The Ben Shapiro Show - Trump’s Saudi TRIUMPH

00:00:00.000 All right, folks, tons to get to on today's show.

00:00:02.000 President Trump's triumphant visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

00:00:04.000 Plus, he heads on over to Qatar.

00:00:06.000 We examine negotiations in Ukraine and the state of the economy.

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00:01:30.000 So yesterday was a huge day for President Trump in Saudi Arabia.

00:01:33.000 He arrived in Riyadh.

00:01:35.000 He was greeted on the tarmac by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

00:01:39.000 MBS, as he is so-called, is obviously a signal figure in the Middle East.

00:01:44.000 He's completely shifted the direction.

00:01:46.000 of Saudi Arabia, away from sort of a Wahhabi version of Islam that was spreading terror tentacles all over the planet. 1.00

00:01:52.000 That's what we all grew up with in the early 2000s, in the 1990s, and toward a regime of modernization.

00:01:59.000 That, of course, is very difficult to do in the Middle East.

00:02:01.000 And MBZ, as he's called, requires credit for that.

00:02:06.000 And the reality is that modernizing the kingdom of Saudi Arabia so as to be more pro-Western, so as to be more modern, it's changed the entire Middle East.

00:02:15.000 It's one of the reasons why President Trump's major accomplishment during his first term, the Abraham Accords, everybody is sort of waiting on tenterhooks for Saudi Arabia to integrate with Israel, because that would sort of be the final sign that Saudi Arabia is now orienting away from radical Wahhabist Islam and towards something that provides a better future for his people.

00:02:33.000 So why exactly does President Trump have such a warm relationship with Saudi in a way that Joe Biden did?

00:02:40.000 Because if you'll recall, Joe Biden really Well, Barack Obama and Joe Biden,

00:03:03.000 who were really part of the same hole when it came to their foreign policy vision, made a bunch of big mistakes in the Middle East, particularly with regard to nations like Saudi Arabia.

00:03:11.000 First, They kept saying words like democracy and human rights, and those would then trump American interests.

00:03:18.000 So you'd have Joe Biden going out of his way during the 2020 campaign to talk about the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, who was a Muslim Brotherhood media member who was murdered by the Saudi regime in a Turkish embassy.

00:03:32.000 And he made this like a big point of his foreign policy.

00:03:35.000 Well, the reality is the Middle East is a place filled with terrible regimes. 0.74

00:03:38.000 The only truly democratic regime in the entire Middle East is Israel.

00:03:42.000 Everybody else is a tyrannical dictatorship.

00:03:44.000 And the question is whether those tyrannical dictatorships are going to move in the direction of the West toward a gradual accommodation with modern modernity or whether those tyrannical regimes are just going to oppose the United States wholesale.

00:03:59.000 President Obama and President Biden kept pretending that words like democracy and human rights trumped American interests.

00:04:04.000 That's how you ended up during the Obama era with the Arab Spring, which is the idea that you need, quote unquote, democracy in the Middle East, which was going to fix everything.

00:04:10.000 And it resulted.

00:04:11.000 In the Muslim Brotherhood, initially in power in Egypt, it resulted in the rise of terror groups all over the region, the complete decay of Libya, for example.

00:04:22.000 It turns out the Arab Spring was actually in Arab winter, and then powerful people took over in these places and had to quash all of these sort of Muslim Brotherhood-led rebellions in a wide variety of these countries.

00:04:35.000 So, well, Barack Obama and Joe Biden preach democracy and human rights.

00:04:40.000 Less democracy and fewer human rights were the result of the Obama-Biden matrix with regard to the Middle East.

00:04:46.000 The second thing that Obama and Biden did was create daylight with our actual allies in the Middle East in favor of our enemies like Iran.

00:04:53.000 So as I say, Joe Biden drew tremendous contrast with Saudi Arabia and also with Israel.

00:04:59.000 Same thing with Barack Obama.

00:05:01.000 Lots of overtures to Iran.

00:05:02.000 Lots of sort of pushing our actual allies in the region off into the corner.

00:05:08.000 Third.

00:05:08.000 The Obama-Biden matrix took at face value the idea that in order for any progress on anything to happen in the Middle East, Israel had to make all sorts of concessions to the Palestinians.

00:05:18.000 And President Trump in his first term said that that is not a thing.

00:05:21.000 President Trump in his first term said, hey, look, that issue is unsolvable.

00:05:25.000 The Palestinians don't want peace with the Israelis.

00:05:28.000 And so actually there can be commerce and cooperation outside of that particular issue.

00:05:33.000 And that is still something that President Trump deeply believes.

00:05:36.000 And then fourth, the Obama-Biden matrix tried to make overtures to Iran without any prospective consequences.

00:05:41.000 It was, we will make you a deal, and there will be no consequences.

00:05:44.000 And we will make you a deal, and there will be no consequences.

00:05:46.000 Well, Donald Trump has reversed all of those things.

00:05:49.000 And that is the reason why he's being more successful in the Middle East.

00:05:51.000 One, he acknowledges that different countries are going to govern differently. 0.58

00:05:56.000 The idea that democracy in Saudi Arabia is going to be a boon is a ridiculous notion on its face.

00:06:02.000 First of all, we should recognize that democracy in the West took...

00:06:05.000 A couple of thousand years in order to actually take root.

00:06:09.000 In places like Great Britain, which we consider sort of the great Western democracy, the powers of Parliament were not fully effectuated until, at the very least, the glorious revolution of 1688.

00:06:21.000 So you're talking about full-on hundreds of years of monarchy and oligarchy in Great Britain.

00:06:29.000 Okay, well, the same thing is going to hold true in the Middle East, particularly because...

00:06:32.000 The Judeo-Christian West and the biblical values upon which it relies have some strains of democracy.

00:06:38.000 There's nothing in the Quran that tends toward democracy.

00:06:40.000 And so that, of course, is going to be sort of a problem in a lot of Islamic nations. 0.96

00:06:45.000 So what does that mean in terms of governance?

00:06:48.000 It means that if you wish to do business with any of these places, if you wish to actually move these countries towards some level of moderation...

00:06:55.000 Democracy is not going to be the number one answer in these places.

00:06:58.000 If there were democracy overnight in Jordan, there'd be a terrorist state.

00:07:00.000 If there were democracy in the UAE, there'd be a terrorist state.

00:07:03.000 If there were democracy in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood would probably run the place. 0.99

00:07:07.000 So all of those big fancy words, those are those big idealistic words that Joe Biden and Barack Obama like to use in the Middle East, their sort of liberal universalism does not apply there.

00:07:17.000 And this is something that President Trump really does understand.

00:07:20.000 On the other hand, what President Trump also understands is that isolationism is not a real perspective in the Middle East.

00:07:26.000 Now, I know yesterday there were a lot of people on the sort of isolationist right who were championing what President Trump was saying in Saudi Arabia.

00:07:33.000 And I want to be clear.

00:07:35.000 President Trump is not an isolationist.

00:07:36.000 He has never been an isolationist.

00:07:38.000 I'll tell you what isolationists don't do.

00:07:40.000 Sell $150 billion worth of military weaponry to the Saudis.

00:07:44.000 You know what isolationists don't do?

00:07:45.000 Fly to Saudi Arabia and Qatar to cut. 0.89

00:07:49.000 Billions of dollars worth of business deals.

00:07:50.000 You know what isolationists don't do?

00:07:52.000 Try to broker accords between Syria and the Saudis and Qatar and the Turks and Israel.

00:07:58.000 None of that's isolationism.

00:08:00.000 What President Trump is not is, one, an isolationist.

00:08:03.000 Number two, he is not a Wilsonian interventionist.

00:08:06.000 And those are not the only two options.

00:08:08.000 Wilsonian interventionism, what people like to call the sort of neocon idea.

00:08:13.000 And again, that's a misnomer because the neocons were a specific group of people who were very hawkish on foreign policy.

00:08:18.000 In the 1960s and 70s, liberals were mugged by reality, became hawkish on foreign policy, and turned against the welfare state.

00:08:26.000 And then that was sort of associated with Wilsonian interventionism in the early 2000s.

00:08:31.000 But today, there are no neocons.

00:08:33.000 The number of Wilsonian interventionists who believe in quote-unquote nation-building in Iraq or Afghanistan, who are those people?

00:08:40.000 Please, name them.

00:08:41.000 So that is also obviously not the president's perspective.

00:08:44.000 The president is a realist.

00:08:45.000 What is a realist?

00:08:46.000 A realist is somebody who understands.

00:08:47.000 That different nations have different interests, they have different cultures, and that there's different nations with different cultures actually have to be negotiated with on their own level.

00:08:56.000 We get to more on this in a moment.

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00:11:15.000 So, President Trump goes to Saudi Arabia and he praised MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, who really is the power over there.

00:11:23.000 In pretty glowing terms.

00:11:25.000 What a great place.

00:11:28.000 What a great place, but more importantly, what great people.

00:11:32.000 I want to thank His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince, for that incredible introduction.

00:11:38.000 He's an incredible man.

00:11:39.000 Known him a long time now.

00:11:42.000 There's nobody like him.

00:11:43.000 Thank you very much.

00:11:44.000 Appreciate it very much, my friend.

00:11:46.000 We have great partners in the world.

00:11:50.000 But we have none stronger and nobody like the gentleman that's right before me.

00:11:57.000 He's your greatest representative.

00:11:59.000 Greatest representative.

00:12:03.000 Okay, so, again, that sort of praise, not rare.

00:12:06.000 President Trump likes to butter up the people with whom he is making deals.

00:12:10.000 This, of course, is true for pretty much everybody.

00:12:12.000 But he does have a warm relationship with Mohammed bin Salman, specifically because he believes that Mohammed bin Salman is driven by commerce.

