Elon Musk and Donald Trump go head-to-head in the latest battle royale between the billionaire tech billionaires and the president. Today s episode is all about the fallout from Musk's departure from the Trump administration.
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00:01:03.000I mean, really at it in the most severe way.
00:01:07.000And from an entertainment perspective, obviously, break out the popcorn because these two guys are very entertaining.
00:01:12.000But from a political perspective, not amazing for the Republican Party because the sort of tech bro blue-collar alliance represented by Elon Musk on the one hand and Donald Trump on the other.
00:01:21.000It was quite good for the Republican Party.
00:01:23.000I think it will outlast this particular tête-à -tête between the two men.
00:01:27.000But yesterday, all of this broke out into the open.
00:01:32.000Elon Musk left the administration just about a week ago.
00:01:35.000His 130 days at the administration expired.
00:01:38.000Basically, the rule is that you are allowed to serve inside an administration for something like 130 days as a special government employee.
00:01:46.000But when that expires, you need some sort of typical waiver.
00:01:50.000Where you need a congressional approval in order to keep serving, and Musk didn't receive that, and thus, he left last week.
00:01:55.000And when that happened, he started speaking out very openly about what he thought about the big, beautiful bill.
00:02:00.000The big, beautiful bill, in Musk's view, is chalk-filled with spending, there's a lot of pork, and you can see why Musk is angry about the bill, because he just gave up extraordinary amounts of time, effort, and stock valuation in order to go into the administration and pursue waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:02:14.000When he left, just about a week ago, I said that it was an actually heroic move.
00:02:19.000A rare heroic move in American public life is to give up your financial interests.
00:02:24.000Now pretend to actually give them up in the sense that you take a massive financial hit and go into public service in order to reduce spending.
00:02:32.000And it turns out that Elon thought that he was going to be able to quickly and easily reduce spending.
00:02:37.000It turns out that's not exactly how government works.
00:02:38.000And so when he left, Doge, the Department of Governmental Efficiency that he had pioneered, was still on the road to cutting tens of billions of dollars, but certainly not.
00:02:46.000A trillion or two trillion dollars as Elon first thought he was going to be able to do when he entered government.
00:02:52.000And so he looks around and he says, listen, I just spent months and months and months of my life and hundreds of millions of my own dollars, if not billions of my own dollars, trying to get the federal government of the United States to live within its means.
00:03:02.000And now we have a bill that's coming out that actually somehow increases the national debt.
00:03:06.000Now, as I've been speaking about for days, because Musk has been very critical of the bill very openly on an ideological level, Musk is not wrong on a pragmatic level.
00:03:14.000The fact is that the Republicans in Congress are not going to restructure Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the massive drivers of our national debt.
00:03:21.000And so on a pragmatic level, President Trump is right.
00:03:23.000The big, beautiful bill is better than nothing because nothing means that all of the tax rates that are currently in place expire and you probably get a recession.
00:03:30.000And on an ideological level, obviously, my sympathies are with Elon Musk and were long before Elon Musk was a Republican.
00:03:36.000I've been advocating for a much smaller government, including restructuring of entitlement programs for literally my entire career, which now amounts to almost a quarter century in American politics.
00:03:44.000So this is nothing new to me, even if it's new to some of the other people who are now discussing this particular issue.
00:03:49.000Well, all this broke out into the open yesterday because Elon continued to rip into the big, beautiful bill, telling people on X, his social media service that he bought and then opened up, that it was time to kill the bill.
00:04:01.000And President Trump was doing a presser in the Oval.
00:04:06.000And he decided that he had had enough.
00:04:08.000It was time to fire back because Elon had basically suggested publicly that he didn't know what was in the bill until after the bill had already been passed in the House.
00:04:16.000And there are other people, including the Speaker of the House and the White House, who said, well, no, actually, some of that information was available and Elon didn't look at it.
00:04:23.000And now he's mad about stuff that he was already OK with.
00:04:26.000In any case, President Trump decided he had had enough.
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00:08:14.000Meanwhile, President Trump was suggesting again and again that Elon was upset because of the removal of the EV mandate from the electric vehicle mandate from the big, beautiful bill.
00:09:16.000They leave, and they wake up in the morning, and the glamour's gone.
00:09:21.000The whole world is different, and they become hostile.
00:09:26.000Okay, so Elon was watching this press conference happen in the Oval in real time.
00:09:32.000And at this point, Elon signed into chat.
00:09:34.000So he tweeted out, at 12.19 p.m., whatever, Keep the EV solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil and gas subsidies are touched, very unfair, but ditch the mountain of disgusting pork in the bill.
00:09:45.000In the entire history of civilization, there's never been legislation that is both big and beautiful.
00:10:22.000Elon was very important to the 2024 race.
00:10:24.000And then Elon tweeted, such ingratitude.
00:10:27.000About an hour later, he tweeted, is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?
00:10:35.000Okay, the idea being that he's left the Republican Party now, he had left the Democratic Party, do we need a new party?
00:10:40.000Now, I know this question comes up a lot.
00:10:42.000Actually, I'm asked this question a lot.
00:10:43.000And the answer is no, we don't actually need another party because the reality is that just because you're dissatisfied with vanilla and you're dissatisfied with chocolate doesn't mean everybody's going to like strawberry.
00:10:52.000Everybody has these ideas about what a third party will amount to, but there are many third parties in American public life.
00:10:57.000That 80% is just an 80% that is dissatisfied with both of the parties, not an 80% that is desperate for a third kind of mashup party.
00:11:06.000In any case, President Trump then responded, quote, the easiest way to save money in our budget, billions and billions.
00:11:16.000So Trump responds on Truth Social, his own competing social media service, by saying that he is going to remove subsidies from, say, SpaceX, for example, which, by the way, is kind of a bad idea because SpaceX actually happens to be one of the only efficient parts of the American federal spending plan.
00:11:31.000And then, Trump, just a few minutes later, put out a statement.
