The Ben Shapiro Show - February 20, 2025


Trump HAMMERS…Ukraine?!


Episode Stats


Length

47 minutes

Words per minute

199.46516

Word count

9,448

Sentence count

630

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

17

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Trump goes all in on Vladimir Zelensky and his deal with the Russian president over the Ukraine conflict, but Ukraine is not present in the negotiations, which is causing some consternation in Ukraine. Alex Blumberg explains why.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 So, yesterday President Trump decided that he was going to go whole hog on Vladimir Zelensky.
00:00:05.000 The Trump team is in Saudi Arabia negotiating with the Russian team over the end of the Ukraine war.
00:00:09.000 Ukraine is not present in these negotiations.
00:00:11.000 A matter of some consternation in Ukraine.
00:00:14.000 And let's be very clear about where I stand when it comes to the Ukraine war.
00:00:18.000 Russia attacked Ukraine.
00:00:20.000 There is no good reason for Russia to attack Ukraine.
00:00:22.000 Russia's goal in attacking Ukraine was to take over all of Ukraine up to and including Kiev and originally to kill Vladimir Zelensky and anyone else who was ruling in power and who was not going to act as a puppet of the Putin regime.
00:00:34.000 None of this is speculative.
00:00:35.000 That is all just the reality in February of 2022. Now, Ukraine did a masterful job of fending off that attack.
00:00:42.000 And by summer of that year, it was very clear that basically a stalemate had set in.
00:00:48.000 And despite all of the best attempts by the Europeans... 0.96
00:00:50.000 And the half-hearted attempts by the Biden administration to provide Ukraine with additional arms, the lines just weren't moving that much.
00:00:56.000 And so since summer of 2022, the lines have been pretty much set.
00:01:00.000 The Donbass area has been occupied by Russia.
00:01:02.000 Crimea has been occupied by Russia.
00:01:04.000 And love nor money is not going to move Russia off of that particular land, not unless the Biden administration was willing to do much more, which they simply were not.
00:01:13.000 What does that mean?
00:01:14.000 It means that any sort of settlement between Russia and Ukraine was always going to have the following Basic outline.
00:01:21.000 One, Russia was going to retain control over Donbass and Crimea because otherwise there was no off-ramp for Russia.
00:01:25.000 Vladimir Putin was not going to lose face as the dictator of Russia and simply hand back territory that had originally been invaded in 2014 and has been held by Russia ever since.
00:01:35.000 That was number one.
00:01:36.000 Ukraine was not going to win back that territory.
00:01:38.000 It was a victory for Ukraine simply to continue existing in the face of the Russian bear. 0.98
00:01:42.000 Number two, Ukraine was going to have to have some pretty significant security guarantees to make sure that Putin didn't just do this again.
00:01:48.000 One of Putin's demands was that Ukraine essentially disarm.
00:01:51.000 That was never going to be a going concern.
00:01:53.000 It was never going to happen.
00:01:55.000 So, that was always going to be the outline of the deal.
00:01:57.000 Security guarantees for Ukraine.
00:02:00.000 Russia keeps Donbass and Crimea. 0.63
00:02:01.000 That was always how this was going to look.
00:02:03.000 It's been this way for almost three years at this point.
00:02:07.000 Now, there's some other additional elements that President Trump, as the president, is throwing into the mix.
00:02:11.000 One of those is that he believes the United States has spent an exorbitant amount of money in Ukraine and somehow Ukraine should repay all of that money forthwith.
00:02:21.000 And so he's got a couple of proposals on the table for that.
00:02:24.000 One of those proposals was a sort of economic proposal that was pretty punitive with regard to Ukraine's future industry.
00:02:30.000 Now, the case in favor of that particular economic proposal, which, effectively speaking, forced The Ukrainian government to split pretty much all exportable material with the United States or at least profits from that exportable material with the United States.
00:02:45.000 The good news for Ukraine in a deal like that was that it would have tied the United States into Ukrainian security for the future.
00:02:51.000 Because if the United States and Ukraine had a big economic deal that was already in the offing and was already operating, then the United States would have a pretty significant interest in making sure that Ukraine was not then invaded once again by Vladimir Putin.
00:03:05.000 That was the case in favor.
00:03:07.000 The case against is that the amount that Trump was actually asking of Ukraine was extraordinarily burdensome, according to the at least leaked reports as to what exactly it was that was being asked.
00:03:16.000 The New York Post, which obviously is a Trump-friendly newspaper, suggests that that offer that Trump was making to Vladimir Zelensky and the Ukrainians was far too burdensome for Ukraine to really undertake.
00:03:27.000 Quote, the proposed contract, which reportedly hit Ukraine President Vladimir Zelensky's desk last week, demands half the country's revenues for natural resources, ports, and infrastructure indefinitely as payback for U.S. military aid since the war began.
00:03:39.000 So apparently that was met with a rather cold reception in Kyiv.
00:03:44.000 And so that ticked off President Trump.
00:03:47.000 Beyond that, Vladimir Zelensky has a way of getting on President Trump's nerves.
00:03:51.000 There's just no question about this.
00:03:52.000 This goes back years.
00:03:54.000 This goes all the way back to the phone calls that they were having, the perfect phone calls that President Trump was having with Vladimir Zelensky during Trump term number one.
00:04:00.000 And then, of course, Zelensky decided to make best friends with Joe Biden.
00:04:04.000 Nothing ticks off President Trump more than that sort of nonsense.
00:04:07.000 Then you recall, in the late stages of the election, Vladimir Zelensky actually came to Pennsylvania and for some odd reason was going around to munitions factories with Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, which was seen correctly by the Trump campaign as an attempt to warm up.
00:04:24.000 And so, Trump didn't like that either.
00:04:27.000 Then, Trump made some not particularly nice remarks about Vladimir Zelensky a couple of days ago, and Zelensky responded by suggesting that Trump was part of a disinformation echo chamber.
00:04:37.000 And this led to the big blow-up yesterday.
00:04:39.000 So, President Trump first went on Truth Social, and he made a very lengthy statement.
00:04:44.000 Quote, think of it.
00:04:46.000 A modestly successful comedian, Vladimir Zelensky.
