The Ben Shapiro Show - What Do We Do About CHINA?

00:00:00.000 Today on the Ben Shapiro show, China is growing by leaps and bounds in terms of manufacturing.

00:00:04.000 What does that actually mean?

00:00:06.000 How should the United States actually orient its national security strategy to stop China? 0.65

00:00:10.000 What does that mean for Russia?

00:00:11.000 We'll get into the weeds on all of this.

00:00:13.000 How do we stop China? 1.00

00:00:14.000 How do we stop Russia? 0.96

00:00:16.000 How do we strengthen America in the world first?

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00:00:53.000 The United States right now is facing down an existential threat.

00:00:56.000 That existential threat, of course, does come from a lack of willpower.

00:01:01.000 It comes from a doubt about what America is.

00:01:04.000 But in terms of foreign policy, that existential threat comes from a team-up that has been growing.

00:01:09.000 That team-up is between China, which is really the sponsor state of the anti-American bloc, along with its friends like Russia and Iran.

00:01:17.000 The existential threat doesn't mean that China is going to attack the United States.

00:01:20.000 It does mean that as the United States recedes from the world, as Russia expands its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, as China expands its sphere of influence, not just in the Far East, but also in Africa, across the rest of Asia, into South America, the United States is going to be in the unenviable position of having to withdraw from the world.

00:01:41.000 And a United States that is no longer able to guarantee freedom of the seas, a United States with no economic allies, a United States that is sort of a secondary partner, as opposed to China being a primary partner for all the rest of these countries, is a United States that has an economy that is shrinking, a United States that is forced within its own borders.

00:01:58.000 And that is a problem.

00:01:59.000 That is not a good thing.

00:02:01.000 That is a problem.

00:02:02.000 There is this bizarre notion that has arisen on the right that if the United States were to be essentially autarkic, if the United States were to withdraw from the world, the rest of the world, suddenly things would get better, that the amount that we expend in foreign aid, for example, or military expenditure is a complete waste of money.

00:02:18.000 If we just spend that money at home, then magically everything gets better.

00:02:22.000 The problem, of course, is that the world is interconnected.

00:02:25.000 The reason that you are able to obtain better, cheaper products that make your life easier every single day is because the interconnection of world trade makes that possible.

00:02:34.000 And that, of course, is only possible because of the power of the United States economy and the power of the United States military.

00:02:40.000 Why do I bring that up?

00:02:42.000 Well, because China seems to be posing a broader and broader threat.

00:02:46.000 And yet, there is a bizarre unwillingness on the left to acknowledge the threat that is China.

00:02:51.000 And on the right, there seems to be an unwillingness to deal with the actual realities of what it would mean to face down China in a responsible and coherent fashion.

00:03:01.000 So, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that China is actually growing at the expense of the rest of the world.

00:03:09.000 According to Greg Ipp, writing for the Wall Street Journal, who has contributed more to the rest of the world's growth this year, China or the United States?

00:03:16.000 The answer is the United States, and it's not even close.

00:03:19.000 Even as the U.S. rolls out tariffs, its imports are up 10% so far this year from a year earlier.

00:03:24.000 And as China moralizes against protectionism, its imports are down 3% in dollar terms.

00:03:30.000 The U.S. figures might be an anomaly reflecting people attempting to get around the tariffs by importing product before the tariffs went into effect, but China's are not.

00:03:37.000 In the past five years, its export volumes have soared while imports have flatlined.

00:03:41.000 China is swallowing up a growing share of the world's market for manufactured goods.

00:03:46.000 This reveals an uncomfortable truth.

00:03:47.000 Beijing is pursuing a beggar thy neighbor growth model at everyone else's expense.

00:03:53.000 According to economist at Goldman Sachs, 1% more output in China in the past would raise the rest of the world's output by 0.2% as it pulled in imports because we would then export to China.

00:04:04.000 But as China has raised its own tariff barriers, instead, the relationship has turned negative.

00:04:09.000 China's growth is now being driven by its leadership's determination and capability to further advance manufacturing competitiveness and boost exports.

00:04:17.000 So, for the rest of the world, theoretically, that could be a good because that means cheaper stuff coming into the United States.

00:04:23.000 But there's also a problem in that they are emptying out our manufacturing sector.

00:04:27.000 Okay, but what this has led to in the West is the bizarre perception that what we ought to do is radically increase tariffs, not just on China, which would be retaliatory and worthwhile, but on every place else.

00:04:39.000 And that, of course, is a gigantic mistake.

00:04:42.000 And this leads to questions about the overall policy of the United States vis-a-vis China.

00:04:47.000 What exactly are we trying to do vis-a-vis China?

00:04:49.000 Now, I've made the case that if you wish to face down China, you have to do a few things. 0.99

00:04:53.000 One is you need closer relationships, not more attenuated relationships, closer trade and security relationships with other countries surrounding China, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India.

00:05:07.000 You need better relations with those countries so as to box in China and essentially isolate China. 0.96

00:05:12.000 If China wants to cheat, if they don't want to play by the rules, if China wishes to beggar its neighbor, let them pursue an autarkic economic policy. 0.79

00:05:19.000 The thing about autarky is that it tends to make the country pursuing it poorer over time.

00:05:24.000 Initially, it looks like an explosion of economic activity.

00:05:28.000 But over time, as countries start pouring resources into less efficient modes of manufacture in order to do it at home rather than to import those products from abroad, they tend to empty themselves out.

00:05:39.000 And this is the common pattern in economics.

00:05:42.000 Every mercantilist or fascistic economic system that has worked like this shows very good early growth numbers.

00:05:48.000 And then that growth curve eventually peters out and the country ends up with economic stagnation.

00:05:54.000 This happened in Japan.

00:05:55.000 It happened in South Korea.

00:05:56.000 If you go back prior to World War II, this happened in Germany.

00:05:58.000 One of the reasons that Germany, under the Nazis, had to become an expansionist power is because Germany tried to pursue economic autarky in the 1930s.

00:06:07.000 And they saw for a brief moment in time, a gigantic manufacturing boom, people getting off of the unemployment lines, moving out of the Weimar Republic era.

00:06:16.000 But as it turns out, they were doing that, again, based on state expenditures that actually made them less economically viable over the long term.

00:06:24.000 And so then they had to turn to actual physical territorial expansionism.

00:06:28.000 Autarky very often turns into a necessity for expanding your access to resources, which leads actually to invasions of other countries.

00:06:36.000 It is not a coincidence that countries that tend to embrace a very mercantilistic policy, an economic policy that focuses on let's build everything right here at home.

