also expected to call for the agency to inventory a complex set of laws needed to delegate the department's powers to other agencies and then shut down the department.

00:32:54.000 So, in other words, many of the functions of the DOE would move outside the DOE, but the department itself would be shut down.

00:33:01.000 That would require some sort of legislative help, presumably.

00:33:05.000 According to a third person granted anonymity, representatives from DOGE are already working at the Education Department headquarters and seeking access to agency records.

00:33:15.000 So, again, right now, Linda McMahon is up for Secretary of Education. 0.96

00:33:20.000 There will be a Senate confirmation hearing.

00:33:22.000 One of the sort of open strategy questions here is whether it would have been better to wait until she was confirmed in order to actually do this sort of thing.

00:33:30.000 With that said, the fact that Trump is taking this so seriously is yet another indicator that he was serious about the things that he was promising.

00:33:37.000 What exactly does the Department of Education do?

00:33:40.000 Well, it's number one, spending priority.

00:33:43.000 In fiscal year 2024, according to USAFacts.org, the U.S. Department of Education spent about $161 billion on federal student aid.

00:33:54.000 So that would be, you know, like Pell Grants and paying for people to get their degrees in lesbian dance theory and all the rest. 0.96

00:34:01.000 Another $83 billion was spent on elementary and secondary education, which are basically block grants that are given to various states.

00:34:10.000 Education should be a local consideration.

00:34:13.000 Education should be controlled by the state, by localities, by local school board.

00:34:18.000 Ideally, we'd have vouchers so people can actually, you know, go to the school that they want to go to.

00:34:22.000 There is no question the Department of Education is yet another gravy train for the left, one of the biggest gravy trains in America.

00:34:28.000 The university system is a giant apparatchik-for-the-left-producing machine.

00:34:33.000 It is a giant machine designed to churn out left-wingers with worthless diplomas, unless you're in the STEM fields.

00:34:41.000 That is what it is designed to do.

00:34:42.000 And by the way, if you're in the STEM fields, you can certainly get a private loan to study engineering at MIT. The reality that the reason Democrats are very, very in love with these agencies is, again, because they are permanent structures that are designed to pay all of their friends.

00:34:56.000 Some of the biggest graft agencies in the history of mankind are happening via the Department of Education.

00:35:03.000 Speaking of the education, higher education, by the way, a group representing white and Asian.

00:35:08.000 High school and college students filed a complaint Monday in federal court against the University of California, claiming that nine of its campuses are still using racial preferences and admissions in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws.

00:35:19.000 And that is almost certainly true.

00:35:21.000 Many of these universities have vowed that they would essentially do affirmative action under another name.

00:35:26.000 And now the lawsuits are coming fast and furious.

00:35:28.000 The best way to stop all of that is to make Linda McMahon the Secretary of Education and allow her to go to work and to unleash Harmeet Dillon. 0.99

00:35:35.000 Over at the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ to go after all of these universities that are acting in violation of law.

00:35:41.000 I have no doubt that all of that is going to happen.

00:35:44.000 All right, coming up, the cuts don't stop there.

00:35:46.000 It's February, which means the usual crowd is claiming we don't do anything for Black History Month, which is complete nonsense.

00:35:51.000 We literally have the number one documentary of the decade covering race in America.

00:35:55.000 It's called Am I Racist?

00:35:56.000 It was the surprise box office hit of the year.

00:35:58.000 And shocker.

00:35:59.000 It's not exactly what the left was looking for.

00:36:00.000 Now, exclusively on Daily Wire Plus, we're pulling back the curtain with The Making of Am I Racist, where Matt Walsh, director Justin Folk, and the team show how it all came together.

00:36:08.000 Watch it now at dailywire.com.

00:36:10.000 And meanwhile, the cuts don't just stop at the Department of Education or USAID. Scott Besant, who is the...

00:36:17.000 New Treasury Secretary is ordering a freeze at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was always Elizabeth Warren's baby.

00:36:24.000 The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is basically just a way of blackmailing various businesses with regulatory oversight.

00:36:31.000 That's what it always was.

00:36:32.000 It is independently funded, so it actually does not even come from the legislature.

