Well, earlier this week, I sat down with Gavin Newsom. I m going to show you what happened when that happened because it was pretty spicy. Plus, the latest on ICE, will the President invoke the Insurrection Act, and in Iran, is action still imminent? First, the wait is almost over in less than one week. On Thursday, January 22nd, Episodes 1 and 2 of the Pendragon Cycle, Rise of the Merlin, arrive exclusively on Daily Wire Plus.
00:01:04.000You'll hear us go through a number of topics.
00:01:06.000It was a sort of fascinating experience, not only because Governor Newsom, of course, is the governor of the most populous state in the union, a state that I left back in 2020 with my company and with my family, thanks to what I believe to be serious misgovernance in California.
00:01:19.000It's fascinating because right now, according to the polling data, it is very likely that Newsom will be the Democrats nominee in 2028.
00:01:26.000When you look at the potential field of Democratic nominees right now, I've said before I think AOC is underrated as a possible nominee.
00:01:35.000She's likely to do well in places like Iowa and New Hampshire.
00:01:38.000The problem is once you move to the South, AOC's numbers start to dwindle.
00:01:42.000And she's not going to win California if Newsom is in the field.
00:01:45.000Kamala Harris right now in the polling data for 2028 is a placeholder.
00:01:49.000Just like every other election of my lifetime, after somebody loses, they remain the quote-unquote frontrunner for the nomination for the next election cycle for a short period of time.
00:01:59.000And let's just say it's a rarity for somebody to come back the way that President Trump actually did in 2024 and then win a nomination after losing a presidential race.
00:02:10.000Mitt Romney in 2013, if you look at the early polling, would probably have been the frontrunner for 2016, but obviously he was nowhere close to the nomination by the time we hit the next election cycle.
00:02:20.000So it ain't going to be Kamala Harris on the Democratic side of the aisle.
00:02:26.000He's obviously a governor of a very populist state.
00:02:28.000He has positioned himself as the quote-unquote anti-Trump in the field.
00:02:32.000And he's done that by being very, very loud on social media.
00:02:36.000And so it was fascinating to sit down with him, ask him some pretty pointed questions about governance in California and where he thinks the country is going.
00:02:42.000And I think the entire discussion is worth listening to or watching.
00:03:16.000The biggest problem for Gavin Newsom is a problem for the Democratic Party.
00:03:19.000In order for him to appeal to the broad middle of the electorate, he is going to have to jettison some core Democratic positions that are just unpopular with the American people.
00:03:27.000And so I think one of the reasons that Governor Newsom decided that he was going to have me on his show was specifically to do that, to make overtures to the middle.
00:03:34.000Now, you can decide for yourself how genuine you think those overtures are.
00:03:37.000You can decide whether you think the real Gavin Newsom is the moderate or whether you think the real Gavin Newsom is the former San Francisco mayor who has been radical rhetorically for a large part of his career.
00:03:48.000Or maybe there is no real Gavin Newsom, right?
00:03:50.000These are sort of the questions you have to ask about any politician.
00:03:53.000Anybody who sits down in front of you, who wants to win your vote, is a person who could be masquerading as a moderate, could be masquerading as an extremist, could be just masquerading all the time, right?
00:04:06.000And so I'm going to tell you, you should watch that show and you should make your own decisions about Gavin Newsome.
00:04:10.000We're going to play some of the clips from the show, largely because I think it demonstrates the difficulty that Democrats have moving forward as a party.
00:04:18.000Everything that Newsom said that sounds good is a moderate to Republican position.
00:04:23.000Everything he said that I think sounds not particularly good is a Democrat radical position that I don't think holds up under scrutiny.
00:04:30.000And so the question is going to be whether the base of the Democratic Party allows Gavin Newsom to become the nominee, even if they perceive that he is semi-moderate.
00:04:40.000Now, again, in policy, he's not particularly moderate.
00:04:42.000If you look at California, California is very immoderate in terms of its spending, in terms of its social policy around, for example, the trans issues, around things like DEI or immigration.
00:04:53.000Now, Gavin Newsom will tell you that his record has been more moderate than the actual state of California.
00:04:58.000And very typically, the more extreme policies he will attribute to the local officials in his state.
00:05:09.000In fact, this is something that I asked him about because I do think that it is indicative of a way that politicians very frequently will escape their own records.
00:05:18.000Instead of you judging them on their output, you're supposed to judge them on their intent and then they can sort of blame everybody else for failure to achieve what they quote unquote wanted to achieve.
00:05:28.000So, for example, there was one point where I was questioning Governor Newsom about the fact that he had promised to build millions of housing units in California.
00:05:36.000I was really grilling him on the fact that housing prices in California are exorbitant at this moment in time, and they have been for quite a while.
00:05:44.000And I got him to agree that overpromising and under delivering is a bad road to make policy.
00:05:52.000And they usually are talking about using the power of government in order to facilitate and make that change happen, particularly on the Democratic side of the aisle.
00:06:00.000And it seems to me that that is a recipe for disaster for the American body politic, because if you make promises that cannot be fulfilled, because the system does not allow for it to be fulfilled, people inherently end up frustrated.
00:06:12.000And, you know, I have relatives who still live in the state of California.
00:06:15.000I visit it routinely, and they're making a very good living.
00:06:18.000I have a sister-in-law and brother-in-law who live in LA.
00:06:21.000They make a combined excellent living, and they're barely making their mortgage.
00:06:35.000When you look at the supplemental poverty index, when you look at poverty broadly, you define it's slightly above average.
00:06:40.000Supplemental Florida and California, right?
00:06:42.000If you're looking at real estate costs in particular are extraordinary in the state of California.
00:06:47.000As you say, you're trying to remove regulations.
00:06:48.000But the problem is that unless we are willing to recognize a fundamental reality, which is that the relationship of the American people with their government needs to change.
00:07:02.000And so if you listen to him there, he sounds like a moderate, right?
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00:09:48.000So there were multiple times in the interview that we did in which I pressed him on a particular radical Democrat policy and he disavowed it.
00:09:55.000So this happened most obviously with regard to immigration and customs enforcement.
00:09:59.000So I asked him about ICE because obviously ICE has been at the top of the news.
00:10:02.000And as we've talked about on the show, the governor's press office put out a statement calling what happened in Minneapolis with regard to Renee Goode, the shooting of Renee Goode, as state-sponsored terrorism.
00:10:12.000And the governor immediately disavowed his own press office.
00:10:16.000One was a narrative that was immediately pushed by the Trump administration and Secretary of Homeland Security, Christine Noam, that she was a domestic terrorist who was attempting to run over officers with her car and was legitimately trying, not just this officer, but multiple officers.
00:10:54.000So again, they put out the rhetorically radical stuff and then they back off of it.
00:10:59.000I also asked him about the sort of defund ICE movement that's gained all sorts of credibility in left-wing circles in the aftermath of Renee Good's shooting.
00:11:26.000I asked Gavin Newsom about why the Democratic Party hasn't done more speaking about, for example, the Iranian regime.
00:11:32.000And he came out, he said the Democratic Party should do more with regard to the Iranian regime.
00:11:37.000Because right now, for example, where are the members of the Democratic Party protesting and wearing pins for the protesters in Iran who are getting mowed down, maybe by the tens of thousands this week?
00:12:17.000Again, you can see him attempting to move to the middle on all of these issues.
00:12:21.000Same thing with regard to the claim by so many Democrats, including Scott Weiner, who is the person now running for Nancy Pelosi's seat in San Francisco that Israel committed a genocide, which is factually untrue.
00:12:34.000And again, he said, I don't think that's true either.
00:12:36.000And then he sort of started to get, you know, I would say a little bit slippery about why he won't just come out and condemn Democrats who are telling that lie.
00:12:45.000Democrats have now been dragged into this conversation, some drag, some run with, you know, flags waving into the conversation.
00:13:24.000And international and internationality doesn't mean that if you kill my child and I then kill seven criminals, that I've been disproportionate.
00:13:32.000I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think the but I understand that tendency on the basis of trying to reconcile the proportionate nature of how the war was ultimately conducted.
00:13:46.000Why do you feel the need to create a permission structure for that sort of stuff?
00:14:07.000Again, watch as he tries, again, to avoid the rhetorical complications of endorsing the radical side of his own party.
00:14:14.000Same thing with regard to the trans issue.
00:14:16.000I grilled him on why he believes, apparently, that a boy can become a girl, or does he believe that a boy can become a girl?