00:06:46.000 When they can't, they then have to expand their own territorial borders or the places under their immediate dominion.

00:06:52.000 Free trade generally means that you don't have to invade other places because you can trade with those other places.

00:06:57.000 Already coming up, how do we stop China? 1.00

00:07:00.000 Do we first?

00:07:00.000 They have a strategy.

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00:09:29.000 So, when you look at China, how would you stop China? 0.96

00:09:31.000 Well, you need to do a few things, as we say.

00:09:33.000 One, build up better security and economic relationships in the Far East.

00:09:37.000 Also, build up better security and economic relationships, yes, with Europe.

00:09:41.000 And that means that we can use tariffs as a way to force the Europeans to get rid of their non-tariff barriers.

00:09:47.000 One of the ways I would be forcing the Europeans to pay their fair share is by using things like tariffs in order to push the Europeans to pay their fair share when it comes to, for example, the price of pharmaceuticals.

00:09:57.000 Europe pays far less than what the actual market rate should be for pharmaceuticals.

00:10:02.000 And then the United States ends up paying for that via our taxpayers and via our consumers.

00:10:08.000 And that's just the way that it works.

00:10:09.000 We should stop that, right?

00:10:10.000 There are things that we can do to fight the non-tariff barriers and also the unfairness of our systems with Europe.

00:10:15.000 But the thing we should be pursuing in the end is freer trade, better relationships.

00:10:21.000 Because if you're going to box in China, you need to offer both carrot and stick, the stick to China, but carrots to our friends.

00:10:27.000 And when it comes to achieving carrots for our friends, we can actually offer a little bit of the stick in order to achieve the carrot.

00:10:33.000 That is why I'm not against using tariffs as a way to pressure other countries to lower their tariffs.

00:10:37.000 This is a case that Treasury Secretary Scott Besson has made.

00:10:41.000 So you need to box China in. 1.00

00:10:43.000 You need to treat them like the adversary they are.

00:10:46.000 You need to build out other lines of supply.

00:10:50.000 You need supply chains that are diversified.

00:10:52.000 So we're not as reliant on China, right?

00:10:54.000 These are all the things you would need to do.

00:10:55.000 You would need to cut off China's allies at the knees. 0.94

00:10:58.000 So if Russia is expending extensive resources in Ukraine, for example, and it's hollowing out their economy, if it's making them poorer, if it's making them more dependent on China, if in fact Russia is adversarially connected with China against the United States, which again is the philosophy of Duganism, which is the sort of guiding light of the way that Vladimir Putin thinks, if we believe, as we should,

00:11:21.000 that Russia is a geopolitical adversary of the United States, then obviously we should be pursuing an attempt to get Russia to stop invading Eastern Europe.

00:11:32.000 And that means supporting allies in the region to the extent necessary to stop the Russians.

00:11:37.000 Because it's not as though Russia and China aren't talking to each other.

00:11:40.000 They are talking very extensively to each other.

00:11:41.000 If we are attempting to form a better relationship with India, then we should be attempting to form a better relationship with India.

00:11:47.000 Should be trying to make trade relations with India so beneficial to India that they don't want to trade with the Chinese. 0.98

00:11:53.000 There are natural differences in opinion between China and India, which have nearly come to blows several times over the course of the last several decades.

00:12:00.000 India and China are not working hand in glove.

00:12:03.000 They have actual territorial conflicts.

00:12:06.000 We could be attempting to pry India out of China's sphere of influence. 0.95

00:12:10.000 These are all things that a responsible foreign policy would do.

00:12:13.000 And then we certainly would not be shipping many of the most important components in the battle for the future to China.

00:12:20.000 China's already stealing RIP. 1.00

00:12:21.000 China's already cheating when it comes to trade relationships. 1.00

00:12:25.000 China is already beggaring its neighbor. 0.80

00:12:28.000 Why should we be sending, for example, some of our most sophisticated microchips produced in the United States or via TSMC?

00:12:35.000 Why should we be allowing those to flow into China? 1.00

00:12:38.000 Even if we're going to argue that it's only a marginal increase in China's capacity, why would we allow that increase in China's capacity?

00:12:46.000 China is our geopolitical enemy. 0.91

00:12:48.000 They are our opponent.

00:12:49.000 Trying to pretend otherwise is foolish.

00:12:52.000 Because if you allow China to continue pursuing its normal policies, China will, in fact, blow itself out.

00:12:58.000 Here are China's problems. 0.98

00:12:59.000 China has a serious demographic problem.

00:13:01.000 It does not have enough people.

00:13:02.000 I know it's a weird idea, but China is in steep demographic decline.

00:13:06.000 China had one child policy for decades.

00:13:09.000 That means they do not have enough human beings in China, even though it's got a billion people.

00:13:13.000 They do not have enough human beings to actually be able to generate the economic growth necessary to pay for their gigantic redistributionist schemes and mercantilist ideas.

00:13:24.000 They have a massive demographic problem.

00:13:24.000 They don't.

00:13:26.000 They have an enormous debt problem.

00:13:27.000 They've been burying that debt problem in local and regional debt issues.

00:13:32.000 They've been building gigantic empty cities rooted in debt that they're taking out from their own citizens and against their own citizens.

00:13:39.000 They have an enormous debt problem in China.

00:13:42.000 And we always tend to look, this is just the way that people treat economics.

00:13:45.000 They tend to look at the fact that China builds some nice things and say, wow, they must be doing it right.

00:13:51.000 But the fact is that mercantilism looks systematic when you look at the areas where they succeed.

00:13:58.000 And it looks like a trash heap when you look at the areas where they don't succeed.

00:14:00.000 And the areas where you don't succeed in a centralized economy are the areas that tend to be ignored.

00:14:05.000 And it's a lot of them.

00:14:07.000 Capitalism looks really messy, but has a much higher hit rate because capital follows the best ideas.

00:14:13.000 You don't just keep investing in bad ideas the way you do with a centralized economic system, like a China, for example.

00:14:18.000 So there are ways to box in China.

00:14:22.000 The question is whether the United States is actually going to do this.

00:14:25.000 So the United States has now put out a national security strategy via the White House.

00:14:29.000 And there's a lot to recommend the national security strategy.

00:14:32.000 Hard to tell kind of whose fingerprints are on the national security strategy from the White House.

00:14:37.000 Obviously, the Vice President JD Vance had some hand in it.

00:14:40.000 I'm sure the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, had some hands in it.

