A tornado touched down in the United States on Saturday, killing at least 32 people. President Trump responded by unleashing the U.S. military on the Yemeni Houthis and Iranian front group that s been attacking shipping in the Red Sea.
00:00:01.000President Trump has some excellent poll numbers.
00:00:03.000He is also unleashing the American military on the Yemeni Houthis and Iranian front group that's been attacking shipping in the Red Sea.
00:00:10.000So the American military going to town over the weekend first.
00:00:13.000America is in the middle of a comeback, but the culture war is not yet over.
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00:00:44.000Over the weekend, 32 Americans were killed in a massive American storm after fatalities reported, apparently, in both Kansas and Mississippi.
00:00:52.000Violent tornadoes, according to the Associated Press, ripped through parts of the United States, wiping out schools, toppling semi-tractor trailers in several states.
00:00:59.000It was a huge monster storm that has killed at least 32 more people.
00:01:03.000More severe weather was expected late on Saturday.
00:01:07.000Lots of vehicles involved, truly a terrible accident.
00:01:10.000You've already seen the attempt by some in the media to try and paint the Trump administration as responsible for all of this.
00:01:17.000Natural disasters strike on everybody's watch.
00:01:20.000The question is what the fallout looks like and what the federal government can do and should do in response that has yet to be seen.
00:01:25.000So all this sort of preliminary blame on the Trump administration for what happened with these tornadoes across the country, that's silly.
00:01:33.000And it is not Joe Biden's fault that a tornado hit North Carolina.
00:01:36.000It's his fault if the federal government doesn't do what it's supposed to do afterwards.
00:01:40.000We're going to find out in very short order whether the Trump administration rises to the occasion.
00:01:44.000I have a feeling that they absolutely will.
00:01:46.000Meanwhile, the big news of the weekend was that President Trump announced attacks by the United States military on the Houthis.
00:01:54.000So the Houthis are a group of America-hating, Jew-hating, anti-Israel, anti-American, near-satanic terrorists in Yemen.
00:02:04.000And they've been at war with the Saudi government for a very long time.
00:02:07.000And one of the things that the Biden administration did was basically push the Saudis to give up that war with the Yemeni Houthis on quote-unquote humanitarian grounds.
00:02:15.000And the result was that the Houthis, after October 7th, decided that they were going to not only target Israel with some missile strikes, but they were also going to target shipping in the Red Sea.
00:02:25.000The Houthis are almost entirely funded and staffed by the Iranian military.
00:02:30.000The Iranian military has propped up the Houthis for literally years.
00:02:33.000What's been going on in Yemen has been a proxy war.
00:02:35.000The only reason that that had to involve the United States at all is because the Houthis began to attack shipping in the Red Sea, which is a major artery for international shipping and trade.
00:02:45.000So I asked my friends and sponsors at Perplexity to actually explain how Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have affected pricing.
00:02:52.000So I said, how much have prices risen thanks to Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea?
00:02:55.000How much has international shipping been affected by Houthi attacks on that shipping?
00:02:59.000And the answer is, the Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have had significant impacts on both prices and international shipping.
00:03:05.000Global consumer goods inflation increased by approximately 0.6 to 0.7% in 2024 alone due to higher shipping rates caused by Houthi attacks.
00:03:39.000Well, because instead of going through the Red Sea, shipping, which used to take that shortcut through the Red Sea and then through the Mediterranean, instead, now they're going all the way around the Horn of Africa, which takes much, much longer, is much more costly.
00:03:51.000Additional fuel costs for rerouting ships around Africa are roughly a million dollars more per voyage.
00:03:56.000About 90% of ships are now avoiding the Red Sea route due to those Houthi attacks.
00:04:01.000Container shipping through the Red Sea has declined by approximately 90%.
00:04:04.000The number of merchant ships passing through the Red Sea annually has dropped from 25,000 to 10,000.
00:04:10.000And again, that adds an average of 10 to 14 days to voyage times.
00:04:13.000If you're wondering why it takes you longer to get things than it did a couple of years ago, that would be one reason.
00:04:18.00075% of all U.S. and U.K. affiliated vessels, 60% of EU affiliated vessels are now rerouting around Africa instead of transiting.
00:04:49.000I've ordered the United States military to launch decisive and powerful military action against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen.
00:04:54.000They've waged an unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism against American and other ships, aircraft, and drones.
00:04:59.000Joe Biden's response was pathetically weak, so the unrestrained Houthis just kept going.