00:04:48.000 Talked the United States of America into spending $350 billion to go into a war that couldn't be won.
00:04:53.000 It never had to start, but a war that he without the U.S. and Trump will never be able to settle.
00:04:57.000 Okay, so just on the facts, this is not true.
00:04:59.000 On the facts, Ukraine did not talk the United States into the war.
00:05:03.000 Russia invaded Ukraine.
00:05:05.000 Russia is the aggressor party in this particular situation. 0.85
00:05:08.000 As far as the United States' expenditures, the United States has spent an extraordinary amount of money.
00:05:13.000 The United States has given.
00:05:15.000 Or lend to Ukraine really is more of a gift because it's never going to be repaid.
00:05:18.000 The United States, up through the end of last year, had committed somewhere in the arena of $120 billion to Ukraine.
00:05:26.000 About $25 billion of that is basically coming back to the United States in the form of defense expenditures, somewhere around $100 billion that has been given to Ukraine.
00:05:35.000 Now, to be fair, the result of that has been the complete evisceration of Russia's forward military power, which...
00:05:43.000 As a bit of a bargain is not terrible if you see Russia as a geopolitical enemy, which, of course, it has been historically for the United States.
00:05:51.000 President Trump continues, the United States has spent $200 billion more than Europe, and Europe's money is guaranteed while the United States will get nothing back.
00:05:58.000 I see no evidence of this particular proposition.
00:06:01.000 Europe apparently has actually spent slightly more money than the United States.
00:06:04.000 When you aggregate all the European countries together, they spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $138 billion or committed that much money.
00:06:13.000 And it's gone up again recently, so closer to $180 billion committed to Ukraine.
00:06:17.000 So they actually have spent slightly more money than the United States in Ukraine.
00:06:20.000 As to the idea that Europe's money is guaranteed, meaning Ukraine is going to pay it back, no, no shot.
00:06:27.000 President Trump said, why didn't Sleepy Joe demand equalization?
00:06:30.000 And that this war is far more important to Europe than it is to us.
00:06:33.000 We have a big, beautiful ocean of separation.
00:06:34.000 Now, this is the first point that Trump is making that is actually correct, which is, okay, why is the United States footing the bill for this war?
00:06:40.000 The Europeans really need to step up. 0.94
00:06:41.000 And as we will see, Whether that is the intended effect of Trump's attacks on Vladimir Zelensky or whether that is the kind of positive byproduct of those attacks, Europe is going to have to step into the breach here.
00:06:52.000 He's right.
00:06:53.000 The Europeans have much more of a stake in Ukraine remaining Russian-free than the United States does.
00:06:58.000 Trump continued.
00:06:59.000 On top of this, Zelensky admits that half of the money we sent him is missing.
00:07:02.000 He refuses to have elections, is very low in Ukrainian polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden like a fiddle.
00:07:08.000 Okay, well, as far as refusing to have elections...
00:07:10.000 Martial law is declared because you may have noticed there's a war on, a war that has currently cost at a minimum 43,000 dead between February 2022 and December 2024 in Ukraine.
00:07:21.000 Large swaths of Ukrainian territory is currently occupied by Russia.
00:07:26.000 Like, do those people get to vote in Donbass and Crimea in a Russian election?
00:07:29.000 Millions of people are refugees from Ukraine because they've left since the war began, and you have hundreds of thousands of men in fighting positions.
00:07:35.000 So it makes it kind of difficult, just on a logistical level, to actually have a workable election.
00:07:40.000 As far as him being very low in Ukrainian polls, that's not particularly true either.
00:07:42.000 Vladimir Zelensky is riding above 50% in the Ukrainian polls and going up in part because of the conflict with Trump.
00:07:50.000 Trump says a dictator without elections, Zelensky better move faster. 0.85
00:07:52.000 He is not going to have a country left.
00:07:54.000 Now again, this may be just a tactic by Trump to put pressure on Zelensky to come to the table and recognize the obvious.
00:08:00.000 But the truth is that he doesn't have to recognize the obvious.
00:08:03.000 The United States can basically just sign his name on the dotted line.
00:08:06.000 In fact...
00:08:06.000 I have been suggesting just that since August of 2022, that the United States would have to basically go around Ukraine, cut a deal Ukraine doesn't like, and then cram it down on Ukraine.
00:08:15.000 I still don't believe that that requires the moral blindness of suggesting that Zelensky is, in fact, a dictator, you know, as opposed to Vladimir Putin, who has not held a legitimate election in the country of Russia for a quarter century at this point.
00:08:32.000 Zelensky was elected in 2019. His term expired at the end of 2024, and there will presumably be another election.
00:08:41.000 By the way, we should point out at this point that these statements have resulted in Zelensky's opposition in Ukraine coming to Zelensky's defense.
00:08:48.000 So the idea that he is a dictator who's quashing the opposition doesn't really explain why all the opposition parties are now coming to the defense of Vladimir Zelensky.
00:08:56.000 President Trump says, In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia, something I'll admit only Trump and the Trump administration can do.
00:09:02.000 Biden never tried.
00:09:04.000 Now, that part is true. 0.92
00:09:05.000 Trump is the only one who's attempting to get to a solution.
00:09:08.000 Biden did never try.
00:09:09.000 This is one of the signal failures of the Biden administration.
00:09:11.000 I pointed this out throughout Biden's entire term.
00:09:15.000 Europe has failed to bring peace.
00:09:16.000 Again, he is correct about this.
00:09:18.000 Zelensky probably wants to keep the gravy train going.
00:09:20.000 Again, that is a pretty nasty accusation, that Zelensky is willing to let tens of thousands of his own people be slaughtered in the streets simply so the money can keep flowing to Ukraine.
00:09:29.000 I love Ukraine, says President Trump, but Zelensky has done a terrible job.
00:09:32.000 His country has shattered and millions have unnecessarily died, and so it continues.
00:09:36.000 Now again, these are the sorts of words that presumably the Russian delegation is very happy to hear.
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00:11:47.000 And we should point out here that just in terms of the return to the United States on its investment here, the Russian military machine has been absolutely crippled by the war in Ukraine.