00:14:43.000 Probably Elbridge Colby, the Under Secretary of Defense, had some hands in it.

00:14:46.000 Michael Anton, who's sort of a national security advisor, reportedly had some hands in it.

00:14:50.000 It's a lot of hands in it.

00:14:52.000 But what that means is that the final result has some good stuff and it has some incoherent stuff.

00:14:58.000 But the overall sort of takeaway from the national security strategy is an incoherence that I think China and Russia and Iran and other parties are going to try to take advantage of.

00:15:09.000 So to use China as sort of the chief example, there's been a lot of talk in the defense establishment about the shift from, for example, the Middle East to focus on China, something with which I totally agree.

00:15:21.000 The Middle East is not nearly as important geostrategically to the United States as it once was because we are now energy independent.

00:15:28.000 The Middle East is still quite important because obviously when you are talking about the price of global oil, for example, and the Middle East provides a heavy share of that, whatever happens in the Middle East has other ramifications, but it's not nearly as vital as it was in, say, the 1970s when the vast bulk of oil was coming via OPEC.

00:15:44.000 That's no longer the case.

00:15:46.000 And so shifting resources from the Middle East over to the Far East makes a fair bit of sense.

00:15:52.000 In order to achieve that, you wouldn't want to, as the national security strategy suggests, achieve quote-unquote regional balance.

00:15:58.000 That's a very Obama idea.

00:16:00.000 So the national security strategy at one point suggests that there ought to be regional balances of power.

00:16:06.000 Quote, we will work with allies and partners to maintain global and regional balances of power to prevent the emergence of dominant adversaries.

00:16:13.000 I do not know why we should pursue regional balances of power rather than strengthening our allies.

00:16:19.000 I don't want Ukraine to have a balance of power with Russia.

00:16:21.000 I would like for Russia to be weaker. 0.89

00:16:23.000 I do not want Turkey to have a balance of power with Israel and Saudi Arabia.

00:16:26.000 I want Turkey to be weaker.

00:16:27.000 I don't want Iran to have a balance of power. 0.99

00:16:29.000 That's not something I'm interested in, right?

00:16:31.000 Because balance of power suggests that if, for example, Saudi gets too strong, you then have to turn around and strengthen Iran, which makes zero sense at all.

00:16:39.000 So again, there's a bit of incoherence here.

00:16:41.000 But with regard to China, the national security strategy released by the White House says a few things.

00:16:47.000 It says, President Trump single-handedly reversed more than three decades of mistaken American assumptions about China, namely that by opening our markets to China, encouraging American business to invest in China, and outsourcing our manufacturing to China, we would facilitate China's entry into the so-called rules-based international order.

00:17:03.000 This did not happen.

00:17:04.000 Okay, this part is absolutely true.

00:17:06.000 Donald Trump did, in fact, reverse the bipartisan consensus that was false, a total lie, that us integrating China into the world economy would somehow benefit us, but not benefit China because benefit because eventually China would be sort of undermined politically by economic growth.

00:17:22.000 China did not make the mistake that Mikhail Gorbachev made in the USSR.

00:17:26.000 If you believe that the USSR should have been upheld, then what you would say to Gorbachev is you don't want a sort of political loosening along with economic loosening.

00:17:36.000 China allowed some economic loosening, but maintained strict political control.

00:17:41.000 The national security strategy says China adapted to the shift in U.S. tariff policy that began in 2017, in part by strengthening its hold on supply chains, especially in the world's low and middle income countries, among the greatest economic battlegrounds of the coming decades.

00:17:54.000 China's exports to the low-income countries doubled between 2020 and 2024.

00:17:58.000 The United States imports Chinese goods indirectly from middlemen and Chinese built factories in a dozen countries, including Mexico.

00:18:04.000 China's exports to low-income countries are today nearly four times its exports to the United States.

00:18:09.000 Going forward, we will rebalance America's economic relationship with China, prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence.

00:18:16.000 Trade with China should be balanced and focused on non-sensitive factors.

00:18:19.000 Now, again, that's fine.

00:18:21.000 Rebalancing trade with China, boxing China in, would be a good thing. 0.99

00:18:25.000 However, it's the next part of the national security strategy that starts to get dicey.

00:18:30.000 Quote, the United States must work with our treaty allies and partners, who together add another $35 trillion in economic power to our own $30 trillion national economy to counteract predatory economic practices and use our combined economic power to help safeguard our prime position in the world economy and ensure that allied economies do not become subordinate to any competing power.

00:18:49.000 America First Diplomacy seeks to rebalance global trade relationships.

00:18:53.000 We have made clear to our allies America's current account deficit is unsustainable.

00:18:57.000 We must encourage Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada, Mexico, and other prominent nations to adopt trade policies that help rebalance China's economy toward household consumption because Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East alone cannot absorb China's enormous excess capacity.

00:19:10.000 Okay, so this is talk about trade deficits.

00:19:12.000 And the basic idea here is that the United States has to rebalance our trade relationships with Japan and Europe.

00:19:18.000 Now, as we've talked about on the show, trade is mutually beneficial.

00:19:23.000 As an economic matter, put aside national security for a second.

00:19:26.000 If you and I trade, both of us benefit.

00:19:29.000 It's a voluntary exchange of goods, a voluntary exchange of money for goods or services.

00:19:34.000 Both of us benefit or we wouldn't be doing it.

00:19:36.000 The idea that the fact that we run, for example, a trade deficit with Ethiopia is inherently economically problematic for the United States is ridiculous.

00:19:44.000 The GDP per capita in Ethiopia is like a thousand bucks a year, and they're exporting us coffee.

00:19:49.000 Us buying good coffee from Ethiopia does not beggar the United States.

00:19:53.000 That's silly.

00:19:54.000 And this is where the America first tariff policy toward the rest of the world actually ends up achieving the reverse of what it wants to with regard to China.

00:20:02.000 As I said at the top, if you want to box China in, we need better trade relationships with Japan, Australia, Europe, Canada, Mexico.

00:20:11.000 Otherwise, you know what they're going to do?

00:20:13.000 They're going to trade more with China and less with us.

00:20:17.000 This is the problem.

00:20:19.000 The national security strategy laid out by the White House simultaneously argues: quote, we should form coalitions that use our comparative advantages in finance and technology to build export markets with cooperating countries.

00:20:30.000 America's economic partners should no longer expect to earn income from the United States through overcapacity and structural imbalances, but instead pursue growth through managed cooperation tied through strategic alignment and by receiving long-term U.S. investment.