00:05:03.000It's been over a year since a U.S. flag commercial ship safely sailed through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, or the Gulf of Aden.
00:05:09.000The last American warship to go through the Red Sea four months ago was attacked by the Houthis over a dozen times.
00:05:13.000Funded by Iran, the Houthi thugs have fired missiles at US aircraft and targeted our troops and allies.
00:05:18.000These relentless assaults have cost the US and world economy many billions of dollars while at the same time putting innocent lives at risk.
00:05:24.000This is President Trump on Truth Social.
00:05:25.000The Houthi attack on American vessels will not be tolerated.
00:05:27.000We will use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective.
00:05:30.000The Houthis have choked off shipping in one of the most important waterways of the world, grinding vast swaths of global commerce to a halt, attacking the core principle of freedom of navigation upon which international trade and commerce depends.
00:05:40.000Our brave warfighters are right now carrying out aerial attacks on the terrorist bases, leaders and missile defenses to protect American shipping, air and naval assets, and to restore navigational freedom.
00:05:50.000No terrorist force will stop American commercial and naval vessels from freely sailing the waterways of the world.
00:05:55.000To all Houthi terrorists, your time is up.
00:05:57.000Your attacks must stop starting today.
00:05:59.000Hell will rain down upon you like nothing you have ever seen before.
00:06:02.000To Iran, support for the Houthi terrorists must end immediately.
00:06:05.000Do not threaten the American people, their president, who has received one of the largest mandates in presidential history, or worldwide shipping lanes.
00:06:11.000If you do, beware, because America will hold you fully accountable and we won't be nice about it.
00:06:15.000This is what I signed up for, ladies and gentlemen, this right here.
00:06:18.000Because it turns out that freedom of the seas is unbelievably important and the United States, as the global hegemon, is the guarantor of those freedom of the seas.
00:06:28.000Americans, by the way, have died in this battle with the Houthis.
00:06:32.000I mean, there's a thing that has happened where American Marines, I believe it was a couple of American Marines, have drowned in attempting to aid shipping through this area.
00:06:41.000The Houthis, for a year, they are a ragtag group of people who are radical Islamic fundamentalists.
00:06:47.000The actual slogan of the Houthis is, I kid you not, it's called The Scream, and it is, God is the greatest.
00:07:01.000Which, I mean, is a little long and doesn't rhyme, but you kind of get the idea of what these folks are about.
00:07:06.000And they've been holding up international shipping for a year at great cost, as we've discussed.
00:07:12.000The United States launching attacks on pirates is a tradition that goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson fighting the Barbary pirates who are attacking American shipping.
00:07:29.000The basis for which seems to be that if the United States fights the Houthis because they're shutting off global shipping supply, that it must be done on behalf of Israel or the Jews.
00:07:40.000I'm confused because it turns out that pretty much all the shipping that's going through the Red Sea has nothing to do with the Jews.
00:07:46.000And yet it is that shipping that is being attacked by the Houthis, actually.
00:07:53.000This is the peace through strength model that President Trump has always applied.
00:07:58.000Him guaranteeing freedom of the seas, by the way, is also a very good international signal because one of the things that's been happening in, for example, the South China Sea, which is a massive shipping artery as well, is that the Chinese government has been exploring further and further away from land masses that it controls into these waterways, holding up boating and shipping from places like the Philippines.
00:08:18.000And so as a signal to countries like China, That the United States is not going to allow the shutdown of international waterways.
00:08:24.000That is a very powerful signal as well.
00:08:27.000As the Wall Street Journal points out, the Houthis had paid little price for more than a year of piracy that forced the U.S. Navy into a combat pace not seen since World War II. The White House tallies 174 Houthi attacks on U.S. warships and 145 on commercial vessels since 2023. One think tank analyst estimated recently the U.S. Navy fired more air defense missiles in those 15 months than it had in the previous 30 years.
00:08:50.000That means expensive missiles shooting down cheap drones.
00:08:52.000This is one of the things that terrorist groups have discovered, ranging from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis, is that you can fire off cheap drones at very little cost, attach some explosives to them and do tremendous damage.
00:09:02.000And the only way to defend against those things right now is very, very expensive response anti-missile systems, for example.
00:09:11.000So it'll cost you $50,000 to shoot down a $50 drone or whatever it is.
00:09:16.000Well, the other way to do that is you just kill everybody who's firing the drones, and that seems to be the United States military's policy.
00:09:22.000President Trump, by the way, including Iranian responsibility in here is really important because the Houthis could not do this without Iran.