00:11:56.000 According to one NATO official quoted today in the international press, Russia's overall dead and wounded in this war amounts to 837,000.
00:12:05.000 That is a massive number, a huge number.
00:12:08.000 At a minimum, you're talking about 90,000 to 100,000 Russian troops who have been killed in this war, a war in which Putin was supposed to stroll into Kiev.
00:12:15.000 Now, as we can talk about and as we will talk about, Joe Biden was a signal failure in leading the world on this.
00:12:21.000 And when it comes to practical policy, the policy that is likely to emerge from what Trump is doing here is likely to be a much better policy than anything Joe Biden was doing.
00:12:29.000 However, Trump's statements about Zelensky, the attacks on him as a dictator, the suggestion that somehow Russia is the moral party here.
00:12:36.000 That is wrong and it's not true.
00:12:38.000 Trump then reiterated this in a speech.
00:12:40.000 This is clearly White House policy now.
00:12:42.000 This is not Trump making a mistake.
00:12:44.000 Whether it is animus for Zelensky on a personal level or frustration with Zelensky or whether in a sort of Machiavellian way it's an attempt to pressure Zelensky, make Zelensky look bad so that he can cut a deal without Zelensky and then cram it down on Zelensky and he feels he needs the imprimatur of public opinion to do that.
00:13:00.000 I don't know why he's saying this.
00:13:03.000 The motivations are unclear to me.
00:13:05.000 He is obviously reiterating this.
00:13:07.000 This is purposeful.
00:13:07.000 Here he was last night.
00:13:10.000 But think of it.
00:13:11.000 A modestly successful comedian, President Zelensky, talked the United States of America into spending $350 billion to go into a war that basically couldn't be won, that never had to start and never would have started if I was president.
00:13:30.000 Not even a chance.
00:13:31.000 And it didn't start for four years.
00:13:32.000 Never would have started.
00:13:34.000 But a war that he, without the US and Trump, will never be able to settle.
00:13:39.000 They'll never settle that war without our involvement.
00:13:42.000 Now, Russia is attempting to make economic overtures to President Trump.
00:13:45.000 This, of course, is one way to the Trump team's heart because President Trump has a very long-standing policy when it comes to foreign policy, which is that the United States should earn money.
00:13:53.000 And again, that's not a bad policy.
00:13:54.000 It's just that there are other countervailing interests that sometimes overcome those interests.
00:13:58.000 You can earn a lot of money doing business with China.
00:14:00.000 You can also completely undermine your manufacturing base, have all of your IP stolen, and pave the way to Chinese aggression all over the region. 0.96
00:14:07.000 And so money is not the only consideration.
00:14:08.000 It is, however, a fair consideration.
00:14:10.000 According to the New York Times, the Russian government's top investment manager, who has Harvard and McKinsey credentials in fluent English, brought a simple printout to Tuesday's talks with the Trump administration in Saudi Arabia.
00:14:20.000 Its message, by pulling out of Russia in outrage over the invasion of Ukraine, American companies had walked away from piles of cold hard cash.
00:14:27.000 The document, which was handed over by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia's Sovereign Wealth Fund, showed to a New York Times reporter it said total losses $324 billion.
00:14:37.000 And appealing to President Trump, the Kremlin has zeroed in on his desire to make a profit.
00:14:41.000 President Putin on Wednesday praised the U.S. delegation in Riyadh for not criticizing Russia, as previous administrations had done.
00:14:46.000 Now, again, you can make the case that the reason Trump's not doing that is what's the point?
00:14:49.000 If he goes out there and he just shouts at Putin about being a dictator, then is he able to get to the actual end point that he wants?
00:14:56.000 By the same token, is there a real politic rationale for attacking Zelensky in this way?
00:15:02.000 If there is, you know, I'm hard-pressed to see it.
00:15:06.000 And again, on a moral level, what he's saying is obviously not true.
00:15:09.000 Russia attacked Ukraine.
00:15:10.000 Vladimir Putin is, in fact, a quite murderous dictator who has no problem poisoning his enemies or throwing them off of the top's buildings and such.
00:15:19.000 The predictable result of all of this, however, could be salutary in the end.
00:15:24.000 And the reason I say that is, if you already knew how this war was going to end, which, once again, many of us have been asking for and demanding for nigh on three years at this point, perhaps it gets to an end faster because of the kind of activities that Trump is participating in.
00:15:37.000 Now, it may not get there faster with the United States as part of a broad economic deal.
00:15:43.000 That economic deal that was proposed by the Trump administration is almost certain to be refused by Ukraine because it wouldn't pencil out for them in any way, shape, or form.
00:15:52.000 In all likelihood, what is going to happen here is the United States is going to try to cut some sort of deal with Russia, and then there will be a countervailing negotiation led by the Europeans and Ukraine on the other side.
00:16:02.000 Europe is going to be forced to step up here, and that part is what Trump really does have right when it comes to Russia-Ukraine.
00:16:09.000 President Zelensky has pulled out of his trip that was planned to Saudi Arabia to avoid what he called coincidences following that meeting between the United States and Russian officials in Riyadh.
00:16:18.000 This is according to Euronews.
00:16:21.000 Zelensky's announcement came as he met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for talks in Ankara, during which he said any Russia-Ukraine peace negotiations should not take place behind the backs of the parties involved.
00:16:30.000 He said the Russian-American meeting in Saudi Arabia came as a surprise to us, just as it did to many others.
00:16:34.000 When we saw the media coverage, I don't know who will stay, who will leave, where anyone is going.
00:16:38.000 To be honest, I don't really care.
00:16:39.000 What matters to me is that our partners take time to think about us.
00:16:42.000 So again, I think Zelensky is taking a rather unwise position vis-a-vis the Trump administration because...
00:16:47.000 A position of personal animus with President Trump is a bad place to be if you're a foreign leader.
00:16:52.000 However, the result of this is likely to be, again, what has been suggested for years.
00:16:57.000 One, the Ukrainians are likely to rally around Zelensky because of Trump attacking him.
00:17:01.000 So, oddly enough, you'll end up in a stronger domestic position because of Trump's attacks than he otherwise would.
00:17:06.000 And again, the sort of bizarre parallel here is Joe Biden full on attacking Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and that making Bibi significantly more popular in Israel because they were in the middle of an existential war.