00:11:38.000I took away his EV mandate that forced everyone to buy electric cars that nobody else wanted, that he knew for months I was going to do, and he just went crazy.
00:11:44.000So there is Trump accusing Musk of essentially being corrupt because Musk was there just for the EV mandate, and then Trump decided he didn't like him and that he was tired of him, and he threw him out.
00:11:55.000And then somebody tweeted at Musk, this would both end the International Space Station and simultaneously provide no way to safely de-orbit it.
00:12:03.000And Elon tweeted back, this just gets better and better.
00:12:32.000They, of course, were in power during the entirety of the last four years.
00:12:37.000Do we really believe that if they had access to information that Donald Trump was stupping minors on Epstein Island, that never would have leaked into the public?
00:12:46.000With that said, Elon, of course, had access to the Epstein files via Doge.
00:12:50.000And so you have to take it with a little bit of seriousness.
00:12:53.000Although, again, I take it with a gigantic grain of salt.
00:12:55.000However, it is Elon going really, really low there.
00:12:58.000And meanwhile, President Trump is going low by claiming that Elon is corrupt and was only doing all of this so he could secure his EV mandate.
00:13:05.000And when that got taken away, he went crazy.
00:13:07.000Trump, a few minutes later, tried to ramp it down a little bit.
00:13:11.000He said, I don't mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago.
00:13:14.000This is one of the greatest bills ever presented to Congress.
00:13:16.000It's a record cut in expenses, $1.6 trillion, and the biggest tax cut ever given.
00:13:20.000If this bill doesn't pass, there will be a 68% tax increase and things far worse than that.
00:13:40.000However, this is the attitude that Trump should be taking and should have taken the entire time, which is, okay, Elon's over in the corner ranting about the big, beautiful bill.
00:13:50.000The Republicans in Congress are going to pass the big, beautiful bill.
00:13:53.000If it doesn't pass, we have an economic downturn, end of story, and move on with your life.
00:13:56.000I mean, that's exactly what Speaker Johnson's been doing.
00:13:58.000That's what President Trump put out on Truth Social yesterday.
00:14:00.000Well, at the same exact time that Trump was doing that on Truth Social, on the competing social service X. Again, this is just from a comedic perspective, very high comedy.
00:14:09.000From a country perspective, I think all of this is going to blow over.
00:14:29.000So that obviously creates splits inside the Trump administration.
00:14:33.000And I mentioned before, there's sort of this tech bro blue-collar alliance that has happened inside the Trump administration and in the Trump movement.
00:14:40.000J.D. Vance sort of has one foot in each camp.
00:14:42.000J.D. Vance, of course, spent an awful lot of time in Silicon Valley.
00:14:44.000He has many allies in these sort of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen.
00:14:49.000Elon Musk category, David Sachs, right?
00:14:52.000All those people are very fond of J.D. Vance.
00:14:55.000And J.D. Vance, the vice president of the United States, also, of course, has a foot in the blue-collar group because he is from white Appalachia, and he has made a big deal, properly so, over his rise from impoverished circumstances in his youth.
00:15:09.000And so, of any figure who sort of straddles that divide, it's J.D. Vance.
00:15:13.000This is a very bad thing for J.D. Vance that Elon is saying that he wants to oust Trump in favor of J.D. Vance.
00:15:18.000And J.D. Vance last night came out with a tweet saying that his loyalty is entirely to President Trump, which, of course, it would have to be.
00:15:24.000He's the vice president of the United States.
00:15:34.000We'll go through that with John Bickley of Morning Wire in a moment.
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00:17:58.000I think it's likely there will be a detente.
00:18:00.000In fact, Elon had made some signs of that even late last night.
00:18:03.000Somebody with like 100 followers tweeted at him, you probably shouldn't kill Dragon X. So he had said in response to Trump saying he'll remove the subsidies that he was going to...
00:18:18.000Well, if the United States were to stop using SpaceX, stop quote-unquote subsidizing SpaceX, one of the most efficient parts of the government, what would happen?
00:18:25.000I asked our sponsors at Perplexity what actually SpaceX does for NASA and what would happen to America's space program if SpaceX were going to stop providing services.
00:18:33.000And what I found out from Perplexity, SpaceX's Dragon capsule is currently the only SpaceX conducts regular cargo resupply missions to the ISS.
00:18:48.000SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets handle two-thirds of all NASA launches, including science payloads, satellites, and interplanetary missions.
00:18:55.000SpaceX is developing the Starship vehicle, which NASA has selected as the lunar lander for its Artemis program, which is about returning astronauts to the moon.
00:19:03.000And if SpaceX stopped providing services, I mean, first of all, nobody could get to the ISS.
00:19:08.000Second of all, all the other stuff would become way more expensive.
00:19:12.000Alternatives such as the United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin are either more expensive or not yet capable of matching SpaceX's launch cadence and reliability.
00:19:20.000Instead, NASA might actually have to contract with like the Russian Soyuz rockets.
00:19:23.000So yeah, it would be a problem if this relationship broke up, at least on the material side.
00:19:27.000You had investors like Bill Ackman saying that both sides should go weapons down.
00:19:30.000And Politico reported this morning, signs of a truce are emerging in the increasingly bitter clash between two of the world's most powerful men.
00:19:36.000President Trump projected an air of nonchalance in an interview Thursday with Politico.
00:19:41.000Separately, White House aides, after working to persuade the president to temper his public criticism of Musk to avoid escalation, scheduled a call on Friday with the billionaire CEO of Tesla to broker a piece.
00:19:50.000Trump told Politico in a brief telephone call when asked about the public breakup with Elon.
00:20:11.000His poll numbers actually look quite solid at this very moment.
00:20:14.000However, Jonathan Karl then reported this morning, quote, in a phone conversation, Donald Trump told me Elon Musk is, quote, the man who has lost his mind.
00:20:22.000Trump did not, however, seem angry or even concerned about the feud.