00:36:37.000 The legislature does not appoint separate funding.

00:36:39.000 This is actually the subject of the Supreme Court case.

00:36:41.000 The question was whether it violated the separation of powers for Congress to set up.

00:36:45.000 A mechanism that was then funded directly from the Federal Reserve, which is how the CFPB works.

00:36:50.000 Well, the only problem, again, Democrats, if you put all the power in the executive branch, what happens if people you don't like take over the executive branch?

00:36:58.000 Well, now you're finding out.

00:36:59.000 You did all of this in the assumption that even if a Republican was elected, the Republican would never touch your precious?

00:37:05.000 Well, it turns out the Republicans are touching all of the things that you built, and they are taking control of those levers and using them in ways you didn't like.

00:37:12.000 And this is the story of Lord of the Rings.

00:37:14.000 If you don't want somebody you don't like controlling the ring, don't create the ring in the first place.

00:37:18.000 But Democrats created it, and now they're very upset that the powers of the ring are being used by people they don't particularly like.

00:37:25.000 Well, now, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant has ordered a freeze to work at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.

00:37:32.000 In an internal email on Monday, Besant's office directed CFPB staff to cease much of the Bureau's work, including enforcement actions and decisions about active litigation.

00:37:41.000 The email directs staff to suspend the effective dates for rules that had been completed but aren't yet in effect.

00:37:46.000 Besant's appointment is the beginning of what is expected to be a rollback of many of the agency's actions under the Biden administration, which included rules capping overdraft fees and banning the use of medical debt by credit reporting companies.

00:37:56.000 Biden appointee Rohit Chopra was ousted on Friday.

00:38:00.000 Trump hasn't named a candidate to lead the CFPB on a permanent basis yet.

00:38:04.000 But Besant is looking forward to getting rid of the dead wood at the CFPB, which again has become a left wing organization designed to hinder business in the United States.

00:38:15.000 Senator Ted Cruz said last week that he would advance a proposal to cut the CFPB's funding entirely, which would effectively kill the Bureau.

00:38:24.000 Meanwhile, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who built this thing, this is her legacy, aside from her legacy of wigwams and teepees, she said, quote, if President Trump and the Republicans decide they're just gonna bend the knees to Wall Street billionaires and try to destroy that agency They're going to have a fight on their hands.

00:38:39.000 Well, they don't have to have a fight on their hands.

00:38:41.000 Remember, Elizabeth, you're the one who set it up so it's independently funded outside the legislature.

00:38:45.000 All that has to happen is Scott Bessing comes in and just freezes everything.

00:38:49.000 Congrats to you.

00:38:51.000 Genius-level stuff happening over at the Congress of the United States.

00:38:56.000 And again, because Trump is moving so fast, it is very, very difficult for Democrats to consolidate around any one line.

00:39:04.000 And meanwhile, President Trump welcomed his first foreign leader to the White House yesterday.

00:39:08.000 That first foreign leader is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

00:39:12.000 There are all sorts of outstanding issues that the United States and Israel are working through.

00:39:16.000 Those include the currently ongoing hostage deal with Hamas that eventually is going to come to an end.

00:39:22.000 There is no way that Hamas can be allowed to run the Gaza Strip.

00:39:25.000 That is not me saying that.

00:39:26.000 That is Secretary of State Rubio.

00:39:27.000 That is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

00:39:28.000 That is National Security Advisor Mike Walls.

00:39:31.000 The entire leadership of the United States knows that this is not a real possibility, which means Israel will, in fact, have to go back in.

00:39:40.000 Other outstanding issues obviously include the possibility of a Saudi deal and what happens with Iran.

00:39:45.000 New information suggests that Iran, of course, is trying to race toward a bomb, figuring that they're on their last legs at that regime, and that the Trump administration is not going to be handing them pallets of cash worth billions of dollars, unlike the Biden or Obama administrations.

00:39:58.000 They're rushing toward a cheaper...

00:40:00.000 Uglier form of the nuclear bomb.

00:40:02.000 According to the New York Times, new intelligence about Iran's nuclear program has convinced American officials a secret team of the country's scientists is exploring a faster, if cruder, approach to developing an atomic weapon if Tehran's leadership decides to race for a bomb.

