In this episode, I discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the response by the United States, Europe, and the Ukraine's government. I also discuss the potential off-ramp that President Trump and Vladimir Putin have proposed to end the Ukraine conflict.
00:00:00.000Well, President Trump promised that when he entered office, he was going to look at the Russia-Ukraine situation and try to facilitate an actual end to the war.
00:00:08.000People who have been watching this war very closely understand that Russia's original goal, which was to take Kiev to completely ingest and then digest all of Ukraine, turn it into a functioning part of the new Russian empire, that that failed.
00:00:23.000And that failed very early on in the war.
00:00:25.000But very quickly, the war then transmuted into something else, and that was...
00:00:29.000A Ukrainian attempt backed by Europe, backed by the Biden administration, to take back portions of the country that had essentially been conquered by Russia in 2014 after the Euromaidan revolution.
00:00:41.000The attempt to take the Donbass and Crimea back from Russian forces, that was largely doomed to failure because the only way to do that would have been to arm up the Ukrainians to the extent...
00:00:54.000That it might have prompted a larger Russian intervention using perhaps things like tactical nuclear weapons.
00:00:59.000That is the only way that could have been done.
00:01:01.000Or to allow the Ukrainians to attack inside Russia in such a way that could have provoked a larger war.
00:01:07.000Now, it may be that those concerns over a larger war were exaggerated.
00:01:11.000However, the risk-reward relationship there was out of balance.
00:01:15.000The reality was that the West had very little interest in Ukraine.
00:01:20.000Fighting a large-scale war to take back Donbass and Crimea, areas that are predominantly, by virtually all polling data even before the fake Russian democratic takeover, those areas were very pro-Russian, historically.
00:01:35.000And so Russia taking over those areas, while it is devastating to the economy of Ukraine, much of the oil-rich area of Ukraine is in its east in the Donbass region.
00:01:43.000Crimea, of course, is on the Black Sea, and so much of the warm-water ports available to the Ukrainians were via Crimea.
00:01:50.000The reality was that barring some sort of massive war effort, much larger than anything that Ukraine was actually given, those areas were not going to be retaken by Ukraine.
00:01:59.000And so this conflict had settled into a stalemate for almost three years at this point because the original invasion took place at the end of February 2022. And for a very long time, the Biden administration had a conflicting strategy, a mutually exclusive strategy.
00:02:14.000On the one hand, the Biden administration suggested that they would continue to provide endless aid.
00:02:19.000Until, quote-unquote, victory was achieved.
00:02:21.000But they refused to either provide the necessary aid to achieve full-scale victory or to define victory as something other than full-scale victory.
00:02:28.000These were mutually exclusive tactics.
00:02:31.000If they were defining victory as Ukraine takes back Donbass and takes back Crimea, then you have to give Ukraine the weaponry necessary in order to accomplish that.
00:02:39.000Anything less than that is going to lead to stalemate and loss.
00:02:43.000Or, theoretically, you redefine victory to survival, meaning Russia already controlled Donbass and Crimea.
00:02:51.000And so Russia's goal had already been defeated, at which point victory could have been achieved by any sort of rational stretch of the imagination, simply by fending off further Russian territorial aggression.
00:03:02.000And by that measure, the war should have come to an end a couple of years ago, because basically the battle lines in Ukraine have been fairly solidified for two years, two and a half years at this point.
00:03:17.000Henry Kissinger, the late Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, among other titles, he had proposed that this off-ramp essentially be offered way back in May of 2022. And frankly, I thought that that was the correct approach because there was no actual end goal that was achievable.
00:03:35.000And the Biden administration was openly admitting this.
00:03:37.000They were saying, we are going to provide weaponry up until victory is achieved.
00:03:43.000Well, you cannot win a war if you refuse to define victory.
00:03:46.000And again, Either victory is going to be the taking back of all Ukrainian territory, which would have required the Biden administration to send F-16s to Ukraine, among other things.
00:03:55.000Or victory had to be defined in some other way, in which case an off-ramp should have been sought.
00:04:01.000Trump is taking a much more concerted view at reality.
00:04:06.000And so he has now opened negotiations with the Russian regime.