00:20:24.000As for reports, there is going to be a Trump-Musk call scheduled for today.
00:20:27.000Trump told me he is not particularly interested in talking to Musk, although he says Musk wants to talk to him.
00:20:32.000So we'll have to see how this entire thing works.
00:23:11.000He said, remove subsidies from all industries.
00:23:14.000So, while that's true, it is also true that Tesla's solar power unit put out its post on X late last month, quote, abruptly ending the energy tax credits would threaten America's energy independence and the reliability of our grid.
00:23:30.000So, and then Musk put out a tweet at the time saying there's no change to the tax incentives on oil and gas just for EV solar.
00:23:37.000So why are you benefiting one portion of industry at the expense of another portion of industry?
00:23:44.000And that latter point is actually a good point.
00:23:46.000The reality is that the government is just a giant grab bag of cash.
00:23:50.000And so various industries lobby for a piece of that cash.
00:23:53.000And so you can't be surprised when the EV industry wants cash and the oil and gas industry wants cash.
00:24:00.000This is a great reason why government should be limited, specifically so that you don't have that giant grab bag of cash that everybody is trying to stick their hands into the middle of.
00:24:08.000But on a business level, obviously, what President Trump is doing with regard to the big, beautiful bill and EV subsidies and all the rest, that has an impact on Musk's business.
00:24:22.000And this is, I think, the straw that actually broke the camel's back that nobody's actually talking about.
00:24:27.000From people who know both men and who know the administration, what I have heard is that the straw that broke the camel's back on all of this was the decision last week by President Trump to withdraw the nomination of tech billionaire Jared Isaacman, a longtime associate of Elon Musk, to lead NASA.
00:24:44.000So, President Trump put out a statement on his social media site, quote, after a thorough review of prior associations, I am hereby withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman to head NASA.
00:24:53.000I will soon announce a new nominee who will be mission aligned and put America first.
00:25:13.000There are a bunch of people in Doge world, in tech worlds, who are new to the Trump administration, who are very, very competent and ought to be in their positions because of competence.
00:25:33.000He gave money to Democrats, repeatedly.
00:25:36.000That doesn't mean he's a bad Republican.
00:25:39.000It means he decided that he was no longer going to give money to those people.
00:25:43.000So the idea that Jared Isaacman had to sort of be ousted as the NASA head because of his prior associations, I think you have to chalk that one up to.
00:25:51.000The Office of Personnel Management, run by Sergio Gore, OPM, has become sort of a gigantic loyalty test, personal loyalty test for President Trump.
00:25:59.000And the problem with that is that Trump doesn't know any of these people who are applying for jobs.
00:26:06.000And so that means that there's a lot of wiggle room for people at OPM to basically get in the president's ear and tell him that certain people are loyal and certain people are not loyal.
00:26:16.000But the reality is people who are trying to apply for jobs in the Trump administration.
00:26:21.000Are generally very loyal to President Trump.
00:26:50.000In the commentariat, in his administration, some of his harshest critics are now people like his Secretary of State.
00:26:58.000Donald Trump has always been able to do that.
00:26:59.000So this bizarre idea that somebody like Isaacman had to be outed for lack of loyalty, it seems to me that loyalty is now being used as a club by some actors inside the administration who are more ideological and somewhat revenge-minded in the way that they view the staffing of the administration.
00:27:14.000And so firing Isaacman is what actually set this thing off, from what I understand.
00:27:18.000Because Musk said, listen, Isaacman knows this arena.
00:27:29.000If Elon says that Isaacman would have been a good NASA pick, I trust Elon on that way more than I trust anybody at OPM who isn't going to know anything about space, about NASA, about what's actually necessary for the job.
00:27:43.000Apparently, on a personal level, that's what set it off.
00:27:45.000Okay, if that's the spark, That sort of petty stupidity?
00:28:18.000The answer there is no, because the people who are elected are in fact aligned with President Trump's priorities, as we'll get to in a moment.
00:28:24.000But there are some people who are going to try to take advantage of this split.
00:28:28.000There are some people who are going to try to worm their way into the administration by suggesting that because they didn't personally like Musk and now Musk is attacking Trump, they should be given more power.
00:28:36.000One of those people, longtime Musk critic, Steve Bannon.
00:28:39.000So Steve Bannon, you'll remember, is the former chief of staff to the president during his first term.
00:28:44.000Decided he didn't like Bannon and fired him, calling him sloppy Steve in one of the more entertaining moments of Trump 1.0.
00:28:50.000Well, now, Musk is calling Bannon, who's been a longtime critic of Musk, because Bannon is much more sort of protectionist and nativist in his orientation toward American politics.
00:29:03.000He's calling for Elon Musk to be deported.
00:29:05.000And presumably, he feels this is his way back into the Trump administration, which he desperately would love to be a part of.
00:29:13.000As Stuart Stevens talked back in January, I don't know why we haven't had a full investigation.
00:29:17.000Look, if you're going to deport illegal aliens, you've got to deport illegal aliens.
00:29:22.000The good go with the goose and the gander.
00:29:26.000They've got to go back to this, as Stuart Stevens talked about, and go through everything about his immigration status.
00:29:32.000I happen to believe, given the facts that I've been shown, that he's an illegal alien.
00:29:37.000An illegal alien's got to be deported.
00:29:41.000I'm just going to point out at this point that Steve Bannon, who I know personally, I don't disagree with Steve on everything, but Steve has a very strong habit of stapling himself to whomever is the most powerful person in the room.
00:29:53.000Donald Trump happens to be that person, obviously, and so he has for a very long time been trying to kind of push his way back into the administration.
00:29:59.000He feels like this is his moment since he has for a long time predicted the falling out between Musk and Trump.
00:30:04.000The idea that Musk is going to be deported.
00:30:07.000So a man who's responsible for tens of thousands of American jobs and some of the most successful companies in American history.