00:40:15.000 The intelligence was collected in the last month of the Biden administration and relayed to President Trump's national security team during the transition of power.

00:40:21.000 Now, the reality, again, is that effectively a single sortie of airstrikes on Iran's nuclear facilities would end their nuclear program for the moment.

00:40:30.000 They have no air defenses.

00:40:32.000 It turns out that all of their proxies are unbelievably weak.

00:40:36.000 Israel completely destroyed Hezbollah's capacity to make forward war at minimum cost to itself.

00:40:41.000 Israel hit Hezbollah so hard that its ally Assad fell in Syria.

00:40:45.000 Hamas is no longer an offensive powerhouse.

00:40:49.000 The Houthis have been largely quieted.

00:40:52.000 Israel is doing heavy work in Judea and Samaria to shut down Iranian proxies in places like Janine and Ablus.

00:40:58.000 And so what that means is that Iran is uniquely vulnerable to things like an airstrike right now.

00:41:02.000 All that the United States really has to do is give Israel the weaponry and get out of the way. 0.92

00:41:06.000 And that would basically end the threat of an Iranian nuclear program for the moment.

00:41:10.000 As the New York Times points out, Iran has never been weaker than it is today in the view of American and Israeli officials.

00:41:16.000 Hamas and Hezbollah have lost their leadership and their ability to strike Israel.

00:41:20.000 Syria's leader Bashar al-Assad has fled to Moscow.

00:41:22.000 His country is no longer an easy route for Iranian weaponry.

00:41:28.000 He's indicating he's in no hurry to get into a direct conflict with Iran and is open to a negotiation.

00:41:31.000 But the question is going to be what that negotiation looks like.

00:41:34.000 I don't believe that President Trump is going to give away the store the same way that Biden and Obama were going to.

00:41:39.000 And what verification measures could actually be taken to keep Iran from diving for a nuclear weapon?

00:41:44.000 The Saudis certainly don't want it.

00:41:45.000 And the Saudis are another American ally, aside from Israel, that the Trump administration is quite close with.

00:41:51.000 It seems like the precondition for any sort of actual Abraham Accord deal between the Saudis and the Israelis is largely dependent on a forward move against the Iranian nuclear facilities.

00:42:01.000 It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

00:42:03.000 President Trump yesterday gave a nice little geographic disquisition on the state of the Middle East.

00:42:09.000 Here he was.

00:42:10.000 It certainly is a small, it's a small country in terms of land.

00:42:16.000 I take, see this pen, this wonderful pen?

00:42:19.000 My desk is the Middle East.

00:42:21.000 And this pen, the top of the pen, that's Israel. 0.89

00:42:24.000 That's not good, right?

00:42:25.000 You know?

00:42:26.000 That's a pretty big difference.

00:42:27.000 I use that as an analogy.

00:42:29.000 It's pretty accurate, actually.

00:42:30.000 It's a pretty small piece of land, and it's amazing that they've been able to do what they've been able to do.

00:42:38.000 When you think about it, there's a lot of good, smart brainpower, but it is a very small piece of land, no question about it.

00:42:44.000 He's right about that, obviously.

00:42:46.000 President Trump told reporters, I have no assurances that the Gaza truce will hold.

00:42:49.000 I have no guarantees the peace is going to hold, which, of course, is exactly correct. 1.00

00:42:53.000 It is not America's job.

00:42:54.000 It's America's job to ensure that, quote-unquote, the peace holds.

00:42:56.000 It's America's job to ensure that its allies have the wherewithal to destroy terror threats.

00:43:06.000 That's all good for the United States.

00:43:08.000 And President Trump, I believe, is going to do all of those things and more.

00:43:12.000 Okay, meanwhile, the catastrophic fallout continues in California from those devastating wildfires, the most damaging wildfires in American history.

00:43:20.000 I had the opportunity to sit down with my friend Adam Carolla to talk about all of that.

00:43:24.000 Here's what it sounds like.

00:43:26.000 All right, well, Adam, you escaped California, but only after half the state burned down.

00:43:31.000 I mean, you can't say that you weren't mourned, since I did warn you many, many times that this was going to happen.