00:12:19.000 Rather than being driven by Wahhabist ideology.

00:12:22.000 And then President Trump started speaking in sort of broad terms about his vision for the Middle East.

00:12:26.000 And here's where some of the isolationists on the right were chanting triumphant slogans yesterday.

00:12:31.000 That's not what he's saying.

00:12:32.000 I'll explain in a moment.

00:12:33.000 Here's President Trump in sort of the core of the speech.

00:12:36.000 This great transformation has not come from Western interventionists or flying.

00:12:45.000 People in beautiful plains giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.

00:12:51.000 No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal non-profits.

00:13:00.000 Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives.

00:13:10.000 In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies Okay, so he's saying a few different things here.

00:13:29.000 And in order to really understand what he's saying, we have to play the next clip of him talking about how he approaches the Middle East, where he says that a lot of presidents are worried about, you know, big words like democracy or looking into the souls of the people they're dealing with.

00:13:40.000 That's not how you do this.

00:13:41.000 In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it's our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.

00:13:57.000 I believe it is God's job to sit in judgment.

00:14:00.000 My job to defend America and to promote the fundamental interest of stability, prosperity, and peace.

00:14:08.000 Now again.

00:14:11.000 What he's saying there is the sort of Wilsonian interventionism, right?

00:14:14.000 Big words like democracy, human rights.

00:14:16.000 Sure, that stuff matters, but it's his job as president of the United States to preserve America's interests.

00:14:22.000 So, what does that mean?

00:14:24.000 Well, he's mixing up a few things here in this part of the speech.

00:14:26.000 One, he's suggesting, you know, interventionism is bad, nation-building is bad.

00:14:30.000 Let's be clear.

00:14:31.000 Saudi Arabia was, in large part, nation-built by the United States.

00:14:36.000 And there, what I mean is...

00:14:37.000 The entire Saudi economy is reliant on Western drilling for oil.

00:14:41.000 But when he says that you guys created this domestically, that is not true.

00:14:45.000 I'm sorry, it isn't.

00:14:46.000 The flattery is fine, but the idea that the Saudis, on their own, without Western involvement in their economy particularly, would be sitting on trillions of dollars in wealth, it's not true.

00:14:58.000 Saudi Arabia would look like most other countries in the Middle East, namely incredibly poor and fraught with peril. 0.96

00:15:04.000 Were it not for the fact that the West basically drilled their oil for them?

00:15:08.000 Standard Oil of California created the entire Saudi oil industry in 1933.

00:15:12.000 In 1938, what was called SoCal at the time succeeded in deep mining that uncovered Saudi's seas of oil.

00:15:22.000 That company, SoCal, would later be named Aramco, which, of course, you now know.

00:15:26.000 Texaco joined as a partner in 1937.

00:15:28.000 It was American know-how, Western know-how, that built the Saudi economy.

00:15:33.000 In 1980, the Saudi government nationalized Aramco.

00:15:36.000 By the way, I think if President Trump had been president at the time, he probably would have done something about that because the idea of foreign countries nationalizing assets that were built by the West, that's not something President Trump typically likes.

00:15:46.000 Ask him about the Panama Canal.

00:15:49.000 American and European firms are largely responsible for Riyadh's skyline.

00:15:54.000 If you go to Riyadh, it is filled with Western stores.

00:15:57.000 It's not filled with Arabic stores.

00:15:59.000 It is filled with Western chain stores.

00:16:01.000 The United States has basically been providing security for the Saudi regime since the end of World War II.

00:16:07.000 FDR and the king, then Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, established strategic cooperation together in 1945, and we signed a mutual defense assistance agreement with the Saudis in 1951.

00:16:19.000 This idea that non-interventionism in the Middle East was actually the way the Middle East was done, that's not true.

00:16:24.000 The reason that the United States pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait is because the Saudis were afraid.

00:16:28.000 Saddam Hussein was going to continue pushing into Saudi Arabia. 0.93

00:16:32.000 The Saudi regime is in fact reliant on the United States and has been in fact reliant on the United States for 80 years or so.

00:16:39.000 So again, this is not saying that President Trump is wrong about his approach to the Middle East.

00:16:44.000 It's saying that President Trump is a realist.

00:16:46.000 He wants to be involved where it is in the interests of the United States.

00:16:49.000 To, in fact, be involved.

00:16:50.000 He doesn't want to dictate to the South that what they have to do is take counterproductive measures that will undermine their capacity to actually run the country.

00:16:57.000 Because that's not how deals get done.

00:16:59.000 And President Trump was there to get deals done.

00:17:01.000 I mean, that's what he is there to do.

00:17:02.000 President Trump's signal contribution to foreign policy thought in the Middle East, his biggest contribution is the idea that commerce trumps ideology.

00:17:09.000 And this was considered a fool's errand when President Trump first took this on during his first term.

00:17:15.000 The kind of basic idea was that no matter What commerce you offer to various nations, that commerce will never trump the ideology.

00:17:22.000 And President Trump basically said, no, the commerce can, in fact, trump the ideology.

00:17:27.000 Now, in order for that to happen, there have to be strings attached.

00:17:30.000 And here is where things get a little bit complicated for what President Trump was doing in Saudi Arabia yesterday.

00:17:34.000 He gave them an enormous number of benefits.

00:17:36.000 The Saudis are spending an enormous amount of money in the United States or pledging to do so. 0.63

00:17:40.000 We'll get into how much they're actually spending in the United States in a moment.

00:17:43.000 The question is whether enough strings are attached.

00:17:46.000 Just giving the Saudis or the Syrians, as we will see, benefits from the United States without strings attached in the hope that they will, through their own goodwill, then do something nice and integrate further into the world system, that seems to be a mistake.

00:18:00.000 You have to make this stuff conditional on them doing something that we want them to do.

00:18:04.000 Now, I understand there are many things that the United States is getting here, including, for example, a bunch of Saudi oil money that is going to pour into the American economy.

00:18:12.000 To be realistic, however, That Saudi oil money was already pouring into the American economies.

00:18:16.000 That is a reality.

00:18:17.000 Many of the firms that were there negotiating with the Saudis while President Trump was there were already in deals with the Saudi Arabian government.

00:18:24.000 However, President Trump did say yesterday that there was going to be a $600 billion deal with the Saudi.

00:18:32.000 According to the New York Times, the White House on Tuesday said that President Trump, while in Saudi, had secured $600 billion in deals with the Saudi government and firms.

00:18:40.000 But the details the White House provided are still vague.

00:18:43.000 They totaled less than half that number.

00:18:45.000 Many of the projects were already in the works before President Trump took office.

00:18:48.000 As I say, the Saudis are not shy on the spending on American companies and American products.

00:18:54.000 They own enormous amounts of American companies and American products already.

00:19:00.000 President Trump mentioned, of course, that the biggest deal would be a $142 billion agreement to provide the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with state-of-the-art warfighting equipment and services from over a dozen American defense industry companies.

00:19:13.000 Presumably, Saudi wants that mainly to fend off the threat of Iran in their north.

00:19:17.000 Here's President Trump announcing this yesterday.

00:19:19.000 In addition to purchases of $142 billion of American-made military equipment by our great Saudi partners, the largest ever, this week there are multi-billion dollar commercial deals with Amazon, Oracle, AMD, they're all here.

00:19:39.000 Uber, Qualcomm, Johnson & Johnson, and many, many more.

00:19:44.000 Thank you.

00:19:45.000 you Again, all that's great.

00:19:47.000 All that is terrific.

00:19:48.000 You want the Saudis to invest.

00:19:50.000 I mean, you want more money in America, obviously.

00:19:53.000 So that is a very good thing.

00:19:54.000 And President Trump, again, is tying all of this to an overall vision of the Middle East in which commerce dominates rather than chaos.

00:20:00.000 Here is President Trump talking about it being time for commerce rather than chaos.

00:20:04.000 Now, again, if I have one ask of the Trump administration, it's that when this stuff is actually effectuated, there should be pressure on the Saudi royal government to actually engage in things like the Abraham Accords, because otherwise, what you could see, and this is the big danger in doing business with dictatorships, what you could see is something akin to what China has done, which is make bank on capitalism while still opposing the agenda of the United States.

00:20:26.000 So attaching strings is actually quite a good thing.

00:20:29.000 We'll see the same sort of attitude prevail when it comes to Syria in President Trump's Saudi visit.

00:20:33.000 But here is President Trump's overall vision for the region, which of course is correct, that it's time for commerce.

00:20:38.000 Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos, where it exports technology, not terrorism, and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other.

00:21:06.000 And then President Trump said that he wants the Abraham Accords to happen.

00:21:10.000 He said it would be an honor to him if the Abraham Accords happen. 1.00

00:21:13.000 Now again, I wish that some of the stuff that he's giving to the Saudis had been tied to the Abraham Accords because if he's going to broaden out his Nobel Peace Prize worthy accomplishments in term one, which that's what the Abraham Accords are.

00:21:24.000 It seems to me that using leverage is a better plan than simply giving people things and then hoping on the back end they'll do the right thing.

00:21:29.000 But here was President Trump yesterday.

00:21:32.000 It's been an amazing thing, the Abraham Accords, and it's my fervent hope, wish, and even my dream that Saudi Arabia, a place I have such respect for, especially over the last fairly short period of time, what you've been able to do, but will soon be joining the Abraham Accords. 0.77

00:21:50.000 I think it'll be a tremendous tribute to your country.

00:21:54.000 Now, again, my hope is that it goes beyond hope, and it's made a condition of some of the things that we are doing for Saudi Arabia since...

00:22:01.000 If the United States is to use its leverage in order to get countries to do more of the things that we want them to do, we should use leverage rather than simply giving them the things that they want and then hoping on the back end that they are going to give us what we want.