00:30:16.000He then called for the expropriation of SpaceX.
00:30:20.000It's this sort of stuff that I don't think resonates for most Americans.
00:30:24.000The idea that Elon Musk disagrees with President Trump on policy and they're having a Twitter battle and thus SpaceX should be forcibly removed from its founder.
00:30:33.000The act that President Trump should be taking immediately, I think, when he threatens to take one of the big programs out of SpaceX, President Trump tonight should sign an executive order calling for the Defense to Production Act to be called in SpaceX and seize SpaceX tonight before midnight.
00:30:56.000And you can see how happy Bannon is about this.
00:30:58.000I mean, he is loving every single moment.
00:31:00.000The other person who's loving every single moment of this is, of course, AOC.
00:31:03.000So, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, she of the bartending, the stupidity, and the rather negative associations with people who love terrorism, she's very happy.
00:31:13.000Oh man, the girls are fighting, aren't they?
00:31:16.000You know, I would say that this was something that was a long time coming, where we've been seeing that these two huge egos were not long for being together in this world as friends.
00:31:35.000And so I think this breakup we've been seeing a long time coming, but we'll see what the impacts are of it legislatively.
00:32:05.000And that's because Tesla is effectively an AI company that makes cars, not a car company with some AI.
00:32:10.000With that said, the idea that the market cap of the company should shed like $237.2 billion over the last five sessions because of fights between Musk and Trump is an absurdity.
00:33:21.000There could be serious problems if, in fact, the federal government did go after SpaceX because SpaceX is the major provider of an enormous amount of the country's space technology.
00:33:31.000If SpaceX's government contracts were actually canceled, it would eliminate America's ability to launch astronauts to space from American soil.
00:33:40.000SpaceX's crew and cargo Dragon spacecraft variants have changed the landscape of NASA operations aboard the ISS and ushered in a new era of U.S. spaceflight.
00:33:48.000So, of course, Musk has already backed off of that.
00:33:51.000It could also create some serious problems for the Pentagon if there were to be a break in the relationship.
00:33:58.000The Pentagon is reliant on many SpaceX programs.
00:34:02.000Again, I don't think any of this is going to materialize.
00:34:04.000I think all of this is a bit of a spat.
00:34:07.000It means that Elon is going to get less involved with the Republican Party going forward and it means that President Trump is going to be less reliant on Elon publicly.
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00:37:08.000Well, as I mentioned a little bit early on in the show, President Trump has been touting his poll numbers, and you know he does that whether the polls are good or whether the polls are bad, but the polls appear to actually be pretty good for President Trump.
00:37:18.000Joining us online to discuss is John Bickley, executive editor and co-host of Morning Wire, available on video now wherever you get your podcast.
00:38:27.000And even this breakup, the arguments are conservative arguments that they're arguing over.
00:38:32.000One of them is, like you've said, a pragmatic political perspective from Trump.
00:38:38.000Hey, what can we actually accomplish right now in this moment?
00:38:41.000What are the wins for conservatives that we can actually get?
00:38:45.000Which is a great, valid, it's exactly what he should focus on.
00:38:48.000And then you also have the ideological element, which is a conservative argument from Elon Musk, which also, like you said, we all agree with.
00:39:27.000Is the thought leader of the Democratic Party?
00:39:30.000So to talk about the polling aspect, that's the person who gets the highest marks out of Democrats.
00:39:37.000But I talked to Brent Buchanan from Signal Polling, and he said, look, even her, the highest you get in terms of Democrat voters saying, hey, who do you think's the leader?
00:39:47.000She gets the highest marks at about 20%, only about 20%.
00:40:55.000And the other thing I think is a lot of questions, too, is like the tariffs, how much the tariffs had an impact on the polling for Trump and Republicans.
00:41:03.000And actually, there was definitely a downturn for Trump immediately after Liberation Day.
00:41:10.000He got to about a seven-point gap in terms of approval rating.
00:41:14.000He's back now to about a two-point gap, which, as you and I know, watching polling, Particularly with bold presidents who unleash very bold policies.
00:41:45.000But I think that what's fascinating about it is more the incompetence of the Democrats than the competence of the Republicans.
00:41:50.000Obviously, the Republicans are fighting with each other over everything under the sun, ranging from foreign policy to domestic policy to social policy.
00:41:57.000But the Democrats seem to have no capacity to make any attack at all.
00:42:02.000They don't seem to have a consolidating point.
00:42:04.000Even their attacks are sort of backwards in the way that they're approaching them.
00:42:08.000So to take an example, Democrats have been attacking President Trump for being so-called taco, right?
00:42:15.000The idea being that he does tariffs and then he removes the tariffs or he makes a threat and then he doesn't perform the threat.
00:42:19.000But that is an argument that actually does not benefit them because they don't want Trump to be doing those things.
00:42:24.000So if President Trump does a tariff and then he removes it, most Americans say, OK, well, he tried a thing and it didn't work and he stopped doing the thing.
00:42:30.000And Democrats see that as, well, he's a chicken, but he's chicken to a more popular position that Americans actually like.
00:42:37.000I mean, that is a feature, not a bug, is that President Trump And so even the Democratic attacks that are now the most popular, these sort of meme attacks the Democrats are launching, are not calibrated to actually gain popularity with the American people.
00:42:51.000They're looking for a thing to attack President Trump on.
00:42:54.000The reality is the economy is not collapsing, has not collapsed.
00:42:58.000And because of that, they actually don't have anything to run on.
00:43:01.000On foreign policy, they may not like what President Trump is doing, but it actually doesn't differ radically in many ways from what Joe Biden was doing.
00:43:11.000The arms have actually continued to flow to Ukraine.
00:43:13.000And I think the American people are giving President Trump credit for at least attempting to get to some sort of off-ramp between Ukraine and Russia, even if that off-ramp is not achievable given current circumstances.
00:43:23.000So again, I'm looking at the Democratic Party.