00:09:31.000And once again, I hear people who are caterwauling that this is just President Trump wanting war with Iran.
00:09:36.000There will be no war with Iran, even if the United States were to facilitate an Israeli strike.
00:09:41.000On Iranian nuclear facilities, Iran does not go to war with the United States because if they did, we would obliterate them in half a second flat.
00:09:48.000All the people who are telling you that there's a false choice between complete passivity in the face of Iranian aggression and total war boots on the ground in Iran is lying to you.
00:10:09.000Plausible motion is that targeted strikes could do an enormous amount of damage to the Iranian regime, so they ought to stop while they are behind.
00:10:19.000They should stop their nuclear program.
00:10:21.000The Trump administration is taking precisely the correct angle on all of this.
00:10:25.000And again, the liars who are telling you that this is designed to lead to war with Iran, please name me the person who wants full-scale, boots-on-the-ground, hundreds of thousands of troops in the Middle East war with Iran.
00:10:51.000And he's got the headphones on so he can hear, presumably, some of the commands that are happening.
00:10:57.000And I love the casual, the sort of casual nature of President Trump coming off the golf course so that he can watch the Houthis getting obliterated on live TV. I do love that.
00:12:19.000I mean, whenever I am on the road, when I'm at a hotel, at airports, literally anywhere I'm using public Wi-Fi, I gotta use ExpressVPN, and I do.
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00:14:15.000Well, all options are always on the table with the president.
00:14:19.000But Iran needs to hear him loud and clear.
00:14:23.000It is completely unacceptable and it will be stopped.
00:14:27.000The level of support that they've been providing the Houthis.
00:14:32.000And again, that carries over to the idea that the Iranians should not be developing their nuclear weapons.
00:14:37.000This notion that the Iranians are trying to develop peaceful nuclear power, one of the most oil-rich nations on Earth, is absolutely asinine.
00:15:18.000That is not something this administration is going to allow.
00:15:20.000They can either hand it over and give it up in a way that is verifiable, or they can face a whole series of other consequences.
00:15:32.000But either way, we cannot have a world with the Ayatollahs with their finger on the nuclear button.
00:15:37.000We cannot have a situation that would result in an arms race across the Middle East in terms of nuclear proliferation.
00:15:46.000And President Trump is determined one way or another.
00:15:50.000Iran has been offered a way out of this.
00:15:54.000Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been tremendously strong throughout the Trump administration, he said the airstrikes will continue until morale improves.
00:16:03.000So we basically have a band of pirates, you know, with guided precision anti-ship weaponry.
00:16:11.000And exacting a toll system in one of the most important shipping lanes in the world, that's just not sustainable.
00:16:15.000We are not going to have these people controlling which ships can go through and which ones cannot.
00:16:20.000And so your question is, how long will this go on?
00:16:22.000It will go on until they no longer have the capability to do that.
00:17:29.000Don't keep supporting them because then you will also be responsible for what they are doing in attacking Navy ships, in attacking global shipping.
00:17:38.000It turns out a little prevention goes a long way.
00:17:40.000If the Houthis had never been delisted as a terrorist group, which was a thing that the Biden administration did, if the Biden administration had never put pressure on the Saudis to leave the Houthis alone, if the Biden administration not created daylight between Israel and the United States with regard to Iranian terror proxies, none of this would have happened in the first place.
00:17:56.000And President Trump's team is working hard to shore all of that up so that Iran is not, in fact, a threat to global shipping lanes or global oil supplies or a terror threat to the region and beyond.
00:18:26.000Speaking of strong Trump, President Trump and the White House took some moves over the weekend with regard to deportations that are sending Democrats into an absolute tizzy.
00:18:35.000So, obviously, they are still freaking out over the fact that Mahmoud Khalil, a terrorist supporter who somehow got a student visa and then apparently a green card, is now going to be deported.
00:18:47.000So, Marco Rubio was appearing on the Sunday shows.
00:19:12.000When you apply to enter the United States and you get a visa, you are a guest.
00:19:15.000And you're coming as a student, you're coming as a tourist, or what have you.
00:19:18.000And in it, you have to make certain assertions.
00:19:20.000And if you tell us, when you apply for a visa, I'm coming to the U.S. to participate in pro-Hamas events, that runs counter to the foreign policy interests of the United States of America.
00:19:40.000Rubio was asked also about Mahmoud Khalil specifically.
