The Ben Shapiro Show - TRUMP VS. MUSK: THE ULTIMATE BATTLE!

00:00:00.000 All righty, folks, a stacked show today.

00:00:02.000 Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the battle royale is here.

00:00:04.000 They're going after each other.

00:00:05.000 Hammer and tongs will go through every detail, all the fallout.

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00:00:54.000 Woo boy.

00:01:03.000 I mean, really at it in the most severe way.

00:01:07.000 And from an entertainment perspective, obviously, break out the popcorn because these two guys are very entertaining.

00:01:12.000 But 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.

00:01:21.000 It was quite good for the Republican Party.

00:01:23.000 I think it will outlast this particular tête-à-tête between the two men.

00:01:27.000 But yesterday, all of this broke out into the open.

00:01:30.000 So for weeks, this has been coming.

00:01:32.000 Elon Musk left the administration just about a week ago.

00:01:35.000 His 130 days at the administration expired.

00:01:38.000 Basically, the rule is that you are allowed to serve inside an administration for something like 130 days as a special government employee.

00:01:46.000 But when that expires, you need some sort of typical waiver.

00:01:50.000 Where you need a congressional approval in order to keep serving, and Musk didn't receive that, and thus, he left last week.

00:01:55.000 And when that happened, he started speaking out very openly about what he thought about the big, beautiful bill.

00:02:00.000 The 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.

00:02:14.000 When he left, just about a week ago, I said that it was an actually heroic move.

00:02:19.000 A rare heroic move in American public life is to give up your financial interests.

00:02:23.000 Truly give them up.

00:02:24.000 Now 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.

00:02:32.000 And it turns out that Elon thought that he was going to be able to quickly and easily reduce spending.

00:02:37.000 It turns out that's not exactly how government works.

00:02:38.000 And 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.

00:02:46.000 A trillion or two trillion dollars as Elon first thought he was going to be able to do when he entered government.

00:02:52.000 And 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.

00:03:02.000 And now we have a bill that's coming out that actually somehow increases the national debt.

00:03:06.000 Now, 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.

00:03:14.000 The fact is that the Republicans in Congress are not going to restructure Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the massive drivers of our national debt.

00:03:21.000 And so on a pragmatic level, President Trump is right.

00:03:23.000 The 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.

00:03:30.000 And on an ideological level, obviously, my sympathies are with Elon Musk and were long before Elon Musk was a Republican.

00:03:36.000 I'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.

00:03:44.000 So this is nothing new to me, even if it's new to some of the other people who are now discussing this particular issue.

00:03:49.000 Well, 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.

00:04:01.000 And President Trump was doing a presser in the Oval.

00:04:06.000 And he decided that he had had enough.

00:04:08.000 It 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.

00:04:16.000 And 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.

00:04:23.000 And now he's mad about stuff that he was already OK with.

00:04:26.000 In any case, President Trump decided he had had enough.

00:04:28.000 He was done with this.

00:04:29.000 And he went after Elon Musk saying, you know, I don't know if we have a great relationship anymore.

00:04:33.000 We used to.

00:04:34.000 I don't know where it is now.

00:04:37.000 Look, Elon and I had a great relationship.

00:04:41.000 I don't know if we're well anymore.

00:04:43.000 I was surprised because you were here.

00:04:45.000 Everybody in this room practically was here as we had a wonderful sendoff.

00:04:49.000 He said wonderful things about me.

00:04:50.000 He couldn't have nicer.

00:04:51.000 He said the best things.

00:04:53.000 He's worn the hat.

00:04:54.000 Trump was right about everything.

00:04:56.000 And I am right about the great, big, beautiful bill.

00:05:02.000 Okay, then Trump went on to say that he was quite disappointed.

00:05:10.000 But I'm very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here.

00:05:17.000 Better than you people.

00:05:18.000 He knew everything about it.

00:05:20.000 He had no problem with it.

00:05:21.000 All of a sudden, he had a problem.

00:05:22.000 And he only developed the problem when he found out that we're going to have to cut the EV mandate.

00:05:26.000 And he hasn't said bad about me personally, but I'm sure that'll be next.

00:05:29.000 But I'm very disappointed in Elon.

00:05:34.000 So this simultaneously pissed off Elon.

00:05:36.000 So Elon has a giant social media service.

00:05:38.000 Trump has his own social media service, Truth Social.

00:05:40.000 So these two men were fighting with each other, both via video, the way that Trump was right there.

00:05:45.000 And also, Elon was watching this in real time and commenting and saying, that's not true.

00:05:49.000 I didn't know what was in the bill.

00:05:51.000 He's talking about the EV mandate, but I'd been advocating for the end of an EV mandate years ago.

00:05:56.000 Believe me, we're going to get to much more on all the fallout from the Musk-Trump flame fight.

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00:08:14.000 Meanwhile, 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.

00:08:24.000 Well, I'll see you next time.

00:08:32.000 And, you know, they're having a hard time, the electric vehicles.

00:08:36.000 And they want us to pay billions of dollars in subsidy.

00:08:40.000 And, you know, Elon knew this from the beginning.

00:08:46.000 And then President Trump finally signed off by saying that Elon appears to now have Trump's arrangement syndrome.

00:08:52.000 I'll tell you, he's not the first.

00:08:56.000 People leave my administration and they love us.

00:09:02.000 And then at some point they miss it so badly and some of them embrace it and some of them actually become hostile.

00:09:10.000 I don't know what it is.

00:09:11.000 It's sort of Trump derangement syndrome, I guess they call it.

00:09:13.000 But we have it with others, too.

00:09:16.000 They leave, and they wake up in the morning, and the glamour's gone.

00:09:21.000 The whole world is different, and they become hostile.

00:09:26.000 Okay, so Elon was watching this press conference happen in the Oval in real time.

00:09:32.000 And at this point, Elon signed into chat.

00:09:34.000 So 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.

00:09:45.000 In the entire history of civilization, there's never been legislation that is both big and beautiful.

00:09:49.000 Everyone knows this.

00:09:50.000 Either you get a big and ugly bill or a slim and beautiful bill.

00:09:54.000 Slim and beautiful is the way.

00:09:56.000 And then Elon really went off.

00:09:58.000 He said, without me, Trump would have lost the election.

00:10:00.000 Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.

00:10:04.000 That was a response to President Trump saying, In the press conference, that he didn't need Elon to win Pennsylvania.

00:10:09.000 And again, you can see this argument either way.

00:10:11.000 Certainly, President Trump won Pennsylvania pretty solidly.

00:10:14.000 There's a case to be made that he would have won Pennsylvania without Elon Musk.

00:10:17.000 But was Elon's imprimatur involved in Trump's victory?

00:10:21.000 No question.

00:10:22.000 Elon was very important to the 2024 race.

00:10:24.000 And then Elon tweeted, such ingratitude.

00:10:27.000 About an hour later, he tweeted, is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?

00:10:35.000 Okay, the idea being that he's left the Republican Party now, he had left the Democratic Party, do we need a new party?

00:10:40.000 Now, I know this question comes up a lot.

00:10:42.000 Actually, I'm asked this question a lot.

00:10:43.000 And 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.

00:10:52.000 Everybody has these ideas about what a third party will amount to, but there are many third parties in American public life.

00:10:57.000 That 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.

00:11:06.000 In any case, President Trump then responded, quote, the easiest way to save money in our budget, billions and billions.