00:04:16.000That he meet with Vladimir Putin directly?
00:04:19.000He revealed on Wednesday, according to the New York Post, that he and Russian President Putin had agreed to start talks immediately to end Moscow's war on Ukraine.
00:04:25.000He said we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the war with Ukraine-Russia.
00:04:30.000He said that this war would not have happened if I were president, but it did happen, so it must end.
00:04:36.000He said that he and his Russian counterpart expressed openness to visiting each other's nations while letting slip to reporters in the Oval Office Wednesday.
00:04:41.000We expect that he'll come here and I'll go there and we're also probably going to meet in Saudi Arabia.
00:04:46.000Trump added on Truth Social, the negotiation process will begin by calling President Zelensky of Ukraine to inform him of the conversation, something which I will be doing right now.
00:04:55.000And then he revealed that any American delegation to the peace talks would be led by the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, National Security Advisor Mike Walz, and Middle East Special Envoy Steve Witkoff.
00:05:05.000Zelensky then confirmed in a Facebook statement, That he and Donald Trump had a meaningful conversation about opportunities to achieve peace and discussed our readiness to work together at a team level and Ukraine's technological capabilities, including drones and other advanced industries.
00:05:17.000In other words, he was making an argument to Trump that the United States should provide Ukraine with enough weaponry to fend off any future Russian attack.
00:05:25.000Now, in reality, Zelensky is going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the deal, at least publicly.
00:05:32.000Well, because let's assume you're a Ukrainian citizen and you've watched your brothers and sisters get murdered by the Russians.
00:05:36.000Which is what has happened over the course of this war.
00:05:38.000You're talking about hundreds of thousands of people, if you combine both sides, dead and wounded.
00:05:43.000So, let's say you're a Ukrainian citizen, and you've been told by Zelensky that you're going to not just win the war, you're going to push the Russians off of every inch of Ukrainian land.
00:05:51.000And now you're going to get less than that.
00:05:54.000Zelensky is going to have to take the political hit, unless the United States is willing to take the political hit.
00:06:27.000Because he was unwilling to do the thing that actually had to be done, which was in public.
00:06:31.000Biden would need to have negotiated a deal with Putin.
00:06:34.000Over Zelensky's head and then crammed down the deal on Zelensky.
00:06:37.000And that would have made him a bad guy in the eyes of many members of the left in the United States who, for some odd reason, decided that the Ukrainian flag was going to go in their profile.
00:06:48.000You want to put the Ukrainian flag in your Twitter profile or whatever.
00:06:50.000But the reality is that if that's the only flag in your profile, it's kind of strange.
00:06:56.000And not only that, putting the Ukrainian flag in your profile seems less...
00:07:00.000Like, objection to Russian intervention.
00:07:02.000I don't remember a Georgian flag in any of these people's profile.
00:07:04.000Or even a Ukrainian flag back in 2014 in their profile.
00:07:07.000I just remember it in 2022. And that was largely because it was tied to the idea that Russia was a pro-Trump force.
00:07:13.000There's a lot of domestic politics tied up in all of this.
00:07:16.000But, if Joe Biden had been a brave and capable leader, what he would have done is he would have negotiated the off-ramp that everyone saw coming.
00:07:23.000The off-ramp looks something like this.
00:07:25.000Ukraine does not become a part of NATO because, again, one of the reasons that Russia says that it invaded Ukraine is because it didn't want to be bordered by NATO nations, even though it already has a bunch of borders with NATO nations.
00:07:35.000Instead, there would have been effectively a mutual defense guarantee between the United States and Europe and Ukraine to prevent a further act of Russian aggression that was not exactly NATO.
00:07:44.000There wouldn't have been an entry by Ukraine into the EU, which has always been a sort of hot button issue in Ukraine.
00:07:53.000In fact, Vladimir Zelensky, when he was first elected, was not somebody who was considered...
00:07:58.000It's supremely pro-entering the EU. Believe it or not.
00:08:02.000It's only after the Russian invasion that he seemed to turn wildly in that direction.
00:08:07.000And what the deal looks like is Ukraine is armed up to prevent a further Russian invasion.
00:08:11.000Russia gets to claim sovereignty over these areas, which, by the way, it already has.