00:22:14.000 Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Whitcoff was speaking with Breitbart yesterday on specifically this topic, and he suggested that he believes that there will be a bunch of countries that come into the Abraham Accords under President Trump's administration.

00:22:25.000 And we are out there.

00:22:26.000 I have a very, very good team.

00:22:29.000 We work with the State Department exceptionally well, which allows us to take advantage of talent from there as needed in some of these conversations that we're having.

00:22:39.000 And I'm really confident that we're going to have four or five, maybe six countries enter the Abraham Peace Accords in the next couple of months.

00:22:48.000 And the countries that he was mentioning there include, as we will see, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan.

00:22:54.000 Azerbaijan, Armenia, and he hopes Saudi Arabia.

00:22:57.000 Now, President Trump did speak about the issue of what goes on in Gaza.

00:23:01.000 Sort of the precondition to the Abraham Accords being expanded is the ending of the war in Gaza.

00:23:05.000 And Trump said Gaza's leadership has to go, meaning Hamas has to go.

00:23:08.000 My administration shares the hope of so many in this region for future of safety and dignity of the Palestinian people.

00:23:18.000 But that cannot happen as long as Gaza's leaders take delight in. 0.95

00:23:23.000 Torturing and murdering innocent people can't have it.

00:23:27.000 I greatly appreciate the constructive role that the leaders in this room have played in trying to bring the terrible conflict to an end, including by helping secure the release of American hostage Idun Alexander.

00:23:42.000 It was a big day yesterday, a very important day.

00:23:46.000 I was told just before I left that they were going to be releasing Idun.

00:23:50.000 We thought Idun was dead.

00:23:53.000 Three weeks ago, they said Idun was no longer living.

00:23:57.000 And it was a very, very good thing.

00:24:00.000 Ultimately, all hostages of all nationalities must be released as a stepping Okay, now speaking of a nation that he's attempting to bring into the fold, President Trump, he made a huge announcement with regard to Syria.

00:24:19.000 So Syria, as we know, Fell to HTS, which is, in fact, a terror group sponsored by the Turks.

00:24:26.000 HTS is run by a man who now calls himself Ahmed al-Sharaa.

00:24:31.000 Again, he switches his name all the time.

00:24:32.000 His name used to be al-Jolani.

00:24:34.000 You know him as al-Jolani, but he switches his name sort of like Prince switches his name.

00:24:38.000 So now he's the terror leader formerly known as al-Jolani.

00:24:41.000 And he's now the Syrian president sponsored by the Turks.

00:24:45.000 President Trump actually met with him yesterday.

00:24:47.000 There's a picture of him shaking hands with a person who had a $10 million bounty on him as of about two weeks ago because he was a member of al-Qaeda and then he was a member of ISIS and then he was a member of HTS.

00:25:00.000 Well, yesterday in Saudi Arabia, President Trump announced that he would be ending sanctions against Syria at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

00:25:07.000 After discussing the situation in Syria with the Crown Prince, your Crown Prince, and also with President...

00:25:14.000 Erdogan of Turkey who called me the other day and asked for a very similar thing.

00:25:20.000 Among others and friends of mine, people that I have a lot of respect for in the Middle East, I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness.

00:25:34.000 Okay, so big applause in the room in Saudi Arabia.

00:25:37.000 Of course, Saudi Arabia wants the sanctions ended on Syria because they're hoping to forge some sort of common agreement with Syria.

00:25:45.000 HTS is opposed to Iran.

00:25:47.000 So there's this kind of Sunni-Shia split, obviously, in the Middle East, Iran representing the Shia.

00:25:52.000 Sunni powers include Saudi Arabia as well as Turkey and now HTS, which is, in fact, a Sunni regime in Syria.

00:26:01.000 President Trump apparently told al-Jolani, who he met today, That he wants to see Syria enter the Abraham Accords, clear out all Palestinian terrorists from Syria, and all of the rest.

00:26:13.000 Well, again, all I will say here is that I don't think that President Trump's orientation here is wrong.

00:26:17.000 I think the possibility of ending sanctions on Syria, in order to get them to do things that are good for the West, good for the United States, and good for Middle Eastern peace, that's fine.

00:26:26.000 But it better be a string attached, not a hope for a gift at the end of that process.

00:26:30.000 Because otherwise, let's remember, okay, it was three weeks ago that al-Jelani and his team We're murdering Druze. 0.99

00:26:37.000 And they're murdering Druze wholesale in southern Syria to the point that the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, had to deploy in southern Syria to save the Druze from al-Jelani's terrorist thugs.

00:26:46.000 And by the way, they were killing the odd Christian as well.

00:26:49.000 So before we all cheer the removal of the sanctions, we should recognize that al-Jelani is not, in fact, a friend to minorities in Syria.

00:26:56.000 Also, there ought to be strings attached.

00:26:59.000 So trust but verify would be the order of the day with both Saudi. 0.99

00:27:04.000 And with Syria and with everybody in the Middle East. 0.80

00:27:05.000 Trust but verify.

00:27:07.000 Strings attached should be the way that we approach our foreign policy in these areas.

00:27:12.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

00:27:13.000 First, I'd like to change gears for a moment and talk about Israel.

00:27:16.000 It is now May.

00:27:16.000 Exactly 80 years ago this month, the horrors of the Holocaust finally came to an end.

00:27:20.000 But did you know half of all Holocaust survivors actually still live in Israel?

00:27:24.000 Think about that for just a moment.

00:27:25.000 These elderly survivors who already endured unimaginable trauma decades ago, they're now facing renewed pain from the October 7th attacks.

00:27:31.000 What makes this even more heartbreaking is that thousands of elderly Jewish survivors in Israel are living below the poverty line.

00:27:36.000 There's simply not enough of a safety net for them, which is why I support the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

00:27:42.000 The fellowship provides a real lifeline to these precious individuals through hot meals and boxes filled with nutritious food.

00:27:47.000 For just 25 bucks, about the cost of a nice lunch.

00:27:50.000 You can help provide a food box for somebody who desperately needs it.

00:27:53.000 Or, if you're able to give more generously, $335 provides hot meals for an entire year.

00:27:57.000 If you're moved to help, it's easy to make a difference.

00:27:59.000 Just head on over to benforthefellowship.org.

00:28:01.000 That's all one word.

00:28:03.000 Your contribution will directly impact the lives of these survivors who've already been through so much.

00:28:07.000 Again, that's benforthefellowship.org to make a donation today.

00:28:11.000 Benforthefellowship.org.

00:28:13.000 Also, I've been traveling a lot.

00:28:15.000 That means it's hard to maintain my health.

00:28:17.000 Now, I gotta head to the gym.

00:28:18.000 Gotta spend time with the family.

00:28:19.000 When I was younger, I used to think I could just power right through on willpower and caffeine.

00:28:23.000 I learned pretty quickly, peak performance requires peak nutrition, and that means eating veggies.

00:28:27.000 But I hate veggies, so I'm thankful to have Balance of Nature, which fits right into even the busiest of days.

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00:29:15.000 Now, meanwhile, President Trump has also rejected the soft Biden-Obama approach to Iran.

00:29:21.000 So yesterday in Saudi Arabia, he said that he wouldn't hesitate to wield American power.

00:29:25.000 I will never hesitate to wield American power if it's necessary to defend the United States or to help defend our allies.

00:29:36.000 If you threaten America or our partners, however, then you'll be faced with overwhelming strength and devastating force.

00:29:43.000 We have things that you don't even know about.

00:29:48.000 And so then he slammed Iran and he said, listen, the choices for Iran to make, he said he slammed Iran, he said they're a terror-spreading entity.

00:29:56.000 Saudi, of course, agrees with this.

00:29:57.000 So this is a popular perspective in Saudi Arabia.

00:30:00.000 Our task is to unify against the few agents of chaos and terror that are left and that are holding hostage the dreams of millions and millions of great people.

00:30:11.000 The biggest and most destructive of these forces is the regime in Iran, which has caused unthinkable suffering in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, and beyond. 0.96

00:30:22.000 There could be no sharper contrast with the path you have pursued on the Arabian Peninsula than the disaster unfolding right across in the Gulf of Iran.

00:30:35.000 you Okay, so again, his views on Iran are correct. 0.94

00:30:41.000 He said the choices for Iran to make.

00:30:43.000 He said that if Iran doesn't get off the nuclear train, then there will be consequences.

00:30:48.000 But with that said, Iran can have a much brighter future but will never allow America and its allies to be threatened with terrorism or nuclear attack.

00:30:58.000 The choice is theirs to make.

00:31:00.000 We really want them to be a successful country.

00:31:03.000 We want them to be a wonderful, safe, great country.

00:31:07.000 But they cannot have a nuclear weapon.

00:31:09.000 This is an offer that will not last forever.

00:31:13.000 The time is right now for them to choose.

00:31:16.000 Right now, we don't have a lot of time to wait.

00:31:18.000 you So, again, that's fine.

00:31:23.000 He talked about maximum pressure there.

00:31:24.000 You'll notice that some of the language that has disappeared is the possibility of military action in that particular speech.

00:31:29.000 We'll see what President Trump means by that.

00:31:31.000 He also spoke about the Houthis.

00:31:33.000 Now, again, the American take on the Houthis, which is that the Houthis are no longer attacking American shipping in the Red Sea, and therefore the United States no longer has an interest.

00:31:41.000 First of all, the shipping in the Red Sea has not returned.

00:31:44.000 People are not sending their ships through the Red Sea because they don't trust that the Houthis aren't going to attack it.

00:31:49.000 Number two, the Houthis, while President Trump was in Saudi Arabia, fired multiple missiles over Saudi territory in order to fire them at Israel.

00:31:56.000 So again, the Houthis have not, in fact, been defanged in any really serious way.

00:32:01.000 But President Trump, again, this is sort of the balancing point that President Trump is at.