00:14:22.000Why has the state of California taken a wide variety of actions to quote unquote protect boys becoming girls, which is to say, in my opinion, be predatory toward children who are suffering from gender dysphoria and hormonally or surgically mutilate them.
00:14:39.000And he really did not have a good answer on this either.
00:14:41.000Again, this is the problem for the Democratic Party on these issues, that a good Democratic candidate is going to make the radical issues secondary or ignore them.
00:14:48.000But in doing so, he or she is going to piss off his own party.
00:14:52.000Because if you look at X today, X is filled with people on the left who are livid with Gavin Newsom for not endorsing every radical left position.
00:15:00.000Here is Gavin Newsom not being able to answer the question on trans, presumably for political reasons.
00:15:05.000Since, again, we all know the biological realities here.
00:15:09.000But this idea that people are going to public schools and coming back, having surgeries and coming back the next day is absurd.
00:15:17.000But there are certainly cases in which kids are being quote unquote socially transitioned at school without parents knowing about it.
00:15:22.000I know some of the parents to whom this has happened.
00:15:24.000I mean, this is the fundamental question that lies at the root of all of this is the question that you're not wanting to answer, which is whether boys can become girls.
00:15:34.000Yeah, I just, well, I think for the grace of God.
00:16:03.000And this is, I think, Gavin Newsome's secret sauce as a candidate is that he, in person, and again, rhetorically, when you're speaking with people like me, he appears to be a moderate or move toward moderation.
00:16:14.000You can believe him or not believe him.
00:16:16.000I'm just presenting you with what he was saying to me on camera.
00:16:19.000And then there is the stuff where he does not want to appear moderate, and that's particularly on Trump.
00:16:24.000So, Democrats seem to believe that if they campaign against Trump in 2028, that that will be enough.
00:16:29.000And listen, we can say that that's crazy and that may that won't work.
00:16:32.000But I'm old enough to remember when Democrats campaigned against George W. Bush in 2008, right?
00:16:37.000He was on his way out, and they took George Bush and they hung him over John McCain, who is a large-scale opponent of Bush in a wide variety of matters, and tried to paint McCain as his natural heir.
00:16:48.000Well, I assume that Gavin Newsom will do the same thing with JD Vance, should JD Vance be the nominee.
00:16:52.000And so I pushed Gavin Newsom on the idea that he really believes the 2028 election is in danger of being stolen or overthrown.
00:16:59.000I don't believe that he believes that because otherwise, why would he be running if he truly believes that our elections are on the precipice of being overthrown?
00:17:06.000By the way, I don't like that on the right, and I don't like it on the left.
00:17:54.000And then on the other hand, he's sort of playing footsie with the middle.
00:17:58.000And then there is the third prong of Newsome, which, of course, is his record.
00:18:01.000Now, as somebody who left his state and took my family and took our company and moved it and who visits the state pretty frequently and has to hear about the difficulties of being a police officer in LAPD or the difficulties of making a living in Los Angeles or San Francisco.
00:18:17.000I have opinions on how things work in California since I lived my entire life there and watched quality of life radically degrade over the course of decades.
00:18:27.000Gavin Newsom's position seems to be that his policies are better than other Republican states.
00:18:34.000He very often will not defend them on their own merits.
00:18:36.000Instead, what he will say is it's better than Louisiana or something.
00:18:40.000He tried to do this with regard to his tax policy.
00:18:42.000And I sort of said, well, I'm here talking to you, not to the governor of Louisiana, but okay.
00:18:49.000About radically lowering the income tax rates in the state.
00:18:58.000Well, I'm going to say that tax their low-wage earners more than California taxes its high-wage earners.
00:19:02.000Let's talk about lowering those tax rates in those 16 states.
00:19:07.000Now, what he's talking about, again, he doesn't want to talk about California.
00:19:10.000He wants to talk about the fact that if you go to some red states that don't have a state income tax, but they do have sales tax and excise tax, that it's possible that if you're a low-income earner, you're paying a quote-unquote higher percentage of your income than somebody who is a high earner in, say, Florida.
00:20:11.000The problem is that public policy is designed to create better quality of life, not to make you feel better in your innards.
00:20:18.000And so when you look at the state of California right now, rich people who create the jobs, okay, the lie that the poor create jobs in the United States or anywhere else on earth, it is and always has been a lie, which is why the poorest countries generally have the fewest productive jobs.