00:19:43.000Khalil, of course, basically came to the United States in order to pursue pro-terror rabble-rousing.
00:19:48.000He worked for the UNRWA. He was brought in a student visa and apparently did nothing except for lead student protests that took over buildings illegally.
00:19:56.000I hear a Secretary of State Rubio being asked about this.
00:19:59.000Is there any evidence of a link to terrorism or is it just his point of view?
00:20:36.000The question is not the same as if you were an American citizen.
00:20:40.000The question is, if you have a green card, do we owe you a duty as a country to allow you to stay in the country when you express support for terrorist groups?
00:20:53.000Under the law, under the INA, we do not.
00:20:56.000Well, speaking of Democrats taking the wrong side of every single issue, over the weekend, the Trump administration got into hot water with a local district judge.
00:21:05.000Well, because the Trump administration deported alleged Venezuelan gang members under a centuries-old wartime law.
00:21:12.000U.S. District Court Judge James Bosberg early on Saturday evening blocked President Trump from using a law known as the Alien Enemies Act to deport non-citizens held in U.S. custody.
00:21:21.000Government lawyers said Trump was using the law to target members of Tren d'Aragua, which is a deeply violent and evil Venezuelan gang whose members have reached the United States in recent years.
00:21:29.000So these are people who are drug dealers.
00:21:44.000Trenveragua is a deeply evil, violent gang.
00:21:47.000And President Trump is taking people who are alleged to be members of these gangs, violent criminals, and he is deporting them to El Salvador.
00:21:54.000And a U.S. district judge is saying he can't do that.
00:21:57.000During Saturday's hearing, the ACLU told Bosberg that two aircraft believed to be carrying Venezuelan deportees took off from U.S. territory on Saturday.
00:22:05.000The ACLU had sued the administration earlier that day on behalf of migrants at risk of deportation.
00:22:10.000Bosberg said Justice Department lawyers hadn't disputed the claim.
00:22:12.000They told them that, quote, any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in air needs to be returned to the United States.
00:22:18.000The judge subsequently issued a written order that didn't explicitly mention planes that were already in the air.
00:22:23.000So the White House said, okay, well, you didn't say already in the air except verbally.
00:22:26.000You wrote down just planes that had yet to take off.
00:22:33.000Levitt said, quote, Now, one of the reasons this is important is because the left is now claiming that President Trump is defying the judges, defying...
00:22:50.000First of all, what you have here is a judicial activist who does not have the authority to issue injunctions on behalf of the entire United States against activities taken by the administration to deport...
00:23:01.000Illegal immigrants who are members of violent gangs to El Salvador.
00:23:06.000If you can just find a U.S. District Court judge somewhere in San Francisco to strike down everything Trump is doing, well then that guy becomes the president, effectively speaking, and that is not how our system of government was meant to work.
00:23:15.000This stuff will get elevated to the Supreme Court.
00:23:45.000He said his temporary restraining order will preserve the status quo until he can hear arguments more fully.
00:23:50.000Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Exxon Sunday, the administration had sent two leaders of the MS-13 gang and 21 of its most wanted, as well as over 250 members of Trenda Aragua, to El Salvador.
00:24:01.000He also reposted a comment from El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, that said, oopsie, too late.
00:24:06.000Bukele then shared a video with three planes on a dark tarmac that showed gang members being escorted off the planes by security services and sent to jail in El Salvador, where the United States is paying for their room and board.
00:24:27.000And as you can see, they're taking these gang members who are in handcuffs off the plane and to jail in El Salvador.
00:24:36.000And supposedly a district court judge was going to hold all of this up on the basis that he wasn't sure about whether the Alien Enemies Act could be invoked at this point.
00:24:48.000They have not actually deported people who are sitting in American jails right now.
00:24:52.000The plane was already in the air on the way to El Salvador, and they said, we're not turning it around.
00:24:57.000Trump's proclamation that he was invoking the Alien Enemies Act, released by the White House on Saturday, stated that Tren d'Aragua is, quote, undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States, both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.
00:25:12.000And so this, of course, has driven enormous, enormous heartburn among Democrats.
00:25:20.000Okay, if tyranny amounts to the presidents of the United States to invoke the law to deport enemy illegal aliens who are members of violent criminal gangs, gotta tell you, that is not a winning issue for Democrats.
00:25:41.000Local courts have the ability, like single district court judges, have the ability to issue nationwide temporary restraining orders on anything the President of the United States is doing at any time is insane, ridiculous, insufferable.