00:11:16.000 So 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.

00:11:31.000 And then, Trump, just a few minutes later, put out a statement.

00:11:36.000 Elon was wearing thin.

00:11:37.000 I asked him to leave.

00:11:38.000 I 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.

00:11:44.000 So 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.

00:11:55.000 And then somebody tweeted at Musk, this would both end the International Space Station and simultaneously provide no way to safely de-orbit it.

00:12:03.000 And Elon tweeted back, this just gets better and better.

00:12:06.000 Crying laughing emojis.

00:12:07.000 Go ahead.

00:12:07.000 Make my day.

00:12:09.000 And then he finally drops the biggest bomb of the exchange, 2.49 p.m.

00:12:14.000 Quote, time to drop the really big bomb.

00:12:17.000 Donald Trump is in the Epstein files.

00:12:18.000 That is the real reason they have not been made public.

00:12:20.000 Have a nice day, Donald J. Trump.

00:12:22.000 Okay, now, the reality is, is Donald Trump in any really nefarious way in the Epstein files?

00:12:29.000 Highly doubtful.

00:12:30.000 Democrats.

00:12:31.000 Had a look at the Epstein files.

00:12:32.000 They, of course, were in power during the entirety of the last four years.

00:12:37.000 Do 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?

00:12:43.000 We got his IRS records.

00:12:44.000 I really, really doubt that.

00:12:46.000 With that said, Elon, of course, had access to the Epstein files via Doge.

00:12:50.000 And so you have to take it with a little bit of seriousness.

00:12:53.000 Although, again, I take it with a gigantic grain of salt.

00:12:55.000 However, it is Elon going really, really low there.

00:12:58.000 And 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.

00:13:05.000 And when that got taken away, he went crazy.

00:13:07.000 Trump, a few minutes later, tried to ramp it down a little bit.

00:13:11.000 He said, I don't mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago.

00:13:14.000 This is one of the greatest bills ever presented to Congress.

00:13:16.000 It's a record cut in expenses, $1.6 trillion, and the biggest tax cut ever given.

00:13:20.000 If this bill doesn't pass, there will be a 68% tax increase and things far worse than that.

00:13:24.000 I didn't create this mess.

00:13:26.000 I'm just here to fix it.

00:13:27.000 This puts our country on a path to greatness.

00:13:28.000 Make America great again.

00:13:29.000 Now, by the way, this is the response Trump probably should have used the entire time.

00:13:33.000 When we get into who's to blame for all this, the answer is everyone, as we'll get to in a moment.

00:13:39.000 Everyone is to blame for all of this.

00:13:40.000 However, 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.

00:13:47.000 That's his prerogative.

00:13:48.000 But we like the big, beautiful bill.

00:13:50.000 The Republicans in Congress are going to pass the big, beautiful bill.

00:13:53.000 If it doesn't pass, we have an economic downturn, end of story, and move on with your life.

00:13:56.000 I mean, that's exactly what Speaker Johnson's been doing.

00:13:58.000 That's what President Trump put out on Truth Social yesterday.

00:14:00.000 Well, 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.

00:14:09.000 From a country perspective, I think all of this is going to blow over.

00:14:12.000 I actually do.

00:14:12.000 But Elon then tweeted out in response to another tweet from a person named Ian Miles Chong.

00:14:20.000 That tweet said, President versus Elon.

00:14:22.000 Who wins?

00:14:22.000 My money's on Elon.

00:14:24.000 Trump should be impeached and J.D. Vance should replace him.

00:14:26.000 And Musk tweeted back, yes.

00:14:29.000 So that obviously creates splits inside the Trump administration.

00:14:33.000 And 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.

00:14:40.000 J.D. Vance sort of has one foot in each camp.

00:14:42.000 J.D. Vance, of course, spent an awful lot of time in Silicon Valley.

00:14:44.000 He has many allies in these sort of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen.

00:14:49.000 Elon Musk category, David Sachs, right?

00:14:52.000 All those people are very fond of J.D. Vance.

00:14:55.000 And 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.

00:15:09.000 And so, of any figure who sort of straddles that divide, it's J.D. Vance.

00:15:13.000 This 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.

00:15:18.000 And 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.

00:15:24.000 He's the vice president of the United States.

00:15:25.000 What's he going to say?

00:15:26.000 That his loyalty is to Elon Musk?

00:15:28.000 I mean, there's no other choice for him.

00:15:30.000 Coming up, we'll go through all of President Trump's polling data.

00:15:33.000 What's happening in the polls?

00:15:34.000 We'll go through that with John Bickley of Morning Wire in a moment.

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00:17:43.000 Meanwhile, Elon tweeted out, the Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year.

00:17:49.000 Okay, so all of this is nuclear.

00:17:53.000 All of this melts down, sort of the combined movement.

00:17:56.000 Now, will there be a detente?

00:17:58.000 I think it's likely there will be a detente.

00:18:00.000 In fact, Elon had made some signs of that even late last night.

00:18:03.000 Somebody 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...

00:18:18.000 Well, 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?

00:18:25.000 I 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.

00:18:33.000 And what I found out from Perplexity, SpaceX's Dragon capsule is currently the only SpaceX conducts regular cargo resupply missions to the ISS.

00:18:48.000 SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets handle two-thirds of all NASA launches, including science payloads, satellites, and interplanetary missions.

00:18:55.000 SpaceX 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.

00:19:03.000 And if SpaceX stopped providing services, I mean, first of all, nobody could get to the ISS.

00:19:08.000 Second of all, all the other stuff would become way more expensive.

00:19:12.000 Alternatives 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.

00:19:20.000 Instead, NASA might actually have to contract with like the Russian Soyuz rockets.

00:19:23.000 So yeah, it would be a problem if this relationship broke up, at least on the material side.

00:19:27.000 You had investors like Bill Ackman saying that both sides should go weapons down.

00:19:30.000 And Politico reported this morning, signs of a truce are emerging in the increasingly bitter clash between two of the world's most powerful men.

00:19:36.000 President Trump projected an air of nonchalance in an interview Thursday with Politico.

00:19:41.000 Separately, 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.

00:19:50.000 Trump told Politico in a brief telephone call when asked about the public breakup with Elon.

00:19:54.000 He said, it's okay.

00:19:55.000 It's going very well.

00:19:57.000 Never done better.

00:19:57.000 The numbers are through the roof.

00:19:58.000 The highest polls I've ever had.

00:19:59.000 And I have to go.

00:20:01.000 And we'll discuss with John Bickley, the host of Morning Wire.

00:20:05.000 And editor-in-chief of Daily Wire.

00:20:07.000 We will discuss with John in just a few moments what those numbers look like.

00:20:10.000 And Trump isn't wrong about that.

00:20:11.000 His poll numbers actually look quite solid at this very moment.

00:20:14.000 However, 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.

00:20:22.000 Trump did not, however, seem angry or even concerned about the feud.

00:20:24.000 As for reports, there is going to be a Trump-Musk call scheduled for today.

00:20:27.000 Trump told me he is not particularly interested in talking to Musk, although he says Musk wants to talk to him.

00:20:32.000 So we'll have to see how this entire thing works.

00:20:39.000 I don't.

00:20:41.000 Do I think that this is a debate that is going to wreck the Republican Party?

00:20:46.000 I do not.

00:20:47.000 But it is worth analyzing the causes of this particular debate.