00:20:33.000It is people who innovate, invest, build, who end up creating the mechanisms by which everybody else's life gets better and they get paid.
00:20:42.000That doesn't mean that labor isn't an element of that.
00:20:44.000It means that labor is only one element of that, not the only element of that.
00:20:51.000So to take, for example, California and Florida, the state to which I moved, and he loves targeting Florida, of course, because he sees Governor DeSantis as a possible counter to him.
00:21:00.000They had a sort of interesting debate a while back, I believe on CNN, Newsom and DeSantis, which kind of ended in a tie, I would say.
00:21:08.000The private sector job growth in Florida since 2019 has been 10.6% versus 4.8% for California.
00:21:15.000And a huge percentage of that private sector job growth in California has been in the tech sector, large swaths of which are now seeking to relocate because of the tax and regulatory structure in California.
00:21:27.000You could be fully communist and have, quote unquote, the fairest tax structure where everybody's income belongs to the government and they redistribute it according to need, right?
00:21:37.000It turns out not only is it not fair, because again, how you define fairness is the question.
00:21:42.000The way I define fairness is people get to keep the products of their labor that people are allowed to achieve in consonance with their skill set and efforts.
00:22:36.000It was people who lived in California, like me and my family, moving out.
00:22:40.000And then the reverse of that, which I did discuss with him on his show, was achieved by in-migration from other countries.
00:22:48.000So from Mexico, from China, from other places.
00:22:52.000I mean, if you have a giant outmigration of your citizens and people from other countries are coming in, that is not a great sort of indicator of how well you are being governed for sure.
00:23:02.000In 2024, for example, California lost 239,000 residents to domestic migration, but gained 361,000 international immigrants.
00:23:10.000Is that an indicator of economic health, of lifestyle health in the state of California?
00:23:15.000One of the things he tried to say about population in our interview was the governor tried to claim that, well, on a per capita basis, more people left Florida to go to California than left California to go to Florida.
00:23:27.000And I'll give you a very basic mathematical example.
00:23:30.000Let's say that you have a country with two people, and then you have another country with 100 people.
00:23:34.000And let's say that 40 of those 100 people go to the tiny country.
00:23:38.000And let's say that of the original two people in the small country, one of them goes to the more populous country.
00:23:46.000Well, if you did that on a per capita basis and the smaller country per capita sent more citizens than the large country sent to the small country, but that makes no sense.
00:23:54.000If you're a country with 100 people and 40 of them leave to go to a smaller place and one of the two people in the smaller place leaves to go to the bigger place, why would you possibly then make the case that the smaller place is obviously more poorly governed because it's jettisoning people?
00:24:13.000This is how you play stupid games with statistics.
00:24:15.000Certain statistics ought to be measured per capita.
00:24:17.000Certain statistics ought not be measured per capita, pretty obviously.
00:24:22.000The same thing is true with regard to immigration policy.
00:24:24.000So we got into a tete a tete about ICE and about immigration policy, sanctuary city policy.
00:24:29.000He made the case that sanctuary city policy makes cities safer.
00:24:33.000You can make a case that sanctuary cities policies, they don't additionally add to criminality over baseline.
00:24:42.000You could theoretically make that case.
00:24:44.000I mean, of course, every crime that's then committed by an illegal immigrant in your city, if that illegal immigrant goes there because of the sanctuary city policies, is one more crime than would have otherwise been committed.
00:24:55.000But the case that he was making is that people don't even move into areas because of their sanctuary city policies, which I find hard to believe.
00:25:01.000I find it hard to believe that if you have a choice right now under the Trump administration of moving to a sanctuary city area where the local government will not coordinate with the federal government or moving into a red area where the local government absolutely will coordinate with the federal government, that you're going to be more comfortable moving to that redder area.
00:25:19.000I asked him about California's sanctuary city policies and its sanctuary state policies, actually.
00:25:24.000And he suggested that actually California does a wonderful job of cooperating with ICE, which I think ICE might have some questions about this.
00:25:32.000You talk about your pragmatism all the time.
00:25:34.000Wouldn't best policy be to cooperate with ICE in the vast majority of cases.
00:25:38.000So instead of ICE going to, as you say, hospitals and churches to pick people up, they'd be going to jailhouses to pick up.
00:25:43.000That's exactly what they do in California.
00:25:44.000And we have over 10,000 that I've cooperated with since I've been governor of California.