00:25:53.000It wasn't even tried until the 1960s in American law.
00:25:57.000Well, if the idea of local courts issuing nationwide injunctions makes you lose sleep, well, here's the thing.
00:26:01.000At least you don't have to lose sleep because you have a crappy mattress.
00:26:03.000You need to get rid of that old mattress and instead get a Helix mattress.
00:26:07.000I used to have a different kind of mattress.
00:26:09.000And you know that feeling where you wake up and your back is already complaining?
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00:28:11.000Well, there's a reason that more Americans now believe that America's on the right track than at any time since 2004, according to a brand new poll.
00:28:19.000That's the NBC News poll released on Sunday.
00:28:22.000President Trump's approval ratings are not where he would wish them to be at this point.
00:28:25.00054% say they disapprove of his handling of the economy, and that is largely because of the tariff war.
00:28:30.000But the survey found that voters generally feel Trump is bringing the right kind of change on the key issues.
00:28:37.000On a lot of other issues, the border particularly, Trump is incredibly strong.
00:28:41.00056% say positive change on the border.
00:28:43.000In fact, the best way you can tell that Trump is doing an amazing job on the border is that on the list of issues that Americans take seriously, immigration has now dropped.
00:28:53.000President Trump has done such an amazing job on the border that no one is crossing, and so people don't even think about it anymore.
00:29:00.000On government cuts, 47% say his changes are good compared to just 29% who oppose.
00:29:05.000On his handling of the Ukraine war and NATO, some of the most controversial stuff he's done, more respondents say his actions were good, 41% then opposed it.
00:29:12.000So pretty evenly split on all of that.
00:29:15.000As far as inflation, 40% say his policies are having a positive effect.
00:29:24.000As far as the sort of partisan gap, his approval rating among Republicans, unsurprisingly, 90%.
00:29:30.000His approval rating among Democrats, 4%.
00:29:33.000Okay, but among independents, the answer is that his approval rating is much closer to sort of the Republican approval rating than it is to the Democrat approval rating.
00:29:46.000Democrats right now are tearing themselves apart over all of this.
00:29:49.000They legitimately don't know what precisely to do next.
00:29:53.000Here is CNN announcing the terrible Democrats.
00:29:55.000I mean, the Democratic polling numbers, they have favorability numbers worse than cancer at this point.
00:30:00.000Really bad numbers, according to CNN. Americans' favorable views of the Democratic Party's brand are at a record low.
00:30:47.000Seriously, how do you escape from Republicans think that you're crazy, independents kind of think you're crazy, and your own party thinks you're not crazy enough.
00:30:54.000That is the biggest problem for Democrats.
00:30:56.000How do we know they think that they're not crazy enough?
00:30:58.000Because a recent CNN poll shows that the most popular Democrat as, quote-unquote, the leader of the Democratic Party right now, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
00:31:07.000She is considered by 10% to be the leader of the Democratic Party.
00:31:55.000The top names, again, AOC, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Hakeem Jeffries, Barack Obama, who ain't coming back, Jasmine Crockett is at 2%, then Gavin Newsom at 2%, Nancy Pelosi at 2%.
00:32:09.000Tim Walls at one, by the way, that shows you how much Democrats hate Tim Walls, right?
00:32:12.000Tim Walls was the VP candidate half a second ago, and now he's at 1% in the polling.
00:32:17.000He has the same percentage as Al Green.
00:32:46.000Because then he would have had to own it.
00:32:48.000Whatever happened next would be on him.
00:32:50.000First of all, President Trump would have had the ability to designate which employees in the federal government were mandatory employees.
00:32:58.000Because the spending in the federal government...
00:33:01.000There's some spending in the federal government that's considered essential spending that goes forward even during government shutdown, and stuff that's considered non-essential, the non-essential shutdown, essential goes forward.
00:33:12.000Trump would have had more power if the government shutdown had happened along those lines.
00:33:16.000But number two, anything negative that happened economically over the following few weeks was going to be in Chuck Schumer's lap.
00:33:22.000So Chuck Schumer, flirting with the left, which wanted him to resist, resist, resist, thought very seriously about shutting down the government, and then at the last minute he pulled back.
00:33:30.000And he pulled back because he didn't want to be a complete nutjob who destroyed his party.
00:33:33.000And the Democrats are fighting mad at him, enraged at him.
00:33:37.000Here are MSNBC hosts over the weekend bashing Chuck Schumer over it.