00:08:15.000In its own Duma, they've already voted to claim sovereignty over Donbass and Crimea.
00:08:20.000The international community probably half accepts it.
00:08:24.000They don't say, yeah, this is now sovereign Russian territory.
00:08:26.000But they say, That we are not going to foment war over the retaking of that territory.
00:08:33.000And then everybody sort of goes weapons down for the moment.
00:09:05.000There was all of this talk, loose talk, by both isolationists on the right and nutjobs on the left, that Trump was going to walk into office, immediately pull all aid from Ukraine, and allow Vladimir Putin to stroll down the streets of Kiev.
00:09:16.000I said that was not something that Trump was willing to do.
00:09:38.000President Trump is a strong president, and he wishes to actually give off the image of a strong president, which is why he's not going to cut off the aid.
00:09:46.000President Trump is deeply American, and this country was founded on strength and on freedom.
00:09:50.000Freedom from a country that forced us to buy overpriced tea and then tried to blockade us when we dumped their tea into the ocean.
00:09:55.000Which is why Britain no longer rules us.
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00:12:10.000As long as we have to go, because we're not going to let the other happen.
00:12:13.000But President Putin wants to have peace now, and that's good.
00:12:18.000And he didn't want to have peace with Biden.
00:12:21.000This is a pragmatic, utilitarian approach to the situation.
00:12:25.000It has been the correct approach for several years.
00:12:28.000Joe Biden just was unwilling to do it because Trump will be seen by many people on the left particularly as a bad guy for having sold out Ukraine.
00:12:36.000But the reality is Ukraine was never going to be able to retake this territory.
00:12:39.000This is something the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, said yesterday.
00:12:42.000He said, listen, trying to go back to the pre-2014 borders, namely Donbass and Crimea becoming an integral part of Ukraine again, that is not realistic at this time.
00:12:51.000And trying to pretend that it is is foolishness that leads to death.
00:12:55.000We will only end this devastating war and establish a durable peace by coupling allied strength with a realistic assessment of the battlefield.
00:13:08.000We want, like you, a sovereign and prosperous Ukraine.
00:13:14.000But we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective.
00:13:24.000Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.
00:13:32.000Again, this has always been the correct position.
00:13:34.000I've been advocating for this position since a couple of months into the war.
00:13:38.000So Trump had a conversation with Zelensky, and then he put out a statement, quote, And again, Trump is trying to warm relations with Russia, given the fact that...
00:14:06.000The cold relationship with Russia has not been particularly productive at this point in time.
00:14:11.000Does that mean that he trusts the Russians?
00:14:26.000It's something he innately understands in his bones.
00:14:28.000The president goes on, quote, We both reflected on the great history of our nations.
00:14:31.000He's talking about his discussion with Putin and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II, remembering that Russia lost tens of millions of people and we likewise lost so many.
00:14:38.000We each talked about the strengths of our respective nations and the great benefit we will someday have in working together.
00:14:43.000President Putin even used my very strong campaign motto of common sense.
00:14:54.000As he said, the aid is going to continue flowing to Ukraine, sufficient to deter the Russians from continuing this invasion.
00:15:02.000In fact, Trump actually said in the Oval Office, he thinks that some of the pre-2014 territory will, in fact, end up in Ukrainian hands.
00:15:09.000That presumably is because Ukraine, basically ignoring Joe Biden, made territorial incursions directly into Russia, and now they're looking for land swaps, Russian territory for Ukrainian territory.
00:15:20.000Do you see any future in which Ukraine returns to its pre-2014 orders?
00:15:24.000Well, I think Pete said today that that's unlikely, right?
00:15:28.000It certainly would seem to be unlikely.
00:15:30.000They took a lot of land, and they fought for that land, and they lost a lot of soldiers.
00:15:37.000But it would just seem to me, and I'm not making an opinion on it, but I've read a lot on it, and a lot of people think that that's unlikely.
00:16:17.000Believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.
00:16:23.000Instead, any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops.
00:16:32.000If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission, and they should not be covered under Article 5. Okay, so again, one of the reasons not to cover Ukraine under Article 5 is presumably, let's say, that Ukraine gets into another shooting conflict over Donbass or Crimea.