00:43:36.000 And not that I'm a prophet or anything, but plagues were unleashed upon the state of California.

00:43:40.000 But it's a pretty serious topic, obviously.

00:43:42.000 You've been really vocal about the failings of the California state government.

00:43:46.000 First of all, what's it like on the ground over there right now?

00:43:48.000 It's charred on the ground.

00:43:51.000 I lived in Malibu.

00:43:53.000 I fled, evacuated, cannot go back.

00:43:58.000 My place made it.

00:43:59.000 Most of the places around me did not make it all the way down PCH, which is weird for people who don't know the topography.

00:44:08.000 You see people up on the hill burn like a brush fire, but you've never heard of an ocean fire because they don't have them on the other side of Pacific Coast Highway.

00:44:19.000 But it's very rare.

00:44:20.000 well it's it's i'll tell you how rare it is many of those buildings weren't from the 50s some from the 40s the structures on the ocean side of pch and they're all gone and most the places up on the hill are gone i somehow got spared but i can't go back because there's no power and no electricity sorry no no plumbing and no gas nothing no utility well i mean What's been the reaction of people in California to this?

00:44:47.000 I mean, they voted for this.

00:44:49.000 I mean, not for the fire, but for all the policies that lead to the exacerbation of fire, to the failures of the local government, to the failures of the state government.

00:44:56.000 Has there been any sort of great awakening happening in California over this?

00:44:59.000 I think there has been.

00:45:01.000 And I think you can chart it all through Bill Maher.

00:45:05.000 And the reason I'll say Bill Maher is not exactly for the reasons you're thinking, but obviously he's come over to our side.

00:45:16.000 He's been sort of moving.

00:45:17.000 He seems to move further toward a conservative point of view in like the last three years, even more so.

00:45:25.000 So I used to be a contractor.

00:45:27.000 I used to be a builder.

00:45:28.000 And I had to deal with the city.

00:45:29.000 And I had to pull permits.

00:45:30.000 And I had to deal with that bureaucracy, plan check, regulation my whole life.

00:45:36.000 Because that was my job before I got into show business.

00:45:39.000 And I would say to everyone all the time, you don't get...

00:45:42.000 Who these people are?

00:45:43.000 And everyone would go, oh, who cares?

00:45:45.000 And I would say, you live in a rent control apartment in Santa Monica and you don't care.

00:45:51.000 But wait till you buy property and try to build something and then you have to deal with the city and the bureaucracy.

00:45:58.000 You will start thinking like me.

00:46:00.000 And Bill Maher tried to put solar up at his place about three or four years ago and ran headlong right into the bureaucracy.

00:46:11.000 And he started looking around going, why has it taken two years to get a permit for a solar shack and a guy had to come out and inspect my garage door?

00:46:20.000 What do I need an inspection for in my garage?

00:46:22.000 And he tried to pull a permit.

00:46:25.000 He saw firsthand.

00:46:26.000 And now he knows.

00:46:27.000 And that's what turned Bill Maher.

00:46:29.000 That's why he started coming our direction.

00:46:32.000 And what the fire is going to do is turn a bunch of people into Bill Maher.

00:46:38.000 So these are...

00:46:39.000 Malibu, you know, progressive blue leftist.

00:46:43.000 Palisades, progressive blue leftist.

00:46:45.000 Santa Monica, you know, Santa Monica's some of the bluest cities in America.

00:46:51.000 And they're going to start going with me and Bill now because they're going to start dealing with the bureaucracy.

00:46:57.000 And the bureaucracy that got their house burnt down, that's one, mismanagement, Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass.

00:47:04.000 The house is down because of the bureaucracy and mismanagement.

00:47:08.000 But now they're trying to pull a permit to rebuild, and they're going to run right into it.

00:47:13.000 Yeah, well, I think that's one of the great ironies, is suddenly Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass are turning into Republicans, apparently.

00:47:19.000 Emergency waivers.

00:47:20.000 Now you don't have to wait.

00:47:21.000 We have to build as fast as possible.

00:47:23.000 And the question is, well, why?

00:47:25.000 I mean, if it was good policy in the first place, what made it bad policy all of a sudden?