00:17:17.000 And the slow walking of the aid was happening via Biden, who's attempting to oust the sitting prime minister.
00:17:21.000 It seems like the same thing is happening with Zelensky.
00:17:23.000 According to Politico, Yulia Timoshenko, former prime minister of Ukraine and leader of the oppositional motherland faction in the Ukrainian parliament, put out a statement backing Zelensky, quote, Ukraine is a sovereign state.
00:17:34.000 Vladimir Zelensky is the president of Ukraine, legitimate until another is elected.
00:17:37.000 Only Ukrainians can decide when and under what conditions they should change their government today.
00:17:41.000 There are no such conditions.
00:17:42.000 And again, this is coming not from Ukraine.
00:17:47.000 Zelensky himself, or Zelensky's puppets.
00:17:49.000 This is coming from people who legitimately oppose Vladimir Zelensky in Ukraine.
00:17:55.000 So, for example, Member of Parliament Ivana Klimpush-Sinsadzi didn't defend Zelensky outright, but this person is the senior figure in Ukraine's European Solidarity Party.
00:18:07.000 The leader of that party, Petro Poroshenko, is seen as one of the chief rivals to Zelensky.
00:18:12.000 But this MP described at Trump's remarks as unacceptable.
00:18:16.000 She's pushing for the president to form a unity government and to involve all political parties in the negotiation process as well. 0.56
00:18:23.000 She put out a statement saying, quote, Yes, we heard completely unacceptable statements by the U.S. leader about who started the war, about resolving the conflict in Ukraine by completely satisfying Putin's wishes, about de facto potentially forcing Ukraine to surrender everything we've been fighting for for 11 years against aggressive dictatorial Russia.
00:18:37.000 She said Zelensky should bury the acts of war with the opposition and unite the country.
00:18:42.000 And again, pretty much all of the politicians...
00:18:44.000 Right, left, and center in Ukraine are coming to Zelensky's defense because they don't like the characterization of the war by President Trump.
00:18:50.000 So ironically, Zelensky gains in popularity domestically.
00:18:52.000 Meanwhile, the Europeans are finally deciding that, hey, maybe if the United States isn't going to lead the way here, we ought to lead the way here.
00:19:00.000 So, for example, Kemi Badnock, who's the leader of the Conservative Party in Great Britain and who's generally warm toward President Trump, put out a statement, quote, President Zelensky is not a dictator.
00:19:10.000 He's the democratically elected leader of Ukraine who bravely stood up to Putin's illegal invasion.
00:19:14.000 Under my leadership and under successive conservative prime ministers, we have and always will stand with Ukraine.
00:19:19.000 President Trump is right that Europe needs to pull its weight, and that includes the UK. We need to get serious.
00:19:23.000 The PM will have my support to increase defense spending.
00:19:25.000 There is a fully funded plan to get to 2.5% sitting on his desk.
00:19:29.000 That should be the bare minimum.
00:19:30.000 Starmer should get on with it, get on a plane to Washington, and show some leadership.
00:19:33.000 We cannot afford to get this wrong.
00:19:35.000 Meanwhile, President Zelensky put out a statement after a conversation with NATO Secretary General Mark Rudy.
00:19:42.000 saying, quote, Mark informed me about his meeting with General Keith Kellogg.
00:19:45.000 Keith Kellogg is an envoy from the United States to Ukraine.
00:19:48.000 Quote, the key messages align with our goal of achieving guaranteed peace, not just a temporary ceasefire.
00:19:52.000 There must be confidence that in a few months or years, Putin won't return with his war.
00:19:55.000 We also discussed our future contacts with partners and coordinated next steps.
00:19:59.000 We cannot allow Putin to deceive everyone again.
00:20:01.000 Before any potential negotiations, all partners must clearly understand strong security guarantees are the priority for lasting peace.
00:20:07.000 Thank you, Mark, for your support and assistance.
00:20:09.000 And again, that is him calling on NATO, which...
00:20:12.000 Is American, but also European, for support.
00:20:15.000 So, the predictable result of actually all of this could be salutary.
00:20:19.000 As I say, it is quite possible that the predictable result of this is we get to the deal everybody knew is coming.
00:20:24.000 The Europeans are the ones who actually have to enforce it and pay for it, not the United States. 0.50
00:20:28.000 And Zelensky ends up more popular in his own country.
00:20:31.000 That's quite possible.
00:20:32.000 That does not alleviate the sort of moral responsibility to say true things as opposed to false things about Vladimir Putin, but from a real politic sort of point of view...
00:20:41.000 This could end in a decent way.
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00:23:11.000 Now, Democrats, of course, are sounding off in extraordinary ways about all this.
00:23:15.000 And here, I'm sorry, I do not care what Chuck Schumer has to say about this.
00:23:20.000 I do not.
00:23:20.000 The Democrats are the ones who created this situation in the first place.
00:23:23.000 It was Democrats who had control of the boat for three years and they did nothing.
00:23:27.000 Democrats had a choice.
00:23:28.000 They could either increase the amount of aid to Ukraine sufficient to allow them to actually attempt to liberate Donbass and Crimea, or they could have found an off-ramp.
00:23:38.000 They had three years to do it.
00:23:39.000 And instead, they decided that they were going to slow walk aid such that Ukraine couldn't actually take back any of those areas despite heroic defense.
00:23:47.000 And they decided they were also not going to look for an off-ramp.
00:23:49.000 They were going to simply allow this war to continue to percolate with tens of thousands of people dying on both sides.
00:23:56.000 That was going to be their plan.
00:23:58.000 So I don't want to hear from you guys about Donald Trump and his mean words about Vladimir Zelensky.
00:24:02.000 It was you who left Ukraine in the lurch while simultaneously promoting the continuation of a war to which you had no end point.
00:24:09.000 Here is the Senate Minority Leader on this.
00:24:11.000 In a Fox interview released last night, President Trump spoke about the war in Ukraine.
00:24:17.000 And some of his comments sounded straight from a Russian propaganda playbook.
00:24:22.000 Rather than speak the truth, rather than acknowledge Vladimir Putin's role in starting this war, President Trump amazingly blamed Ukraine for Putin's invasion.