00:20:51.000 So, the causes.

00:20:53.000 First of all, the political.

00:20:54.000 So again, as I've said for several weeks at this point, the political debate between Elon and Trump is very simple.

00:21:01.000 Elon is on the side of idealism and Trump is on the side of pragmatism.

00:21:04.000 Elon is saying, we need to cut.

00:21:06.000 The national debt's a major crisis.

00:21:07.000 It's going to sink the country.

00:21:08.000 He's correct about that.

00:21:09.000 Trump is saying, that may be true, but I do not actually have the political support to do the thing you want me to do.

00:21:15.000 And Elon came into government really thinking that he could run it like a business.

00:21:20.000 Elon came into government thinking that he could do the Steve Jobs thing, where he could go to an elevator.

00:21:24.000 The elevator would open.

00:21:25.000 A government employee would be on the elevator.

00:21:27.000 He would ask that person what they did.

00:21:28.000 And if they couldn't answer properly, he could just fire them.

00:21:30.000 And it turns out the government...

00:21:35.000 There are regulations that apply.

00:21:37.000 There are union rules.

00:21:38.000 There are judges who oversee a lot of these sorts of things.

00:21:41.000 There are pieces of legislation that have to be complied with.

00:21:44.000 It is just not that easy to redo government.

00:21:47.000 It isn't.

00:21:48.000 It's not like a business.

00:21:49.000 You can't just come in and clean it out top to bottom.

00:21:51.000 It's one of the great misnomers of American politics that you can do that.

00:21:55.000 You can treat government as though it's a tech company.

00:21:57.000 It doesn't work that way.

00:21:58.000 And Elon, I think, ran up headlong against that.

00:22:00.000 That is also true when it comes to the big, beautiful bill.

00:22:03.000 So I agree with Elon.

00:22:04.000 We should not only go back to 2019 spending levels, we should totally restructure our entitlement programs.

00:22:08.000 We should.

00:22:09.000 That is a thing that should be done.

00:22:10.000 Is there support in Congress to do that right now?

00:22:12.000 No.

00:22:12.000 Is there support in the Senate to do that right now?

00:22:14.000 No.

00:22:15.000 Is there even support among the broader American populace to do that right now?

00:22:18.000 The answer, unfortunately, is no.

00:22:21.000 And that's a real problem.

00:22:22.000 So President Trump is coming down on the pragmatic side.

00:22:24.000 And that debate, again, that's nothing new in American politics.

00:22:27.000 Ideologues versus It's a conversation I'm constantly having with members of Congress, senators and yes presidents.

00:22:39.000 The conversation about what is pragmatically available and what is the thing you should shoot for?

00:22:45.000 Because you're never going to get 100% of the pie.

00:22:47.000 Can you get 65 or 70% of the pie?

00:22:49.000 And is that better than zero?

00:22:51.000 Okay, then there is the question of business.

00:22:53.000 So you heard President Trump over there going after Elon, suggesting the reason that Elon is mad.

00:22:58.000 It's about the EV subsidies.

00:23:00.000 Now, a while back, Elon was openly calling for an end to EV subsidies.

00:23:06.000 And by a while, I mean like July of last year.

00:23:09.000 He said, take away the subsidies.

00:23:10.000 It will only help Tesla.

00:23:11.000 He said, remove subsidies from all industries.

00:23:14.000 So, 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.

00:23:30.000 So, 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.

00:23:37.000 So why are you benefiting one portion of industry at the expense of another portion of industry?

00:23:44.000 And that latter point is actually a good point.

00:23:46.000 The reality is that the government is just a giant grab bag of cash.

00:23:50.000 And so various industries lobby for a piece of that cash.

00:23:53.000 And so you can't be surprised when the EV industry wants cash and the oil and gas industry wants cash.

00:23:58.000 They all want tax subsidies.

00:23:59.000 That's not anything new.

00:24:00.000 This 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.

00:24:08.000 But 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.

00:24:16.000 That's true.

00:24:17.000 Musk says, fine, do it, but cut everything else also.

00:24:21.000 And then there's the personal.

00:24:22.000 And this is, I think, the straw that actually broke the camel's back that nobody's actually talking about.

00:24:27.000 From 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.

00:24:44.000 So, 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.

00:24:53.000 I will soon announce a new nominee who will be mission aligned and put America first.

00:24:59.000 Apparently, this really angered Musk.

00:25:02.000 And he put out a post saying, it is rare to find someone so competent and good-hearted.

00:25:07.000 Now, I gotta say, I'm on my side of this.

00:25:09.000 I understand that Jared Isaacman is a Democratic donor.

00:25:12.000 Can he run NASA properly?

00:25:13.000 There 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.

00:25:33.000 He gave money to Democrats, repeatedly.

00:25:36.000 That doesn't mean he's a bad Republican.

00:25:37.000 That means he changed his opinion.

00:25:39.000 It means he decided that he was no longer going to give money to those people.

00:25:43.000 So 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.

00:25:51.000 The Office of Personnel Management, run by Sergio Gore, OPM, has become sort of a gigantic loyalty test, personal loyalty test for President Trump.

00:25:59.000 And the problem with that is that Trump doesn't know any of these people who are applying for jobs.

00:26:02.000 He doesn't know Isaacman from Adam.

00:26:04.000 He doesn't know any of these people.

00:26:06.000 And 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.

00:26:16.000 But the reality is people who are trying to apply for jobs in the Trump administration.

00:26:21.000 Are generally very loyal to President Trump.

00:26:23.000 That doesn't mean everybody.

00:26:25.000 There are certainly some egregious outliers.

00:26:27.000 But using loyalty as sort of the way of weeding people out of the Trump administration.

00:26:32.000 If that were the case, J.D. Vance would not be vice president right now.

00:26:34.000 J.D. Vance has said things way harsher than I ever have about President Trump.

00:26:37.000 He's the current vice president.

00:26:39.000 There are a lot of allies of the president who have said incredibly harsh things about the president.

00:26:43.000 One of the things about President Trump is that he has been able to bring many of those people into the fold.

00:26:49.000 Many of them.

00:26:50.000 In the commentariat, in his administration, some of his harshest critics are now people like his Secretary of State.

00:26:58.000 Donald Trump has always been able to do that.

00:26:59.000 So 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.

00:27:14.000 And so firing Isaacman is what actually set this thing off, from what I understand.

00:27:18.000 Because Musk said, listen, Isaacman knows this arena.

00:27:21.000 He will be a good NASA administrator.

00:27:23.000 And there's no one in America, literally no one, who knows the space industry better than the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk.

00:27:28.000 So I trust Elon on that.

00:27:29.000 If 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.

00:27:43.000 Apparently, on a personal level, that's what set it off.

00:27:45.000 Okay, if that's the spark, That sort of petty stupidity?

00:27:49.000 That's dumb.

00:27:50.000 And really, somebody should be called on the carpet for it if that's what set off the spark for that.

00:27:53.000 However, with that said, what came next is perfectly predictable.

00:27:57.000 Elon Musk is not an ego-free human.

00:28:00.000 President Trump is not an ego-free human.

00:28:02.000 Both of these men are incredibly large personalities.

00:28:04.000 Both of them are incredibly sensitive to slights.

00:28:06.000 They don't like being insulted.

00:28:07.000 And so the idea, they were then going to take access to one another and that it was going to be very entertaining for everybody watching.