00:47:28.000 And the answer is it was always bad policy.

00:47:30.000 Yeah, just there was no cost to bad policy because they were actually helping a small coterie of environmental activists at the expense of everybody else.

00:47:38.000 And everybody else was basically complacent enough to let them get away with it.

00:47:41.000 Yeah, well, all right.

00:47:45.000 One is, yeah, they did.

00:47:48.000 Well, that's what happened with COVID. It's like people just didn't want to get into trouble.

00:47:54.000 And, you know, the day Gavin Newsom shut the beach, we all should have rushed the beach that day.

00:47:59.000 But instead, we went one at a time and got picked off.

00:48:02.000 So we all should have rushed the guard.

00:48:05.000 The guard tower at once.

00:48:06.000 Some are going to get hit by the machine gun bullets, but we'll get out.

00:48:09.000 You know what I mean?

00:48:10.000 So yes, people are complacent.

00:48:13.000 Newsom and Karen Bass, it's always funny when they go, we cut all the red tape.

00:48:18.000 We're going to cut all the red tape.

00:48:20.000 And I'm like, who put all the red tape?

00:48:23.000 Why is there so much red tape?

00:48:25.000 And so if there wasn't a fire and we're just individually trying to put a deck on your house in the Palisades, let's just say no fire.

00:48:33.000 Then you got to deal with the red tape.

00:48:34.000 Or you wanted to do something in Malibu, then you have to deal with the red tape.

00:48:39.000 It's a lot.

00:48:40.000 I'll tell you what it is when you go, they sound like Republicans.

00:48:42.000 By the way, they sound like Republicans.

00:48:44.000 That's like dressing up as a Republican for Halloween for them.

00:48:47.000 They're coming right back to their Birkenstocks the next day.

00:48:51.000 Believe me, they're kicking off the wingtips and putting on the Birkenstocks the following morning.

00:48:55.000 But here's what it is.

00:48:57.000 It's like they had a lot of productions.

00:49:03.000 Flee Los Angeles, right?

00:49:05.000 So Hollywood, Los Angeles, production capital of the world, right?

00:49:08.000 Then they start with the red tape.

00:49:10.000 Then they start with the money.

00:49:11.000 Then they start with the taxes.

00:49:13.000 Then they start with all what they do, right?

00:49:15.000 And so what happens?

00:49:16.000 All the productions, Canada, Atlanta, Prague, gone, right?

00:49:21.000 They all leave.

00:49:22.000 And then at some point, the people in power notice that there's nothing coming in because they chased off all the productions, runaway production.

00:49:31.000 So what do they do?

00:49:32.000 Then they make an announcement.

00:49:33.000 Hey, fellas, guess what?

00:49:35.000 We decided to make a few alterations on some of our big ass, lower it down, sound like a Republican, and see if we can get you guys to come on back and do a little work here in town.

00:49:47.000 And it's the same thing with the building and the rebuilding.

00:49:50.000 It's like, oh, maybe a little too much red tape.

00:49:53.000 We're going to sound a little like this and see if you can't lure you back.

00:49:57.000 On a personal level, how long do you have to be out of your house?

00:49:59.000 Because it's not...

00:50:00.000 Obviously, just a problem for people whose houses were lost.

00:50:02.000 The entire area, as you say, now charred.

00:50:05.000 Yeah, well, they don't have clear answers on that.

00:50:09.000 The power is not back up yet.

00:50:13.000 Utilities need to come back on.

00:50:14.000 And then the question of the bureaucracy, because is a site contaminated?

00:50:22.000 Is it a hazmat?

00:50:24.000 You set a futon on fire, it's going to leave behind some sort of chemical footprint.

00:50:30.000 And everything, turns out, causes cancer in California.

00:50:34.000 So there's a sticker on every gas pump.

00:50:37.000 There's a sticker on every window of every liquor store.

00:50:41.000 You enter this 7-Eleven, you will get cancer.

00:50:44.000 Now everyone ignores it because you have to pump your own gas, and so what?

00:50:50.000 Technically, there's some benzene in the soil.

00:50:53.000 You know, they will find one part per billion benzene particles in the soil, and then they'll say you need to have a hazmat team and remediation team and blah, blah, blah.