00:16:53.000That would now obligate all Article 5 members of NATO to actually get directly involved in the war.
00:16:58.000But he's saying we're still going to make the security guarantees.
00:17:00.000There may even, in fact, be European troops on the ground to guarantee the peace.
00:17:04.000This always was the pragmatic solution.
00:17:17.000And Trump, by the way, his successes are happening on a daily basis.
00:17:20.000Yesterday, the Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard as the intelligence chief, which is an amazing switch in the nature of the Directorate of National Intelligence.
00:17:27.000Remember, Tulsi Gabbard was actually put on a no-fly list at one point.
00:17:31.000She was targeted by the intelligence community because of her past contacts with Bashar Assad in Syria and her supposed past contacts with the Russians.
00:17:38.000Gabbard, according to the Wall Street Journal, a combat veteran and former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, was confirmed by a vote of 52-48 in the GOP-controlled Senate.
00:17:45.000Senator Mitch McConnell, the former GOP leader, broke with his party to side with Democrats in voting no.
00:17:49.000McConnell, again, is continuing to make a sort of traditionally conservative case that anybody who is heterodox should not be confirmed.
00:17:57.000However, that is not going to cut a lot of ice because, again, Trump is the one who's in charge of his administration.
00:18:01.000The truth is most Republicans probably feel...
00:18:04.000The same way that Bill Cassidy, the senator, feels, which is Trump wants Gabbert, Trump gets Gabbert.
00:18:09.000I mean, that seems to be the going methodology in the Senate.
00:18:12.000And frankly, that seems right if you're talking about many of the top-level cabinet secretaries who are answerable directly to the president.
00:18:19.000I'm not sure that that is directly right about many of the people who are being nominated for, say, undersecretary positions.
00:18:24.000There, the Senate is going to be able to kind of flex its muscle a little bit more in terms of a check and balance on the direction of those departments from underneath.
00:18:33.000President Trump in an Oval Office swearing in called Gabbard, quote, an American of extraordinary courage and exceptional patriotism.
00:18:38.000He said she would have the responsibility of overseeing urgently needed reforms in the intelligence community.
00:18:43.000Again, the DNI is sort of a paper position.
00:18:47.000It's a position that sits on top of the CIA and the FBI and coordinates the two agencies.
00:18:51.000It was originally put into law as a way of breaking down the Chinese firewall that separates intelligence from CIA and FBI. That firewall had led.
00:19:00.000to 9-11 because the CIA had information about the hijackers and wasn't passing it along to the FBI because they were afraid that that would have compromised the FBI's domestic terrorism investigations and prevented prosecutions.
00:19:10.000The DNI was supposed to sit above both of those agencies and help coordinate the intelligence from both.
00:19:14.000That's essentially what Gabbard will be doing.
00:19:17.000But one of the things Gabbard presumably will be doing is also looking into and investigating many of the malfeasances by the FBI and the CIA over the course of the last 10, 15, 20 years.
00:19:30.000McConnell, in explaining his vote, said the nation should not have to worry that the intelligence assessments the president receives are tainted by a director of national intelligence with a history of alarming lapses in judgment.
00:19:38.000But again, I seriously doubt that Tulsi Gabbard is going to be sitting there and just blacklining, redlining, and blacking out portions of reports that don't meet with her political priors.
00:19:54.000Over at Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy looks like he is ready to be confirmed.
00:19:58.000The Senate voted 53-47 to end debate on RFK Jr.'s nomination, following public statements of support from some GOP senators who'd been on the fence about Trump's pick.
00:20:07.000In the betting markets, it's like 99% that RFK Jr. ends up being confirmed.
00:20:12.000Cash Patel will also end up being confirmed as head of the FBI. So President Trump's selections for his cabinet, he's going to get his cabinet.
00:20:17.000Again, there are some other members of the cabinet who, frankly, I think are so far outside of what even what Trump would like to do.
00:20:24.000That it is worthwhile talking about shooting them down.
00:20:28.000That would include Representative Lori Chavez-Dremer, former representative of Oregon, who has been extraordinarily anti-free markets, extraordinarily pro-unions.