00:32:05.000 And it's sort of an inflection point for what Trump means by realism.

00:32:07.000 Because there are more interventionist strands of realism.

00:32:11.000 More hawkish strands, more dovish strands of realism.

00:32:14.000 Unclear how President Trump comes down on that question.

00:32:18.000 Here he was with regard to the Houthis.

00:32:20.000 Following repeated attacks on American ships and freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, the United States military launched more than 1,100 strikes on the Houthis in Yemen.

00:32:34.000 As a result, the Houthis agreed to stop.

00:32:38.000 They said, we don't want this anymore.

00:32:40.000 This was a swift, ferocious, decisive, and extremely successful use of military force.

00:32:46.000 Not that we wanted to do it, but they were shooting down ships.

00:32:49.000 They were shooting at you.

00:32:51.000 They were shooting at Saudi Arabia.

00:32:53.000 We don't want them shooting at Saudi Arabia if that's okay. 0.80

00:32:59.000 So again, he said he doesn't want them shooting at Saudi Arabia.

00:33:01.000 They literally fired missiles over Saudi Arabia.

00:33:03.000 I think the hope here.

00:33:05.000 Is that by arming Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia will then be given the capacity to go back into Yemen and push the Houthis out.

00:33:11.000 That would be part of the goal here in all of this.

00:33:13.000 Bottom line is that this is a triumphant trip from President Trump.

00:33:17.000 He ends up with a bunch of committed Saudi money into the United States, a warmer relationship with the Saudi government, which of course is quite good, better tech relations with the Saudis.

00:33:27.000 What I would love to see from President Trump and the American administration more generally, just the entire American government.

00:33:33.000 If we are going to be doing these sorts of things with Saudi Arabia or relieving sanctions on Syria or making deals in the Middle East, make the strings attach.

00:33:42.000 Make the strings attach.

00:33:44.000 That's what President Trump did in his first term.

00:33:46.000 And the reason UAE, Bahrain, Morocco ended up in the Abraham Accords is not because of pure goodwill for the United States or for Israel.

00:33:55.000 It's because the United States made strings attach to the joining of all of those things.

00:34:01.000 And that doesn't mean the United States has to act on behalf of Israel, obviously.

00:34:05.000 The United States should pursue its own interests.

00:34:07.000 But one of those interests would be a greater integration in the region because that means more commerce.

00:34:11.000 It means less conflict.

00:34:12.000 It means less military funding.

00:34:14.000 It means less weaponry in the region.

00:34:16.000 It means less proliferation in the region.

00:34:19.000 If you want a peaceful Middle East, the United States has always had a thumb on the scale.

00:34:23.000 Only President Trump has properly used that thumb in order to achieve peace in the Middle East.

00:34:28.000 He's the only president in my lifetime who truly did that.

00:34:31.000 And I'd love to see him pursue that same sort of policy in Saudi.

00:34:34.000 Meanwhile, President Trump headed on from Saudi Arabia to Qatar.

00:34:38.000 And again, here you get into some very dicey territory because Qatar is, in fact, a state sponsor of terrorism. 0.67

00:34:44.000 Qatar is the number one funder of Hamas.

00:34:46.000 The dirty little secret about the release of Yudan Alexander, which was done at the behest of the Qataris, is that if the Qataris wanted all hostages released, they could make that happen.

00:34:55.000 The thing the United States should have done under Joe Biden and should still do under President Trump is not engage in this warm, cozy relationship with the Qataris. 1.00

00:35:04.000 What the United States should say is all hostages out, Hamas gone or the airbase goes away.

00:35:08.000 The United States used to have its major Middle Eastern airbase in.

00:35:11.000 Saudi Arabia, the United States could do that again.

00:35:13.000 The Qataris have basically used the giant airbase that they pay for in Qatar as a way of getting the United States to treat their support for terrorism, for anti-American hatred via Al Jazeera and the Muslim Brotherhood with a wink and a nod. 0.81

00:35:26.000 The Qataris play both sides.

00:35:29.000 There's a fascinating piece from the free press.

00:35:32.000 It's a very deep, deeply researched piece called How Qatar Bought America, pointing out that Qatar, which is a tiny little nation, it's a postage stamp, has spent almost $100 billion to establish influence in Congress, universities, newsrooms, think tanks, and corporations.

00:35:49.000 They are not doing this out of the goodness of their heart.

00:35:51.000 And they have honeycombed both parties with their cash.

00:35:55.000 They've just slathered their cash over people in both parties.

00:35:59.000 According to the free press, that airplane deal, which I've criticized on the show, is giving of a $400 million Air Force One ready airplane.

00:36:08.000 It's not Air Force One ready, by the way.

00:36:09.000 We have to completely remake it.

00:36:10.000 We have to check it for Chinese tech.

00:36:11.000 We have to make sure there are no bugs in it.

00:36:13.000 It'll take years to retrofit that particular plane.

00:36:15.000 And then it will be in use for a fairly short period of time before it is given to the Trump presidential library, where presumably President Trump, I know he says he's not going to fly around on it.

00:36:24.000 It's not going to sit there.

00:36:25.000 Okay?

00:36:26.000 It just, it isn't.

00:36:28.000 According to the Free Press, the airplane deal was signed off on by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

00:36:33.000 She used to work at a Washington, D.C. lobbying firm that received $115,000 a month from Qatar to fight human trafficking, according to a 2019 contract reviewed by the Free Press.

00:36:43.000 Which, by the way, that is an absurdity.

00:36:45.000 Qatar engages in slave labor. 0.99

00:36:47.000 The idea that Qatar is an opponent of human trafficking?

00:36:49.000 Who do you think built the World Cup Stadium?

00:36:51.000 It's a major issue in Doha.

00:36:54.000 But it's not just the Attorney General.

00:36:55.000 Who's being paid over a million dollars a year to fight trafficking by Qatar. 0.64

00:37:02.000 President Trump's chief of staff, Susie Wiles, led a lobbying firm called Mercury Public Affairs when it was representing Qatar's embassy in Washington.

00:37:09.000 The FBI director, Kash Patel, worked as a consultant for Qatar, though he didn't register as a foreign agent.

00:37:13.000 We've already talked about Steve Witkoff, the special envoy to the Middle East, who has nothing but warm words for the Qataris.

00:37:18.000 And so he should, because in 2023, they bailed him out of a crappy real estate deal by buying out.

00:37:24.000 Park Lane Hotel for $623 million.

00:37:27.000 Meanwhile, as I've mentioned, the Trump Organization is planning a luxury golf resort near Doha in partnership with a Qatari government-backed company.

00:37:35.000 As I mentioned, the president's son, Donald Jr., is speaking next week at a Qatar Economic Forum.

00:37:40.000 Originally, the session was called Monetizing MAGA.

00:37:43.000 Omid Malik of 1789 Capital, whose partner at 1789 Capital, was also supposed to speak there.

00:37:49.000 Qatar, of course, is a terror supporter, as I mentioned yesterday. 0.94

00:37:52.000 They support the Muslim Brotherhood. 0.94

00:37:53.000 They support Hamas. 0.93

00:37:54.000 They used to support the Taliban.

00:37:56.000 They've cheer-led pretty much every form of radical Islamic terrorism in the entire region. 0.96

00:38:02.000 So where did they spend the money?

00:38:04.000 They spend the money everywhere.

00:38:05.000 If you don't like what Qatar is doing in American universities, and they are literally the number one spender at American universities, why? 0.74

00:38:11.000 You tell me.

00:38:12.000 Why is a tiny, little Middle Eastern dictatorship that is rich in oil expending tens of billions of dollars On American college campuses, explain.

00:38:24.000 The only reason is for propaganda purposes and to infiltrate these universities and put their messages out there.

00:38:30.000 According to the Free Press, Qatar has spent, over the course of the last few years, in the United States, $29 billion on weapons purchases, $30 billion on business investments, $20 billion on energy plants and export facilities, $6.3 billion on colleges and universities.

00:38:51.000 $224 million on lobbying and public relations.

00:38:55.000 The influence built by Qatar in the United States says the free press has no modern parallel. 0.57

00:39:00.000 Whether compared with large American companies seeking to influence antitrust policy, energy firms trying to win new drilling rights, or other foreign governments aiming to shape U.S. policy or shield themselves from it.

00:39:09.000 For comparison, Qatar spent three times more in the United States than Israel did on lobbyist public relations advisors and other foreign agents in 2021.

00:39:16.000 Qatar spent almost two-thirds as much as China.

00:39:20.000 Qatar is a country with a population of 2.6 million people.

00:39:24.000 China is a country with a population of over a billion people.

00:39:27.000 And they spent two-thirds as much as China.

00:39:29.000 Why?

00:39:29.000 Because they're a stand-in for terrorists all over the region.

00:39:31.000 They're a clearinghouse for terrorism all over the region.

00:39:36.000 Qatar's not doing this for free.

00:39:37.000 And just as the president should be attaching strings to things the United States does for other countries, if you think Qatar is not attaching strings and they are doing stuff for just the bleeps and the giggles of it, they're doing it out of the kindness of their heart. 0.79

00:39:48.000 That's a ridiculous notion.

00:39:50.000 Of course Qatar is not doing it that way. 0.93

00:39:52.000 By the way, you know who knows that?

00:39:54.000 Other Arab states.

00:39:54.000 In 2017, according to the Free Press, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Arab states launched a formal economic siege of Qatar, accusing the country of supporting terrorism and extremism and threatening the stability of their own regimes.

00:40:06.000 They demanded that Doha end its support for the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Jazeera.

00:40:10.000 The Alfani family, which runs Qatar, saw the siege as an existential threat to their rule.

00:40:15.000 The operation included attempts to sever Doha's external sea and air routes, There were rumblings of a Saudi cross-border ground invasion.