00:51:03.000 So that's how they do it.

00:51:04.000 They could tie everybody up and say you can't just get a bobcat in here and start scooping this stuff into a dumpster and truck it off to a landfill because it has dangerous levels of benzene.

00:51:16.000 Well...

00:51:18.000 They decide what the dangerous levels of benzene are.

00:51:21.000 They're always dangerous levels.

00:51:22.000 They're always going to be higher than what's acceptable to the Coastal Commission.

00:51:27.000 And so they could tie this stuff up for years if they wanted a small thing that people don't think about.

00:51:34.000 But as a builder, I was like, oh yeah.

00:51:37.000 Everything's on septic in Malibu.

00:51:40.000 And all the places along the ocean are on septic.

00:51:44.000 Now these are $20 million homes.

00:51:47.000 12 million on the low end and maybe 80 on the high that are gone.

00:51:52.000 But a lot of these places are from the 60s, 50s, 70s.

00:51:56.000 They're on an old septic system.

00:51:58.000 The city's not going to let them just rebuild and use the old septic system.

00:52:03.000 They need a new septic system, and their septic system was from 1963. It's 2025 now.

00:52:09.000 That is a different septic system.

00:52:11.000 They have to build a seawall so that the water won't, you know, the ocean won't erode the septic.

00:52:16.000 You could be millions of dollars into the septic system before you pull out your first 2x4 and start framing.

00:52:24.000 How many people are actually going to end up going back?

00:52:26.000 I mean, because there are going to be a lot of people.

00:52:28.000 Number one, many of the actual insured values of the homes are not up to par with the actual value of the homes.

00:52:34.000 I mean, people lost not just their homes.

00:52:36.000 Many of these people, whether you're talking about the richest people or many who are not nearly as rich, lost pretty much everything.

00:52:42.000 And the fire insurance situation in California is a disaster area.

00:52:46.000 A lot of these people just don't have the money to rebuild.

00:52:48.000 Many of them are going to say, why do I want to take 5, 10 years to rebuild in Malibu and I can just take my money and go somewhere else?

00:52:54.000 How many of these people do you think just leave?

00:52:57.000 Well, you know, Suzanne Somers and Alan Hamill, you know, a famous couple of 50 years or so.

00:53:04.000 Suzanne is a friend.

00:53:05.000 Alan's still a friend.

00:53:07.000 Susan passed recently.

00:53:09.000 They would come back to Malibu all the time from Palm Springs.

00:53:13.000 And we'd go out to dinner with them.

00:53:15.000 And they'd go, oh, man, we love Malibu. 0.61

00:53:17.000 We used to live in Malibu.

00:53:18.000 We love Malibu so much.

00:53:19.000 But now they live in Palm Desert, you know.

00:53:22.000 And I'd go, well, why did you ever leave Malibu if you love it so much?

00:53:25.000 And Alan and Susan would say to me, oh, we had this beautiful spread, like three acre, three lots wide, right down on the ocean.

00:53:33.000 And it burnt to the ground.

00:53:35.000 Oh, yeah.

00:53:36.000 And he said, after about year seven of dealing with the Coastal Commission, he said, screw it.

00:53:42.000 We're too old.

00:53:42.000 We packed it up, and we just moved to Palm Springs.

00:53:46.000 And there's going to be, like, life is too short.

00:53:50.000 A lot of people, like, you know, a lot of these people, first off, these are 22-year-old new couples that are living on PCH in Malibu in a $17 million house.

00:53:59.000 Some of these people are old, and it's old money.

00:54:02.000 And, you know, when you're 71 years old, do you have 11 years?

00:54:07.000 To rebuild your house?

00:54:09.000 Or do you just move to Nashville?

00:54:11.000 Yeah, so it seems to me that you have two choices.

00:54:13.000 I mean, you have your house there, which you may never go back to, depending on what the California Coastal Commission has to say.

00:54:18.000 So you either have to run for mayor of L.A. yourself, or you have to leave.

00:54:21.000 These seem to me the two most obvious options.

00:54:23.000 Which one is it, Adam?

00:54:25.000 I don't know.