00:28:12.000 That was sort of the way it was going to go.

00:28:14.000 Now, does this mean a broader crack-up?

00:28:16.000 In sort of the Republican Party?

00:28:18.000 The 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.

00:28:24.000 But there are some people who are going to try to take advantage of this split.

00:28:28.000 There 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.

00:28:36.000 One of those people, longtime Musk critic, Steve Bannon.

00:28:39.000 So Steve Bannon, you'll remember, is the former chief of staff to the president during his first term.

00:28:43.000 Then President Trump.

00:28:44.000 Decided he didn't like Bannon and fired him, calling him sloppy Steve in one of the more entertaining moments of Trump 1.0.

00:28:50.000 Well, 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.

00:29:03.000 He's calling for Elon Musk to be deported.

00:29:05.000 And presumably, he feels this is his way back into the Trump administration, which he desperately would love to be a part of.

00:29:13.000 As Stuart Stevens talked back in January, I don't know why we haven't had a full investigation.

00:29:17.000 Look, if you're going to deport illegal aliens, you've got to deport illegal aliens.

00:29:22.000 The good go with the goose and the gander.

00:29:26.000 They've got to go back to this, as Stuart Stevens talked about, and go through everything about his immigration status.

00:29:32.000 I happen to believe, given the facts that I've been shown, that he's an illegal alien.

00:29:37.000 An illegal alien's got to be deported.

00:29:41.000 I'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.

00:29:53.000 Donald 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.

00:29:59.000 He feels like this is his moment since he has for a long time predicted the falling out between Musk and Trump.

00:30:04.000 The idea that Musk is going to be deported.

00:30:07.000 So a man who's responsible for tens of thousands of American jobs and some of the most successful companies in American history.

00:30:12.000 We're going to deport him.

00:30:13.000 Based on what?

00:30:15.000 That's absurd.

00:30:16.000 He then called for the expropriation of SpaceX.

00:30:20.000 It's this sort of stuff that I don't think resonates for most Americans.

00:30:24.000 The 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.

00:30:33.000 The 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.

00:30:55.000 Seize SpaceX.

00:30:56.000 And you can see how happy Bannon is about this.

00:30:58.000 I mean, he is loving every single moment.

00:31:00.000 The other person who's loving every single moment of this is, of course, AOC.

00:31:03.000 So, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, she of the bartending, the stupidity, and the rather negative associations with people who love terrorism, she's very happy.

00:31:13.000 Oh man, the girls are fighting, aren't they?

00:31:16.000 You 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.

00:31:35.000 And so I think this breakup we've been seeing a long time coming, but we'll see what the impacts are of it legislatively.

00:31:43.000 you Thank you.

00:31:48.000 Meanwhile, in business terms, Tesla took a massive one-day market cap decline, which again, I think is really silly.

00:31:57.000 Like the underlying math on Tesla has not changed.

00:31:59.000 It hasn't.

00:32:00.000 Tesla happens to be an amazing company.

00:32:02.000 I think for a long time that it's overvalued.

00:32:04.000 Its PE ratio is wild.

00:32:05.000 And that's because Tesla is effectively an AI company that makes cars, not a car company with some AI.

00:32:10.000 With 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.

00:32:22.000 That's ridiculous.

00:32:23.000 If any company is that reliant on the largest of the federal government, it's already overvalued.

00:32:27.000 I do not think now is like an amazing time to sell Tesla, for example.

00:32:31.000 Meanwhile, President Trump's own stock in his media company also took a hit.

00:32:37.000 There was an 8% decline in the Trump Media and Technology Group, allegedly costing the president $200 million.

00:32:43.000 Now, again, I think it is worth noting at this point, that's not how the stock market works.

00:32:46.000 Whenever you read a story about how Elon lost $100 billion yesterday, he didn't lose any money.

00:32:51.000 He didn't cash out his stock.

00:32:52.000 He's not an idiot.

00:32:53.000 That's not how it works.

00:32:55.000 That's like saying that every time the real estate market goes down, you lost money.

00:32:58.000 No, you didn't unless you sold your house into it.

00:33:00.000 That is actually not how stock works.

00:33:02.000 It is not how asset ownership works.

00:33:06.000 President Trump's meme coin also declined some 10%, potentially costing him nearly $900 million.

00:33:12.000 Again, I'm not a big fan of these meme coins in the first place.

00:33:14.000 However, the fact that these two are tethered together economically is sort of fascinating.

00:33:18.000 As far as the space program.

00:33:21.000 There 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.

00:33:31.000 If SpaceX's government contracts were actually canceled, it would eliminate America's ability to launch astronauts to space from American soil.

00:33:38.000 This is according to Space.com.

00:33:40.000 SpaceX'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.

00:33:48.000 So, of course, Musk has already backed off of that.

00:33:50.000 Of course.

00:33:51.000 It could also create some serious problems for the Pentagon if there were to be a break in the relationship.

00:33:58.000 The Pentagon is reliant on many SpaceX programs.

00:34:02.000 Again, I don't think any of this is going to materialize.

00:34:04.000 I think all of this is a bit of a spat.

00:34:07.000 It 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.

00:34:14.000 All of that is true.

00:34:15.000 And it means that many of the debates that were had kind of behind closed doors about things ranging.

00:34:19.000 From free trade to immigration to foreign policy are now going to be had out in the open.

00:34:23.000 I don't think that's a terrible thing, by the way.

00:34:24.000 I think it is worthwhile for people to have clarity in these conversations about who exactly stands where.

00:34:31.000 This sort of bizarre notion that ideological vagary is somehow good for the Republican Party I think is bad.

00:34:37.000 I don't think it is.

00:34:37.000 I think we ought to have these debates.

00:34:39.000 I think we ought to know where people stand.

00:34:41.000 With that said, what is the ultimate impact of this?

00:34:45.000 Some fraying of the seams, but certainly not the collapse.

00:34:48.000 Of the Republican coalition, more broadly speaking.

00:34:51.000 Because the Republican coalition is, in fact, going to pass the big, beautiful bill.

00:34:54.000 In a moment, we'll get to the polling numbers for President Trump.

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00:37:08.000 Well, 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.

00:37:18.000 Joining us online to discuss is John Bickley, executive editor and co-host of Morning Wire, available on video now wherever you get your podcast.

00:37:25.000 John, great to see you.

00:37:26.000 Hey, great to see you.

00:37:27.000 Yes, we are available on video on YouTube.

00:37:29.000 Like and subscribe.

00:37:30.000 I'll get that in before I forget to do it at the end.

00:37:33.000 Hey, yes, things are looking good for Republicans.

00:37:35.000 This is actually interesting.

00:37:37.000 All anybody can think about, all I can think about right now, Trump versus Elon, this huge breakup.

00:37:43.000 But actually, stepping back a little bit, it actually highlights the strength of the Republicans.

00:37:49.000 And what I mean by that is, this is fascinating.

00:37:53.000 It is all-consuming.

00:37:54.000 Everybody's watching this thing.

00:37:56.000 It's supposedly a bad moment, and there's some elements that are potentially bad.

00:38:00.000 And I'm glad to hear your perspective.

00:38:02.000 I have the same perspective.

00:38:04.000 I think this is not going to be that big of a deal in the end.

00:38:07.000 I hope not.

00:38:07.000 I hope it has no real-world ramifications for NASA, for example.

00:38:11.000 I think there is actually reconciliation possible in the future.