00:20:38.000Putting her at the head of the Labor Department would be kind of a disaster.
00:20:41.000So I could see Republicans opposing her.
00:20:43.000But they weren't going to, I think, waste their fire on Tulsi Gabbard or Kash Patel or on RFK Jr. And I think they are right not to do so.
00:20:51.000Now, the fact is, this administration is letting me sleep more comfortably at night, but it's not just, you know, the fact that Trump got elected and we now have a government worthy of its name.
00:21:00.000It's also that I have a better mattress.
00:21:02.000You know, I used to have this old mattress, the one that I got from the mattress store, and it would sag in the middle, and you're like, oh man, it's probably just as good as everything else.
00:23:12.000Controversy continues over the cuts that are being made to the federal government under the Trump-Musk revolution in government spending.
00:23:22.000What's amazing about this is, again, how many people on the left seem to think it's a winning argument to argue in favor of waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:23:30.000Poll data show that Americans do not like waste in government.
00:23:34.000The latest polling that I saw from Gallup about these broad issues shows 56% of Americans Believe that a huge percentage of government spending is in fact waste and abuse.
00:23:48.000In fact, according to the Gallup poll from this November, just after the election, 55% of Americans believe the government is doing too much.
00:23:58.000Only 41% believe the government needs to do more.
00:24:02.000When it comes to the waste inherent in government, Most Americans, in fact the vast majority of Americans, want government made more efficient.
00:24:13.000Americans' views of the federal government, 26% positive, 58% negative, are second from the bottom of all 25 industries tested.
00:24:22.000The only industry that is less popular than the federal government is the pharmaceutical industry.
00:24:29.000A Pew Research poll in April showed that 56% of U.S. adults, this would be April 2024, agreed the government is almost always wasteful and inefficient.
00:24:37.00058% of Americans were dissatisfied with the size and power of the federal government.
00:24:41.000And so what Trump is doing here, and it's quite smart, is he's singling out bad, wasteful, abusive projects, and he's making those the tip of the spear in a broader attack on the size and scope of the federal government.
00:24:55.000And what's amazing is the Democrats are falling right into it.
00:24:57.000They're claiming there is no waste, fraud, or abuse.
00:24:59.000So, for example, yesterday, a Democratic witness named Dylan Hetler Gaudet testified before Congress, suggesting...
00:25:06.000That he could not see widespread abuse or fraud in the government.
00:25:10.000He's the director of government affairs at an NGO called the Project on Government Oversight, which again is another one of these ridiculous left-wing front groups funded by George Soros.
00:25:19.000Project on Government Oversight, but they don't do any government oversight, and apparently the government's doing an amazing job, according to Mr. Hedler Gaudet.
00:25:28.000Fraud is different from abuse, and abuse is different from both.
00:25:32.000When we talk about improper payments, they are a subset of those other three categories.
00:25:36.000But that doesn't tell us the whole picture either.
00:25:39.000Sometimes improper payments are a function of bad record keeping.
00:25:42.000Sometimes they are a function of outdated information technology systems.
00:25:46.000Sometimes they come about through human error and sometimes they come about through negligence.
00:25:50.000There are a variety of reasons why improper payments happen.
00:25:54.000It just simply is not the case that improper payments are only a function of bad people Well, I mean, it's not a matter of bad people doing bad things with bad intent.
00:26:07.000Whether you intend to waste our money or whether you're just wasting our money is irrelevant to the taxpayer whose money is wasted.
00:26:13.000President Trump, for his part, again, this is going to be a popular case with the American people.
00:26:16.000He says, of course there's lots of fraud.
00:26:18.000Have you seen the size of our federal government?
00:26:21.000We should talk about widespread fraud and abuse.
00:26:37.000You're talking about with regard to all of the investigations that are going on about this stupidity.
00:26:42.000What we're going to do is tomorrow I'm having a news conference.
00:26:45.000I'm going to read to you some of the names that hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars have been given to.
00:26:52.000And if you tell me that we should be giving money to those things, those entities, I think you'll probably have to leave as a reporter because you're not very talented.
00:27:01.000When you look at the kind of money, billions and billions of dollars being thrown away illegally, and there's no chance.