00:20:43.000 Hold up a second.

00:20:44.000 Now, what you're talking about here is we should form coalitions using our comparative advantage in finance and tech, but we should also prevent other countries from building their manufacturing capacity to make t-shirts and such.

00:20:58.000 Okay, none of this is going to result in the thing you want it to result in.

00:21:02.000 And the proof is in the pudding.

00:21:04.000 All righty, coming up, we'll get to the president's decision to allow NVIDIA to sell certain types of sophisticated microchips to the Chinese.

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00:23:41.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, President Trump retook the White House almost a year ago, promising a manufacturing boom.

00:23:47.000 He got one in China.

00:23:49.000 Chinese industrial production broke records this year as its factories churned out more cars, machinery, and chemicals than ever before.

00:23:55.000 Despite the disruptions of tariffs, the country's trade surplus in goods has set a record as growing shipments to Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Africa offset the hit from Trump's levies on direct sales to the United States.

00:24:06.000 Chinese companies that built their business around low trade barriers to sell into the U.S. have adapted and in some cases are bouncing back.

00:24:12.000 In May, Chinese-owned e-commerce giant Timu's business model of serving up affordable household goods, beauty products, and clothes to American consumers looked all but finished.

00:24:21.000 Today, Timu is once again among the most downloaded apps in the United States, and business is booming.

00:24:25.000 Why?

00:24:26.000 Well, because if you're worried about affordability, I know there are a lot of people on the right who are up against the American desire for cheap products.

00:24:32.000 We used to just call that affordability.

00:24:34.000 Americans do like products better and cheaper.

00:24:38.000 That's a reality.

00:24:39.000 If you can't compete, you lose.

00:24:42.000 China has reported a goods trade surplus of more than $1 trillion for the year through November.

00:24:47.000 Manufacturing output in the first 10 months of the year was up 7% compared with the same period in 2024.

00:24:54.000 China's on track this year to post a surplus in manufactured goods of around $2 trillion.

00:25:01.000 Now, again, some of this is China subsidizing its manufacturing capacity at the cost of massive debt.

00:25:08.000 But part of this is because the United States decided that we were going to go to tariff war, not just with China, but with everybody.

00:25:14.000 And it turns out everybody else still wants cheap goods.

00:25:17.000 It turns out everybody else is happy to shop in China if they want to.

00:25:23.000 Not only that, if we're looking at ways to box in China, I have to say, I do not understand for the life of me why we are allowing NVIDIA to export the H200 chip to China.

00:25:34.000 President Trump says the United States will receive a 25% cut of whatever China buys.

00:25:39.000 But the whole point is that once China has widespread access to those chips, they will buy some and then they will steal the IP and make others. 0.58

00:25:48.000 Not only that, China's way out of the box. 0.99

00:25:51.000 We've talked about their problems with debt.

00:25:52.000 We've talked about China's problems with human lack, right? 0.99

00:25:56.000 They don't have enough human capital because they killed half their population through the one-child policy.

00:26:01.000 They have an aging population, a hugely aging demographic.

00:26:04.000 What's their way out of the box?

00:26:05.000 One way out of the box is winning the AI race.

00:26:07.000 What does AI do?

00:26:08.000 AI means you need fewer people.

00:26:11.000 AI means that you can actually increase your productivity numbers without as many employees.

00:26:19.000 That the computers and the robots do all the work.

00:26:22.000 The chief beneficiaries of that are places like China, which actually are lacking human capital, lacking human beings, and have heavy debt problems. 0.93

00:26:29.000 So why are you allowing them the possibility of winning an AI race that not only has consequences economically, but also has consequences in terms of military power?

00:26:38.000 All the next wars in human history are going to be AI-powered wars, drone-on-drone, AI assessment against AI assessment.

00:26:47.000 Whoever has the best tech is going to win.

00:26:50.000 That is going to be the next step in human warfare because it will be robot warfare essentially.

00:26:54.000 So NVIDIA is doing really well.

00:26:56.000 It helps the NVIDIA stock valuation.

00:26:59.000 But this is one area where America first really should kick in.

00:27:01.000 It shouldn't kick in with regard to tariffs on Japan.

00:27:04.000 It should kick in with regard to why are we selling H200s to the Chinese, even if it delays them by six months.

00:27:11.000 That is a national security consideration.

00:27:14.000 The H200 has higher performance, according to the Wall Street Journal, than the H20 that NVIDIA was previously allowed to sell.

00:27:20.000 It's not as powerful as the company's top Black Welt products released this year or the Rubin generation of chips coming next year.

00:27:27.000 With that said, some of what's going on here is pure bulk.

00:27:32.000 Now, yes, more sophisticated chips mean greater efficiency.

00:27:34.000 But if you're China, you could brute force this thing theoretically if you have enough of these chips that you can string together. 0.98

00:27:41.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the exports could also help Chinese tech giants that have struggled to get top chips to train their models.

00:27:47.000 Jensen Huang, who's the head of NVIDIA, has argued that the company should be allowed to compete in the Chinese market because China has many of the world's top AI researchers and the U.S. should want them using American technology.

00:27:57.000 But why?

00:27:59.000 Why?

00:27:59.000 I mean, the idea is that China will then go and they'll build their own if we don't allow them access to this one.

00:28:03.000 Fine.

00:28:04.000 We should out-compete them.

00:28:06.000 We should out-compete them.

00:28:09.000 The attempt, NVIDIA was trying to sell a slimmed-down black wealth chip to China.

00:28:13.000 So if Trump's initial critique of the sort of globalist trade regime is rootless corporations attempting to make money at the expense of American security, I mean, this one is like top of the list.

00:28:27.000 This doesn't make any sense to me.

00:28:29.000 If you want to box in China, you have to stop them from winning the AI race. 0.99

00:28:34.000 As Stu Wu at the Wall Street Journal writes, with one unorthodox deal, President Trump instantly reshaped the U.S.-China technological cold war.

00:28:41.000 The fear among his critics, he just helped Beijing catch up.

00:28:45.000 He handed China's AI industry what it couldn't build itself, the high-end semiconductors needed to rival America.

00:28:52.000 And again, one of the problems here is that the reason this happened is because of the trade wars.

00:28:59.000 President Trump may have made concessions in these wars on the chips because the Chinese have so much control over rare earth minerals where we didn't game out. 0.82

00:29:08.000 Again, I said we have to build alternative supply lines and then box China in. 1.00

00:29:12.000 If you don't build out those alternative supply lines, China has a pressure point, which it used. 0.93

00:29:16.000 Also, China has manufacturing advantages in places like pharmaceutical.