00:33:41.000The Democratic Tea Party was born the same day that Chuck Schumer took to that podium to read that very well-crafted statement that told us he folded like a paper napkin.
00:33:52.000Well, and that's why you have members of the Democratic caucus privately.
00:33:57.000Encouraging Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to primary Schumer.
00:35:08.000We in the Congress gave up our authority, gave up our power to allow him to continue to do this because we feared something worse if we refused.
00:35:21.000Now, I made it clear I think that was the wrong judgment.
00:35:24.000I strongly oppose this CR, but nevertheless, it passed.
00:35:30.000He strongly opposes the CR. It was the wrong judgment.
00:35:33.000Senator Sheldon Whitehouse doing the same thing.
00:35:35.000He says, listen, we need to stop fighting internally.
00:36:03.000The other problem for the Democrats is that because the leadership is up for grabs, there's a battle among the nuts for the leadership.
00:36:10.000If AOC is at 10%, Jasmine Crockett is looking at this and she's going, hey, hey, we've talked about Jasmine Crockett, the very voluble congresswoman from Texas.
00:36:18.000Who's trying to become the new AOC and trying to steal some of her thunder.
00:36:21.000Here she was, trying to go after AOC. You're close with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
00:36:29.000Some of your fellow House Democrats say, and not just progressives, by the way, we've heard that moderates have said this too, that they're ready to support her, to challenge Chuck Schumer in a Democratic primary.
00:36:58.000We don't even know what elections will look like in four years if we will have elections.
00:37:02.000And so I definitely think that younger, fresher leadership.
00:37:07.000May be something that many of us, not just depending on what part of the spectrum you're on, but many Americans may be looking for it, especially in the state of New York.
00:37:19.000You notice how she kind of slides in right there, that there might not be elections in four years later.
00:37:22.000There are going to be elections in four years.
00:37:23.000The real reason that she's not endorsing AOC at this point is because she's afraid that she's going to get banged on by the moderate wing of her party.
00:37:29.000And she is currently riding in that same SSRS poll, which shows AOC at 10%.
00:37:34.000At 4% out of nowhere, the same as Barack Obama.
00:37:37.000So why precisely would she hand over leadership of the party to a person while she herself might make that climb?
00:37:48.000Gavin Newsom, by the way, he's been attempting through his Gavin Newsom podcast to move to the center by interviewing people who are on the right.
00:37:56.000This, of course, is a play for the 2028 nomination among Democrats.
00:38:00.000He's going to run as a quasi-moderate.
00:38:02.000The problem for him is in that same SSRS poll, it's like 2% of Democrats think that he's the leader of the party.
00:38:08.000And his approval rating has absolutely plummeted throughout all of this.
00:38:29.000But just because every president is faced with crises, bad things happen in every presidency, and they should wait until he makes a mistake to jump on him.
00:38:38.000Over the weekend, Scott Besant, the Secretary of the Treasury, who is excellent at his job, he was talking about President Trump's economy.
00:38:45.000He said, look, the economy is going to be fine.
00:38:47.000Again, Besant is doing heavy work on behalf of the administration to quiet the markets, given all the sort of tariff chaos that has been taking place over the course of the last several weeks.
00:38:56.000I've been in the investment business for 35 years, and I can tell you that corrections are healthy.
00:39:40.000And then the economic policy would get sanded down by all the people around him into something that was more palatable to markets.
00:39:46.000That is one of the things that Scott Besant is doing here.
00:39:48.000By the way, J.D. Vance was doing the same thing over the weekend with regard to Doge.
00:39:51.000So there have been tons of questions about Doge and about the fact that Doge is moving fast and breaking things.
00:39:56.000And that means that some people are getting fired who probably need to be rehired, for example, over the weekend.
00:40:01.000Vance said in an interview with NBC News, the vice president, quote, Elon himself has said, sometimes you do something and you make a mistake and then you undo the mistake.
00:40:08.000I also think you have to act quickly to correct those mistakes.
00:40:11.000But I'm also very aware of the fact there are a lot of good people who work in the government, a lot of people who are doing a very good job.
00:40:16.000We want to try to preserve as much of what works in government as possible while eliminating what doesn't work.
00:40:20.000Again, that is a smart way to approach all this.
00:40:22.000If you explain to the American people that...
00:40:24.000When you are performing a surgery on a catastrophic cancer inside the federal government, you might have to cut out some stuff that you don't want to cut out, but then you have to allow it to grow back.
00:40:34.000That's what Vance is essentially saying right now.