00:40:21.000 Qatari nationals worried about food shortages, necessitating emergency supplies from Iran at one point.

00:40:26.000 So what did the al-Fanis do? 0.97

00:40:27.000 They started spraying the cash everywhere.

00:40:29.000 The U.S. government found that in 2021 alone, Qatar employed 35 registered lobbyists and public relations firms at a total cost of more than $51 million.

00:40:39.000 In comparison, the total expenditures for the UAE were $35 million for Saudi, $25 million.

00:40:46.000 So the free press sifted through every single filing it could find since 2017 by lobbyists and public relations firms.

00:40:51.000 Qatar has spent $225 million since then.

00:40:57.000 And that's just part of the picture.

00:40:58.000 Because according to lawyers, governments are not required to tell the DOJ how much they spend on things like think tanks or hosting U.S. political and congressional delegations.

00:41:06.000 In 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported.

00:41:08.000 That Qatar targeted a list of 250 people close to Trump aimed at, quote, getting into his head as much as possible in the words of a lobbyist involved in the effort.

00:41:16.000 And let's be clear, I mean, President Trump is very, very warm toward Qatar these days, for sure.

00:41:22.000 Here is President Trump just yesterday.

00:41:23.000 He refuses to give up on this idea of the Qataris giving them 400 million.

00:41:28.000 Okay, they say that he's giving it to the Air Force.

00:41:30.000 If it goes to your presidential library after, and that's a condition of the transfer of the jet, yes, it has something to do with you.

00:41:35.000 It's not just a magical gift to the DOD.

00:41:38.000 Some people say, oh, you shouldn't accept gifts for the country.

00:41:43.000 My attitude is, why wouldn't I accept a gift?

00:41:46.000 We're giving to everybody else.

00:41:47.000 Why wouldn't I accept a gift?

00:41:48.000 Because it's going to be a couple of years, I think, before the Boeings are finished. 0.98

00:41:52.000 And they'll be wonderful when they're finished.

00:41:58.000 So the answer is, you wouldn't accept a gift if it is a Trojan horse, and inside of it are enemy soldiers.

00:42:03.000 And that is what Qatar is doing with all of its money.

00:42:06.000 That's what it is doing.

00:42:07.000 Great example of how Qatar pays people off, according to the Free Press.

00:42:13.000 Over the past decade, there's a man named Elliot Broidy.

00:42:15.000 He used to be the finance chair of the Republican National Committee.

00:42:19.000 Broidy used his connections to try to expose Qatar. 0.52

00:42:23.000 He helped pay for conferences at think tanks like Hudson Institute and Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

00:42:28.000 And he solicited anti-Qatar opinion articles from American diplomats and scholars.

00:42:32.000 In 2018, he accused Qatar of engineering a computer hack of his devices.

00:42:39.000 So Broidy spent a bunch of money targeting Qatar, and then he went completely quiet.

00:42:42.000 After secret talks in Qatar and Europe that included Broidy and senior aides to Qatar's ruling Alfani family, he agreed last year to a settlement that paid him more than $150 million, according to people intimately familiar with the deal.

00:42:54.000 He agreed to abandon his legal fight and any funding of efforts aimed at tarnishing Qatar.

00:42:58.000 This sort of stuff apparently is very common.

00:43:01.000 Actually, the free press name checks Lindsey Graham as a person who may be associated with Qatar.

00:43:08.000 Qatar, his perspective on Qatar shifted.

00:43:11.000 So, for example, he had ripped into radical Islam for a long time, but in December 2023, a couple months after Hamas invaded Israel, he showed nothing but admiration and respect to Qatar.

00:43:24.000 So the Free Press says, back in 2018, when Graham was known more for his vigorous support of the Iraq war and friendship with John McCain, Qatar began investing hundreds of millions of dollars into Graham's home state of South Carolina, including via Boeing, Graham and South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster met with leaders of Qatar's sovereign wealth fund to discuss additional investments in the state.

00:43:45.000 Charleston and Doha became sister cities.

00:43:47.000 Qatar's embassy donated $100,000 to Charleston for COVID aid relief.

00:43:51.000 Qatar, by the way, says it has invested more than $21 billion in Texas and $8 billion along the Gulf Coast.

00:43:58.000 On the day of the 2023 Hamas attack, Graham took a phone call from Andrew King, a former deputy chief of staff, to Graham, whose firm earns $50,000 a month.

00:44:06.000 As a lobbyist for Qatar's embassy, In Washington, and then they met seven more times by the end of December.

00:44:13.000 Al Jazeera is a massive influence campaign that is run by Qatar.

00:44:17.000 And they pay an enormous number of big-name people in the United States in order to push their propaganda.

00:44:25.000 Those people include, for example, apparently, Ali Velshi.

00:44:30.000 In May 2024, Ali Velshi interviewed America's ambassador to Qatar, Timmy Davis, at the Global Security Forum, co-hosted by the Qatari government and the Sufan Center, a global research and events organization headed by a former FBI counterterrorism expert, Ali Sufan.

00:44:44.000 Velshi, who used to be at Al Jazeera America.

00:44:46.000 Again, this sort of stuff is really...

00:45:04.000 When I said skeezy earlier this week, This sort of stuff is more than skeezy.

00:45:08.000 Qatar is doing this sort of stuff because they want influence.

00:45:12.000 That is why Qatar has funded universities and colleges in the United States to the tune of $6.3 billion, the highest number for any nation, not close.

00:45:22.000 You think they're doing this out of the goodness of their heart?

00:45:26.000 They're a terrorist-supporting country, obviously.

00:45:29.000 And the fact that the United States, the Trump administration, continues to treat them as an honest broker is wrong.

00:45:35.000 It is not true.

00:45:36.000 And it's from people on both sides.

00:45:38.000 Again, Democrats are jumping on the jet question, but that's not really the question.

00:45:41.000 The question here is, what is Qatar doing at the university?

00:45:43.000 You can't say it's good for Qatar to fund our universities, but bad for them to give President Trump a jet.

00:45:47.000 Both things are not good.

00:45:49.000 Both things are very bad. 0.96

00:45:50.000 Qatar is a cancer from within the Western coalition. 1.00

00:45:55.000 That is what they are. 0.99

00:45:56.000 And pretending otherwise is a mistake.

00:45:58.000 Meanwhile, again, as I've said, it does not benefit President Trump to continue to take this jet.

00:46:03.000 It just doesn't.

00:46:05.000 It's not just people like me saying this.

00:46:07.000 Obviously, there are Republican senators who are going to be up for re-election, who are going to be asked questions about all this.

00:46:11.000 Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that there are lots of issues associated with that offer I think need to be further talked about.

00:46:18.000 Senator Rand Paul said, I think the jet probably sends the wrong signal to people.

00:46:21.000 I don't like the look or the appearance of it.

00:46:22.000 I would hope he rejects it.

00:46:24.000 Senator Cruz noted Qatar's financial support for Hamas and also that Qatar backed Hezbollah.

00:46:30.000 He said, I think the plane poses significant espionage and surveillance problems.

00:46:34.000 We'll see how it plays out.

00:46:36.000 Again, this is going to be a problem.

00:46:38.000 It will.

00:46:38.000 And Democrats are going to make hay out of it.

00:46:40.000 Apparently, Democrats are planning to fly some flags in Florida, near Mar-a-Lago, calling it Qatar-a-Lago.

00:46:47.000 I mean, honestly, it'd be political malpractice for them not to jump on this, considering they basically have no other ground to attack President Trump.

00:46:54.000 Hakeem Jeffries is hopefully...

00:46:56.000 With stars in his eyes, attacking the $400 million jet quote-unquote gift.

00:47:02.000 A $400 million flying palace is an unconstitutional gift to this president or any president if it is not explicitly approved by the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate.

00:47:24.000 Okay, so by the way, that is a thing that actually happened with the Statue of Liberty.

00:47:27.000 So people saying this is like the Statue of Liberty, a few differences.

00:47:30.000 One, the president couldn't personally fly the Statue of Liberty.

00:47:34.000 Two, it actually did have to be approved by Congress.

00:47:37.000 Three, it was from an allied country, France, not a country that supports terrorism, Qatar.

00:47:42.000 So a few differences.

00:47:44.000 Also, the Statue of Liberty did not have surveillance technology, probably honeycombed throughout the technology.

00:47:49.000 On the most sensitive security site in America.

00:47:52.000 So there are a few differences that I will note there.

00:47:54.000 Chuck Schumer is using this as an opportunity to hold up President Trump's Justice Department nominees, according to the New York Times.

00:47:59.000 Senator Schumer, who is the Democratic minority leader, intends on Tuesday to put a hold on all Justice Department political appointees awaiting Senate confirmation until he gets more information on plans by President Trump to accept a luxury airliner from Qatar.

00:48:12.000 Schumer said on the Senate floor, it's not just naked corruption, it's a grave national security threat.

00:48:18.000 And he's expected to call on the Justice Department's Foreign Agents Registration Act unit to report on any activities by Qatari agents in the United States that could benefit the president or any of his family's businesses.

00:48:27.000 This is why, again, you've got to stay away from the shady activity because Democrats are going to make hay out of it for no other reason.

00:48:35.000 Now, I have moral objections, but put aside the moral objections.

00:48:38.000 Just for practicality's sake, if you want President Trump to succeed, this is not helpful in doing all of that.

00:48:43.000 Democrats, meanwhile, also jumping on the Trump family's crypto investments.

00:48:48.000 According to Axios, Senate Democrats are asking President Trump to divest from his own cryptocurrency empire as he embarks on a Middle East trip this week.

00:48:56.000 Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen urged Trump on Monday to divest from his stablecoin before reaching any agreements with foreign governments on his trip abroad.

00:49:03.000 Why?

00:49:04.000 Well, because the New York Times reported earlier this month that the Trump family members could profit from $2 billion worth of their stablecoins that would be used for a foreign transaction involving an Abu Dhabi investment fund.

00:49:14.000 Again, there are all sorts of questions about crypto and world liberty financial and the Trump family and foreigners being able to buy that sort of crypto, influence operations and all the rest.

00:49:24.000 Democrats are going to make hay out of this because, again, it would be political malpractice for them not to do so.

00:49:29.000 Okay, meanwhile, in other news from the Middle East, yesterday it appeared that Israel killed Yahya Sinwar's brother.

00:49:36.000 Sinwar, of course, was the leader of Hamas.

00:49:38.000 After Israel assassinated Yahya Sinwar, They apparently took out Mohammed Sinwar, who is the new leader of Hamas.

00:49:44.000 It was all running in the family.

00:49:46.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, they launched a strike.

00:49:51.000 It hit an underground site near a European hospital.

00:49:54.000 It's called European Hospital in Khan Yunus because this is where terrorists hide.

00:49:58.000 This again is why it is so absurd for the French government to yell at the Israelis about, oh my God, you're attacking your civilians.

00:50:04.000 They're not civilian sites when you use them as terror bases.

00:50:06.000 If you use a hospital as a terror base, it is now a terror base, not a hospital.

00:50:10.000 This is why Mohamed Sinwar hid there.

00:50:12.000 The unspoken acknowledgement, by the way, that the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, are actually targeted and moral lies in the fact that the Palestinians are constantly hiding beneath civilian sites. 0.98

00:50:23.000 You know who doesn't care about hiding beneath civilian sites? 0.98

00:50:26.000 Terrorists in Chechnya.

00:50:27.000 You know why?

00:50:28.000 Because they know that Vladimir Putin is just going to blow away their families, everybody around them.

00:50:31.000 They don't care.

00:50:32.000 Vladimir Putin does not care. 0.93

00:50:34.000 So if terrorists in Chechnya hide behind their kids, Putin just blows away the kids. 0.59

00:50:37.000 The reason that terrorists in Gaza hide behind children is because they know that Israel is reluctant to kill children.

00:50:43.000 They know that Israel is reluctant to hit so-called civilian sites.

00:50:46.000 That is the specific reason they do it.

00:50:50.000 Acknowledging the innate morality of the IDF is the key to understanding why Hamas is hiding in these places, obviously.

00:50:58.000 So, footage is available of the strike.

00:51:01.000 It could take days for Israel to determine whether the strike was successful in killing Senwar.

00:51:06.000 But it's very likely that Sinwar is dead.

00:51:08.000 They blew a crater in the middle of the street.

00:51:11.000 They targeted the tunnel.

00:51:12.000 This could lead, presumably, to a broader conversation because if you've defenestrated the entire leadership of Hamas, then basically there's no chance that Hamas is going to lead the Gaza Strip.

00:51:21.000 So hopefully this leads to a faster off-ramp, including the complete destruction of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

00:51:29.000 Meanwhile, in other foreign policy news, direct talks have now been set in Turkey.

00:51:34.000 Now, originally, Vladimir Putin said that he was going to go to Turkey and negotiate with Vladimir Zelensky.

00:51:40.000 That was something that he had said he was going to do.

00:51:42.000 President Trump then encouraged Zelensky to put aside his demands for a 30-day ceasefire in order to have those direct talks.

00:51:48.000 Zelensky said yes, and now it appears that Putin is not actually going to show up.

00:51:51.000 So, shock of shocks, it turns out that Putin is slow playing this thing, figuring that President Trump is going to withdraw support from Ukraine, and then he'll just be able to roll the tanks right through Kyiv.

00:52:00.000 That is the game.

00:52:01.000 It is a slow play.

00:52:03.000 And again, this is something the Trump administration needs to watch out for.

00:52:06.000 Because there are a few different things that help America's enemies.

00:52:09.000 One of them is just slow-playing America.

00:52:12.000 This is what Iran is doing. 0.99

00:52:13.000 Iran has no intentions of giving up its nuclear programs.

00:52:16.000 None, zero, zip, zilch.

00:52:18.000 They are slow-playing Special Envoy Steve Whitcoff right now to give them time to rebuild their air defenses, to give themselves time to rebuild their ballistic missile supply, and to allow them to move closer to the development of a nuclear weapon.

00:52:29.000 That is what they are doing.

00:52:30.000 Iran can win in two ways.

00:52:31.000 One, a bad deal cut with the United States.

00:52:33.000 And two, no deal cut with the United States, but a lengthening of the time period for their nuclear program to gain steam.

00:52:41.000 Putin seems to be doing the same thing with regard to Ukraine.

00:52:44.000 He's slow playing the negotiations in the hope that President Trump and the administration will basically get bored and walk away.

00:52:49.000 And here's the problem in Ukraine.

00:52:51.000 The Europeans are ready to pick up the ball, spend more money, give more military weaponry.

00:52:55.000 I've been in Ukraine.

00:52:56.000 I've talked to people who have fought in the army over there.

00:52:59.000 The Ukrainian weaponry is largely reliant on American munitions.

00:53:03.000 You can't just switch those over overnight to European munitions.

00:53:06.000 It takes a period of time to switch those over to European-made armaments.

00:53:10.000 If the United States stops supplying, there will be a gap in the armaments.

00:53:13.000 If there's a gap in the armaments, Russia can steamroll. 0.63

00:53:16.000 That is what Putin presumably is hoping for.

00:53:18.000 So, going to Turkey will be Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoys Steve Witkoff and Keith Kellogg.

00:53:26.000 Putin apparently will not be going.

00:53:29.000 Zelensky will be going.

00:53:31.000 So again, Putin had offered direct negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Turkey for Thursday.

00:53:36.000 He made the move, even though Russian pundits have been pushing a narrative for weeks that talks with Kiev are not possible because of Zelensky's supposed lack of legitimacy.

00:53:44.000 It'll be interesting to see whether or not anything comes of these talks.

00:53:51.000 Again, I think that it is highly unlikely that anything comes of these talks because given the fact that Russia's innate goal is the destruction, Of the Ukrainians as an independent polity, that their goal at the very least is to set up some sort of puppet regime, I say Belarus, in this region, that the notion that you're going to be able, I think, to negotiate a deal there is lackluster.

00:54:13.000 With that said, obviously the United States has an interest in trying to promote that as much as humanly possible.

00:54:19.000 Okay, meanwhile, when it comes to the economy, obviously President Trump getting off.

00:54:24.000 The Schneid with regard to the tariff war moving away from the 145% tariffs that the Treasury Secretary said were unsustainable on China, moving toward what will be probably a 30% tariff, moving the rest of the world to a 10%.

00:54:38.000 That's better than it was.

00:54:39.000 It's not as good as it could be.

00:54:41.000 It is still the truth that the overall tariff rate, the average tariff rate after all of this, is still going to be significantly higher than it was before.

00:54:52.000 The tariff framework in the United States remains as high as it has been since the 1930s.

00:54:58.000 And the current tariff rate on average will remain somewhere in the 13% range.

00:55:05.000 Now, the average tariff rate until all this happened was much closer to zero.

00:55:09.000 So this is why people are still worried about inflation.

00:55:12.000 Despite the fact that the CPI came in lower than expected, people are still waiting for the inflationary policies to actually hit.

00:55:22.000 Basically, the tariff war was the old Yiddish joke.

00:55:25.000 There's an old Yiddish joke about a man and his wife.

00:55:27.000 He's not getting along with his wife.

00:55:28.000 So he goes to the rabbi and he says, Rabbi, I'm not getting along with my wife.

00:55:31.000 It's just loud in my house.

00:55:32.000 It's dirty in my house.

00:55:34.000 I can't deal with it.

00:55:35.000 And so the rabbi says, I want you to take a chicken and put it in your house, a live chicken and put it in your house.

00:55:39.000 And he says, okay.

00:55:40.000 I mean, it doesn't seem great, but okay.

00:55:42.000 He's the rabbi.

00:55:43.000 He takes a chicken, puts it in his house.

00:55:45.000 A week later, he goes back to the rabbi.

00:55:47.000 He says, Rabbi, it's unthinkably bad in my house.

00:55:49.000 I've got problems with my wife.

00:55:50.000 It's dirty.

00:55:51.000 It's loud.

00:55:52.000 And now I've got a chicken in there.

00:55:53.000 The rabbi says, I need you to take two goats into your house. 0.94

00:55:55.000 So the man takes two goats and puts them in his house.

00:55:57.000 And he comes back a week later and says, Rabbi, I can't deal with this.

00:56:00.000 I'm going to lose my mind.

00:56:01.000 This is crazy.

00:56:01.000 I've got a chicken and two goats and my wife and it's dirty and it's just terrible and loud and awful in the house.

00:56:06.000 And the rabbi says, I need you to take a cow and put it in the house.

00:56:09.000 And so the man says, all right, he puts the cow in the house.

00:56:12.000 Comes back a week later and says, Rabbi, it's awful.

00:56:15.000 I can't handle this at all.

00:56:17.000 I'm committing suicide. 0.93

00:56:18.000 This is awful. 1.00

00:56:19.000 The rabbi says, okay, now it's time to take all the animals out of your house. 0.98

00:56:21.000 The chicken, the two goats, the cow, take them all out of your house.

00:56:25.000 The man does.

00:56:26.000 A week later, he comes to the rabbi.

00:56:27.000 He says, rabbi, I gotta tell you, it's so quiet in my house.

00:56:30.000 It's amazing in my house.

00:56:32.000 My wife and I are getting along for the first.

00:56:33.000 That's basically Trump's tariff war.

00:56:35.000 But Trump decided to stack on what was a good economy that he himself was building, a giant tariff war, and then he removed most of it.