00:27:11.000Our Attorney General, there's no chance that there's not kickbacks or something going on.
00:27:16.000When you give millions and millions of dollars to somebody that stands to look at something for 15 minutes and walks away with millions of dollars, that money's coming back in some form.
00:27:28.000And that's only one form of corruption.
00:27:32.000Now, what is different about what Trump is doing than what Republicans have historically done is that by unleashing Elon Musk, who's an outsider.
00:27:39.000And aiming at the technological systems that actually generate the payments by aiming at the actual machinery of government rather than sort of overall policy.
00:27:49.000When it comes to the bureaucracy, there's the overall policy.
00:27:52.000Very, very difficult to shape the overall policy without touching the machinery.
00:27:56.000The machinery is the thing that keeps printing the money and sending the money, and it keeps going no matter what.
00:28:01.000And you can question the policy, but if you don't actually change the machinery underneath the hood of the car, you're just changing the paint of the car.
00:28:07.000And the machine continues to move in the same direction.
00:28:22.000Joe Lonsdale, who's an expert at this, he's the founding partner of 8VC, which is a major venture capital firm, one of the founding partners of Palantir.
00:28:30.000He talked on CNBC about what is different that Elon is doing from historically what Republicans have done.
00:28:37.000I have mentors in the Reagan administration who came in looking for these things, and those people were not technical.
00:28:43.000And so when they went to the bureaucracy and they asked questions, there's so many ways of obscuring and blocking and deterring.
00:28:49.000And so what Elon did is he got root access and he went to the tech systems themselves.
00:29:46.000And it's now pervading throughout every branch of government.
00:29:49.000Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, who was a guest on our program just last week, he said, listen, I've been trying to identify waste, fraud, and abuse with the help of Doge, and we're finding it.
00:30:00.000Shockingly, Roughly $20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA. This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history, and it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.
00:30:19.000EPA needs to reassume responsibility for all of these funds.
00:30:24.000We will review every penny that has gone out the door.
00:30:28.000I will be referring this matter to the Inspector General's office and will work with the Justice Department as well.
00:30:35.000Again, is this stuff going to be unpopular with Americans?
00:30:38.000I'm hard-pressed to see precisely how.
00:30:40.000Mike Lawler, a representative from New York, he was talking about USAID, which of course has had its funding dramatically slashed by Musk and by Doge.
00:30:48.000And he says, you want to talk about a waste of money?
00:30:51.000And here's an example of a waste of money by USAID. You look at some of the expenditures by USAID. For instance, I uncovered over $3 million to a rap artist in Gaza producing anti-Israel, anti-Semitic songs.
00:31:11.000Is that the best use of American taxpayer dollars?
00:31:16.000And so one of the things that we're going to do in this hearing tomorrow, obviously, is go through what actually is the role of USAID, what should they be focused on, and frankly, what have they been focused on?
00:31:32.000Well, again, he is right about all this.
00:31:34.000It's not going to be hard to find examples of bad spending, and that is a great way of approaching these issues.
00:31:39.000From a public relations perspective, it's a great way of approaching these issues because it puts Americans in mind of how much money is being wasted.
00:31:45.000Now, Democrats are trying to do the opposite.
00:31:47.000They're trying to find examples of things being cut that are just so devastating.
00:31:50.000That's every day in the New York Times.
00:31:52.000Somebody who's been deprived of their government paycheck, and oh, how sad.
00:31:55.000Somebody who's in Thailand who's been deprived of a medical appointment because USAID is no longer paying for it.
00:32:02.000But the truth is, in a time when Americans feel that America has been overstretched, that our economy is basically stretched beyond its capacity, that we are paying too much money for everything, there's not a lot of sympathy for the Democrat position, that we need endless largesse and waste of taxpayer money in order so that one government employee that we need endless largesse and waste of taxpayer money in order so that one government employee can get her retirement That is not going to be a popular position.
00:32:25.000At the same time, and the Trump government is being very careful and meticulous, actually, and how they are presenting this publicly, one of the things that they are saying is, when it comes to things that are really important, government benefits, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, we're not touching those things.
00:32:38.000Again, that's not something that I want.