00:54:26.000 I think...

00:54:28.000 Obviously, Karen Bass has to go. 0.98

00:54:32.000 She's just there.

00:54:33.000 We do ceremonial mayors, but we don't do actual people who do stuff.

00:54:38.000 We like the idea of a black woman in this position. 0.99

00:54:42.000 It's like we cast them like they cast a judge in a crime show.

00:54:46.000 The judge should be a black woman. 1.00

00:54:48.000 Why?

00:54:49.000 It's just better.

00:54:50.000 Does she know anything about law?

00:54:51.000 It's just a show.

00:54:53.000 She doesn't need to know anything about law.

00:54:54.000 Just make sure she gets the gown right. 1.00

00:54:56.000 We did that with the Supreme Court, as it turns out.

00:54:58.000 Yes, we're doing a lot of just casting in movies now.

00:55:03.000 You know, Rick Caruso is a developer, is a commercial.

00:55:07.000 I mean, Rick Caruso is basically Trump in that developers, especially big project commercial developers, and that's Trump.

00:55:17.000 And I know it because it used to be my business.

00:55:20.000 These guys are always in a hurry.

00:55:22.000 They're like, why is it taking so long?

00:55:23.000 What's going on?

00:55:24.000 And then they're going, well, we got to get the guys come in and form and pour the concrete slabs.

00:55:30.000 Like, why is it taking so long?

00:55:31.000 Well, because in their world, the foundation has to be poured.

00:55:36.000 And then the framers can come in and start framing.

00:55:38.000 And when the framers are done, then the drywallers can come in.

00:55:41.000 When the drywallers are done, the roofers can come in.

00:55:43.000 And so everything's like, what's taking so long?

00:55:46.000 They're in a hurry.

00:55:47.000 And you saw in that press conference, Mayor Bass is like, you know, we want to rebuild, but we want to do it safely.

00:55:56.000 When you hear safely, that just means more paperwork.

00:56:01.000 Yeah, we wanted to go through COVID. But safely.

00:56:05.000 That's why they locked the schools down for a year and a half.

00:56:07.000 That's why they locked the beaches.

00:56:08.000 That's why they shut down outdoor dining. 1.00

00:56:10.000 That's why you got screwed in the workplace.

00:56:12.000 Because when you hear safety, that means you're about to get screwed hard for a long time.

00:56:17.000 But it sounds good, right?

00:56:19.000 Like safety.

00:56:20.000 Oh yeah, who's not?

00:56:21.000 So she's sitting there going, we gotta rebuild.

00:56:24.000 But we gotta do it safely.

00:56:26.000 And he's like...

00:56:27.000 Two days is too long.

00:56:28.000 Get it going.

00:56:29.000 I know guys who'll be up there with a flathead shovel right now, scooping ash into a can right now.

00:56:35.000 And so Trump's like, hurry, hurry, hurry.

00:56:37.000 And she's like, slow her down, slow her down. 1.00

00:56:40.000 So if we could get a Rick Caruso who has the commercial building and developing behind him, all those guys are just going to be like, you know, our problem is, is we take people who've never been in business and we put them in charge of policy.

00:56:56.000 And they're career bureaucrats, and they don't have a metronome that's like, come on, let's go.

00:57:01.000 And there's no precision.

00:57:03.000 You need a background of commercial airline pilot or developer or engineer.

00:57:08.000 Guys like that are like, let's go, let's do it.

00:57:11.000 We take a bunch of people, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Karen Bass, Gavin Newsom, just pie-in-the-sky idiots who sit around and pontificate, but nothing comes out the other end.

00:57:23.000 Well, Adam, it's great to see you.

00:57:24.000 I'm sorry it's under these circumstances that you're in Florida, but, you know, when you return to the blighted land of my former home, then, you know, I hope that things are better for you there.

00:57:35.000 I think between you and Dave Rubin's shame, that'll expedite my process of leaving California, because I get a lot of it from both of you.

00:57:44.000 And as well you should.

00:57:45.000 Well, good to see you.

00:57:46.000 All righty, guys, coming up.

The Ben Shapiro Show - February 04, 2025

Trump and Musk Bring The CHAINSAW

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript