On today s show: President Trump s triumphant visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Plus, he heads on over to Qatar. We examine negotiations in Ukraine and the state of the economy. And of course, there s a fresh installment of Ben Destroys where I metaphorically set fire to the week s dumbest idea and then roast marshmallows in the flames.
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00:01:17.000It's late night, but significantly worse.
00:01:35.000He was greeted on the tarmac by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
00:01:39.000MBS, as he is so-called, is obviously a signal figure in the Middle East.
00:01:44.000He's completely shifted the direction.
00:01:46.000of Saudi Arabia, away from sort of a Wahhabi version of Islam that was spreading terror tentacles all over the planet.
00:01:52.000That's what we all grew up with in the early 2000s, in the 1990s, and toward a regime of modernization.
00:01:59.000That, of course, is very difficult to do in the Middle East.
00:02:01.000And MBZ, as he's called, requires credit for that.
00:02:06.000And 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.
00:02:15.000It'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.
00:02:33.000So why exactly does President Trump have such a warm relationship with Saudi in a way that Joe Biden did?
00:02:40.000Because if you'll recall, Joe Biden really Well, Barack Obama and Joe Biden,
00:03:03.000who 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.
00:03:11.000First, They kept saying words like democracy and human rights, and those would then trump American interests.
00:03:18.000So 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.
00:03:32.000And he made this like a big point of his foreign policy.
00:03:35.000Well, the reality is the Middle East is a place filled with terrible regimes.
00:03:38.000The only truly democratic regime in the entire Middle East is Israel.
00:03:42.000Everybody else is a tyrannical dictatorship.
00:03:44.000And 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.
00:03:59.000President Obama and President Biden kept pretending that words like democracy and human rights trumped American interests.
00:04:04.000That'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.
00:04:11.000In 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.
00:04:22.000It 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.
00:04:35.000So, well, Barack Obama and Joe Biden preach democracy and human rights.
00:04:40.000Less democracy and fewer human rights were the result of the Obama-Biden matrix with regard to the Middle East.
00:04:46.000The 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.
00:04:53.000So as I say, Joe Biden drew tremendous contrast with Saudi Arabia and also with Israel.
00:05:08.000The 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.
00:05:18.000And President Trump in his first term said that that is not a thing.
00:05:21.000President Trump in his first term said, hey, look, that issue is unsolvable.
00:05:25.000The Palestinians don't want peace with the Israelis.
00:05:28.000And so actually there can be commerce and cooperation outside of that particular issue.
00:05:33.000And that is still something that President Trump deeply believes.
00:05:36.000And then fourth, the Obama-Biden matrix tried to make overtures to Iran without any prospective consequences.
00:05:41.000It was, we will make you a deal, and there will be no consequences.
00:05:44.000And we will make you a deal, and there will be no consequences.
00:05:46.000Well, Donald Trump has reversed all of those things.
00:05:49.000And that is the reason why he's being more successful in the Middle East.
00:05:51.000One, he acknowledges that different countries are going to govern differently.
00:05:56.000The idea that democracy in Saudi Arabia is going to be a boon is a ridiculous notion on its face.
00:06:02.000First of all, we should recognize that democracy in the West took...
00:06:05.000A couple of thousand years in order to actually take root.
00:06:09.000In 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.
00:06:21.000So you're talking about full-on hundreds of years of monarchy and oligarchy in Great Britain.
00:06:29.000Okay, well, the same thing is going to hold true in the Middle East, particularly because...
00:06:32.000The Judeo-Christian West and the biblical values upon which it relies have some strains of democracy.
00:06:38.000There's nothing in the Quran that tends toward democracy.
00:06:40.000And so that, of course, is going to be sort of a problem in a lot of Islamic nations.
00:06:45.000So what does that mean in terms of governance?
00:06:48.000It 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...
00:06:55.000Democracy is not going to be the number one answer in these places.
00:06:58.000If there were democracy overnight in Jordan, there'd be a terrorist state.
00:07:00.000If there were democracy in the UAE, there'd be a terrorist state.
00:07:03.000If there were democracy in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood would probably run the place.
00:07:07.000So 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.
00:07:17.000And this is something that President Trump really does understand.
00:07:20.000On the other hand, what President Trump also understands is that isolationism is not a real perspective in the Middle East.