00:38:15.000 But no matter what, these two guys, these are two of the biggest personalities in history.

00:38:21.000 In history.

00:38:22.000 And they're both on the right side.

00:38:25.000 And they both come from the left.

00:38:27.000 And even this breakup, the arguments are conservative arguments that they're arguing over.

00:38:32.000 One of them is, like you've said, a pragmatic political perspective from Trump.

00:38:38.000 Hey, what can we actually accomplish right now in this moment?

00:38:41.000 What are the wins for conservatives that we can actually get?

00:38:45.000 Which is a great, valid, it's exactly what he should focus on.

00:38:48.000 And then you also have the ideological element, which is a conservative argument from Elon Musk, which also, like you said, we all agree with.

00:38:58.000 It's not possible right now.

00:39:00.000 Maybe it has a little bit of a sort of rose-colored glasses perspective, but we should be having this debate.

00:39:05.000 This is a great debate.

00:39:07.000 This moment is actually not bad for Republicans, I would argue.

00:39:10.000 It's actually highlighting just how more interesting, how more dynamic, and how actually we have room for debate in our party.

00:39:19.000 It's actually fascinating.

00:39:20.000 And you mentioned AOC.

00:39:22.000 AOC's thrilled about this.

00:39:25.000 AOC, from the polling.

00:39:27.000 Is the thought leader of the Democratic Party?

00:39:30.000 So to talk about the polling aspect, that's the person who gets the highest marks out of Democrats.

00:39:37.000 But 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?

00:39:47.000 She gets the highest marks at about 20%, only about 20%.

00:39:51.000 No one else gets anything better.

00:39:54.000 There are no leaders.

00:39:55.000 What is it, Gavin Newsom?

00:39:57.000 No way.

00:39:58.000 And the truth is, the Democrats right now are in disarray.

00:40:01.000 I asked Brent, you know, from your polling, is it hyperbole to say that they are in a death spiral?

00:40:07.000 They continue to be in a death spiral, the Democratic Party.

00:40:10.000 He said it's not hyperbole.

00:40:12.000 He said this is the worst moment they've had in decades in terms of polling.

00:40:18.000 They have lost 15 percent.

00:40:21.000 Actually, they lost 19 percent.

00:40:23.000 Of their support from independents.

00:40:25.000 They're underwater by 15 points with independents.

00:40:27.000 They are losing not young white males.

00:40:32.000 They're losing all young males.

00:40:36.000 All of them.

00:40:37.000 20 point swings for Hispanics and among black young males.

00:40:43.000 This is devastating.

00:40:44.000 We saw this happening leading up to the election and a lot of people looking at the actual election results and saying this was the trend.

00:40:52.000 And the question was, would it continue?

00:40:54.000 It has totally continued.

00:40:55.000 And 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.

00:41:03.000 And actually, there was definitely a downturn for Trump immediately after Liberation Day.

00:41:09.000 A lot of questioning.

00:41:10.000 He got to about a seven-point gap in terms of approval rating.

00:41:14.000 He'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.

00:41:24.000 This is great.

00:41:26.000 He's actually in the black in multiple polls in the last week.

00:41:31.000 So, Republicans, I'm not trying to spin to be overly optimistic for Republicans here.

00:41:39.000 I think this is the reality.

00:41:40.000 Republicans are still in an amazing position.

00:41:43.000 What have you seen?

00:41:44.000 I mean, I think that's exactly right.

00:41:45.000 But I think that what's fascinating about it is more the incompetence of the Democrats than the competence of the Republicans.

00:41:50.000 Obviously, the Republicans are fighting with each other over everything under the sun, ranging from foreign policy to domestic policy to social policy.

00:41:57.000 But the Democrats seem to have no capacity to make any attack at all.

00:42:02.000 They don't seem to have a consolidating point.

00:42:04.000 Even their attacks are sort of backwards in the way that they're approaching them.

00:42:08.000 So to take an example, Democrats have been attacking President Trump for being so-called taco, right?

00:42:14.000 Trump always chickens out.

00:42:15.000 The 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.

00:42:19.000 But that is an argument that actually does not benefit them because they don't want Trump to be doing those things.

00:42:24.000 So 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.

00:42:30.000 And Democrats see that as, well, he's a chicken, but he's chicken to a more popular position that Americans actually like.

00:42:37.000 I 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.

00:42:51.000 They're looking for a thing to attack President Trump on.

00:42:54.000 The reality is the economy is not collapsing, has not collapsed.

00:42:58.000 And because of that, they actually don't have anything to run on.

00:43:00.000 They can't run on social policy.

00:43:01.000 On 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.

00:43:09.000 For example, Ukraine and Russia.

00:43:11.000 The arms have actually continued to flow to Ukraine.

00:43:13.000 And 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.

00:43:23.000 So again, I'm looking at the Democratic Party.

00:43:25.000 Every time you look at the Republican Party, you say, wow, there's a lot of disarray.

00:43:27.000 But then you look at the Democratic Party and you go, this place is just a disaster area.

00:43:32.000 It's like that dog drinking tea while the room is on fire meme for the Democratic leadership.

00:43:38.000 Right.

00:43:38.000 Have you seen David Brooks' op-ed for the New York Times?

00:43:42.000 I looked at it.

00:43:43.000 I read as much as I could stomach.

00:43:45.000 But he had an interesting line.

00:43:48.000 He said, look, the way you save the Democratic Party is an entire worldview shift.

00:43:54.000 This is his solution that he presents.

00:43:56.000 It's an entire worldview shifting leader.

00:44:01.000 They actually have to abandon their worldview is the way I interpret what he wrote.

00:44:07.000 It is a problem.

00:44:08.000 And it is a major problem, as you pointed out so well over and over again.

00:44:12.000 I mean, Trump is a real world.

00:44:15.000 He lives in the real world.

00:44:16.000 He governs from real consequences.

00:44:19.000 So he sees immediately if he has consequences for his actions that he does not like, he pivots.

00:44:25.000 Who doesn't agree with this?

00:44:27.000 Who doesn't agree with common sense, practical legislation, executive orders, all these things?

00:44:34.000 Who doesn't agree with that?

00:44:36.000 We 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.

00:44:45.000 And even though within months, it was unbelievable.

00:44:48.000 I remember back in 2021, absolutely floored by the flood of immigrants instantly under Biden.

00:44:56.000 Instantly.

00:44:57.000 It's not like it took years to figure out, oh man, maybe we made a mistake.

00:45:01.000 It was instant.

00:45:02.000 Dug in and never changed.

00:45:04.000 And now you've got a guy that pivots.

00:45:06.000 Now you could say, look, he's oscillating.

00:45:08.000 He's backtracking.

00:45:10.000 Or maybe he's responding in real time to real challenges.

00:45:15.000 And I think that's the majority of people want that.

00:45:18.000 That's John Bickley, executive editor, co-host of Morning Wire.

00:45:21.000 Again, available on video wherever you get your podcasts, including on YouTube.

00:45:24.000 John, appreciate the time.

00:45:26.000 Thanks, man.

00:45:27.000 Well, what does all of this mean in terms of practical fallout?

00:45:29.000 Again, it appears that the Republicans are going to pass the big, beautiful bill.

00:45:33.000 President Trump himself yesterday was making the case for passing the bill without delay.

00:45:37.000 Here he was.

00:45:37.000 So I want to thank you for your support, and now let's get the bill passed.

00:45:42.000 We want to get it passed through Congress without delay.

00:45:45.000 And 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.

00:45:52.000 Elon Musk may provide money and funding for congressional races down ballot.

00:45:57.000 But 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.

00:46:04.000 As The Wall Street Journal reports, in the battle between the Republican titans, most GOP lawmakers sided with Trump.

00:46:10.000 Representative 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.

00:46:17.000 Many Republicans have defended the GOP mega bill.

00:46:20.000 He hasn't moved to vote, said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Elon Musk.

00:46:24.000 And that, of course, is not possible.

00:46:27.000 Many 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.

00:46:35.000 Representative Kevin Hearn of Oklahoma told Axios, quote, we're getting people calling our offices 100% in support of President Trump.

00:46:41.000 Every tweet that goes out, people are more in lockstep behind President Trump and Musk is losing favor.

00:46:46.000 So this is not a shock.

00:46:48.000 The Republicans know quite well that the big, beautiful bill.

00:46:53.000 is maybe the only thing that stands between the country and a serious recession.

00:46:57.000 Because the reality is that the tariff war that President Trump has declared is actually not particularly wonderful for the economy.

00:47:04.000 The prices are starting to rise.

00:47:06.000 We've not seen the full impact of the price increases yet.

00:47:09.000 But, again, uncertainty means that people are holding out their money.

00:47:12.000 It means investors are waiting on the sidelines.

00:47:14.000 They don't know where to put their money.

00:47:15.000 As 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.

00:47:24.000 It's draining resources and creating logistical headaches for wholesalers, distributors and retailers during the most critical business period.

00:47:30.000 June 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.

00:47:38.000 So businesses are freaking out a little bit.

00:47:40.000 If 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.

00:47:48.000 And again, part of the problem here is that the trade Perspective of the Trump administration remains utterly incoherent.

00:47:55.000 You 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.

00:48:07.000 The goal is to actually get to zero.

00:48:09.000 Reciprocal tariffs.

00:48:10.000 And then you have people like Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, who is hot on the idea that tariffs themselves are a wondrous, wondrous thing.

00:48:16.000 And apparently this is breaking out into the open in the middle of meetings with other countries.

00:48:21.000 Apparently, 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.

00:48:31.000 Quote, 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.

00:48:41.000 Open disagreements, competition, confusion among Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and U.S. Trade Representative.

00:48:47.000 Jamie Greer, have made it hard for the Japanese side to judge the Trump administration's intentions, according to sources close to the negotiations.

00:48:54.000 One 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.

00:49:01.000 Well, that's not great, Bob.

00:49:04.000 The responsibilities of Besant, Letnick, and Greer overlap each other, complicating the tariff talks.

00:49:09.000 Besant is also responsible for negotiating with China, South Korea, and other countries, making scheduling a meeting with him difficult.

00:49:14.000 In addition to lack of unity between Besant, Lutnik, and Greer, Tokyo is also concerned about insufficient coordination between cabinet officials and working-level staff.

00:49:23.000 So, again, is that going to be great for the economy?

00:49:26.000 It certainly could be a major problem for the economy, especially given the fact that U.S. job growth continues to slow.

00:49:32.000 The United States added, according to the Wall Street Journal, 139,000 jobs in May.

00:49:37.000 That 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.

00:49:48.000 So it all balances out to an economy that seems to be at the very least slowing fairly significantly.

00:49:55.000 Now, does that mean that the economy is in serious trouble?

00:49:57.000 Again, it doesn't mean the economy is in serious trouble.

00:49:59.000 It just means that nobody knows what the hell is going on.

00:50:01.000 That is the rule of the day on Wall Street.

00:50:02.000 No one knows where this is going.

00:50:04.000 No one knows what the hell is going on.

00:50:06.000 That is why the most...

00:50:17.000 And meanwhile, President Trump is indicating openness to scaling back salt relief in the GOP tax bill in the Senate.

00:50:23.000 He 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.

00:50:30.000 Now remember, the way this works is that the House passes a bill.

00:50:33.000 The Senate passes its own version of the bill, and then the two sides negotiate over a combined bill that can pass both houses.

00:50:38.000 So everything that President Trump takes with one hand, he has to give with the other.

00:50:42.000 It's a very difficult negotiation.

00:50:44.000 Pretending otherwise is foolhardy.

00:50:46.000 With that said, do I think the big, beautiful bill ends up over the finish line?

00:50:49.000 I would be shocked if it doesn't.

00:50:51.000 Meanwhile, 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.

00:51:03.000 You can certainly be a white, straight male and be discriminated against, or in this particular case, a white, straight female.

00:51:09.000 According to the New York Times, the Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously ruled, unanimously, and our right-wing decision is unanimous.

00:51:15.000 It includes far leftists like Sonia Sotomayor and Tanji Brown-Jackson.

00:51:19.000 They 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.

00:51:30.000 That 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.

00:51:39.000 Of course, that's the New York Times coverage, as you could expect.

00:51:43.000 Now, Ketanji Brown Jackson actually wrote for the court.

00:51:45.000 So again, this is not a right-wing decision, despite the best attempts of the New York Times to turn it into one.

00:51:50.000 The 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.

00:51:58.000 The 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.

00:52:06.000 After a decade there, in 2014, she became administrator of a program addressing prison rape, and five years later, she applied for a promotion.

00:52:13.000 Her supervisors turned her down.

00:52:15.000 They 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.

00:52:22.000 Not 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.

00:52:29.000 She was then replaced by a gay man with less seniority.

00:52:33.000 So she claimed that she basically was discriminated against because she was straight.

00:52:38.000 Now, 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.

00:52:55.000 The 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.

00:53:11.000 On appeal, she said a gay supervisor had also played a role.

00:53:14.000 Now, 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.

00:53:24.000 If you're a member of a majority group, you can be discriminated against.

00:53:27.000 That is not a shock in any way, shape, or form.

00:53:30.000 And good for the Supreme Court for ruling correctly on all of that.

00:53:34.000 Meanwhile, over at the White House, it's Pride Month, but this White House is celebrating Pride Month a little bit differently.

00:53:38.000 Joining us online to discuss, Mary Margaret Olehan, our White House Daily Wire correspondent.

00:53:44.000 Mary Margaret, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:53:45.000 Really appreciate it.

00:53:46.000 Thanks, Ben.

00:53:47.000 So great to see you again.

00:53:50.000 So let's talk about Pride Month in Washington, D.C. It's different than prior Pride Months.

00:53:54.000 Of course, June is the...

00:54:05.000 No, it's not.

00:54:06.000 In fact, it is June here in Washington, D.C., where you'll typically see some very serious Pride Month celebrations.

00:54:12.000 But like you were saying, Ben, it's a little bit different this year.

00:54:15.000 In past years, under the Biden administration, we saw a big Pride Month celebration on the White House lawn.

00:54:20.000 There 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.

00:54:34.000 It 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.

00:54:44.000 And 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.

00:54:53.000 So 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.

00:55:01.000 And 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.

00:55:29.000 So 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.

00:55:41.000 The 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.

00:55:56.000 So two big, very high-profile cases that the Department of Education is investigating.

00:56:01.000 And there's also a whole bunch of other stuff going on at the agencies.

00:56:04.000 For 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.

00:56:16.000 And Ben, we reported yesterday that the FBI has received almost 100 tips since they posted that call for tips on Monday.