00:25:48.000We work very directly with ICE as it relates to CDCR, our state prison.
00:25:54.000California has cooperated with more ICE transfers probably than any other state in the country.
00:25:59.000And I vetoed multiple pieces of legislation that have come from my legislature to stop the ability for the state of California to do that.
00:26:06.000So when it comes to the issues of violent criminals, when it comes to felons, people that are being released from the largest state system in the United States of America, California cooperates with ICE.
00:26:26.000In fact, the law in the state of California is that police are not supposed to question individuals about their immigration status.
00:26:32.000State and local funds cannot be used to investigate, detain, or arrest people for immigration violations because that's federal law.
00:26:38.000And local police are not supposed to proactively share non-public information like home addresses.
00:26:43.000California will not release information about individuals unless they have been convicted of specific violent crimes, which means ICE has to ramp up their own surveillance efforts.
00:26:51.000And certain localities have been made ICE-free zones, which ban ICE from using any city-owned property as staging areas, which means that ICE then has to use private or federal sites only.
00:27:00.000Again, if the goal is to make your state into a sanctuary state, obviously that has some impact.
00:27:05.000Okay, the whole episode, I think, is really interesting.
00:27:09.000Again, credit to Governor Newsom for having me on.
00:27:12.000Credit to him for actually having a pretty open and I would say fairly both cordial and combative conversation about some of the key issues facing the country.
00:27:20.000Now, I've talked about the problems facing the Democratic Party.
00:27:22.000The problems facing the Democratic Party are pretty obvious.
00:27:24.000There's a big divide between their radical base and the moderation they're going to need in order to win.
00:27:30.000Gavin Newsom wants to campaign as the guy who cooperates with ICE, as the guy who wants to be at least moderate on the trans issue, secondary on the trans issue, who wants to be fairly moderate on foreign policy, who does not want to engage in a lot of the same sort of rhetorical radicalism of his own party.
00:27:57.000And of course, the other problem is his record in California.
00:28:00.000There are going to be a lot of sort of Willie Horton type ads that come out against Governor Newsom as he runs for the presidency.
00:28:06.000Now, the problem for the Republicans, Gavin Newsom is a very talented guy.
00:28:09.000I don't think there's any doubt when you watch that episode that he is good on his feet, that he is slippery when he needs to be, that he does a convincing imitation of a pro-capitalism moderate, if you think that's an imitation.
00:28:21.000Maybe that's the real Gavin Newsom, and he's had to slather it over with radicalism to get where he wants to go.
00:28:55.000For both parties, maybe you ought to take a look at what the American people want.
00:29:01.000Maybe you ought to take a look at the closeness of every American election for the last 12 years and think to yourself, maybe if I tacked toward the middle, maybe what Americans really just want is normalcy.
00:29:17.000Now, maybe the primary structure prevents normalcy from actually taking the floor.
00:29:22.000But as we are seeing from the polling data, more and more Americans are identifying as independent.
00:29:26.000And the reason for that is because all they want is return to normalcy.
00:29:28.000I think that the reason President Trump won in 2024 is he was by far the most normie candidate by far.
00:29:38.000Kamala Harris was not a normie candidate.
00:29:40.000She was an empty suit and she was radical.
00:29:42.000Donald Trump took the middle position on nearly every issue.
00:29:46.000Will Republicans do that or will they be so high on their own supply that they go rhetorically radical over and over and over for no apparent reason while pursuing mainstream policy?
00:29:58.000That's going to be the big battle of 2028.
00:30:01.000Meanwhile, President Trump is threatening to deploy more federal forces to Minneapolis given the amount of unrest over there.
00:30:08.000According to the Washington Post, President Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota on Thursday, raising the prospect of sending U.S. troops into Minneapolis, despite opposition from state and local leaders to quell protests over a recent federal immigration enforcement surge.
00:30:22.000Some of these have involved actually attacking ICE vehicles.
00:30:25.000We had video yesterday on the show of people attempting to break into a gun box that was in the back of an ICE vehicle.
00:30:31.000Meanwhile, Christy Noam at DHS has blamed another Minneapolis shooting on Tim Walz, the governor, and Jacob Fry, the mayor of Minneapolis.
00:30:40.000That shooting, of course, occurred when a person that ICE was trying to take into custody apparently attacked ICE officers along with a couple of others with shovels.