00:56:44.000 The difference is the chicken's still in the house.

00:56:46.000 So, the chicken still being in the house means that inflation is not yet dead.

00:56:50.000 It is still a serious concern.

00:56:53.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, inflation was relatively mild in April, but economists said tariffs will end a recent lull and push up prices in the coming months.

00:57:02.000 The Consumer Price Index rose a seasonally adjusted 0.2% in April, according to the Labor Department.

00:57:08.000 Analysts said this was good news because it didn't reveal bad news.

00:57:11.000 And by the way, this seems to be...

00:57:12.000 The sort of way that we are now viewing how the markets work is that if it's not bad news, it's good news.

00:57:19.000 Well, actually, if it's not bad news, it's just news.

00:57:21.000 There's a difference between good news and bad news.

00:57:23.000 And just to point out the obvious, when President Trump took office, the stock market was at 45,000.

00:57:30.000 The Dow Jones Industrial Average is at 45,000 or so, 44,600.

00:57:33.000 Today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is at 42,220.

00:57:40.000 That is not growth.

00:57:41.000 It's not a massive dump, but it's not growth.

00:57:43.000 And what you would like to see is actual growth.

00:57:46.000 You want to see that number going up and to the right.

00:57:49.000 If you had said to me when President Trump took office, at five months into his administration, the stock market would essentially be flat.

00:57:56.000 I'd say that's kind of weird.

00:57:57.000 I mean, President Trump is a better president economically than Joe Biden.

00:58:00.000 Really, it should be going up and to the right.

00:58:03.000 So removing most of the bad policy, but leaving some of the bad policy is actually not going to be, I think, enough.

00:58:10.000 To forestall the possibility of some sort of stagnation, which is why the tax plan becomes so important.

00:58:15.000 By the way, I think the tax plan is still baked into the stock market.

00:58:17.000 I think that the stocks are already assuming the tax plan will get done.

00:58:21.000 So I don't think after the tax plan gets done, there will be a major stock market increase.

00:58:25.000 We need a bunch of things to happen economically.

00:58:28.000 We need massive deregulation.

00:58:30.000 We need true AI breakthroughs.

00:58:32.000 And we need better free trade agreements with all these countries that we are currently slamming with 10% tariffs when we are close to zero with most of them.

00:58:39.000 A moment ago.

00:58:41.000 So we are not out of the woods yet.

00:58:42.000 And the sort of early triumphalism, again, just I'm going to warn, there's a difference between avoiding the really, really bad thing.

00:58:48.000 There's a big difference between not having the cow, two goats, and a chicken in your house and having nothing in your house.

00:58:57.000 Right now, we still have a chicken.

00:58:59.000 The chicken is still making trouble.

00:59:01.000 That's not wonderful.

00:59:01.000 We need to fix that.

00:59:03.000 Well, joining us online to discuss President Trump's latest economic move with regard to big pharma is Tevi Troy.

00:59:09.000 He is a bestselling presidential historian and former White House aide, as well as the deputy secretary of health.

00:59:14.000 And of course, he has a brand new book out called The Power and the Money.

00:59:17.000 The epic clashes between American titans of industry and commanders in shape.

00:59:20.000 chief, which is a fascinating read, especially given the close relationship between President Trump and business leaders today.

00:59:26.000 Tevi Troy, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:59:27.000 Really appreciate it.

00:59:28.000 Ben, thanks.

00:59:29.000 And thanks for reading my book.

00:59:30.000 So let's talk about President Trump's announcement with regard to big pharma.

00:59:36.000 So he had said this was sort of the biggest announcement of his presidency so far.

00:59:40.000 It is a unilateral attempt to lower pharmaceutical prices by doing what he calls most favored nation status.

00:59:47.000 The idea being that Medicaid should basically pay the lowest price that anyone is paying The case that I've been making is that that is the wrong way to approach this issue.

01:00:00.000 But the reality is that if you actually want big pharma to charge lower prices to Americans, what you actually ought to do is use the kind of tariff measures that President Trump is using on foreign countries to get those foreign countries to pay their fair share.

01:00:12.000 Basically, all of these nationalized health care systems.

01:00:14.000 Yeah, Ben, that is exactly right.

01:00:30.000 And I always get nervous when I hear the phrase, Unilaterally set prices because that's government setting prices rather than the market setting prices.

01:00:37.000 And as you know, well, the market is the best mechanism for setting prices.

01:00:40.000 But you're right.

01:00:41.000 The Europeans artificially push down American prices because they don't want to pay their full share for pharmaceutical products. 0.84

01:00:48.000 And that does leave American consumers fitting the bill.

01:00:53.000 Imposing price controls here doesn't solve the problem.

01:00:55.000 What we should do is, yes, encourage the European countries to.

01:00:58.000 Pay their fair share.

01:01:00.000 But also we should do FDA regulatory reform so it doesn't cost over $3 billion to do a new drug.

01:01:05.000 We also need to do tort reform.

01:01:07.000 The trial lawyers extort hundreds of billions of dollars from these pharmaceutical companies and that gets priced into the products.

01:01:13.000 So there's a lot of other factors here besides just what President Trump is talking about.

01:01:20.000 Dr. Troy, one of the things that I'm worried about is when you look at Make America Healthy Again, which has a lot of great things attached to it, the idea that we should look at our food supply or that we should be more careful about our own nutrition, one of the problems with Maha is its sort of orientation against pharma in general, this idea that big pharma is the enemy, and therefore actually trial lawsuits are good, that it is an active good to basically sue pharma all the time or make it more difficult to bring drugs to market, not make it easier to bring drugs.

01:01:48.000 I think people don't understand as a general rule, why are pharmaceuticals so expensive in general?

01:01:54.000 Non-generics. 0.98

01:01:55.000 Generics in the United States are actually cheaper than they are anywhere else in the world.

01:01:57.000 But non-generics in the United States, brand new drugs that are produced, are extremely expensive.

01:02:02.000 Can you explain the process for why it is so darned expensive for a new treatment to be provided to the market?

01:02:10.000 Yeah, it's a really great question.

01:02:11.000 And there's a lot of really great points you made, including the fact that generics are indeed cheaper here.

01:02:16.000 It is incredibly expensive to bring products to market.

01:02:18.000 The FDA has very rigorous testing, but also a huge skepticism towards the pharma industry, which makes it hard to get products through.

01:02:26.000 The trial lawyers then sue the pants off these companies.

01:02:30.000 And this is part of a 30-plus year war that I talk about in Commentary magazine, where the trial lawyers and Hollywood and the Democratic Party, and now unfortunately the Republican Party, are constantly demonizing big pharma, imposing new restrictions on them.

01:02:44.000 doing no lawsuits on them, making them the bad guys in all the movies.

01:02:48.000 And that makes them unpopular.

01:02:49.000 It makes their products more expensive.

01:02:51.000 And it also makes it less likely that young, smart Americans are going to go into the pharmaceutical industry.

01:02:56.000 I think one of the things people need to keep in mind is that it costs billions of dollars to successfully bring a drug to market.

01:03:05.000 That is not counting the hundreds of billions of dollars that are spent on drugs that never make it to market.

01:03:09.000 A huge percentage of R&D is done on...

01:03:13.000 Pharmaceutical products and drugs and biotech that will never make it all the way into a patient because there's so many things that are tried and you have to follow every pathway when you're doing that in order to determine whether the thing is even going to be effective or not.

01:03:25.000 You have to go through multiple rounds of trials.

01:03:27.000 You have to get through four phases from the FDA in order to get actual FDA approval.

01:03:31.000 Most drugs fail out at phase one or phase two.

01:03:34.000 And it's basically a winnowing process, which is why so few drugs actually...

01:03:37.000 How many drugs actually make it to market?

01:03:44.000 The best year we've ever had was the FDA approving about 50 products in one year.

01:03:49.000 Usually it's closer to about 30 products in a year.

01:03:52.000 And just think about all the companies and all the potential products and all the potential sicknesses and illnesses that can be treated.

01:03:57.000 So it's very hard.

01:03:58.000 It is a huge winnowing process.

01:04:00.000 And also this gets into your expertise, Ben, about Hollywood and the culture.

01:04:03.000 It creates this blockbuster effect.

01:04:05.000 Where you don't want to do a single or a double.

01:04:08.000 Every drug has to be a home run in order to justify the massive costs.

01:04:12.000 So that's why every drug they put out is the equivalent of a Marvel movie.

01:04:16.000 And if you do have a small disease called an orphan disease, the drug companies barely even bother to make products for those types of illnesses.

01:04:26.000 And the other thing that people ought to keep in mind is that the original price of these pharmaceuticals when they're brought onto market is really, really high.

01:04:32.000 But the whole point is that over time, as they move toward generic status, The price decreases.

01:04:36.000 There's competition because the price is so high to undercut the people who did the R&D by bringing in competitive drugs that might be changed in a way that doesn't infringe on the patent.

01:04:44.000 And then how long is the patent period for brand new drugs in the United States?

01:04:49.000 I think it's about 15 years, but that counts once you declare the patent and it doesn't count all the FDA testing.

01:04:55.000 So there's a whole bunch of things that are happening while your patent clock is ticking.

01:04:59.000 And once that clock ticks down, then, as you say, the generic is out there on the market and undercutting you on price.

01:05:06.000 And I'm for generics.

01:05:07.000 I think we should have generics after the patent window expires.

01:05:09.000 But it does make it put a lot of pressure on the pharmaceutical companies to get as much to recoup their investment in the period in which they have the patent still in effect.

01:05:19.000 Thank you.

01:05:21.000 So we're speaking with Dr. Tevi Troy, Senior Fellow at Bipartisan Policy Center and the former Deputy Secretary of Health.

01:05:28.000 How effective is President Trump's EO actually going to be?