00:56:24.000 And we were told that this is a big priority for the FBI and for Kash Patel.

00:56:28.000 They're very focused on protecting children, whether that's related to the border or it's related to protecting them from irreversible transgender surgeries.

00:56:37.000 So I could talk about this all day.

00:56:38.000 I don't think is a coincidence.

00:57:00.000 You'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.

00:57:07.000 Why don't you talk about that?

00:57:09.000 Yes, so I was joking earlier this week.

00:57:11.000 This is what my conservative friends around here would call a very based resolution.

00:57:15.000 If 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.

00:57:28.000 So Representative Mary Miller introduced this earlier this week.

00:57:32.000 She had a whole bunch of Republican colleagues sign on.

00:57:35.000 I don't think we saw any Democrats signing on to it.

00:57:37.000 It's not exactly the verbiage that you're saying.

00:57:39.000 We're hearing from the left these days.

00:57:41.000 But, 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.

00:57:58.000 But of course, then, at the same time, you know, you're seeing all this from the right.

00:58:01.000 This is still Pride Month in D.C. Tomorrow, on Saturday, we'll see a huge, massive Pride parade.

00:58:07.000 I think most of the streets will be blocked.

00:58:09.000 You'll see a lot of people coming in from out of town.

00:58:12.000 I'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.

00:58:19.000 I'm sure we'll get to see a lot of things that are not child-friendly in that parade.

00:58:23.000 So that's very exciting.

00:58:24.000 Mary 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.

00:58:33.000 What's the general attitude over there?

00:58:36.000 So obviously this is the biggest news of the week, maybe of the last six months.

00:58:41.000 I 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.

00:58:46.000 You know, Elon and Trump's relationship has often been considered a little bit tenuous in the last couple weeks.

00:58:51.000 And 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.

00:59:05.000 What I'm being told.

00:59:11.000 It's possible there's going to be a call scheduled with Trump and Elon later today.

00:59:15.000 We're still waiting for more on that front.

00:59:17.000 We're hearing that it may happen, but that Trump is not super excited about it.

00:59:21.000 And 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.

00:59:30.000 But 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.

00:59:37.000 That's been widely reported for many years.

00:59:40.000 He'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.

00:59:51.000 And the FBI has told us recently that he committed suicide, so he did kill himself.

00:59:56.000 And we're supposed to see videos proving that fact very soon.

00:59:59.000 So we're all kind of waiting with bated breath around here to see how this Elon-Trump feud pans out.

01:00:06.000 Hoping that this call has some news in it.

01:00:09.000 I'm in the White House press pool today, so if there's any open Oval events, I will be in them.

01:00:12.000 So hopefully I'll be able to ask the president about that.

01:00:15.000 And I'm excited to question him about what's going on in the future of this Trump-Elon relationship.

01:00:22.000 Well, that's Mary Margaret Olihan, our Daily Wire White House correspondent.

01:00:25.000 Mary Margaret, I know you're busy, so I'll let you get back to it.

01:00:27.000 Really appreciate the time.

01:00:30.000 Thank you, Ben.

01:00:30.000 Meanwhile, 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.

01:00:42.000 James Carville, who I've suggested is sometimes voice of reason inside the Democratic Party, rejecting the wokeness.

01:00:47.000 They are off the rails, really, truly off the rails.

01:00:51.000 So 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.

01:01:03.000 The 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.

01:01:11.000 It is a party that suggests wrongly that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, which is a false, nonsensical claim.

01:01:17.000 It is a party that has stood by rabid anti-Semites inside of its own party.

01:01:23.000 And here's James Carville ripping into the Jews.

01:01:26.000 Go try and raise money from really wealthy Jewish fundraisers.

01:01:30.000 And he said, look, James, I'm a Democrat, but I can't be a party because of what happened at Columbia.

01:01:38.000 What the f*** did the Democrats have to do with what happened at Columbia, by the way?

01:01:43.000 Well, I can't do that, but I can be for a party that everybody endorses the alternative for Deutschland.

01:01:52.000 Read.

01:01:53.000 The modern incarnation of national socialism, if you will.

01:02:00.000 And I just find these kind of people, I literally, my instinct is, and they tell me that.

01:02:07.000 They look me right in the eye.

01:02:10.000 No, you just want your tax cut.

01:02:15.000 That's ridiculous.

01:02:16.000 I mean, ridiculous.

01:02:17.000 And yes, indeed, anti-Semitic.

01:02:19.000 The 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.

01:02:29.000 The Republicans have been offering tax cuts as long as I've been alive.

01:02:31.000 I've been a Republican as long as I've been in politics.

01:02:33.000 So I have not shifted at all.

01:02:35.000 But there was a marked shift in the Jewish vote, particularly in swing states like Pennsylvania, not because of tax policy.

01:02:42.000 Because the Democrats embraced full-scale a bunch of anti-Semitic garbage.

01:02:46.000 Yes, because of Columbia University.

01:02:48.000 Chuck 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.

01:02:58.000 Yes, because your Democratic Party has not only looked the other way but promoted some of the worst Jew haters in your own party.

01:03:05.000 Yes, because they've made room for terrorist groups across the map.

01:03:10.000 Slow walking aid to Israel in the middle of an existential war.

01:03:14.000 Yeah, because of that.

01:03:15.000 James Carville.

01:03:16.000 Really, truly disgusting stuff there from James Carville.

01:03:20.000 Speaking 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.

01:03:32.000 It was supposed to take place, apparently, in Texas.

01:03:36.000 An American jihadist forced a shutdown of the event.

01:03:40.000 according to a press release from the group involved.

01:03:43.000 One 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.

01:03:53.000 The 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.

01:04:04.000 Organizers 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.

01:04:14.000 And then a second venue was also threatened by pro-Hamas jihadist groups.

01:04:18.000 We should probably stop importing those sorts of folks into the United States.

01:04:22.000 That is the point that President Trump has quite correctly made.

01:04:26.000 Now, meanwhile, President Trump hosted Frederick Murs, who is the new chancellor of Germany, at the White House yesterday.

01:04:33.000 Today, 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.

01:04:45.000 President Trump had a bit of a strange moment with Frederick Murs talking about D-Day.

01:04:50.000 It was a little odd.

01:04:52.000 Here's the president.

01:04:59.000 This is D-Day anniversary when the Americans once ended a war in Europe.

01:05:06.000 And I think this is in your hand in specific, in ours.

01:05:10.000 That was not a pleasant day for you?

01:05:12.000 No, that was not a pleasant day.

01:05:13.000 Well, in the long run, Mr. President, this was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship.

01:05:21.000 That's true.

01:05:25.000 Not a pleasant day for you.

01:05:26.000 I mean, Frederick Merz isn't like a Nazi.

01:05:30.000 That's a little awkward.

01:05:33.000 By the way, I should mention here, James Carville.

01:05:35.000 Calls out alternative for Deutschland, AFD, in Germany and says they're a neo-Nazi party.

01:05:38.000 That's not true.

01:05:39.000 Okay, it's not true.

01:05:40.000 I know Alice Fidel.

01:05:42.000 She's the leader of the AFD.

01:05:43.000 It is not a true statement.

01:05:45.000 But, you know, again, people don't know either their history or their current politics too often.

01:05:50.000 Meanwhile, during the same presser with Frederick Murs, President Trump commented on Ukraine.