00:32:40.000I, as a fiscal conservative, would love to see a restructuring of many of these gigantic entitlement programs, which are, in fact, the systemic drivers of our debt.
00:32:48.000However, when it comes to those programs, Trump is being very clear we're not touching those.
00:32:53.000Again, he's just going to say waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:32:55.000We're not going to touch the third rails.
00:32:57.000Here was the VA Secretary, Doug Collins, saying, you know, you're hearing that veterans' benefits are being cut.
00:33:21.000We're doing what we're supposed to be doing.
00:33:25.000And so, and this is all very smart PR. Kristi Noem, who's the head of the Department of Homeland Security, yesterday she announced that she was clawing back payments that FEMA had given.
00:33:38.000She wrote, Mark my words, there will not be a single penny spent that goes against the interest and safety of the American people.
00:33:55.000And the entire government is being brought to bear behind the idea that they're going to cut the size and scope of the government.
00:33:59.000All this talk about Musk being a fascist, Trump being a fascist, they're all Nazis.
00:34:03.000When was the last time you saw a fascist movement that was cutting the size and scope of government?
00:35:10.000We'll get to Democratic reaction in just a minute.
00:35:11.000But what they are saying when they say that the judges are being overridden and all the rest of this, Americans are not in the business of listening to district court judges who say we have to keep spending wasteful dollars because they say so.
00:35:23.000This is another point that Pam Bondi was making yesterday.
00:35:26.000We have so many unelected judges who are trying to control government spending, and there is a clear separation of powers.
00:35:36.000You know, they're doing it to Elon Musk, who is a great man and a good friend at Doge.
00:35:41.000What they're doing to him, to our country, is outrageous.
00:35:49.000By the way, a judge yesterday did, in fact, lift the ban on Trump's buyout offer to federal employees.
00:35:56.000According to the Washington Post, a judge on Wednesday lifted his pause on the federal government's deferred resignation program, prompting the Trump administration to swiftly declare victory as it closed the offer to any more workers who might still have been mulling it.
00:36:06.000That program had been halted since last Thursday.
00:36:09.000But now, the judge said, that the union's lawsuit could not succeed because they lacked standing to sue and because his court lacked jurisdiction.
00:36:23.000And all these things are going to go to the Supreme Court.
00:36:25.000And what's amazing is that the left keeps taking legal positions that are pretty much unsustainable on executive power.
00:36:31.000If Trump were designing in a laboratory some methodology for legally giving the go-ahead and giving the imprimatur of Supreme Court legitimacy to his actions, he's basically doing it.
00:36:42.000He's doing things that are pretty uncontroversial, actually, under the Constitution.
00:37:10.000Every dollar goes right back into building a real alternative to the mainstream.
00:37:13.000More shows, more movies, more investigative journalism.
00:37:16.000this is how we continue to reshape the culture but here's another reason if you like this show there's more of it waiting for you only daily wire plus members get exclusive content at the end of every episode the show after the show plus live chats and more don't just listen be a part of it download the daily wire plus app or go to dailywire.com slash subscribe and become a member today meanwhile democrats are looking for a way to resist the ongoing trump train it's not going amazing They're...
00:37:43.000The tip of the spear, in terms of personalities, is, believe it or not, Bernie Sanders, who is 100,000 years old.
00:37:50.000Bernie Sanders was a colleague of Eugene V. Debs.
00:37:52.000Bernie Sanders may, in fact, have marched with the original Karl Marx, and yet he is being trotted out as the ideological thought leader of the Democratic Party, because always and forever, the Democrats continue to double down on stupid.
00:38:04.000Instead of moderating and moving more toward common sense, they have decided that all of the juice is with the far left.
00:38:10.000And listen, it could work out for them.
00:38:11.000You could see a world where, for some exogenous reason, the economy goes through a really rough patch and suddenly the entire country swivels and the pendulum swings the other way and suddenly got AOC as president.
00:38:20.000You could see that because, again, politics is unpredictable.
00:38:23.000But is it a smart move to put Bernie Sanders at the head of your ideological party?
00:38:30.000It hasn't really borne tremendous fruit for them, but they continue to do it.