00:30:51.000You know, this kind of violence is perpetuated by what we hear the governor saying, what we hear the mayor in Minneapolis saying, and their irresponsibility is extremely reckless.
00:31:01.000Governor Tim Walz has my phone number.
00:31:03.000I have called him and talked to him and said, listen, you let your city burn down in 2020.
00:31:16.000I want to remind you that Minneapolis itself, under the mayor's leadership and the governor's leadership, released almost 500 criminals out onto the streets rather than bring them to justice and turn them over to federal authorities.
00:31:27.000They know they're releasing murderers and drug traffickers on the streets of Minneapolis.
00:31:32.000We're out there making sure they don't harm American citizens, and we're getting attacked while we do it.
00:31:37.000But we're going to continue to do our work and do what's right because it's what President Trump promised the American people.
00:31:43.000Now, Noam was asked if the president of the United States would invoke the Insurrection Act.
00:31:47.000She said, I don't know what he's going to do at this point.
00:31:50.000Do you think that there needs to be an Insurrection Act invoked?
00:31:53.000Oh, I think that the President has that opportunity in the future.
00:31:56.000It's his constitutional right, and it's up to him if he wants to utilize it.
00:32:03.000Would it lead to more deadly killings in Minnesota if the Insurrection Act is invoked?
00:32:07.000If anything doesn't change with Governor Walls, I don't anticipate that the streets will get any safer.
00:32:16.000Democrats in a variety of states are planning to introduce bills allowing residents to sue federal agents for violating their Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure.
00:32:24.000According to Fox News, New Jersey Democrats are trying to establish the state as a sanctuary state.
00:32:29.000Governor Walls, for his part in Minnesota, put out a statement: quote, I'm making a direct appeal to the president.
00:32:33.000Let's turn the temperature down, stop this campaign of retribution.
00:32:46.000Noah Rothman has a good piece over at National Review, pointing out the game that Tim Walz is playing.
00:32:51.000Quote, he called on state residents to protest loudly, urgently, but also peacefully, and to peacefully film ICE agents, as though repeating the word peacefully negates the danger that protesters put themselves in when they insert themselves between armed law enforcement officers and their targets of arrest.
00:33:05.000Indeed, he set out to convince the passionate and impressionable they'd been deputized in the campaign of resistance he envisions by the state.
00:33:11.000What Walls is advising his citizens to do is likely to result in more violence and potentially more death.
00:33:19.000Stephen Miller, the most passionate of the president's senior advisors when it comes to a wide variety of issues, including immigration, told Fox News, what we are watching right now is clearly an insurgency that would require the Insurrection Act.
00:33:32.000You only have to read their own words and hear their own words and judge their own conduct to understand that this is clearly an insurgency against the federal government.
00:33:43.000They are describing the federal government as an occupying force.
00:33:50.000Okay, the ICE chief, Todd Lyons, similarly said, we're not watching peaceful protests in Minnesota anymore.
00:33:57.000Yeah, Martha, without getting too much into the investigation, it was a federal vehicle.
00:34:01.000But just to the point, that is not peaceful protesting.
00:34:04.000That's not what the governor, that's not what the mayor is calling for.
00:34:11.000And unfortunately, that's what ICE agents are encountering every day.
00:34:15.000What we really need is elected officials to say, you know, you can peacefully protest, but not like that, not throwing fireworks, not breaking into vehicles, not putting your hands on ICE agents.
00:34:26.000But instead, they just keep increasing the rhetoric.
00:34:29.000And that's why you keep seeing this night after night.
00:34:33.000Lyons said that Democrats are incentivizing this.
00:34:37.000Fortunately, again, you know, I hate to sound like a broken record, but when you have elected officials that are saying, go out and do this, go out and impede ICE, you know, go out and protect your neighbor, and they're doing it like this.
00:34:50.000And unfortunately, you know, these videos come up and there's only one side to it.
00:34:55.000And we're constantly having to go on the defense.
00:34:57.000But the men and women of ICE are professional.
00:34:59.000They're professional law enforcement officers.
00:35:01.000That's what they're out there doing every day.
00:35:03.000And again, at the end of the day, we have to make sure our men and women of ICE and all law enforcement call them safe every night.
00:35:09.000Again, invoking the Insurrection Act under Section 252, which is presumably the section that the president would invoke, allows the president to enforce the law.