00:24:35.000 To quote the president, "'You should never have started it,' he said." He was saying that to President Zelensky.
00:24:45.000 This is disgusting.
00:24:47.000 Disgusting.
00:24:47.000 After how this man has fought so hard and so valiantly.
00:24:51.000 Now again, the moral suasion argument from the same people who slow walked aid to Ukraine, who did not give them the jets that they needed, did not give them the weaponry that they needed, in the middle of a war that they then were encouraging them to run across into Donbass and get themselves killed.
00:25:07.000 I'm not willing to hear that from Chuck Schumer.
00:25:09.000 He has no moral leg to stand on here.
00:25:12.000 Again, I think that Trump is factually and morally wrong when he says that Zelensky started the war or when he labels Zelensky a dictator or when he suggests the true immoral power here is Ukraine.
00:25:22.000 But I'm not willing to hear that from Chuck Schumer, who is largely responsible for the terrible Western policy toward Ukraine over the course of the last three years.
00:25:32.000 Same thing coming from Senator Tammy Duckworth. 0.99
00:25:34.000 Again, it's the same routine message.
00:25:36.000 I'm just not buying it from these folks.
00:25:39.000 He is parroting Vladimir Putin's talking points.
00:25:43.000 It's a complete betrayal of the Ukrainian people, of American leadership and our values. 0.81
00:25:49.000 I never thought in the 23 years I served in the military that I would hear the commander-in-chief of the United States military parroting Russian talking points.
00:25:59.000 And really, you know, it is astonishing to me.
00:26:05.000 That he would also betray our allies in Europe in this way and pave the way for Putin.
00:26:10.000 He essentially just surrendered to Putin, and that simply is not acceptable.
00:26:14.000 Now, again, that's not true.
00:26:16.000 Any deal here is going to end with security guarantees from the NATO powers to Ukraine to prevent a further invasion.
00:26:23.000 It will end with that, because otherwise Ukraine won't be able to accept it, and the war will continue, no matter how much pressure President Trump puts on Vladimir Zelensky.
00:26:30.000 That's just the reality.
00:26:32.000 Putin is not going to end up with Kiev.
00:26:33.000 He's not going to end up running Ukraine.
00:26:35.000 I've said this for years.
00:26:36.000 Trump does not want that happening.
00:26:38.000 No matter how much he personally dislikes Vladimir Zelensky.
00:26:41.000 He does not actually want Vladimir Putin walking down the streets of Kiev in triumph.
00:26:45.000 That's not something that he wants.
00:26:47.000 It was Democrats who blew this.
00:26:49.000 And that's how they end up with Donald Trump as president.
00:26:51.000 He's the one who's going to have to negotiate the deal.
00:26:53.000 Meanwhile, the Trump administration is looking into overspending at the Department of Defense.
00:26:58.000 And it is unclear to me what exactly the policy is.
00:27:01.000 So if the policy here is to unleash Doge on the Department of Defense to find golden toilet seats, I'm all for it.
00:27:06.000 If we're talking about getting rid of the sort of waste, fraud, and abuse that we've seen in pretty much every other department, I'm in favor of it.
00:27:11.000 It's not clear that's what the policy is.
00:27:12.000 Apparently, according to the Washington Post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has now ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military to develop plans for cutting 8% from the defense budget in each of the next five years, according to a memo obtained by the Washington Post and officials familiar With the matter.
00:27:29.000 That is a massive, massive reduction in military expenditure.
00:27:35.000 Among the areas that the Trump administration wants exempted, operations at the U.S. southern border, modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense, and acquisition of some marines, one-way attack drones, and other munitions.
00:27:47.000 Robert Salisas, a senior Pentagon official, said in a statement the money saved could be realigned to pay for new priorities in the Trump administration, including, for example, Iron Dome for America.
00:27:55.000 So if what we're talking about is to save money in some areas to move toward new weapons systems, all in favor of it, that sounds great to me.
00:28:03.000 Because obviously the money that's been allocated to many of the older weapons systems is money that is wasted.
00:28:07.000 If the goal, however, is actual spending cuts that are not reallocated into growth of our military power around the globe, that to me is a large-scale mistake.
00:28:16.000 The Pentagon budget for 2025 is about $850 billion, with broad consensus on Capitol Hill that extensive spending is necessary to deter both China and Russia.
00:28:24.000 If adopted in full, the cuts would include tens of billions of dollars in each of the next five years.
00:28:30.000 Now, again, if the goal here is to simply cut that waste, fraud, and abuse, that's one thing.
00:28:34.000 If the cuts are being identified by size and not by location, that is another thing.
00:28:40.000 The argument that I'm making here is if you find a bad weapons program, you should cut it no matter how much it costs.
00:28:47.000 If the goal is to cut 8% and you're just spotting places to cut to hit that 8%, that is a bigger problem because you could be cutting This particular chart,
00:29:16.000 you can see that during wartime, it spiked.
00:29:21.000 It was all the way up at near 15% in 1953, and then it's been steadily declining since the end of the Cold War.
00:29:27.000 By the end of the Cold War, the United States was spending north of 6% of GDP. Today, we are spending approximately 3.6% of our GDP on defense.
00:29:35.000 And that's in the face of a very aggressive China.
00:29:38.000 China is a rising power.
00:29:40.000 China is extraordinarily aggressive. 0.71
00:29:43.000 Cutting our own defense capacity in the face of all this would be a fairly large-scale mistake.
00:29:48.000 The commander of Indo-Pacific?
00:29:50.000 A guy named Admiral Sam Paparo, he said, quote, we're very close to the point where on a daily basis the fig leaf of an exercise could very well hide operational warning, meaning China doing these sort of military exercises around Taiwan.
00:30:02.000 Their aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan right now are not exercises, they call them, they're rehearsals.
00:30:05.000 They're rehearsals for the forced unification of Taiwan to the mainland.
00:30:10.000 Paparo said, our magazines run low, our maintenance backlogs grow longer each month.
00:30:14.000 We operate on an increasingly thin margin of error.
00:30:17.000 Our opponents see these gaps and they're moving aggressively to exploit them.