00:07:26.000Now, 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.
00:08:46.000A realist is somebody who understands.
00:08:47.000That 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.
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00:11:15.000So, 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.
00:12:03.000Okay, so, again, that sort of praise, not rare.
00:12:06.000President Trump likes to butter up the people with whom he is making deals.
00:12:10.000This, of course, is true for pretty much everybody.
00:12:12.000But he does have a warm relationship with Mohammed bin Salman, specifically because he believes that Mohammed bin Salman is driven by commerce.
00:12:19.000Rather than being driven by Wahhabist ideology.
00:12:22.000And then President Trump started speaking in sort of broad terms about his vision for the Middle East.
00:12:26.000And here's where some of the isolationists on the right were chanting triumphant slogans yesterday.
00:12:33.000Here's President Trump in sort of the core of the speech.
00:12:36.000This great transformation has not come from Western interventionists or flying.
00:12:45.000People in beautiful plains giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.
00:12:51.000No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal non-profits.
00:13:00.000Instead, 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.
00:13:10.000In 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.
00:13:29.000And 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.
00:13:41.000In 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.
00:13:57.000I believe it is God's job to sit in judgment.
00:14:00.000My job to defend America and to promote the fundamental interest of stability, prosperity, and peace.
00:14:46.000The 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.
00:14:58.000Saudi Arabia would look like most other countries in the Middle East, namely incredibly poor and fraught with peril.
00:15:04.000Were it not for the fact that the West basically drilled their oil for them?
00:15:08.000Standard Oil of California created the entire Saudi oil industry in 1933.
00:15:12.000In 1938, what was called SoCal at the time succeeded in deep mining that uncovered Saudi's seas of oil.
00:15:22.000That company, SoCal, would later be named Aramco, which, of course, you now know.
00:15:28.000It was American know-how, Western know-how, that built the Saudi economy.
00:15:33.000In 1980, the Saudi government nationalized Aramco.
00:15:36.000By 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.
00:15:59.000It is filled with Western chain stores.
00:16:01.000The United States has basically been providing security for the Saudi regime since the end of World War II.
00:16:07.000FDR 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.
00:16:19.000This idea that non-interventionism in the Middle East was actually the way the Middle East was done, that's not true.
00:16:24.000The reason that the United States pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait is because the Saudis were afraid.
00:16:28.000Saddam Hussein was going to continue pushing into Saudi Arabia.
00:16:32.000The 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.
00:16:39.000So again, this is not saying that President Trump is wrong about his approach to the Middle East.
00:16:44.000It's saying that President Trump is a realist.
00:16:46.000He wants to be involved where it is in the interests of the United States.
00:16:50.000He 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.
00:16:57.000Because that's not how deals get done.
00:16:59.000And President Trump was there to get deals done.
00:17:01.000I mean, that's what he is there to do.
00:17:02.000President Trump's signal contribution to foreign policy thought in the Middle East, his biggest contribution is the idea that commerce trumps ideology.
00:17:09.000And this was considered a fool's errand when President Trump first took this on during his first term.
00:17:15.000The kind of basic idea was that no matter What commerce you offer to various nations, that commerce will never trump the ideology.
00:17:22.000And President Trump basically said, no, the commerce can, in fact, trump the ideology.
00:17:27.000Now, in order for that to happen, there have to be strings attached.
00:17:30.000And here is where things get a little bit complicated for what President Trump was doing in Saudi Arabia yesterday.
00:17:34.000He gave them an enormous number of benefits.
00:17:36.000The Saudis are spending an enormous amount of money in the United States or pledging to do so.
00:17:40.000We'll get into how much they're actually spending in the United States in a moment.
00:17:43.000The question is whether enough strings are attached.
00:17:46.000Just 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.
00:18:00.000You have to make this stuff conditional on them doing something that we want them to do.
00:18:04.000Now, 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.
00:18:12.000To be realistic, however, That Saudi oil money was already pouring into the American economies.
00:18:17.000Many of the firms that were there negotiating with the Saudis while President Trump was there were already in deals with the Saudi Arabian government.
00:18:24.000However, President Trump did say yesterday that there was going to be a $600 billion deal with the Saudi.
00:18:32.000According 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.
00:18:40.000But the details the White House provided are still vague.
00:18:43.000They totaled less than half that number.
00:18:45.000Many of the projects were already in the works before President Trump took office.
00:18:48.000As I say, the Saudis are not shy on the spending on American companies and American products.
00:18:54.000They own enormous amounts of American companies and American products already.
00:19:00.000President 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.
00:19:13.000Presumably, Saudi wants that mainly to fend off the threat of Iran in their north.
00:19:17.000Here's President Trump announcing this yesterday.
00:19:19.000In 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.
00:19:39.000Uber, Qualcomm, Johnson & Johnson, and many, many more.
00:19:54.000And President Trump, again, is tying all of this to an overall vision of the Middle East in which commerce dominates rather than chaos.
00:20:00.000Here is President Trump talking about it being time for commerce rather than chaos.
00:20:04.000Now, 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.
00:20:26.000So attaching strings is actually quite a good thing.
00:20:29.000We'll see the same sort of attitude prevail when it comes to Syria in President Trump's Saudi visit.
00:20:33.000But here is President Trump's overall vision for the region, which of course is correct, that it's time for commerce.
00:20:38.000Before 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.
00:21:06.000And then President Trump said that he wants the Abraham Accords to happen.
00:21:10.000He said it would be an honor to him if the Abraham Accords happen.
00:21:13.000Now 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.
00:21:24.000It 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.
00:21:29.000But here was President Trump yesterday.
00:21:32.000It'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.
00:21:50.000I think it'll be a tremendous tribute to your country.
00:21:54.000Now, 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...
00:22:01.000If 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.
00:22:14.000Special 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.
00:22:29.000We 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.
00:22:39.000And 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.
00:22:48.000And the countries that he was mentioning there include, as we will see, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan.
00:22:54.000Azerbaijan, Armenia, and he hopes Saudi Arabia.
00:22:57.000Now, President Trump did speak about the issue of what goes on in Gaza.
00:23:01.000Sort of the precondition to the Abraham Accords being expanded is the ending of the war in Gaza.
00:23:05.000And Trump said Gaza's leadership has to go, meaning Hamas has to go.
00:23:08.000My administration shares the hope of so many in this region for future of safety and dignity of the Palestinian people.
00:23:18.000But that cannot happen as long as Gaza's leaders take delight in.
00:23:23.000Torturing and murdering innocent people can't have it.
00:23:27.000I 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.
00:23:42.000It was a big day yesterday, a very important day.
00:23:46.000I was told just before I left that they were going to be releasing Idun.
00:24:00.000Ultimately, 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.
00:24:19.000So Syria, as we know, Fell to HTS, which is, in fact, a terror group sponsored by the Turks.
00:24:26.000HTS is run by a man who now calls himself Ahmed al-Sharaa.
00:24:31.000Again, he switches his name all the time.
00:24:34.000You know him as al-Jolani, but he switches his name sort of like Prince switches his name.
00:24:38.000So now he's the terror leader formerly known as al-Jolani.
00:24:41.000And he's now the Syrian president sponsored by the Turks.
00:24:45.000President Trump actually met with him yesterday.
00:24:47.000There'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.
00:25:00.000Well, yesterday in Saudi Arabia, President Trump announced that he would be ending sanctions against Syria at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
00:25:07.000After discussing the situation in Syria with the Crown Prince, your Crown Prince, and also with President...
00:25:14.000Erdogan of Turkey who called me the other day and asked for a very similar thing.
00:25:20.000Among 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.
00:25:34.000Okay, so big applause in the room in Saudi Arabia.
00:25:37.000Of course, Saudi Arabia wants the sanctions ended on Syria because they're hoping to forge some sort of common agreement with Syria.
00:25:47.000So there's this kind of Sunni-Shia split, obviously, in the Middle East, Iran representing the Shia.
00:25:52.000Sunni powers include Saudi Arabia as well as Turkey and now HTS, which is, in fact, a Sunni regime in Syria.
00:26:01.000President 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.
00:26:13.000Well, again, all I will say here is that I don't think that President Trump's orientation here is wrong.
00:26:17.000I 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.
00:26:26.000But it better be a string attached, not a hope for a gift at the end of that process.
00:26:30.000Because otherwise, let's remember, okay, it was three weeks ago that al-Jelani and his team We're murdering Druze.
00:26:37.000And 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.
00:26:46.000And by the way, they were killing the odd Christian as well.
00:26:49.000So 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.
00:26:56.000Also, there ought to be strings attached.
00:26:59.000So trust but verify would be the order of the day with both Saudi.
00:27:04.000And with Syria and with everybody in the Middle East.
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00:29:15.000Now, meanwhile, President Trump has also rejected the soft Biden-Obama approach to Iran.
00:29:21.000So yesterday in Saudi Arabia, he said that he wouldn't hesitate to wield American power.
00:29:25.000I will never hesitate to wield American power if it's necessary to defend the United States or to help defend our allies.
00:29:36.000If you threaten America or our partners, however, then you'll be faced with overwhelming strength and devastating force.
00:29:43.000We have things that you don't even know about.
00:29:48.000And 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.
00:29:57.000So this is a popular perspective in Saudi Arabia.
00:30:00.000Our 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.
00:30:11.000The 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.
00:30:22.000There 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.
00:30:35.000you Okay, so again, his views on Iran are correct.
00:30:43.000He said that if Iran doesn't get off the nuclear train, then there will be consequences.
00:30:48.000But 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.
00:31:33.000Now, 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.
00:31:41.000First of all, the shipping in the Red Sea has not returned.
00:31:44.000People are not sending their ships through the Red Sea because they don't trust that the Houthis aren't going to attack it.
00:31:49.000Number two, the Houthis, while President Trump was in Saudi Arabia, fired multiple missiles over Saudi territory in order to fire them at Israel.
00:31:56.000So again, the Houthis have not, in fact, been defanged in any really serious way.
00:32:01.000But President Trump, again, this is sort of the balancing point that President Trump is at.
00:32:05.000And it's sort of an inflection point for what Trump means by realism.
00:32:07.000Because there are more interventionist strands of realism.
00:32:11.000More hawkish strands, more dovish strands of realism.
00:32:14.000Unclear how President Trump comes down on that question.
00:32:18.000Here he was with regard to the Houthis.
00:32:20.000Following 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.
00:32:34.000As a result, the Houthis agreed to stop.
00:32:38.000They said, we don't want this anymore.
00:32:40.000This was a swift, ferocious, decisive, and extremely successful use of military force.
00:32:46.000Not that we wanted to do it, but they were shooting down ships.
00:33:05.000Is that by arming Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia will then be given the capacity to go back into Yemen and push the Houthis out.
00:33:11.000That would be part of the goal here in all of this.
00:33:13.000Bottom line is that this is a triumphant trip from President Trump.
00:33:17.000He 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.
00:33:27.000What I would love to see from President Trump and the American administration more generally, just the entire American government.
00:33:33.000If 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.
00:34:16.000It means less proliferation in the region.
00:34:19.000If you want a peaceful Middle East, the United States has always had a thumb on the scale.
00:34:23.000Only President Trump has properly used that thumb in order to achieve peace in the Middle East.
00:34:28.000He's the only president in my lifetime who truly did that.
00:34:31.000And I'd love to see him pursue that same sort of policy in Saudi.
00:34:34.000Meanwhile, President Trump headed on from Saudi Arabia to Qatar.
00:34:38.000And again, here you get into some very dicey territory because Qatar is, in fact, a state sponsor of terrorism.
00:34:44.000Qatar is the number one funder of Hamas.
00:34:46.000The 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.
00:34:55.000The 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.
00:35:04.000What the United States should say is all hostages out, Hamas gone or the airbase goes away.
00:35:08.000The United States used to have its major Middle Eastern airbase in.
00:35:11.000Saudi Arabia, the United States could do that again.
00:35:13.000The 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.
00:35:29.000There's a fascinating piece from the free press.
00:35:32.000It'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.
00:35:49.000They are not doing this out of the goodness of their heart.
00:35:51.000And they have honeycombed both parties with their cash.
00:35:55.000They've just slathered their cash over people in both parties.
00:35:59.000According 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.
00:36:08.000It's not Air Force One ready, by the way.
00:36:11.000We have to make sure there are no bugs in it.
00:36:13.000It'll take years to retrofit that particular plane.
00:36:15.000And 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.
00:36:28.000According to the Free Press, the airplane deal was signed off on by Attorney General Pam Bondi.
00:36:33.000She 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.
00:36:43.000Which, by the way, that is an absurdity.
00:36:54.000But it's not just the Attorney General.
00:36:55.000Who's being paid over a million dollars a year to fight trafficking by Qatar.
00:37:02.000President Trump's chief of staff, Susie Wiles, led a lobbying firm called Mercury Public Affairs when it was representing Qatar's embassy in Washington.
00:37:09.000The FBI director, Kash Patel, worked as a consultant for Qatar, though he didn't register as a foreign agent.
00:37:13.000We've already talked about Steve Witkoff, the special envoy to the Middle East, who has nothing but warm words for the Qataris.
00:37:18.000And so he should, because in 2023, they bailed him out of a crappy real estate deal by buying out.
00:37:27.000Meanwhile, as I've mentioned, the Trump Organization is planning a luxury golf resort near Doha in partnership with a Qatari government-backed company.
00:37:35.000As I mentioned, the president's son, Donald Jr., is speaking next week at a Qatar Economic Forum.
00:37:40.000Originally, the session was called Monetizing MAGA.
00:37:43.000Omid Malik of 1789 Capital, whose partner at 1789 Capital, was also supposed to speak there.
00:37:49.000Qatar, of course, is a terror supporter, as I mentioned yesterday.
00:38:05.000If you don't like what Qatar is doing in American universities, and they are literally the number one spender at American universities, why?
00:38:12.000Why is a tiny, little Middle Eastern dictatorship that is rich in oil expending tens of billions of dollars On American college campuses, explain.
00:38:24.000The only reason is for propaganda purposes and to infiltrate these universities and put their messages out there.
00:38:30.000According 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.
00:38:55.000The influence built by Qatar in the United States says the free press has no modern parallel.
00:39:00.000Whether 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.
00:39:09.000For comparison, Qatar spent three times more in the United States than Israel did on lobbyist public relations advisors and other foreign agents in 2021.
00:39:16.000Qatar spent almost two-thirds as much as China.
00:39:20.000Qatar is a country with a population of 2.6 million people.
00:39:24.000China is a country with a population of over a billion people.
00:39:27.000And they spent two-thirds as much as China.
00:39:37.000And 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.
00:39:54.000In 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.
00:40:06.000They demanded that Doha end its support for the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Jazeera.
00:40:10.000The Alfani family, which runs Qatar, saw the siege as an existential threat to their rule.
00:40:15.000The operation included attempts to sever Doha's external sea and air routes, There were rumblings of a Saudi cross-border ground invasion.
00:40:21.000Qatari nationals worried about food shortages, necessitating emergency supplies from Iran at one point.
00:40:27.000They started spraying the cash everywhere.
00:40:29.000The 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.
00:40:39.000In comparison, the total expenditures for the UAE were $35 million for Saudi, $25 million.
00:40:46.000So the free press sifted through every single filing it could find since 2017 by lobbyists and public relations firms.
00:40:51.000Qatar has spent $225 million since then.
00:40:58.000Because 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.
00:41:06.000In 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported.
00:41:08.000That 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.
00:41:16.000And let's be clear, I mean, President Trump is very, very warm toward Qatar these days, for sure.
00:41:22.000Here is President Trump just yesterday.
00:41:23.000He refuses to give up on this idea of the Qataris giving them 400 million.
00:41:28.000Okay, they say that he's giving it to the Air Force.
00:41:30.000If 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.
00:41:35.000It's not just a magical gift to the DOD.
00:41:38.000Some people say, oh, you shouldn't accept gifts for the country.
00:41:43.000My attitude is, why wouldn't I accept a gift?
00:42:07.000Great example of how Qatar pays people off, according to the Free Press.
00:42:13.000Over the past decade, there's a man named Elliot Broidy.
00:42:15.000He used to be the finance chair of the Republican National Committee.
00:42:19.000Broidy used his connections to try to expose Qatar.
00:42:23.000He helped pay for conferences at think tanks like Hudson Institute and Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
00:42:28.000And he solicited anti-Qatar opinion articles from American diplomats and scholars.
00:42:32.000In 2018, he accused Qatar of engineering a computer hack of his devices.
00:42:39.000So Broidy spent a bunch of money targeting Qatar, and then he went completely quiet.
00:42:42.000After 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.
00:42:54.000He agreed to abandon his legal fight and any funding of efforts aimed at tarnishing Qatar.
00:42:58.000This sort of stuff apparently is very common.
00:43:01.000Actually, the free press name checks Lindsey Graham as a person who may be associated with Qatar.
00:43:08.000Qatar, his perspective on Qatar shifted.
00:43:11.000So, 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.
00:43:24.000So 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.
00:43:45.000Charleston and Doha became sister cities.
00:43:47.000Qatar's embassy donated $100,000 to Charleston for COVID aid relief.
00:43:51.000Qatar, by the way, says it has invested more than $21 billion in Texas and $8 billion along the Gulf Coast.
00:43:58.000On 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.
00:44:06.000As a lobbyist for Qatar's embassy, In Washington, and then they met seven more times by the end of December.
00:44:13.000Al Jazeera is a massive influence campaign that is run by Qatar.
00:44:17.000And they pay an enormous number of big-name people in the United States in order to push their propaganda.
00:44:25.000Those people include, for example, apparently, Ali Velshi.
00:44:30.000In 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.
00:44:44.000Velshi, who used to be at Al Jazeera America.
00:44:46.000Again, this sort of stuff is really...
00:45:04.000When I said skeezy earlier this week, This sort of stuff is more than skeezy.
00:45:08.000Qatar is doing this sort of stuff because they want influence.
00:45:12.000That 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.
00:45:22.000You think they're doing this out of the goodness of their heart?
00:45:26.000They're a terrorist-supporting country, obviously.
00:45:29.000And the fact that the United States, the Trump administration, continues to treat them as an honest broker is wrong.
00:46:38.000And Democrats are going to make hay out of it.
00:46:40.000Apparently, Democrats are planning to fly some flags in Florida, near Mar-a-Lago, calling it Qatar-a-Lago.
00:46:47.000I 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.
00:46:56.000With stars in his eyes, attacking the $400 million jet quote-unquote gift.
00:47:02.000A $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.
00:47:24.000Okay, so by the way, that is a thing that actually happened with the Statue of Liberty.
00:47:27.000So people saying this is like the Statue of Liberty, a few differences.
00:47:30.000One, the president couldn't personally fly the Statue of Liberty.
00:47:34.000Two, it actually did have to be approved by Congress.
00:47:37.000Three, it was from an allied country, France, not a country that supports terrorism, Qatar.
00:47:44.000Also, the Statue of Liberty did not have surveillance technology, probably honeycombed throughout the technology.
00:47:49.000On the most sensitive security site in America.
00:47:52.000So there are a few differences that I will note there.
00:47:54.000Chuck Schumer is using this as an opportunity to hold up President Trump's Justice Department nominees, according to the New York Times.
00:47:59.000Senator 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.
00:48:12.000Schumer said on the Senate floor, it's not just naked corruption, it's a grave national security threat.
00:48:18.000And 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.
00:48:27.000This 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.
00:48:35.000Now, I have moral objections, but put aside the moral objections.
00:48:38.000Just for practicality's sake, if you want President Trump to succeed, this is not helpful in doing all of that.
00:48:43.000Democrats, meanwhile, also jumping on the Trump family's crypto investments.
00:48:48.000According 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.
00:48:56.000Senators 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.
00:49:04.000Well, 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.
00:49:14.000Again, 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.
00:49:24.000Democrats are going to make hay out of this because, again, it would be political malpractice for them not to do so.
00:49:29.000Okay, meanwhile, in other news from the Middle East, yesterday it appeared that Israel killed Yahya Sinwar's brother.
00:49:36.000Sinwar, of course, was the leader of Hamas.
00:49:38.000After Israel assassinated Yahya Sinwar, They apparently took out Mohammed Sinwar, who is the new leader of Hamas.
00:50:12.000The 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.
00:50:23.000You know who doesn't care about hiding beneath civilian sites?
00:51:12.000This 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.
00:51:21.000So hopefully this leads to a faster off-ramp, including the complete destruction of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
00:51:29.000Meanwhile, in other foreign policy news, direct talks have now been set in Turkey.
00:51:34.000Now, originally, Vladimir Putin said that he was going to go to Turkey and negotiate with Vladimir Zelensky.
00:51:40.000That was something that he had said he was going to do.
00:51:42.000President Trump then encouraged Zelensky to put aside his demands for a 30-day ceasefire in order to have those direct talks.