01:05:30.000 Presumably, it would take some congressional action to actually effectuate something like this.

01:05:34.000 Can Medicaid, just because the president says so, start using MFN status?

01:05:38.000 And also, what will be the result for patients?

01:05:40.000 Because I would assume that many pharma companies, if they are forced to deliver these drugs at below market prices to Medicaid, are just going to stop delivering the drugs in the same way that many doctors no longer take Medicaid if the reimbursement rates are too low.

01:05:53.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.

01:05:54.000 We are going to see less innovation, fewer products making it to market, maybe fewer markets, or maybe fewer products being available in America.

01:06:01.000 That's what happened in Europe.

01:06:02.000 Europe, because of their price controls, yes, there are lower prices, but they have fewer products available and they have a much less robust biotechnology sector.

01:06:11.000 So there are advantages to our more free market way of pricing, even though the prices are higher here.

01:06:17.000 I do fear that President Trump's executive order is more just a statement.

01:06:25.000 Well, that is Dr. Tevi Troy.

01:06:43.000 You can check out his brand new book, The Power and the Money, The Epic Clashes Between American Titans of Industry and Commanders-in-Chief.

01:06:49.000 That's available right now.

01:06:50.000 Dr. Troy, I really appreciate it.

01:06:51.000 Thanks for having me.

01:06:53.000 Meanwhile, in the other big news, again, it's amazing this is news, but Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson from Axios have a brand new book called Original Sin.

01:07:02.000 I plan on having Jake on the show to talk about it.

01:07:06.000 This book reveals everything that we all knew.

01:07:10.000 And so I understand the upset and the dyspepsia and the heartburn and all the rest, the indigestion.

01:07:15.000 And many of us on the right have toward the existence of a book like this because we all knew.

01:07:20.000 Everybody knew in 2020 that Joe Biden was feeble mentally, that he was ailing already.

01:07:25.000 And so this idea that, oh my gosh, we were bamboozled.

01:07:28.000 Okay, but to be fair to the authors, to be fair, I'm doing my best here.

01:07:32.000 To be fair to the authors, I will say that there's a difference between generically knowing there's a problem with the President of the United States and the stories in this book, which are astonishingly bad.

01:07:41.000 Truly, truly bad.

01:07:42.000 Now, should the media have been more skeptical of the administration?

01:07:45.000 Absolutely.

01:07:47.000 Absolutely.

01:07:48.000 And I would bet...

01:07:49.000 That Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson would admit as much, that they themselves should have been more skeptical of the White House's claims with regard to the health of the President of the United States.

01:07:58.000 Again, giving everybody the benefit of the doubt.

01:07:59.000 But the stories here are really, really amazing.

01:08:03.000 Apparently, according to the book, Biden's aides were so concerned by his perceived decline, they started scrambling for ideas.

01:08:11.000 Apparently, his spine was in particular decline.

01:08:14.000 He couldn't basically walk.

01:08:16.000 So, aides discussed the possibility of putting him in a wheelchair after the election.

01:08:21.000 They knew that they couldn't do it before the election.

01:08:22.000 They thought, maybe if he wins, we'll put him in a wheelchair.

01:08:27.000 And there are a bunch of other revelations in this new book, Original Sin.

01:08:32.000 First, Biden's top aides tried to hide him from their own staff.

01:08:36.000 They didn't want it getting out that Joe Biden was as bad as he was.

01:08:40.000 One person identified by Tapper and Thompson as a senior aide who quit the White House, according to Mediaite, told the authors, quote, we attempted to shield him from his own staff.

01:08:48.000 So many people didn't realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023.

01:08:51.000 three.

01:08:52.000 Now again, we all knew.

01:08:55.000 With that said, I still think that most people were at least a little shocked by the extent of the fact that his brain was gone in that debate with President Trump, which is why he had to drop out of the race.

01:09:05.000 The unnamed aide said, I love Joe Biden.

01:09:07.000 When it comes to decency, there are few in politics like him still.

01:09:09.000 It was a disservice to the country and to the family and to the party for his family and advisors to allow him to run again.

01:09:15.000 Now, the dirty secret behind all of this, obviously, is that the Democratic Party did not want, for any reason whatsoever, to leave Kamala Harris as the nominee.

01:09:24.000 That is the actual, real, buried story lead.

01:09:26.000 That's the buried lead here.

01:09:28.000 The reason that you prop up a dead person is because you know the person who's behind the dead person is even worse than the dead guy.

01:09:34.000 The reason you pop L-sit on that horse is because you ain't got nobody else out there.

01:09:37.000 And that is the dirty secret.

01:09:39.000 Everyone knew Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate and that she was a joke, which, of course, she ended up being. 1.00

01:09:44.000 David Plouffe was a top Kamala Harris campaign advisor. 0.81

01:09:47.000 He said, we got so screwed by Biden as a party.

01:09:50.000 He said the truncated campaign was an effing nightmare. 0.97

01:09:52.000 And he said, it's all Biden.

01:09:53.000 He totally effed us.

01:09:54.000 But that's not true.

01:09:55.000 If that campaign had lasted longer, it would have been worse for Kamala Harris, not better. 1.00

01:09:58.000 It was only the extreme brevity of the campaign that gave her a shot.

01:10:02.000 If the campaign had been two weeks long, she might be president. 0.97

01:10:05.000 Because in those first two weeks, you remember the vibes?

01:10:07.000 Remember the vibe shift?

01:10:08.000 You remember how brat Kamala Harris was? 1.00

01:10:10.000 And the question was, would she ever come down to earth?

01:10:13.000 And the answer was, absolutely. 0.97

01:10:15.000 Like a freaking stone, she came down to Earth. 0.84

01:10:19.000 At the beginning, it was like, oh, she's a hot air balloon. 0.94

01:10:21.000 And then it turns out there was no air in the balloon, and that wasn't her descending.

01:10:24.000 It was just her falling, plummeting like Wile E. Coyote.

01:10:27.000 Basically, her campaign was Wile E. Coyote over the edge of the cliff. 0.99

01:10:29.000 You know, before he looks down at the beginning, he's kind of like, and you're like, wow, maybe Wile E. Coyote can fly.

01:10:34.000 And then he looks down and...

01:10:35.000 That was her campaign. 0.74

01:10:39.000 And they all knew it, which is why they propped up the dead guy.

01:10:43.000 According to the book, Barack Obama had to rescue Joe Biden numerous times during that star-studded fundraiser.

01:10:48.000 This one is amazing.

01:10:49.000 Now, we all know this.

01:10:50.000 We played the tape.

01:10:51.000 We played the tape.

01:10:52.000 You remember, there was this star-studded fundraiser, June 15th, 2024.

01:10:57.000 That was the one where Biden froze on stage.

01:10:58.000 And then we were told it was a cheap fake.

01:11:00.000 That's what the White House said.

01:11:01.000 It was a cheap fake.

01:11:02.000 Joe Biden had to be guided offstage like Barack Obama was working for visiting angels.

01:11:07.000 And that's what it looked like in the video.

01:11:09.000 And the entire media pretended it was a cheap fake.

01:11:11.000 But apparently that wasn't the only time that night.

01:11:13.000 According to the book, at one point, in a small group of a few dozen top donors, Biden began speaking barely audibly and trailed off incoherently.

01:11:20.000 Obama had to jump in and preside.

01:11:22.000 At other moments during photos, Obama would hop in and finish sentences for him. 0.99

01:11:26.000 Another revelation from the book, and this one, I kind of love this one because it is both Joe Biden being senile and gone, and George Clooney being the arrogant jackass that he is. 0.95

01:11:35.000 Apparently, George Clooney attended an earlier June fundraiser. 0.89

01:11:39.000 And an assisting aide told Biden, you know George?

01:11:43.000 And Biden said, yeah, yeah.

01:11:44.000 Thank you for being here.

01:11:46.000 And Clooney said, hi, Mr. President.

01:11:47.000 And the president said, how are you?

01:11:48.000 And Clooney said, how was your trip?

01:11:50.000 And the president said, it was fine.

01:11:52.000 It seemed clear the president had not recognized Clooney.

01:11:54.000 It was not okay, recalled a Hollywood VIP who witnessed the moment.

01:11:57.000 That thing, the moment where you recognize someone you know, especially a famous person who's doing a fundraiser for you, it was delayed.

01:12:03.000 It was uncomfortable.

01:12:04.000 George Clooney, the aide clarified for the president.

01:12:06.000 Oh, yeah.

01:12:07.000 Hi, George, said Biden.

01:12:09.000 Clooney was shaken to the core.

01:12:11.000 The president had not recognized him.

01:12:12.000 So first of all, I love the arrogance of being like, he didn't recognize me.

01:12:15.000 I'm George Clooney.

01:12:17.000 I'm George.

01:12:18.000 I was on ER.

01:12:20.000 I haven't made a good movie in 20. I was on ER.

01:12:23.000 So I love that.

01:12:24.000 But also, yeah, Joe Biden was completely senile.

01:12:26.000 So yeah, everything you thought was true.

01:12:29.000 The scandal that the media brought upon itself by covering up Joe Biden's health, I'm not sure they're ever going to heal from it.

01:12:36.000 I think it completely destroyed the media.

01:12:37.000 Probably for all time, the legacy media.

01:12:40.000 Alrighty, coming up on the Ben Shapiro show, we'll get to MLB now declaring that Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe are off the ban list for the Hall of Fame.

01:12:49.000 We'll get to what I feel about that as a baseball fan.

01:12:51.000 Plus, David Hogg, they're going hog wild on him over at the DNC.

01:12:54.000 He might be ousted.

01:12:56.000 So he lasted about seven Scaramucci's.

01:12:58.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

01:13:00.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

01:13:01.000 Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - May 14, 2025

Trump’s Saudi TRIUMPH

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