00:29:20.000 Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase, he pointed out that we currently rely on China for 90% of our pharmaceutical ingredients.

00:29:29.000 It's not just about China, but we rely on single parties for things we need for F-35s and nuclear submarines.

00:29:37.000 So the resilience, we rely on China for something like 90% of the ingredients go to our pharmaceuticals and 90% of our penicillin.

00:29:47.000 Again, if we are going to go to conflict with China, which we should, then we should be smart about it. 1.00

00:29:52.000 Phil Graham and Donald Boudreau, both economists, they are writing in the Wall Street Journal today about world trade and the fact that world trade is growing in the absence of the United States.

00:30:04.000 They point out the current trade diversion began when Mr. Trump's first term tariffs led China to shift its exports to other countries.

00:30:10.000 Under Mr. Trump's second term tariffs, Chinese exports to the United States fell by 69% from February through September, but Chinese exports to other regions rose.

00:30:18.000 Over these same months, Chinese exports to Association of Southeast Asian Nations, that's Asian member states, were up by 61%, to Japan and Korea by 41%, to Africa by 35%, to the EU by 28%, to India and Latin America each by more than 10%.

00:30:34.000 As trade is diverted around the United States, other countries will continue to specialize in producing goods and services for which they have comparative advantage.

00:30:42.000 This specialization and the trade that sustains it will enhance efficiency and fuel economic growth in those trading nations.

00:30:48.000 America's economy will become increasingly isolated to our own detriment.

00:30:51.000 Before tariffs, well over half of U.S. imports were inputs used by American producers.

00:30:56.000 Keeping tariffs high will deny these producers access to many of the world's lowest caught inputs.

00:31:01.000 Instead, U.S. producers will become less efficient and less competitive on the world market.

00:31:07.000 And by the way, as we simultaneously cut ourselves off from world trade, which is a mistake, we are going to have to scale up our military.

00:31:16.000 And there's very little in the actual national security strategy with regards to what it looks like to scale up our military.

00:31:22.000 In fact, again, there's this sort of peculiar isolationist streak that runs through a national security strategy that seems to ping pong between a Reagan-esque peace-through-strength policy that President Trump historically has supported and a bizarre sort of isolationism that suggests that America needs to move away from its attempts to provide a muscular supporting presence to allies around the world.

00:31:46.000 We may be falling behind China in terms of military capacity.

00:31:50.000 According to the New York Times today, the Trump administration wants to increase defense spending in 2026 to more than a trillion dollars.

00:31:58.000 Much of that money will be squandered on capabilities that do more to magnify our weaknesses than to sharpen our strengths.

00:32:04.000 What do they mean?

00:32:05.000 Well, they point out that China's ability to strike U.S. forces has radically expanded.

00:32:11.000 They now have 500 intermediate-range missiles, 1,300 medium-range missiles, and 900 short-range missiles.

00:32:17.000 Those short-range missiles from China are capable of striking South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, of course.

00:32:23.000 The United States continues to direct its money toward gigantic aircraft carriers that take decades to build.

00:32:31.000 The USS Gerald Ford cost $13 billion.

00:32:35.000 Drone war can make it obsolete.

00:32:38.000 This is a point being made by people over at Palantir, for example.

00:32:42.000 Meanwhile, to pretend that China does not have an overall strategy is, of course, silly.

00:32:45.000 China is very strategic in its overall game plan.

00:32:49.000 China has been using for years its Belt and Road Initiative in order to make inroads in Africa and in South America.

00:32:56.000 You know, when the national security strategy focuses heavily on the Western Hemisphere, what we should recognize is that the threat to the United States is not chiefly Venezuela.

00:33:03.000 It is chiefly China.

00:33:04.000 And China is working with places like Venezuela and Cuba.

00:33:07.000 I'm not worried about the Cuban government.

00:33:08.000 I'm worried about the Chinese using the Cuban government. 1.00

00:33:12.000 And China is working with Russia, of course.

00:33:16.000 So the national security strategy goes out of its way to wrap the Europeans on the knuckles. 0.88

00:33:20.000 That is totally fine with me.

00:33:21.000 The Europeans deserve to have their knuckles wrapped. 1.00

00:33:25.000 The Europeans have lived high on the hog by not paying their own defense bills for decades. 0.95

00:33:31.000 And they simultaneously have imported an enormous number of people from areas of the world that seek to undermine European civilization. 0.99

00:33:38.000 That critique from JD Vance, that critique from the administration, totally correct. 0.69

00:33:43.000 However, however, if you wish to instill in the Europeans a new backbone, if you wish to do a spinal injection on the Europeans, you need to point out who their enemies are. 0.91

00:33:56.000 And yes, of course, they have internal problems, real internal problems, serious internal problems, but to pretend that the United States ought to take a sort of neutral position between the Europeans and the Russians is not so.

00:34:08.000 That is wrong.

00:34:09.000 The Russians have overtly made clear their strategy for decades under Vladimir Putin, and that is to expand their sphere of influence to play at being a great power, despite the fact that the Russian economy is smaller than the economy of the state of Florida or Italy.

00:34:23.000 And they want to do so at the expense of the Europeans, because what the Russians do not lack is stones. 0.93

00:34:30.000 They lack a functioning economy.

00:34:33.000 They lack a functioning democracy, but they have nuclear weapons and they have gall.

00:34:37.000 And so what does that require?

00:34:38.000 It requires that the Europeans and the United States actually work together to stop Russian predations. 0.84

00:34:44.000 And yet if you look at the national security strategy, Russia barely earns a mention.

00:34:48.000 Quote, should present trends continue about Europe, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.

00:34:54.000 As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.

00:35:01.000 Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path.

00:35:03.000 We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.

00:35:09.000 Yes, agree with all of that, but the strategy continues.

00:35:12.000 This lack of self-confidence is most evident in Europe's relationship with Russia.

00:35:16.000 European allies enjoy a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure save nuclear weapons.

00:35:21.000 As a result of Russia's war in Ukraine, European relations with Russia are now deeply attenuated, and many Europeans regard Russia as an existential threat.

00:35:29.000 Managing European relations with Russia will require significant U.S. diplomatic engagement, both to reestablish conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states.

00:35:42.000 Okay, let's be clear here.

00:35:43.000 The United States should not pretend to be a neutral broker between Russia and Ukraine.

00:35:48.000 We have a very strong, yes, there's massive corruption in Ukraine.