00:30:21.000 And that is right.
00:30:23.000 And when it comes to, for example, Chinese military spending, the reality is that China, while the claim is that China's only spending like 1 point something percent, 1.6 percent of their GDP on defense, that's not actually true.
00:30:36.000 Other estimates suggest they're not spending $280 billion on their military every year.
00:30:40.000 They're spending close to $700 billion on their military every year and hiding it in order to...
00:30:49.000 And we have some indicators.
00:30:56.000 Obviously, it's an aggressive foreign policy willing to use economic power in order to leverage change in places like Colombia or in Mexico.
00:31:04.000 President Trump is willing to think outside the box in the Middle East in, I think, new and amazing ways.
00:31:09.000 And President Trump obviously wants to get to a solution in Ukraine.
00:31:12.000 If, however, the goal is to cut defense, If the goal is a sort of generalized American retreat from the world, the sort of neo-isolationist position that if the United States retreats from the world, that nothing fills the gap, that is just not true.
00:31:27.000 Something will fill the gap, and the thing that fills the gap will not be friendly to the United States.
00:31:31.000 Now, maybe you make the calculation somehow, somehow, that the turning of the Far East into a giant Chinese pond is somehow not all that damaging to the United States, or at least... 0.94
00:31:42.000 You know, if we save a couple hundred billion dollars here or there around the military, somehow that outweighs the amount of cost to China taking over the South China Sea.
00:31:51.000 I fail to see how that pencils out precisely.
00:31:54.000 Because what we're talking about here in ramping up American military capacity is deterrence.
00:31:59.000 The goal is to never have to go to war.
00:32:00.000 That is what peace through strength is all about, to push people off the line.
00:32:04.000 Something, by the way, that Trump is very familiar with and that he's been very successful at in the past.
00:32:08.000 That credible threat of use of force has been President Trump's friend.
00:32:11.000 Historically speaking, withdrawing from areas all over the globe in the sort of hackneyed belief that the rest of the world will then become a friendly place, that a multipolar world will be constructed similarly to the current world order, that allies that we have across the world won't simply reorient toward China, which is much more ambitious and willing to expend capital and willing to expend military force where it wants.
00:32:37.000 That's just not true.
00:32:38.000 There are countries that we take for granted.
00:32:40.000 Say, Japan, Australia.
00:32:42.000 These are countries that have been long-time American allies.
00:32:46.000 If the United States were to abandon its footing in the Far East, what do Japan and Australia do?
00:32:51.000 Well, either they arm up, in which case you have arms races in the Far East, which raises the prospect of serious conflict, or you have these countries trying to make some sort of accommodation with China, which of course strengthens China at the expense of the United States.
00:33:03.000 Economics is not a zero-sum game, because if two sides trade, both sides get richer.
00:33:08.000 But...
00:33:09.000 Foreign policy power is a zero-sum game.
00:33:12.000 And trajectory matters.
00:33:14.000 The United States is, in fact, the guarantor of, say, freedom of the seas.
00:33:18.000 The United States is the force that is keeping North Korea from walking across the border in South Korea. 0.57
00:33:23.000 It's our trigger force in South Korea.
00:33:26.000 It is, in fact, American presence in places like Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in the Baltic states that does prevent further Russian aggression in those states.
00:33:33.000 It is not the ground threat of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia's.
00:33:38.000 Military prowess.
00:33:41.000 Preventative power, it's always very easy to do the counterfactual.
00:33:45.000 And the counterfactual is like, well, you know, if we just withdrew from these areas, if we didn't have military power, if we cut the defense budget, then probably everything would be okay because that's an imaginary world.
00:33:53.000 The costs right now are real, but the success of the counterfactual is imaginary.
00:33:59.000 So it's easy to make that case.
00:34:00.000 Well, you know, the costs are real.
00:34:01.000 We have to keep soldiers in a lot of places and spend a lot of money.
00:34:04.000 And do we really want to be doing that?
00:34:06.000 The counterfactual, however, fails to acknowledge the reality of life, which is that America has aggressive enemies, all of which have their own interests in mind.
00:34:14.000 They act on their own.
00:34:15.000 They're not acting in opposition to the United States in the sense that the U.S. does something, they simply react.
00:34:21.000 They have their own priorities.
00:34:22.000 They have their own agendas.
00:34:23.000 And those agendas do not align with the agenda of the United States.
00:34:27.000 Again, I don't think that that is what President Trump is looking for.
00:34:30.000 I think what President Trump is looking for here is a peace-through-strength policy.
00:34:33.000 I think that because he told me that on this show.
00:34:37.000 And that is why I think it's important to see who gets staffed up in, for example, the Defense Department.
00:34:42.000 There's a bubbling battle over a potential Defense Department nominee named Elbridge Colby.
00:34:47.000 And there's a lot of controversy over exactly what Elbridge Colby thinks.
00:34:51.000 Very good piece over at Tablet Magazine by Lee Smith talking about Elbridge Colby.
00:34:56.000 But the bizarre thing about Elbridge Colby, who, again, is being pushed by some segments of sort of the MAGA right.
00:35:01.000 The bizarre thing about Elbridge Colby is that his actual history is working in Democratic circles.
00:35:07.000 He began his career working for the Center for a New American Security, which is a think tank founded by Clinton officials and allies, with the purpose of turning military officers into loyal Democrats.
00:35:17.000 He then worked at West Exec Advisors, founded in 2017 by two former Barack Obama officials, Anthony Blinken and Michelle Flournoy.
00:35:25.000 Avril Haines, the West Exec consultant, went on to become Biden's Director of National Intelligence.
00:35:29.000 Blinken, of course, went on to be Secretary of State.
00:35:31.000 And Florida was theoretically going to lead the Pentagon, where supposedly she was going to actually hire Elbridge Colby. 0.57
00:35:37.000 Instead, Colby ended up working in the first Trump administration under James Mattis, who, of course, was not a friend to the Trump foreign policy.
00:35:45.000 He's advised a bunch of people in the GOP, including, for example, Jeb Bush.
00:35:50.000 So Colby's foreign policy doesn't truly align particularly well with many of the things that President Trump has said.
00:35:56.000 Colby's argument historically has been.