01:05:54.000 And again, his comments on Ukraine are a bit strange at this point.

01:05:56.000 As I've said before, Vladimir Zelensky is ready to do what President Trump wants.

01:06:00.000 Vladimir Putin is not.

01:06:02.000 This bizarre sort of moral equivalence between the two sides is not factually based, in my belief.

01:06:07.000 Here is President Trump correctly saying he is not friends with Russia yesterday.

01:06:12.000 I wish we could do the same thing with Ukraine and Russia.

01:06:16.000 And at some point it'll happen.

01:06:18.000 I believe that.

01:06:20.000 And if it doesn't happen or if I see somebody's out of line, if Russia's out of line, we'll be, you'll be amazed how tough.

01:06:29.000 Remember this.

01:06:30.000 They like to say that I'm not friends with anybody.

01:06:36.000 Okay, so again, he's right about that.

01:06:39.000 With 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.

01:06:48.000 Here is President Trump, for example, comparing the fight between Russia and Ukraine to a hockey fight between kids.

01:06:53.000 Let's just be real about this.

01:06:54.000 Ukraine is fighting an existential war against an opponent that wishes to completely ingest it according to its own policy.

01:06:59.000 Top politicians.

01:07:01.000 It's being said out loud by Demetri Medvedev and Vladimir Putin.

01:07:04.000 So not quite the same thing as a hockey fight between kids.

01:07:08.000 But sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy.

01:07:12.000 They hate each other and they're fighting in a park.

01:07:16.000 And you try and pull them apart.

01:07:18.000 They don't want to be pulled.

01:07:19.000 Sometimes you're better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.

01:07:25.000 And I gave that analogy to So, again, saying that he wants to pull them apart is one thing.

01:07:44.000 It is another thing to say, as President Trump did yesterday, that maybe he will put sanctions on both countries.

01:07:49.000 Why would you put sanctions on the Ukrainians?

01:07:51.000 They literally just signed a rare earth minerals deal with you.

01:07:54.000 They keep coming to the table.

01:07:55.000 They're offering a 30-day ceasefire right now.

01:07:57.000 If 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.

01:08:04.000 That is the actual off-ramp here.

01:08:06.000 Vladimir Putin doesn't want that off-ramp.

01:08:08.000 Why would we possibly sanction Ukraine?

01:08:10.000 Please, like, explain.

01:08:13.000 When I see the moment when we're not gonna make a deal, when this thing won't stop, if that moment, yeah, it's in my brain, the deadline.

01:08:21.000 When I see the moment where, It's not going to stop.

01:08:27.000 And I'm sure you're going to do the same thing.

01:08:29.000 It will be very, very tough.

01:08:32.000 And it could be on both countries, to be honest.

01:08:34.000 You know, it takes two to tango.

01:08:37.000 Well, yes, but one of the parties is ready to tango.

01:08:40.000 So again, I remain bemused by the approach that suggests that if you're going to go hands off, that that doesn't help Putin.

01:08:47.000 It clearly does.

01:08:48.000 I mean, just on a practical level, it clearly does.

01:08:50.000 Meanwhile, all the talk about how the United States attacks on the Houthis resulted in some sort of success.

01:08:56.000 It didn't result in a success.

01:08:57.000 Okay, let's just be real about this.

01:08:59.000 The only success with regard to the attacks on the Houthis were the Houthis pledged they would not attack American shipping.

01:09:04.000 That was not the original goal of the attacks on the Houthis.

01:09:07.000 The original goal of the attack on the Houthis was to stop them from harassing shipping in the Red Sea.

01:09:11.000 That has not happened.

01:09:12.000 According 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.

01:09:22.000 Again, 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.

01:09:32.000 That's really what that was about.

01:09:33.000 And that was really at the behest of Iran and Qatar.

01:09:35.000 The ceasefire, which began May 6th, ended a U.S. campaign that involved over 1,100 strikes against the Houthis in Yemen.

01:09:40.000 Now, the reality is I'm not sure that the United States should be directly involved in attacks on the Houthis.

01:09:45.000 I think that what we really should do is we should unshackle the Saudis to do exactly what they want to do with the Houthis.

01:09:50.000 That seems to me a better plan.

01:09:53.000 The 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.

01:10:05.000 Richard 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.

01:10:13.000 The shipping industry has not gone back.

01:10:14.000 Ship traffic through the Red Sea is down by around three-fifths since 2023.

01:10:19.000 Fearing 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.

01:10:28.000 The Houthis have said they are still at war with Israel and will attack vessels bound for Israel.

01:10:33.000 But 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?

01:10:54.000 So 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.

01:11:01.000 China is helping them out.

01:11:02.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran has ordered thousands of tons of ballistic missile ingredients from China.

01:11:07.000 People familiar with the transaction said, seeking to rebuild its military prowess as it discussed the future of its nuclear program with the United States.

01:11:13.000 Again, the goal for Iran is delay.

01:11:15.000 That is Iran's goal in this entire negotiation with the United States.

01:11:19.000 They have no intention of giving up their nuclear program.

01:11:21.000 All they want is a delay to rebuild their ballistic missile stock, to rebuild their air defenses.

01:11:26.000 That is their goal because they think that that will prevent some sort of Israeli strike on the nuclear facilities in Iran.

01:11:33.000 And 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.

01:11:40.000 That is the simple calculus of the timeline right now.

01:11:43.000 Iran wants to bolster regional allies and rebuild its arsenal while it pushes deeper into contentious talks with the Trump administration over its nuclear program.

01:11:50.000 Iran continued to expand its stockpiles of uranium enriched to just below weapons grade and ruled out negotiation limits on its missile program.

01:11:57.000 So, again, remember, they don't just want to develop the missiles in order to put conventional warheads on them.

01:12:01.000 They 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.

01:12:12.000 The 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.

01:12:20.000 This is why President Trump has correctly treated China as a geopolitical opponent.

01:12:24.000 Now, it would be helpful if the national security infrastructure of the United States were not being taken over by Koch Institute allies.

01:12:32.000 Amazing.

01:12:32.000 When 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.

01:12:40.000 With the administration, obviously people in his personnel office are not paying any attention.

01:12:44.000 They 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.

01:12:56.000 According 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.

01:13:05.000 He is the latest of several senior Pentagon nominees.

01:13:08.000 who 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.

01:13:16.000 Apparently, at the State Department, people being staffed at the State Department are now more along the isolationist lines.

01:13:23.000 Morgan 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.

01:13:30.000 Top officials focused on Israel and the Middle East were pushed out last month as the National Security Council was restructured.

01:13:38.000 So, 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.

01:13:45.000 President Trump publicly has said all the same things he's been saying for 10 years.

01:13:48.000 He's been saying for 10 years, the JCPOA, worst deal in history.

01:13:53.000 Nuclear weapons cannot be held by Iran.

01:13:55.000 Nuclear development cannot be done by Iran.

01:13:59.000 That the United States has to enforce peace through strength.

01:14:01.000 Again, 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.

01:14:13.000 And that's something to keep our eyes on.

01:14:15.000 Alrighty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.

01:14:16.000 We'll be jumping into the mailbag.

01:14:18.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

01:14:19.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

01:14:20.000 Use code Shapira.

01:14:21.000 Check out for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - June 06, 2025

TRUMP VS. MUSK: THE ULTIMATE BATTLE!

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