00:35:51.000 Also, there's massive corruption in Qatar, in Saudi Arabia, in a wide variety of nations that the Trump administration has quite warm relations with.

00:36:00.000 The idea that we ought to play a neutral role with regard to the Russians or that the Russians are about to flip and suddenly become a pro-American power.

00:36:07.000 That is foolishness.

00:36:08.000 It is absurd.

00:36:09.000 It is not true.

00:36:10.000 The Russians are adversarial to what they call Atlanticist interests, which is predominantly the United States.

00:36:17.000 So when the national security strategy says it is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine in order to stabilize European economies, prevent unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and reestablish strategic stability with Russia.

00:36:33.000 What does strategic stability look like when Russia is an aggressive power? 0.74

00:36:37.000 The Trump administration has quite properly called the Europeans on the fact that they have continued to purchase Russian gas.

00:36:46.000 But what we should be doing is providing them American LNG.

00:36:50.000 We should be strengthening our relations with them in the face of Russia's increasing predations because, of course, Russia and China are working in tandem. 0.50

00:36:58.000 According to the new national security strategy, quote, the Trump administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.

00:37:12.000 Okay, yes, there are problems in places like France with suppressing the right.

00:37:17.000 There are problems in places like Romania with suppressing.

00:37:20.000 We've talked about this on the show.

00:37:22.000 To somehow call the Europeans on the quote-unquote suppression of minority political rights while making room for the Russians where there are no minority political rights. 0.66

00:37:31.000 You find yourself flying off a fourth story balcony if you oppose Vladimir Putin in Russia is kind of absurd.

00:37:37.000 A large European majority, says the national security strategy, wants peace.

00:37:41.000 Yet that desire is not translated into policy in large measure because of those governments' subversion of democratic processes.

00:37:49.000 Okay, this is the reverse of what the actual situation is.

00:37:57.000 Yes, the Europeans, there are many Europeans on the right who would like to cut a separate peace with Russia.

00:38:03.000 No, that would not be good for the United States if Russia somehow earns itself a gigantic chunk of Ukraine and another invasion of Ukraine in the next five, 10 years.

00:38:13.000 The notion that we ought to be chiding the Europeans on their democracy, but not chiding, we should chide everybody, but chiding the Europeans and not chiding the Russians and pretending neutrality. 0.51

00:38:22.000 I mean, I can see why the Russians are trying to expand their foothold in Ukraine.

00:38:29.000 I mean, what guarantee could a United States that puts out that in the national security strategy give to the Ukrainians to get them to stop fighting?

00:38:36.000 Like, what security guarantee would be trustable under those circumstances?

00:38:40.000 You can see why Vladimir Zelensky, again, none of this excuses the corruption inside the Zelensky regime in Ukraine.

00:38:46.000 None of it.

00:38:47.000 I asked Zelensky directly about corruption in Ukraine when I visited with him in Kyiv.

00:38:52.000 You can watch the interview.

00:38:53.000 But you can see why Zelensky is refusing to cede land to Russia.

00:38:57.000 Why?

00:38:58.000 Because he doesn't have any security guarantees from a country that is attempting to equate Russia's predation with European multi-party democracy, which is not even remotely on the same scale as what's happening in Russia.

00:39:10.000 Donald Trump Jr. in Qatar, of all places, which, yes, is a terror-supporting slave state. 0.98

00:39:16.000 Okay, let's just be clear.

00:39:18.000 Qatar can be a strategic ally of the United States in certain respects, including all Uday airbase.

00:39:23.000 And also, they can, in fact, be a terror-supporting slave state, which is what they are.

00:39:28.000 Human slavery is alive and well in Doha. 0.64

00:39:31.000 Who do you think is building all of their beautiful buildings?

00:39:33.000 They have a population, a citizenry in Qatar of something like 300,000 people.

00:39:38.000 But that ain't the population in Qatar.

00:39:41.000 Alrighty, coming up, we'll get to Qatar, what people are saying there about Russia.

00:39:45.000 It's a little weird.

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00:40:49.000 I asked our sponsors over at Comet, a project of perplexity, what is the population of Qatar and how many citizens are there?

00:40:55.000 Qatar's total population is 3.1 million people.

00:40:57.000 That's the total population.

00:40:59.000 How many citizens are there?

00:41:00.000 Somewhere between 330,000 and 360,000.

00:41:04.000 90% of the people living in Qatar are not citizens.

00:41:07.000 They cannot vote.

00:41:08.000 They have no actual serious legal rights there.

00:41:12.000 Not only that, when you ask Comet, how many of these expatriates are either slaves or indentured foreign laborers?

00:41:17.000 The Global Slavery Index estimates about 20,000 people in Qatar are living in modern slavery.

00:41:22.000 That would be forced labor or forced marriage around 2020, 2021.

00:41:26.000 But not just that.

00:41:27.000 Human rights organizations report migrant workers make up over 90% of Qatar's population and 95% of its labor force.

00:41:34.000 And many low-paid workers experience serious abuses under or linked to the Khalafa, the Kafala sponsorship system.

00:41:40.000 Documented problems include passport confiscation.

00:41:44.000 That is where a foreign worker shows up and their boss takes their passport so they can't leave.

00:41:48.000 So now they're stuck there and they can't get out.

00:41:50.000 Restrictions on changing jobs or leaving the country, unpaid or delayed wages, debt bondage through recruitment fees, which can amount to conditions resembling de facto slavery or indentured servitude for some workers.

00:42:02.000 And Qatar uses that money in order to apparently pay pretty much everybody to head on over to Qatar.

00:42:08.000 And Qatar uses that money to pay for a gigantic propaganda operation in the West, to pay for its sponsorship of soccer teams in London and ownership of half of the assets in the UK, and also to pay people to come over to Qatar and talk warmly about how magical Qatar is.

00:42:25.000 Donald Trump Jr. in Qatar, which again plays a, shall we say, middle role between the United States and adversaries of the United States, including places like Russia, he suggested in Qatar that the United States may walk away from Ukraine.

00:42:42.000 Because of the war and because he's one of the great marketers of all time, Zelensky became a borderline deity, especially to the left, where he could do no wrong.

00:42:51.000 He was beyond reproach.

00:42:52.000 Years of corruption, years of graft and theft on a world stage that everyone in this new room knew was happening was totally absolved.

00:43:00.000 And it's ridiculous.

00:43:01.000 We're not dealing in reality.

00:43:03.000 But is your hunch that President Trump is going to walk away?