00:35:58.000 That we need to reorient American interests away from, say, Europe and the Middle East and toward China, which is a fair enough argument if what you mean to do is actually then ramp up your capacity around Taiwan.
00:36:09.000 But, as Lee Smith points out, many of the people who are being put into place in the Defense Department don't even want to confront China.
00:36:17.000 Michael Domino, who's named as the Pentagon's principal Middle East policy advisor, and Andrew Byers, who's tapped for a South and Southeast Asia job, both of those people...
00:36:27.000 Our fellows at Defense Priorities, which is a Koch-funded think tank, the Koch brothers are quite isolationist on foreign policy.
00:36:33.000 Byers believes the United States should abandon belligerent military initiatives targeted at China because the two are, quote, more geopolitical rivals than full-fledged adversaries.
00:36:42.000 Meanwhile, Colby himself, he says we ought to orient, again, toward China.
00:36:48.000 But, he says, quote, it is true that Taiwan is a very important strategic interest to the United States.
00:36:52.000 It is not, however, an existential interest.
00:36:54.000 America has a strong interest in defending Taiwan, but Americans could survive without it. 0.97
00:36:58.000 And then he posted, And then he suggested that the only logical and coherent position was to raise the alarm that we are heading to a situation in which defending Taiwan won't make sense and may not even be possible.
00:37:18.000 So, in other words, swivel attention from the Middle East to China and then ignore China, which is a very, very weird policy.
00:37:24.000 And certainly not one that seems to align with the Trump foreign policy.
00:37:27.000 But the Trump foreign policy remains in the early stages here.
00:37:29.000 We'll have to see how all of this shakes out.
00:37:31.000 We'll have to see how this ends up defining itself over time.
00:37:37.000 Suffice it to say that America that abandons a leadership interest in the world is going to watch its interests get wrested away by opponents of the United States.
00:37:46.000 Because again, those opponents don't stop existing just because you wish they would.
00:37:50.000 And then you start unilaterally cutting defense.
00:37:52.000 Or divesting from certain parts of the globe.
00:37:54.000 It doesn't mean every intervention everywhere is a good idea, obviously, clearly.
00:37:58.000 Many interventions aren't worth it.
00:37:59.000 It doesn't mean that we ought to expend money in stupid places.
00:38:02.000 It doesn't mean we ought to expend money on bad weapons systems.
00:38:05.000 It does mean, however, that pretending away America's enemies and pretending that there will be no cost to the United States if those enemies gain regional power is whistling past the graveyard.
00:38:15.000 Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the latest with regard to Doge.
00:38:18.000 First, if you're with us for election night or the inauguration, you already know.
00:38:22.000 The Daily Wire doesn't just show up, we take over, and now we are headed back to D.C. to do just that at CPAC. Join me, along with Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan, and Jeremy Boring, all on stage, live, tonight, February 20th.
00:38:32.000 Check it out.
00:38:33.000 Check it out.
00:39:03.000 They're streaming live at Daily Wire Plus, and we are taking your questions.
00:39:05.000 Don't just watch CPAC, be a part of it.
00:39:07.000 Live tonight, February 20th, at Daily Wire Plus.
00:39:10.000 Meanwhile, controversy continues over Doge.
00:39:13.000 President Trump announced yesterday, in a piece of interesting news, that he is considering a Doge dividend, which would essentially take a per capita payment saved by Doge and then pass it back to the American people in the form of a check or a tax cut.
00:39:28.000 Now, there's a case to be made that we actually should use that money to pay down the national debt because, of course, that is one of the reasons that you're cutting the spending.
00:39:33.000 However, I'd rather the taxpayers have back their money than that that money be blown on random turning the kids gay in Guatemala nonsense. 0.96
00:39:40.000 Here is President Trump.
00:39:42.000 There's even under consideration a new concept where we give 20 percent of the Doge savings to American citizens and 20 percent goes to paying down debt because the numbers are incredible.
00:39:54.000 Elon, so many billions of dollars, billions, hundreds of billions.
00:39:58.000 And we're thinking about giving 20 percent back to the American citizens and 20 percent down to pay back debt and pay down debt.
00:40:07.000 So, again, I think that I'm not a bad idea.
00:40:11.000 How much is Doge actually cutting is sort of one of the open questions at this point.
00:40:14.000 Because Doge is working so fast, and because they are citing a bunch of different things they're cutting, it's sort of hard to get a handle on what exactly is being cut.
00:40:22.000 Apparently, according to...
00:40:24.000 The website for Doge, they account for $16.6 billion at this point of savings via cuts.
00:40:30.000 But there was an error in some of the data that was published at the Doge website.
00:40:34.000 They mislabeled the contract as an $8 billion contract.
00:40:36.000 It was actually an $8 million contract.
00:40:38.000 So you're talking about under $10 billion in actual itemized savings at this point.
00:40:43.000 It may be much, much more than that.
00:40:44.000 It may be less.
00:40:45.000 We don't actually know at this point.
00:40:47.000 The itemized list includes a huge number of failed spending initiatives.
00:40:51.000 And you can imagine that by the time we go through the entire federal government, it is going to amount to, say, $100 billion.
00:40:56.000 Now, in the vast scope of federal spending, is that going to make a huge debt?
00:41:00.000 Are you talking about trillions of dollars that is suddenly going to get clawed back?
00:41:03.000 I seriously doubt it.
00:41:04.000 And herein lies the problem that I've noted for a while.
00:41:08.000 Doge is doing great work, and I love what they're doing.
00:41:10.000 And I love the idea of naming all these programs because the American people need to be made aware of how much of their money is being wasted.
00:41:16.000 But the reality is the big drivers of America's debt are, of course, the giant entitlement programs.
00:41:20.000 Kevin O'Leary on CNN makes this case.
00:41:22.000 He says, listen, Doge actually needs to be radically increasing the amount of cuts.
00:41:26.000 I think the issue is they're not whacking enough.
00:41:29.000 There's this concept in private equity when you get a bankrupt company and you go in there, you cut 20% more than your initial read.
00:41:38.000 And then you find like a pool of mercury, the organization gels back together again.
00:41:43.000 Always cut deeper.
00:41:45.000 Harder when there's fat and waste.