00:43:25.000Every time you look at the Republican Party, you say, wow, there's a lot of disarray.
00:43:27.000But then you look at the Democratic Party and you go, this place is just a disaster area.
00:43:32.000It's like that dog drinking tea while the room is on fire meme for the Democratic leadership.
00:44:36.000We just came out of a presidency that was completely run by ideologues that put their head in the sand and did not look at the results of any of their policies for four years.
00:44:45.000And even though within months, it was unbelievable.
00:44:48.000I remember back in 2021, absolutely floored by the flood of immigrants instantly under Biden.
00:45:37.000So I want to thank you for your support, and now let's get the bill passed.
00:45:42.000We want to get it passed through Congress without delay.
00:45:45.000And again, in the debate between President Trump and Elon Musk in Congress, the congressional Republicans are, of course, backing President Trump because he is the political leader.
00:45:52.000Elon Musk may provide money and funding for congressional races down ballot.
00:45:57.000But the reality is that most of these congressional Republicans recognize that if they were to fuck the president, that would be significantly more of a political problem for them.
00:46:04.000As The Wall Street Journal reports, in the battle between the Republican titans, most GOP lawmakers sided with Trump.
00:46:10.000Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee said Musk is going off the deep end with his call for Trump's impeachment and suggested Musk is losing his sway with the MAGA crowd.
00:46:17.000Many Republicans have defended the GOP mega bill.
00:46:20.000He hasn't moved to vote, said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Elon Musk.
00:46:27.000Many Republicans are coming out of the woodwork to defend President Trump from the Musk accusation that he's in the Epstein files and all the rest.
00:46:35.000Representative Kevin Hearn of Oklahoma told Axios, quote, we're getting people calling our offices 100% in support of President Trump.
00:46:41.000Every tweet that goes out, people are more in lockstep behind President Trump and Musk is losing favor.
00:47:06.000We've not seen the full impact of the price increases yet.
00:47:09.000But, again, uncertainty means that people are holding out their money.
00:47:12.000It means investors are waiting on the sidelines.
00:47:14.000They don't know where to put their money.
00:47:15.000As the Washington Post reports, months of trade policy whiplash and ensuing rounds of legal challenges have created uncertainty at every stage of the supply chain, according to interviews with half a dozen business leaders.
00:47:24.000It's draining resources and creating logistical headaches for wholesalers, distributors and retailers during the most critical business period.
00:47:30.000June is the busiest month of time of the year for freight, partly because companies are moving much of their inventory for back to school and holiday shopping.
00:47:38.000So businesses are freaking out a little bit.
00:47:40.000If there were to be a failure of the Big Beautiful, if tax rates were to rise in the middle of all of this, it would be a full-scale disaster area.
00:47:48.000And again, part of the problem here is that the trade Perspective of the Trump administration remains utterly incoherent.
00:47:55.000You have some members of the administration, like Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, who President Trump should listen to, who's making the case that in trade negotiations, what matters is that both sides go weapons down.
00:48:10.000And then you have people like Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, who is hot on the idea that tariffs themselves are a wondrous, wondrous thing.
00:48:16.000And apparently this is breaking out into the open in the middle of meetings with other countries.
00:48:21.000Apparently, there is a negotiation happening in Japan, and members of the Trump team started arguing with each other in front of the Japanese about the goal of the trade negotiations.
00:48:31.000Quote, the presence of three top U.S. negotiators with differing stances on trade, this is according to Nikkei.com, is adding a layer of complexity to tariff talks with Japan.
00:48:41.000Open disagreements, competition, confusion among Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and U.S. Trade Representative.
00:48:47.000Jamie Greer, have made it hard for the Japanese side to judge the Trump administration's intentions, according to sources close to the negotiations.
00:48:54.000One source said, quote, at one point, the three cabinet officials put the talks with the Japanese side on hold and began debating right in front of them.
00:49:04.000The responsibilities of Besant, Letnick, and Greer overlap each other, complicating the tariff talks.
00:49:09.000Besant is also responsible for negotiating with China, South Korea, and other countries, making scheduling a meeting with him difficult.
00:49:14.000In addition to lack of unity between Besant, Lutnik, and Greer, Tokyo is also concerned about insufficient coordination between cabinet officials and working-level staff.
00:49:23.000So, again, is that going to be great for the economy?
00:49:26.000It certainly could be a major problem for the economy, especially given the fact that U.S. job growth continues to slow.
00:49:32.000The United States added, according to the Wall Street Journal, 139,000 jobs in May.
00:49:37.000That is above a gain of 125,000 jobs expected, but at the same time, There was a major revision down in terms of the jobs in the last couple of months.
00:49:48.000So it all balances out to an economy that seems to be at the very least slowing fairly significantly.
00:49:55.000Now, does that mean that the economy is in serious trouble?
00:49:57.000Again, it doesn't mean the economy is in serious trouble.
00:49:59.000It just means that nobody knows what the hell is going on.
00:50:01.000That is the rule of the day on Wall Street.
00:50:17.000And meanwhile, President Trump is indicating openness to scaling back salt relief in the GOP tax bill in the Senate.
00:50:23.000He is suggesting to Senate Republicans he is open to a lower limit on tax deductions for state and local taxes than the version included in the House passed version.
00:50:30.000Now remember, the way this works is that the House passes a bill.
00:50:33.000The Senate passes its own version of the bill, and then the two sides negotiate over a combined bill that can pass both houses.
00:50:38.000So everything that President Trump takes with one hand, he has to give with the other.
00:50:51.000Meanwhile, in very positive news, the Supreme Court has now ruled in favor of the idea that you don't actually have to be a member of a minority in order to be discriminated against, which, of course, is obviously true.
00:51:03.000You can certainly be a white, straight male and be discriminated against, or in this particular case, a white, straight female.
00:51:09.000According to the New York Times, the Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously ruled, unanimously, and our right-wing decision is unanimous.