00:51:48.000Zelensky said yes, and now it appears that Putin is not actually going to show up.
00:51:51.000So, 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.
00:52:18.000They 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.
00:53:31.000So again, Putin had offered direct negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Turkey for Thursday.
00:53:36.000He 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.
00:53:44.000It'll be interesting to see whether or not anything comes of these talks.
00:53:51.000Again, 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.
00:54:13.000With that said, obviously the United States has an interest in trying to promote that as much as humanly possible.
00:54:19.000Okay, meanwhile, when it comes to the economy, obviously President Trump getting off.
00:54:24.000The 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%.
00:54:41.000It 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.
00:54:52.000The tariff framework in the United States remains as high as it has been since the 1930s.
00:54:58.000And the current tariff rate on average will remain somewhere in the 13% range.
00:55:05.000Now, the average tariff rate until all this happened was much closer to zero.
00:55:09.000So this is why people are still worried about inflation.
00:55:12.000Despite the fact that the CPI came in lower than expected, people are still waiting for the inflationary policies to actually hit.
00:55:22.000Basically, the tariff war was the old Yiddish joke.
00:55:25.000There's an old Yiddish joke about a man and his wife.
00:56:53.000According 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.
00:57:02.000The Consumer Price Index rose a seasonally adjusted 0.2% in April, according to the Labor Department.
00:57:08.000Analysts said this was good news because it didn't reveal bad news.
00:57:41.000It's not a massive dump, but it's not growth.
00:57:43.000And what you would like to see is actual growth.
00:57:46.000You want to see that number going up and to the right.
00:57:49.000If you had said to me when President Trump took office, at five months into his administration, the stock market would essentially be flat.
00:58:32.000And 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.
00:59:30.000So let's talk about President Trump's announcement with regard to big pharma.
00:59:36.000So he had said this was sort of the biggest announcement of his presidency so far.
00:59:40.000It is a unilateral attempt to lower pharmaceutical prices by doing what he calls most favored nation status.
00:59:47.000The 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.
01:00:00.000But 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.
01:00:12.000Basically, all of these nationalized health care systems.
01:00:30.000And I always get nervous when I hear the phrase, Unilaterally set prices because that's government setting prices rather than the market setting prices.
01:00:37.000And as you know, well, the market is the best mechanism for setting prices.
01:01:07.000The trial lawyers extort hundreds of billions of dollars from these pharmaceutical companies and that gets priced into the products.
01:01:13.000So there's a lot of other factors here besides just what President Trump is talking about.
01:01:20.000Dr. 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.
01:01:48.000I think people don't understand as a general rule, why are pharmaceuticals so expensive in general?
01:02:11.000And there's a lot of really great points you made, including the fact that generics are indeed cheaper here.
01:02:16.000It is incredibly expensive to bring products to market.
01:02:18.000The FDA has very rigorous testing, but also a huge skepticism towards the pharma industry, which makes it hard to get products through.
01:02:26.000The trial lawyers then sue the pants off these companies.
01:02:30.000And 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.
01:02:44.000doing no lawsuits on them, making them the bad guys in all the movies.
01:02:49.000It makes their products more expensive.
01:02:51.000And it also makes it less likely that young, smart Americans are going to go into the pharmaceutical industry.
01:02:56.000I 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.
01:03:05.000That is not counting the hundreds of billions of dollars that are spent on drugs that never make it to market.
01:03:09.000A huge percentage of R&D is done on...
01:03:13.000Pharmaceutical 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.
01:03:25.000You have to go through multiple rounds of trials.
01:03:27.000You have to get through four phases from the FDA in order to get actual FDA approval.
01:03:31.000Most drugs fail out at phase one or phase two.
01:03:34.000And it's basically a winnowing process, which is why so few drugs actually...
01:03:37.000How many drugs actually make it to market?
01:03:44.000The best year we've ever had was the FDA approving about 50 products in one year.
01:03:49.000Usually it's closer to about 30 products in a year.
01:03:52.000And just think about all the companies and all the potential products and all the potential sicknesses and illnesses that can be treated.
01:04:05.000Where you don't want to do a single or a double.
01:04:08.000Every drug has to be a home run in order to justify the massive costs.
01:04:12.000So that's why every drug they put out is the equivalent of a Marvel movie.
01:04:16.000And 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.
01:04:26.000And 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.