00:41:47.000 The FAA, it's not the people.
00:41:49.000 The code is cobalt.
00:41:52.000 It's from the 60s.
00:41:54.000 It needs CapEx put into it for the technology to be upgraded to make it safer.
00:41:59.000 Fat, like a chicken.
00:42:01.000 All of these agencies are like big fat chickens dripping over barbecues of fat.
00:42:07.000 This is the best barbecue I've ever seen, but I don't think it's happening fast enough.
00:42:10.000 They're not cutting enough.
00:42:12.000 Keep slashing.
00:42:13.000 Keep hacking while you have a 24-month mandate before the midterms.
00:42:17.000 Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.
00:42:20.000 More.
00:42:20.000 More cutting.
00:42:22.000 Believe me, it's going to work out just great.
00:42:24.000 Even people with their nuclear codes?
00:42:26.000 Cut them too?
00:42:27.000 Cut everything.
00:42:28.000 Because if you don't see what they're doing and they can't show you that they're adding value, you whack.
00:42:34.000 By the way, this is exactly how a company should be run.
00:42:37.000 If you come in and there's a lot of fat dripping from the edges of the company, you've got to cut.
00:42:41.000 And cut nearly everywhere.
00:42:42.000 By the way, there's tons of fat that needs to be cut.
00:42:44.000 A Washington Free Beacon report now says that the Biden EPA actually awarded a group linked to Stacey Abrams with no real track record, a $2 billion environmental grant in 2024, which looks very much like just a money laundering attempt to left-wing causes, which of course is what so much of the spending actually is.
00:43:01.000 And Democrats are trying to fight back against this, and they are doing so unsuccessfully.
00:43:05.000 They have two angles.
00:43:06.000 One is, how dare you cut all of our fat?
00:43:09.000 That fat needs to remain.
00:43:11.000 Chuck Schumer, the awful Senate Minority Leader, he tried to say this.
00:43:14.000 He said, listen, I'm fine with taking a scalpel, but you're using a meat axe.
00:43:17.000 Well, yeah, because the government is as bloated as any government in human history.
00:43:22.000 Of course there's some wasteful spending, but you don't use a meat axe and cut everything.
00:43:28.000 We need to look at each program.
00:43:31.000 We need to go through Congress and see what's wasteful and move to eliminate it, and what's very not wasteful but very much needed.
00:43:38.000 I'll give you one example.
00:43:40.000 They went after community health centers in Medicaid.
00:43:44.000 They're among the most efficient producers of health care we have, yet they tried to eliminate them.
00:43:49.000 Makes no sense.
00:43:50.000 They're just using a meat axe and cutting everything, including many things that American families need, want, and approve of. 0.71
00:43:58.000 So, no.
00:44:00.000 Actually, the meat axe is a good thing.
00:44:01.000 And good for Trump and good for Musk for taking the initiative on all of this.
00:44:06.000 And angle number two Democrats are trying is to find single incidents of cuts that really tug it to heart.
00:44:12.000 And they're having a problem here because it turns out that government employees are not the most sympathetic victims.
00:44:17.000 So, for example, here you have Chelsea Milbourne, a former federal employee fired from the Education Department, brought on to CNN to cry about it. 0.57
00:44:25.000 I was excited to continue serving in this capacity.
00:44:30.000 And they not only tore that out from under my feet, but couldn't even just grant me a layoff and instead place the blame on me that it was my performance.
00:44:41.000 And I've gotten nothing but positive reviews on that situation.
00:44:44.000 So I feel very much like the message is that my service is valued.
00:44:52.000 They don't care about how this impacts me or people like me.
00:44:55.000 And to me, it's inhumane.
00:44:58.000 It feels like they're ignoring our personhood and not respecting us as human beings or as American citizens.
00:45:06.000 Inhumane?
00:45:06.000 I mean, not respecting you as a human?
00:45:08.000 Like, what if we just don't want you doing the job that you were doing because we don't feel like paying you for that?
00:45:12.000 You are not owed a job.
00:45:13.000 Good luck with this.
00:45:15.000 Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer is trying to blame President Trump for airplane crashes now.
00:45:18.000 They're getting desperate.
00:45:19.000 Here is Chuck Schumer yesterday.
00:45:21.000 The more Donald Trump and Doge indiscriminately hack away at public agencies, the greater harm to Americans' well-being and even their safety.
00:45:31.000 The FAA is a good example.
00:45:33.000 Just weeks after the deadliest plane crash in a long time, and just as we see more incidents around the country, President Trump has fired hundreds of FAA workers, including air safety personnel.
00:45:50.000 Firing people whose very job it is to keep air travel safe is nothing short of reckless.
00:45:57.000 Okay, but there's only one problem, which is they've yet to connect any of the cuts to any of the airplane crashes.
00:46:02.000 This is what Delta's CEO was saying to Gayle King, who tried the same exact routine yesterday.
00:46:08.000 The Trump administration recently fired many employees of the FAA administration.
00:46:13.000 Do those cuts worry you, and do you think that impacts the safety?
00:46:17.000 I know you just said it's the safest way to travel, but after looking at all these mishaps, a lot of people are very nervous.
00:46:23.000 Do these cuts affect you?
00:46:24.000 The cuts do not affect us, Gail.
00:46:26.000 I've been in close communication with the Secretary of Transportation.
00:46:30.000 I understand that the cuts at this time are something that are raising questions, but the reality is there's over 50,000 people that work at the FAA, and the cuts, I understand, were 300 people, and they were in non-critical safety functions.
00:46:45.000 So, no, actually, it is not President Trump at all.
00:46:49.000 They're having some real trouble, some real trouble out there.
00:46:52.000 Okay, in just one second, we're going to get to Democrats who are trying to vie now for leadership of a failing Democratic Party.
00:46:57.000 The Democratic Party ratings, by the way, are absolutely in the toilet.
00:47:00.000 We're talking like 30% in the 20s.
00:47:02.000 Truly terrible.
00:47:03.000 If you're not a member, become a member.
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00:47:09.000 We've got so much great stuff behind the paywall, ranging from our various movies and TV shows to things like All Access, special behind-the-scenes stuff all about Matt Walsh's work.
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