00:51:15.000It includes far leftists like Sonia Sotomayor and Tanji Brown-Jackson.
00:51:19.000They unanimously ruled in favor of a straight woman who twice lost position to gay workers, saying an appeals court had been wrong to require her to meet a heightened burden in seeking to prove workplace discrimination because she was a member of a majority group.
00:51:30.000That decision came two years after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in higher education and amid the Trump administration's fierce efforts to root out programs that quote-unquote promote diversity.
00:51:39.000Of course, that's the New York Times coverage, as you could expect.
00:51:43.000Now, Ketanji Brown Jackson actually wrote for the court.
00:51:45.000So again, this is not a right-wing decision, despite the best attempts of the New York Times to turn it into one.
00:51:50.000The standard for proving workplace discrimination under the law, said Ketanji Brown Jackson, quote, does not vary based on whether or not the plaintiff is a member of a majority group.
00:51:58.000The case was originally brought By a person named Marlene Ames, who had worked for the Ohio Department of Youth Services, which oversees part of the state's juvenile corrections system.
00:52:06.000After a decade there, in 2014, she became administrator of a program addressing prison rape, and five years later, she applied for a promotion.
00:52:15.000They eventually gave the position to a gay woman who'd been in the department for a shorter time and lacked a college degree, unlike the plaintiff.
00:52:22.000Not long after that, the supervisors removed her from her existing job, telling her they had concerns about her leadership and offering her a demotion that came with a substantial pay cut.
00:52:29.000She was then replaced by a gay man with less seniority.
00:52:33.000So she claimed that she basically was discriminated against because she was straight.
00:52:38.000Now, put aside the underlying facts of the case, the question here for the Supreme Court was whether she had to, like the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals suggested, whether she had to prove that she was a member of minority or face a sort of heightened standard because she's not a member of a minority group.
00:52:55.000The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit In the trial court, she said the two supervisors took negative employment actions against her restraint.
00:53:11.000On appeal, she said a gay supervisor had also played a role.
00:53:14.000Now, again, the underlying facts of the case are less relevant than the actual ruling, which says that, yes, of course, you can be discriminated against if you're a white straight person, for example.
00:53:24.000If you're a member of a majority group, you can be discriminated against.
00:53:27.000That is not a shock in any way, shape, or form.
00:53:30.000And good for the Supreme Court for ruling correctly on all of that.
00:53:34.000Meanwhile, over at the White House, it's Pride Month, but this White House is celebrating Pride Month a little bit differently.
00:53:38.000Joining us online to discuss, Mary Margaret Olehan, our White House Daily Wire correspondent.
00:53:44.000Mary Margaret, thanks so much for joining the show.
00:54:06.000In fact, it is June here in Washington, D.C., where you'll typically see some very serious Pride Month celebrations.
00:54:12.000But like you were saying, Ben, it's a little bit different this year.
00:54:15.000In past years, under the Biden administration, we saw a big Pride Month celebration on the White House lawn.
00:54:20.000There were lots of pro-transgender activists and people who identified as transgender themselves who got in some hot water for taking topless photos and videos that ended up getting them banned from the White House lawns.
00:54:34.000It said during a press briefing earlier this week that there will be no proclamation of any kind, whether it's about Pride Month or some other kind of celebration, during June.
00:54:44.000And we broke an exclusive earlier this week where the Department of Education told us that instead of celebrating Pride Month, they're celebrating Title IX month.
00:54:53.000So they're going to be attempting to celebrate and promote the victories of the Trump administration so far as it pertains to protecting women's sports and spaces.
00:55:01.000And as part of that effort, So the first one, Ben, is Colorado, where I actually reported a couple years ago that there was a family who was shocked and horrified to find that their little daughter, who was 11, got assigned to share a bed with a boy who identifies as a girl on an overnight school trip without being told.
00:55:29.000So the only reason this little girl didn't end up spending the night in the same bed as this trans-identifying male was because she was, you know, a very resilient young lady and got out of bed and called her mom and said, I don't think this is right.
00:55:41.000The other case that the Department of Education is investigating deals with the University of Wyoming where a man who identifies as a woman entered a sorority, lived in a sorority house, and allegedly was ogling the girls in their towels as they went to and from the showers.
00:55:56.000So two big, very high-profile cases that the Department of Education is investigating.
00:56:01.000And there's also a whole bunch of other stuff going on at the agencies.
00:56:04.000For example, the FBI announced on Monday that they're looking for tips into any doctors or hospitals that are pushing transgender procedures on children or performing these procedures on children.
00:56:16.000And Ben, we reported yesterday that the FBI has received almost 100 tips since they posted that call for tips on Monday.
00:56:24.000And we were told that this is a big priority for the FBI and for Kash Patel.
00:56:28.000They're very focused on protecting children, whether that's related to the border or it's related to protecting them from irreversible transgender surgeries.
00:57:00.000You're reporting that Representative Mary Miller of Illinois has now introduced a resolution in Congress to declare June as Family Month rather than Pride Month.
00:57:09.000Yes, so I was joking earlier this week.
00:57:11.000This is what my conservative friends around here would call a very based resolution.
00:57:15.000If you read the language of the resolution, it talks a lot about traditional family, the importance of the family unit, the importance of celebrating traditional values, and how that's going to ultimately promote society at the end of the day.
00:57:28.000So Representative Mary Miller introduced this earlier this week.
00:57:32.000She had a whole bunch of Republican colleagues sign on.
00:57:35.000I don't think we saw any Democrats signing on to it.
00:57:37.000It's not exactly the verbiage that you're saying.
00:57:39.000We're hearing from the left these days.
00:57:41.000But, you know, I'm just seeing in my own reporting and from the response that this story got that there's a lot of people that really like the idea of celebrating the traditional family, celebrating traditional virtue during this month rather than, you know, some of the antics and the really loud celebrations that we've seen in the past.
00:57:58.000But of course, then, at the same time, you know, you're seeing all this from the right.