00:40:37.000He said many people are clearly collecting a check and not doing a job.
00:40:41.000He said, I don't know how many people that is in a three million strong federal workforce.
00:40:47.000But he said we have a lot of great civil servants who are doing great work.
00:40:50.000So again, the administration is moving into a more comfortable arena.
00:40:53.000Where it's not just moving fast and breaking things.
00:40:56.000It is moving fast, breaking things, and then rebuilding the things that shouldn't have been broken or broken in the process of getting to the root of the issue.
00:41:04.000They're going to get better at things as things go on.
00:41:06.000This is actually the roughest point in the Trump administration in terms of actually being able to make major change.
00:41:11.000Meanwhile, the situation in Ukraine is in some ways getting worse.
00:41:19.000The sort of moment in order to consolidate land grabs as much as humanly possible over the weekend.
00:41:24.000Ukraine's audacious military gambit inside Russia drew toward a close this week as much as it started last summer quickly, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:41:30.000A rapid Russian advance in recent days left remaining Ukrainian forces increasingly isolated under withering assault.
00:41:36.000They all but pulled out from a sliver of Kursk province by the weekend.
00:41:41.000Well, Putin went out and he got a bunch of North Korean soldiers who were basically conscripted into service and then forced into fighting in Kursk.
00:41:48.000The Russians used familiar tactics, relentless assaults with overwhelming numbers of troops, including elite units and North Korean soldiers, that ground Ukrainian forces down over months.
00:41:56.000Glide bombs smashed buildings and bunkers where Ukrainian troops sheltered.
00:41:59.000Then, in the past month, Russia deployed large numbers of drones controlled via fiber-optic cables to strike armored vehicles on the main routes for supplying Ukrainian soldiers on a shrinking patch of land.
00:42:10.000The Ukrainian military's seven-month foray had surprised allies with its vigor and embarrassed Putin, but now Putin has turned the tables.
00:42:16.000And he has become the first Kremlin leader since Stalin.
00:42:19.000He was faced trying to oust a foreign army from his own territory, but it appears that now he has actually done that.
00:42:24.000Ukraine was hoping to cling on to that territory as sort of a bargaining chip.
00:42:57.000He said they were already discussing dividing up certain assets.
00:43:00.000Steve Witkoff, the president's negotiator in Russia, described his four-hour meeting with Putin as positive and said the discussions was solutions-based.
00:43:08.000Witkoff said that Putin accepts Trump's philosophy of ending the war with Ukraine.
00:43:11.000He says the two sides are a lot closer today than they were a few weeks ago.
00:43:15.000We'll have to see whether that materializes or not because Putin has sort of a history of holding out the football and then removing the football at the very moment at which a consummation becomes possible.
00:43:26.000Holman Jenkins, writing for the Wall Street Journal, is doubtful.
00:43:29.000He says, there won't be a deal anytime soon.
00:43:31.000Vladimir Putin has received no reason to stop pushing for more concessions to see where the limit, if any, exists.
00:43:35.000Neither has he received any message from the administration that now is the time to cut a deal because President Trump will open the floodgate to make the situation more painful and costly than Putin would find it useful.
00:43:45.000So it's possible that there is another possibility, he says.
00:43:50.000He says, You know, these are all open questions, obviously.
00:44:18.000I am doubtful that Vladimir Putin is going to come to the table with anything that looks like a real peace deal here, because again, he has to feel the pressure in order for him to have an impetus to actually sign on to something.
00:44:28.000Meanwhile, there was some talk that Keith Kellogg had sort of been sidelined in the negotiations.
00:44:32.000Keith Kellogg is sort of a more hawkish member of the foreign policy team.
00:44:36.000President Trump put out a statement, quote, I am pleased to inform you that General Keith Kellogg has been appointed special envoy to Ukraine.
00:44:41.000General Kellogg, a highly respected military expert, will deal directly with President Zelensky and Ukrainian leadership.
00:45:23.000So I went to Hofstra University in Long Island, and you could hear the accent slip out here and there.
00:45:28.000And they initially say, when you want to do...
00:45:31.000Journalism, you have to choose politics or sports.
00:45:33.000And at the time, I was like, well, of course I'm going to choose sports because I hate politics.
00:45:36.000And it's funny because all of my professors ended up being so politically involved on the woke left and always proselytizing the students with their ideologies and especially the gender ideologies.
00:45:48.000And it became so nauseating that the focus was never about sports.
00:45:52.000Prime example was sports journalism, which I did not do well in because my professor failed me for going to the Super Bowl and missing four classes.