00:43:08.000 I think he may.

00:43:09.000 What's good about my father and what's unique about my father is you don't know what he's going to do.

00:43:14.000 The fact that he's not predictable, he's not following the playbook of every clown who's, again, been a bureaucrat for decades, you don't know.

00:43:25.000 Now, again, I believe that President Trump will do the right thing with regard to Ukraine because there's one thing he doesn't want, which is the perception of American weakness, including, for example, Russian troops strolling through Kyiv because of a cut-and-run strategy in Ukraine.

00:43:38.000 I will say that the disproportionate focus put on Ukrainian corruption sitting in Qatar, one of the most corrupt states on planet Earth. 0.88

00:43:46.000 It is legitimately a dictatorial monarchy, is pretty astonishing.

00:43:52.000 And if you think that America's enemies don't take no, they absolutely do.

00:43:55.000 They absolutely do.

00:43:56.000 And that has some consequences.

00:43:59.000 Now, again, some of what's going on with regards to China has political considerations attached in the United States.

00:44:04.000 One of those political considerations has been Chinese restrictions on soybean exports from the United States to China.

00:44:10.000 Just another reason why a free trade system promoted by the United States, yes, using tariffs to ratchet down tariffs that other countries have put on us, would be superior to throwing up tariffs on the entire world and then having to cut deals with the Chinese. 0.96

00:44:24.000 So America's farmers, particularly soybean farmers, have been harmed by the trade war between the United States and China.

00:44:31.000 President Trump says that soybeans are now being exported to China.

00:44:34.000 Here's what he had to say.

00:44:36.000 Since my successful meeting in South Korea with President Xi, purchases have been made and soybeans are being exported out of the United States to China as we speak.

00:44:46.000 And I say that our soybeans, I told this to President Xi, our soybeans are more nutritious than competitors.

00:44:56.000 Somebody said, is that a Trump statement or is that real?

00:44:59.000 In fact, you know who asked me that question?

00:45:01.000 President Xi asked me that question.

00:45:03.000 He said, really, I had never heard of him.

00:45:05.000 And he was a food purchaser for a long time.

00:45:09.000 I mean, that's all fine.

00:45:10.000 Okay.

00:45:11.000 But the reality is that if we have to cut deals on NVIDIA chips so we can open up their markets on soybeans, that seems like a bad deal to me.

00:45:18.000 It also means that because of all of the tariff conditions, and again, it's not just us tariffing other countries.

00:45:24.000 It's also just the broiling economy that's forcing a bunch of other countries to try and now make common cause with other countries.

00:45:31.000 As trade shifts away from the United States, in other words, as that happens, we have to keep bailing out farmers.

00:45:36.000 So yesterday, President Trump announced a farm bailout.

00:45:40.000 What we're doing is we're taking a relatively small portion of that, and we're going to be giving and providing it to the farmers in economic assistance.

00:45:51.000 And we love our farmers.

00:45:53.000 And as you know, the farmers like me, because, you know, based on voting trends, you could call it voting trends or anything else, but they're great people.

00:46:03.000 They're the backbone of our country.

00:46:05.000 So we're going to use that money to provide $12 billion in economic assistance to American farmers.

00:46:13.000 Okay, so again, those are some of the consequences that happen when, in fact, you have mercantilistic policy on all sides, is that you require payoffs.

00:46:23.000 Now, what does all this mean for affordability?

00:46:25.000 Are things getting more affordable?

00:46:26.000 Well, the inflation rates have obviously come down.

00:46:28.000 They've come down because, well, I've been very critical of the trade policy of the administration.

00:46:33.000 We've had great deregulatory policy under this administration and excellent tax policy under this administration.

00:46:39.000 And President Trump is right when he says the Democrats caused the affordability problem.

00:46:42.000 Here was the president yesterday.

00:46:44.000 We inherited a mess affordability, but you can call it affordability or anything you want.

00:46:51.000 But the Democrats caused the affordability problem, and we're the ones that are fixing it.

00:46:57.000 So it's a very simple statement.

00:47:00.000 They caused it.

00:47:01.000 We're fixing it.

00:47:03.000 He's not wrong about that.

00:47:03.000 Okay.

00:47:06.000 At the same time, the only way that people are going to feel the dynamism of the American economy is if we actually allow for the dynamism of the American economy, broad scale.

00:47:15.000 That doesn't mean picking and choosing winners and losers.

00:47:17.000 It doesn't mean taking stakes in private companies.

00:47:19.000 It means allowing the economy to roar.

00:47:22.000 President Trump knows how to do that.

00:47:23.000 And that's what he should do.

00:47:25.000 And by the way, liquidity is not going to be the problem because apparently the expectations for the rate cut are really, really, really high from the Federal Reserve.

00:47:33.000 According to Axios, The likely outcome of a two-day Federal Reserve policy meeting that concludes Wednesday would be one more rate cut that will probably last for a while.

00:47:42.000 The final signals from Hawks, Doves, and Fed leadership all point to an accord of sorts that the Federal Open Market Committee probably will cut its interest rate target by a quarter point on Wednesday while signaling a high bar for when it may do so again, which again makes sense.

00:47:55.000 I mean, I'm not sure that I'm even in favor of the rate cut at this point.

00:47:58.000 It seems to me that there's plenty of liquidity in the economy.

00:48:02.000 With that said, liquidity is not going to be the problem.

00:48:05.000 The problem is going to be how do we outcompete everybody else?

00:48:09.000 That is the thing that matters.

00:48:11.000 Other things the GOP could do right now, obviously cracking down on welfare fraud would be a big one.

00:48:16.000 The president is focused a lot on illegal immigration, but the actual bigger story with regard to Minnesota is the gigantic presence of huge bags of government cash inevitably leads to fraud.

00:48:27.000 These programs are not efficient.

00:48:29.000 They do not achieve the goals that they seek, generally speaking.

00:48:33.000 A fascinating story from the Wall Street Journal today talking about the sort of welfare fraud that is actually far more common than what we saw in the Somali community in Minnesota.

00:48:43.000 And that is people just lying about their conditions in order to achieve welfare.

00:48:46.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, diagnosis rates of autism among children have more than tripled over the past 15 years.

00:48:52.000 One reason which Minnesota's welfare scandal lays bare with shocking details is Medicaid fraud and abuse.

00:48:57.000 This is Alicia Finley writing.

00:48:58.000 Medicaid pays healthcare providers big bucks to diagnose and treat children with autism, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a month for a single child.