01:04:32.000But the whole point is that over time, as they move toward generic status, The price decreases.
01:04:36.000There'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.
01:04:44.000And then how long is the patent period for brand new drugs in the United States?
01:04:49.000I think it's about 15 years, but that counts once you declare the patent and it doesn't count all the FDA testing.
01:04:55.000So there's a whole bunch of things that are happening while your patent clock is ticking.
01:04:59.000And once that clock ticks down, then, as you say, the generic is out there on the market and undercutting you on price.
01:05:07.000I think we should have generics after the patent window expires.
01:05:09.000But 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.
01:05:21.000So we're speaking with Dr. Tevi Troy, Senior Fellow at Bipartisan Policy Center and the former Deputy Secretary of Health.
01:05:28.000How effective is President Trump's EO actually going to be?
01:05:30.000Presumably, it would take some congressional action to actually effectuate something like this.
01:05:34.000Can Medicaid, just because the president says so, start using MFN status?
01:05:38.000And also, what will be the result for patients?
01:05:40.000Because 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.
01:05:54.000We are going to see less innovation, fewer products making it to market, maybe fewer markets, or maybe fewer products being available in America.
01:06:02.000Europe, 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.
01:06:11.000So there are advantages to our more free market way of pricing, even though the prices are higher here.
01:06:17.000I do fear that President Trump's executive order is more just a statement.
01:06:43.000You can check out his brand new book, The Power and the Money, The Epic Clashes Between American Titans of Industry and Commanders-in-Chief.
01:06:53.000Meanwhile, 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.
01:07:02.000I plan on having Jake on the show to talk about it.
01:07:06.000This book reveals everything that we all knew.
01:07:10.000And so I understand the upset and the dyspepsia and the heartburn and all the rest, the indigestion.
01:07:15.000And many of us on the right have toward the existence of a book like this because we all knew.
01:07:20.000Everybody knew in 2020 that Joe Biden was feeble mentally, that he was ailing already.
01:07:25.000And so this idea that, oh my gosh, we were bamboozled.
01:07:28.000Okay, but to be fair to the authors, to be fair, I'm doing my best here.
01:07:32.000To 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.
01:07:49.000That 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.
01:07:58.000Again, giving everybody the benefit of the doubt.
01:07:59.000But the stories here are really, really amazing.
01:08:03.000Apparently, according to the book, Biden's aides were so concerned by his perceived decline, they started scrambling for ideas.
01:08:11.000Apparently, his spine was in particular decline.
01:08:16.000So, aides discussed the possibility of putting him in a wheelchair after the election.
01:08:21.000They knew that they couldn't do it before the election.
01:08:22.000They thought, maybe if he wins, we'll put him in a wheelchair.
01:08:27.000And there are a bunch of other revelations in this new book, Original Sin.
01:08:32.000First, Biden's top aides tried to hide him from their own staff.
01:08:36.000They didn't want it getting out that Joe Biden was as bad as he was.
01:08:40.000One 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.
01:08:48.000So many people didn't realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023.
01:08:55.000With 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.
01:09:05.000The unnamed aide said, I love Joe Biden.
01:09:07.000When it comes to decency, there are few in politics like him still.
01:09:09.000It 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.
01:09:15.000Now, 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.
01:09:24.000That is the actual, real, buried story lead.
01:11:02.000Joe Biden had to be guided offstage like Barack Obama was working for visiting angels.
01:11:07.000And that's what it looked like in the video.
01:11:09.000And the entire media pretended it was a cheap fake.
01:11:11.000But apparently that wasn't the only time that night.
01:11:13.000According 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.
01:11:22.000At other moments during photos, Obama would hop in and finish sentences for him.
01:11:26.000Another 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.
01:11:35.000Apparently, George Clooney attended an earlier June fundraiser.
01:11:39.000And an assisting aide told Biden, you know George?
01:12:24.000But also, yeah, Joe Biden was completely senile.
01:12:26.000So yeah, everything you thought was true.
01:12:29.000The 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.
01:12:36.000I think it completely destroyed the media.
01:12:37.000Probably for all time, the legacy media.
01:12:40.000Alrighty, 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.
01:12:49.000We'll get to what I feel about that as a baseball fan.
01:12:51.000Plus, David Hogg, they're going hog wild on him over at the DNC.