00:58:01.000This is still Pride Month in D.C. Tomorrow, on Saturday, we'll see a huge, massive Pride parade.
00:58:07.000I think most of the streets will be blocked.
00:58:09.000You'll see a lot of people coming in from out of town.
00:58:12.000I'm sure that you will have thoughts on that and what we see go down, so stay tuned because there's more coming on that front.
00:58:19.000I'm sure we'll get to see a lot of things that are not child-friendly in that parade.
00:58:24.000Mary Margaret, I would be remiss if I did not ask you what the attitude is around the White House considering the blow-up between Elon Musk and President Trump that began yesterday has carried into today.
00:58:33.000What's the general attitude over there?
00:58:36.000So obviously this is the biggest news of the week, maybe of the last six months.
00:58:41.000I would say in the attitude of many of the White House reporters who have been kind of waiting for this sort of thing to happen.
00:58:46.000You know, Elon and Trump's relationship has often been considered a little bit tenuous in the last couple weeks.
00:58:51.000And now that things have blown wide open, especially with Elon's Epstein allegations yesterday, what I'm hearing from my White House sources is that they consider this to be a very overly strong reaction to Elon's dissatisfaction with the one big beautiful bill.
00:59:11.000It's possible there's going to be a call scheduled with Trump and Elon later today.
00:59:15.000We're still waiting for more on that front.
00:59:17.000We're hearing that it may happen, but that Trump is not super excited about it.
00:59:21.000And you know, there's been so much back and forth between the two of them, very public back and forth, that it's not likely to be completely patched up anytime soon.
00:59:30.000But what I was told by some of my White House sources is that, A, President Trump actually kicked Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club.
00:59:37.000That's been widely reported for many years.
00:59:40.000He's also already known to have socially interacted with Epstein, but there's no evidence that he did any wrongdoing associated with the late sex offender who died in a New York City jail.
00:59:51.000And the FBI has told us recently that he committed suicide, so he did kill himself.
00:59:56.000And we're supposed to see videos proving that fact very soon.
00:59:59.000So we're all kind of waiting with bated breath around here to see how this Elon-Trump feud pans out.
01:00:06.000Hoping that this call has some news in it.
01:00:09.000I'm in the White House press pool today, so if there's any open Oval events, I will be in them.
01:00:12.000So hopefully I'll be able to ask the president about that.
01:00:15.000And I'm excited to question him about what's going on in the future of this Trump-Elon relationship.
01:00:22.000Well, that's Mary Margaret Olihan, our Daily Wire White House correspondent.
01:00:25.000Mary Margaret, I know you're busy, so I'll let you get back to it.
01:00:30.000Meanwhile, among all the hubbub about the right wing and the Republican Party and Elon versus Trump and all this, we should mention, as my friend John Bickley mentioned earlier, Democrats are in total disarray and they don't know which way is up at this point.
01:00:42.000James Carville, who I've suggested is sometimes voice of reason inside the Democratic Party, rejecting the wokeness.
01:00:47.000They are off the rails, really, truly off the rails.
01:00:51.000So James Carville was on a show yesterday in which he suggested that That Jews were not sufficiently supporting the Democratic Party because basically they love money, which is an unbelievable allegation by James Carville.
01:01:03.000The reason that many Jews turned away from the Democratic Party is because the Democratic Party is filled with people like AOC and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
01:01:11.000It is a party that suggests wrongly that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, which is a false, nonsensical claim.
01:01:17.000It is a party that has stood by rabid anti-Semites inside of its own party.
01:01:23.000And here's James Carville ripping into the Jews.
01:01:26.000Go try and raise money from really wealthy Jewish fundraisers.
01:01:30.000And he said, look, James, I'm a Democrat, but I can't be a party because of what happened at Columbia.
01:01:38.000What the f*** did the Democrats have to do with what happened at Columbia, by the way?
01:01:43.000Well, I can't do that, but I can be for a party that everybody endorses the alternative for Deutschland.
01:02:19.000The idea that Jews are supporting the Republican Party above the Democratic Party because they wanted the tax cut belies the fact that many Jews moved from Democrat to Republican in this last election cycle.
01:02:29.000The Republicans have been offering tax cuts as long as I've been alive.
01:02:31.000I've been a Republican as long as I've been in politics.
01:02:48.000Chuck Schumer calling up the president, Manoush Shafiq, of Columbia University and telling her to ignore Republicans on the congressional committees asking about widespread anti-Semitism on her campus.
01:02:58.000Yes, because your Democratic Party has not only looked the other way but promoted some of the worst Jew haters in your own party.
01:03:05.000Yes, because they've made room for terrorist groups across the map.
01:03:10.000Slow walking aid to Israel in the middle of an existential war.
01:03:16.000Really, truly disgusting stuff there from James Carville.
01:03:20.000Speaking of problems with actual anti-Semitism in the world, there was an event that David Friedman, the former Trump ambassador to Israel, was supposed to speak at over the course of the next few days.
01:03:32.000It was supposed to take place, apparently, in Texas.
01:03:36.000An American jihadist forced a shutdown of the event.
01:03:40.000according to a press release from the group involved.
01:03:43.000One of the largest pro-Israel gatherings planned for 2025 has been indefinitely postponed after escalating terror threats left organizers without a viable venue just days before the event.
01:03:53.000The Israel summit, scheduled to be held June 9th through 11th in the Dallas area, with more than 1,000 attendees from across the United States and via livestream, has become the latest casualty of growing hostility toward public support for Israel in the United States.
01:04:04.000Organizers were forced to relocate the event once already after the original Dallas venue was no longer feasible due to heightened threat levels and an overwhelming security burden estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
01:04:14.000And then a second venue was also threatened by pro-Hamas jihadist groups.
01:04:18.000We should probably stop importing those sorts of folks into the United States.
01:04:22.000That is the point that President Trump has quite correctly made.