00:46:00.000Being 19 and covering the Super Bowl is pretty impressive in my book.
00:46:03.000I mentioned I'd be voting for Trump, and the entire class transitioned into a why, if you vote for Trump, you support Hitler, even though he's not a Jew, and he's lecturing me about supporting Hitler, and just completely had this bias towards me the rest of the semester.
00:46:56.000It was too deep in the semester, and it really affected my GPA. My next professor was they-them, which was really new to me at the time, because you look like a man.
00:47:06.000You have chest hair that you love to flaunt.
00:47:08.000You have naked pictures on Instagram with your genitals out.
00:47:12.000And I was like, don't tell me you're a woman, because that's insulting to me.
00:47:58.000I was definitely more politically active in my own opinions, and a lot of people resonated with common sense, but there was a loud opposition of just like this lunacy that took over the media during Biden's presidency.
00:48:19.000So I want to go through some of the stories of the day with you.
00:48:22.000There is a sports story that is on the radar.
00:48:24.000Apparently, West Virginia's Rich Rodriguez has now put out a rule that his players are not allowed to dance on TikTok.
00:48:37.000I can tell you from a sports reporter perspective that when we had a...
00:48:41.000Hofstra had a Division I basketball team and a lot of the star athletes on the team would just be dancing in the locker room on TikTok.
00:48:48.000So I would go on my algorithm and I see them hitting the woe and doing really zesty kind of dances.
00:48:56.000And I was like, if I'm your opponent and I see you in the locker room dancing and I don't see you on the court doing drills, I'm going to come into this game with more of...
00:49:08.000Less of an opinion on you, but more confidence in myself.
00:49:10.000And I feel like it actually took a toll on the players because we were looked so down upon from dancing in the locker room.
00:49:33.000We apparently have excerpts from his new book.
00:49:36.000Quote, My healthy long brunette locks constantly reminded me of the images I would see of myself in conservative media, the Audrey Hepburn persona I had leaned into for most of my transition.
00:49:45.000I was the good girl, Jackie O, but I wanted to be the other woman for once.
00:50:28.000And I didn't send an email because I was overly hormonal.
00:50:31.000He talks about how he carries tampons in his purse when we know very well you're not getting your period ever, no matter how much you wish and pray.
00:50:38.000And he's insulting real women that go through womenly problems that he will never relate to.
00:50:43.000He doesn't know what a hormonal mood swing is like.
00:50:45.000He doesn't know what going through puberty is like as a kid.
00:51:06.000First of all, biologically, you never will be.
00:51:08.000Mentally, you never will be, and no amount of hormones will change that.
00:51:11.000But what you are doing is you're hurting the real women who deal with these, who have a chance to take this platform, and you're robbing them of their platform.
00:51:18.000In sports, I'm not even going to go there.
00:51:20.000It's an abomination that ever was allowed to happen, but it's in every industry.
00:51:23.000They're making a mockery out of hard working women that fight for their place to be there.
00:51:27.000And then for them, for Dylan to be featured on Women's Day, for Leah Thomas to be ESPN's athlete of the month, they should be so ashamed of themselves.
00:51:35.000Meanwhile, the Democrats seem to be unable to actually separate off from this issue.
00:51:54.000Listen, the 2024 election is a lot closer than I think people want to admit that it was.
00:51:58.000And you shipped a couple hundred thousand votes in particular jurisdictions, and suddenly this looks like a much more competitive election.
00:52:03.000If the economy tanks, obviously Democrats could come back.
00:52:07.000I think Republicans have a lot of systemic advantages.
00:52:09.000I think that the population movement to the South is obviously helping Republicans an awful lot right now.
00:52:14.000But things change really rapidly in American politics.
00:52:17.000If Democrats actually jettison some of the insane culture war issues that they've been running on, and if the economy turns south, then yeah, they have a decent shot, but they can't jettison those issues.
00:52:25.000What do you make of the Democratic field right now?
00:53:35.000And because I want to win, I'm going to turn my back on all you wokeys, even though this is what I've been claiming I care about, just to win whatever it is, let's say, presidency that he's running for.
00:53:45.000However, and I don't think Republicans should head into 28 with a hothead, I don't know if the Democrats could.
00:53:54.000Manage the disarray that they're in because they're so conflicted within that I feel like they need to focus on their own issues before competing with Republicans.
00:54:02.000And like the men in women's sports, like John Fetterman voted against it.