00:38:34.000According to Politico, Bernie Sanders, the two-time presidential candidate, is barnstorming Iowa and Nebraska to rally voters against what he calls the oligarchy, the kind of high-profile offensive that typically signals a potential run for the White House.
00:38:45.000In Sanders' case, he's more likely paving the way for someone to follow in his footsteps.
00:39:03.000He's probably looking at Joe Biden and thinking, I'm a spring chicken next to that guy, and that guy was president.
00:39:08.000Sanders is supposedly not interested in mounting a third presidential campaign, but he's trying to figure out who would carry the torch in 2028. Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's fame, the ice cream shop, the socialist ice cream shop that is not, in fact, socialist.
00:39:55.000When Elon Musk is cutting the size and scope of government, how do you make the case that an oligarchy is running the country on its own behalf when they are literally cutting the amount of funding available to other people?
00:41:35.000Apparently they were activists at a Save the Civil Service rally because there's nothing that unifies Americans like Save the Civil Service!
00:42:07.000And they're trotting out all their most popular faces.
00:42:10.000They got Bernie, and then they've got Randy Weingarten, the super corrupt head of the American Federation of Teachers.
00:42:15.000They're trying her out to say that she's going to sue everybody in sight because there's nothing Americans love more than career bureaucrats and union leaders who have miseducated our children trying to sue everyone into stopping the train for which they voted.
00:42:30.000The irony here is at the same exact time as Elon Musk and his coders have information across basically that affects all Americans, he refuses.
00:42:44.000To disclose his interests as someone who is a government contractor who gets probably millions if not billions of dollars in his own companies in terms of all of this.
00:42:58.000So number one is to try to stop the data breach.
00:43:23.000The American Federation of Teachers, which wants to remove your children from you and trans them, they are very deeply concerned about the invasion of privacy if Elon Musk might know your social security number while he's looking to possible cuts.
00:43:35.000Well, they do have another strategy, which is to just call Elon Musk a dick over and over and over.
00:43:38.000That's Democratic Representative Robert Garcia, who did that yesterday.
00:43:42.000Again, Democrats are a little frustrated.
00:43:45.000Now, I find it ironic, of course, that our chairwoman, Congresswoman Green, is in charge of running this committee.
00:43:50.000Now, in the last Congress, Chairwoman Green literally showed a dick pic in our oversight congressional hearing.
00:44:41.000Elon Musk and his co-president Donald Trump have spent the first three weeks of their presidency attempting a full assault on the separated powers of the Constitution.
00:44:50.000He seems to be acting as Trump's co-commander-in-chief.
00:44:53.000Elon Musk is acting like a co-president Trump's.
00:45:18.000Carolyn Levitt, the White House press secretary, here she was yesterday saying, you know, you guys are being ridiculous with your Musk has the power.
00:45:38.000I mean, I understand that Democrats have never worked in the private sector and so they don't actually understand, presumably, how this actually operates, but here we go.
00:45:48.000Does Elon Musk have the power of the presidency?
00:46:00.000Most recently, Jamie Raskin, the congressman, took it a step further, calling for Musk's impeachment, saying that he somehow usurped the power of the presidency.
00:47:16.000But we're ranked number one in one department, cost per pupil.
00:47:20.000So we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world.
00:47:24.000But we're ranked number 40. We've been between 38 and 40. The last time I looked, it was 38. And then I looked two days ago, it came out the new list.
00:47:32.000It came out at number 40. So we're ranked 40. Okay, by the way, one of the things that Trump, it's so funny.
00:47:39.000Democrats, you know, continue to claim that Trump is some sort of idiot.
00:47:44.000I'd like some evidence of this proposition, please.
00:47:47.000Really, he goes out there, he talks to the press every single day.
00:47:49.000He has a fairly solid level of fluency with the issues about which he is speaking.
00:47:54.000He's not afraid to take the questions.
00:47:55.000He's not hiding behind his old age the same way that Joe Biden did.
00:48:00.000You guys are getting run over, and you deserve it.
00:48:03.000All right, coming up, speaking of getting run over, Pam Bondi is now suing, the Attorney General is now suing the state of New York over illegal immigration.
00:48:10.000If you're not a member, become a member.