01:04:26.000Now, meanwhile, President Trump hosted Frederick Murs, who is the new chancellor of Germany, at the White House yesterday.
01:04:33.000Today, of course, marks D-Day, one of the signal moments in world history and in American history where America finalized the process of saving the world from the Nazi scourge.
01:04:45.000President Trump had a bit of a strange moment with Frederick Murs talking about D-Day.
01:06:30.000They like to say that I'm not friends with anybody.
01:06:36.000Okay, so again, he's right about that.
01:06:39.000With that said, obviously, you know, President Trump has taken a bit of an in-between position with regard to Russia and Ukraine that I think is unjustified by the current circumstances.
01:06:48.000Here is President Trump, for example, comparing the fight between Russia and Ukraine to a hockey fight between kids.
01:07:55.000They're offering a 30-day ceasefire right now.
01:07:57.000If the Ukrainians had the ability to do so, they would freeze the lines of combat in place right now in exchange for security guarantees from the West.
01:09:12.000According to the New York Times, the largest commercial shipping companies continue to avoid the Red Sea and Suez Canal, despite a recent ceasefire agreement between the United States and Houthis intended to make the trade lanes safer.
01:09:22.000Again, what the Houthis wanted out of that particular agreement was the Unfettered ability to continue to fire long-range missiles over Saudi territory and into Israel without America getting mad at them.
01:09:53.000The Saudis were battling with the Houthis, somewhat successfully actually, up until the point Joe Biden decided that it was a violation of human rights and decided to allow the Houthis to basically set up their own mini-state inside Yemen.
01:10:05.000Richard Mead, editor of Lloyd's List, said if the intention was to restore freedom of navigation, which is what they said it is, then the results speak for themselves.
01:10:13.000The shipping industry has not gone back.
01:10:14.000Ship traffic through the Red Sea is down by around three-fifths since 2023.
01:10:19.000Fearing their vessels would be struck, big shipping companies avoided the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, taking a much longer route around the southern tip of Africa to travel between Asia and Europe.
01:10:28.000The Houthis have said they are still at war with Israel and will attack vessels bound for Israel.
01:10:33.000But shipping companies are worried that their vessels may be hit deliberately or mistakenly because the reality is that do the Houthis have some sort of magical intelligence suggesting which ships are bound for Ashdod as opposed to which ships are bound for ports in Madrid?
01:10:54.000So for a supposedly peaceful country that is desirous of good relations with the rest of the world, they don't seem to be particularly peaceful.
01:11:02.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran has ordered thousands of tons of ballistic missile ingredients from China.
01:11:07.000People familiar with the transaction said, seeking to rebuild its military prowess as it discussed the future of its nuclear program with the United States.
01:11:15.000That is Iran's goal in this entire negotiation with the United States.
01:11:19.000They have no intention of giving up their nuclear program.
01:11:21.000All they want is a delay to rebuild their ballistic missile stock, to rebuild their air defenses.
01:11:26.000That is their goal because they think that that will prevent some sort of Israeli strike on the nuclear facilities in Iran.
01:11:33.000And the longer the negotiations go on and the longer the Trump administration says the Israelis don't do anything while we're negotiating, the better it is for Iran.
01:11:40.000That is the simple calculus of the timeline right now.
01:11:43.000Iran wants to bolster regional allies and rebuild its arsenal while it pushes deeper into contentious talks with the Trump administration over its nuclear program.
01:11:50.000Iran continued to expand its stockpiles of uranium enriched to just below weapons grade and ruled out negotiation limits on its missile program.
01:11:57.000So, again, remember, they don't just want to develop the missiles in order to put conventional warheads on them.
01:12:01.000They want to put nuclear warheads at the end of those missiles, which would create an umbrella across the entire Middle East and actually even into Europe, considering the length of the missiles.
01:12:12.000The Chinese side continues to fund all of this because China, of course, is a big funder of pretty much all of the United States' enemies.
01:12:20.000This is why President Trump has correctly treated China as a geopolitical opponent.
01:12:24.000Now, it would be helpful if the national security infrastructure of the United States were not being taken over by Koch Institute allies.
01:12:32.000When President Trump came into office, he said that the Koch brothers, their foreign policy, the very isolationist foreign policy, was not something he wanted associated with.
01:12:40.000With the administration, obviously people in his personnel office are not paying any attention.
01:12:44.000They continue to staff up a bunch of people underneath the secretary level in these various administration positions who are very sympathetic to an isolationist position on foreign policy.
01:12:56.000According to a publication called Jewish Insider, the Senate will soon consider the nomination of a guy named Justin Overbaugh to be Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
01:13:05.000He is the latest of several senior Pentagon nominees.
01:13:08.000who come from defense priorities, a Koch-backed think tank that has generally argued that the United States should scale back involvement in global conflicts, including in the Middle East.
01:13:16.000Apparently, at the State Department, people being staffed at the State Department are now more along the isolationist lines.
01:13:23.000Morgan Ortegas and Ron Hawk, who's been serving as Deputy Middle East Special Envoy under Steve Whitcoff, plans to now depart the office at the National Security Council.
01:13:30.000Top officials focused on Israel and the Middle East were pushed out last month as the National Security Council was restructured.
01:13:38.000So, again, it's strange to me that President Trump continues to apparently have a different agenda than many of the people being staffed under him.
01:13:45.000President Trump publicly has said all the same things he's been saying for 10 years.
01:13:48.000He's been saying for 10 years, the JCPOA, worst deal in history.
01:13:53.000Nuclear weapons cannot be held by Iran.
01:13:55.000Nuclear development cannot be done by Iran.
01:13:59.000That the United States has to enforce peace through strength.
01:14:01.000Again, these are consistent positions from President Trump, but many of the people being staffed by whoever is doing the staffing Are being staffed directly from people who effectively oppose much of the foreign policy of Trump 1.0.
01:14:13.000And that's something to keep our eyes on.
01:14:15.000Alrighty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.