00:49:06.000 Yet states rarely verify that kids who are diagnosed actually meet the medical criteria for the disorder or that they get appropriate treatment from qualified specialists.

00:49:14.000 The result, children covered by Medicaid or the government-run children's health insurance program are two and a half times as likely as those with private coverage to be diagnosed with autism.

00:49:23.000 Many lower-income kids are labeled autistic merely because they have behavioral or developmental problems.

00:49:28.000 So if you want to look at the tremendous number of increased autism diagnoses, one of the reasons for that, of course, is because if you pay people more based on their diagnosis of autism, you're going to get more autism diagnoses.

00:49:41.000 In Minnesota, the number of autism providers soared 700%.

00:49:45.000 Payments to them increased 3,000% between 2018 and 2023.

00:49:52.000 All of this underlines broader problems with America's social welfare industrial complex.

00:49:56.000 Liberals measure success by how much money is spent rather than outcomes, and they accept waste and fraud and abuse.

00:50:02.000 This is particularly true in our disability system, the number of people claiming disability in the United States.

00:50:06.000 You think disability, you think some dude racked up his back and legitimately can't work anymore.

00:50:11.000 Somebody lost a leg in a coal mining incident.

00:50:13.000 Disability now applies to tens of millions of people, most of whom are not in any real sense disabled.

00:50:20.000 But they can claim disability with very little evidence, and now they are on the government dole. 0.95

00:50:26.000 Giant sacks of cash at home bankrupt the economy.

00:50:29.000 They are a drag on the economy, of course.

00:50:33.000 You know, the generalized fact is that if you want to increase the dynamism of the American economy, you need to jettison the ballast.

00:50:40.000 There is too much ballast.

00:50:43.000 And there are ways around some of the ballast.

00:50:45.000 For example, if you let the market work, so one sort of green shoot in terms of letting the market work.

00:50:54.000 According to Peter Loftus, reporting for the journal, drug makers are moving to sell their medicines directly to patients, abandoning the middlemen they've long relied on.

00:51:01.000 The shift is a huge departure from how pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Pfizer, have sold drugs for decades and threatens the multi-billion dollar business of firms that have traditionally filled prescriptions.

00:51:11.000 It's saving some patients hundreds of dollars off the cost of prescriptions because companies have been lowering the prices for drugs sold directly.

00:51:18.000 In the meantime, drug makers who've been rolling out the services in recent months see a big opportunity to boost sales, though they risk losing revenue if they don't offset lower prices by selling to more patients.

00:51:28.000 According to Pratabh Kedikar, the chief executive of pharmaceutical consulting firm ZS, for the first time, pharma is looking to end, sorry, for the first time, pharma is actually looking end-to-end at the full patient journey.

00:51:40.000 So you can see it in the weight loss market, where people are actually selling directly to consumers.

00:51:47.000 Now, that is actually a good thing because if you move through an insurance system, then very often you're paying way too much, or the insurance company is giving you a fake bill.

00:51:55.000 They then negotiate it down and they pay it.

00:51:58.000 They'll tell you that it costs them a thousand bucks for a dose.

00:52:00.000 And then they're not actually going to pay a thousand bucks.

00:52:02.000 They go and they negotiate it with the provider.

00:52:07.000 And then they are reporting that they're getting a certain level of discount.

00:52:12.000 So for example, one person gets his health insurance through a Medicare plan that doesn't cover the weight loss drug Zepp bound.

00:52:21.000 He said, quote, it was $1,050 at Costco when I started and the vials weren't available.

00:52:25.000 As soon as it was offered at $550 in the vial, I switched.

00:52:28.000 And then he used the savings to help his daughter-in-law pay for her prescription for the drug.

00:52:34.000 Again, let the markets work, the price goes down.

00:52:36.000 Don't let the markets work, the price goes up.

00:52:40.000 This also applies to things like H-1B visas.

00:52:42.000 I know this is very controversial stuff now because we're supposed to believe that illegal immigration and H-1B visas are perfectly coincident.

00:52:49.000 It's the same policy question.

00:52:50.000 It is absolutely not the same policy question.

00:52:53.000 For the 1,000th time, there are fixes we can make to the H-1B system.

00:52:56.000 If you want the educational level to be higher for people coming in, fine.

00:53:01.000 If you want to make people pay a fee, depending on the company that's applying, open, open question.

00:53:09.000 But to pretend that raising the cost to bring in additional labor doesn't impact the price on the other end is obviously untrue.

00:53:16.000 And so one of the factors in healthcare costs, particularly in rural areas, is that many of the healthcare providers in rural areas of the United States, places where many Americans who have graduated medical school don't want to move, are being filled by people who are actually on H-1B visas.

00:53:32.000 According to the Washington Post, after President Trump signed an executive order restricting H-1Bs in September, soaring costs are roiling rural healthcare facilities that have long struggled to find staff.

00:53:42.000 The fee increase for visa applicants, coupled with broader crackdowns on legal pathways for foreign-born workers, threatens a growing industry and jeopardizes patients who need timely care, according to some labor experts and immigration lawyers.

00:53:52.000 Again, these are open questions, but pretending that economics are not a matter of trade-offs.

00:53:56.000 That is what economics literally are.

00:53:58.000 They are a matter of trade-offs.

00:54:01.000 Now, I know that it's become unpopular to talk policy.

00:54:04.000 I get it.

00:54:04.000 I know that when we talk policy, some people's eyes glaze over because it's more fun to talk about the Rockham Stockham robots of politics.

00:54:12.000 But the reality is that once you are in power governing, things better get better and more solid.

00:54:18.000 That is going to be the question for Republicans in 2028.

00:54:20.000 It is much easier to campaign when you're out of power than it is to campaign when you are in power.

00:54:25.000 That is just the reality of the situation.

00:54:27.000 And so if the Republicans wish to be victorious in 2026 and 2028, they're going to need to deliver.

00:54:33.000 They've already delivered on many fronts.

00:54:35.000 They're going to need to deliver in even broader fashion on economic affordability, which means really economic robustness, and a national security strategy that strengthens our allies at the expense of our enemies.

00:54:48.000 Alrighty, coming up, we will talk about Jasmine Crockett, the crazed Democrat from Texas, now wants to run for the Senate. 1.00

00:54:54.000 We'll see how it goes for her, Cotton.

00:54:56.000 It's a bold strategy.

00:54:57.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

00:54:58.000 If you're not a member, become a member, use Coach Shapiro.

00:55:00.000 Check out for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - December 09, 2025

What Do We Do About CHINA?

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