00:35:18.000Basically, if people are stopping the enforcement of the law, you can invoke the Insurrection Act to effectuate the enforcement of that law.
00:35:24.000Meanwhile, over in Iran, the Iranian government is announcing apparently they're going to keep the internet shut until March.
00:35:30.000So, for those who believe that things are going swimmingly in Iran, that now the temperature has been turned down by the Iranian government.
00:35:35.000I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
00:35:40.000The Iranian government has basically shut down protests by stationing troops pretty much everywhere in the country and threatening to shoot people if they go outside.
00:35:48.000According to the Wall Street Journal, a fierce crackdown by Iranian security forces that has killed thousands of people protesting against the country's autocratic leaders has forced demonstrators off the streets in some cities, with residents reporting an eerie quiet after days of escalating violence.
00:36:01.000Iran's government has blocked the internet and deployed large numbers of police and troops, by the way, including tanks, in an effort to quell the biggest threat to the regime since 1979.
00:36:09.000Iranians said that they were afraid to leave their homes.
00:36:12.000That is why when you hear public officials, President Trump had said the killing has stopped.
00:36:16.000Well, I mean, the killing has stopped because the Iranians literally put out the Revolutionary Guard on street corners and said, if you show up outside your house, we'll kill you.
00:36:25.000Ali Vaez, Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group, said the reason is very clear.
00:36:31.000According to human rights activists, which is one of these groups, they say that they've confirmed at least 2,600 deaths and more than 18,000 arrests.
00:36:40.000Estimates have ranged from that range all the way on up to the tens of thousands.
00:36:45.000Unclear at this point what's true and what is not.
00:36:47.000Certainly, at least thousands of people have been murdered at this point.
00:36:51.000The regime has massacred its own people in large numbers.
00:36:56.000The president of the United States, of course, said people should maintain their presence out in the streets, that help was on its way.
00:37:02.000We'll have to see what the president is intending.
00:37:05.000Now, some people are claiming the president is going to do nothing.
00:37:09.000That red line has been breached in an extraordinary fashion.
00:37:12.000I think the president wants to do something meaningful.
00:37:14.000He doesn't want to shoot a missile and hit a camel in the ass.
00:37:16.000I think he wants to actually do something meaningful if he's going to do anything at all.
00:37:20.000The Wall Street Journal reports something similar.
00:37:22.000Apparently, President Trump was advised a large-scale strike against Iran was unlikely to make the government fall and could spark a wider conflict.
00:37:29.000And for now, we'll monitor how Tehran handles protesters before deciding on the scope of a potential attack.
00:37:33.000So it's not as though everything is off the table.
00:37:35.000I think the question was one of efficacy.
00:37:38.000If you launch a few airstrikes against random IRGC facilities, does it actually change the regime or allow the protesters to remain out in the streets?
00:37:46.000Or does it simply result in a bit of a firefight in the Middle East and the Iranians continuing to murder people in the streets?
00:37:53.000Advisors told President Trump the United States would need more military firepower in the Middle East, both to launch a large-scale strike and also to protect American forces in the region from retaliatory ballistic missile attack.
00:38:06.000It appears, according to the Wall Street Journal, that a wide variety of regimes in the Middle East, ranging from the Saudis to the Israelis, actually, suggested that a potential strike should not be undertaken until all the pieces are in place.
00:38:18.000So Saudis, Israelis, Qatar, like everyone apparently was saying no for different reasons.
00:38:23.000Qatar doesn't want to strike because they're backed by Iran.
00:38:25.000Saudi apparently doesn't want to strike because they're afraid they're going to get hit by missiles coming the other way and the Americans don't have enough force strength in the region to repel that.
00:38:33.000The Israelis, presumably concerned about the same sort of thing.
00:38:38.000NBC earlier had reported that Trump's advisors couldn't guarantee the Iranian regime would quickly collapse after a U.S. strike.
00:38:44.000Lindsey Graham, who obviously the center from South Carolina, is in close touch with the presidents on this sort of stuff.
00:38:49.000He said, the question is, should it be bigger or smaller?
00:39:02.000You know, looking at the best available plan and then taking the best available plan is better than doing something precipitous.
00:39:10.000Negotiations are not on the table here.
00:39:13.000So the question is going to be what the actual military measures that could be undertaken would be, or economic measures or cybersecurity measures that could be taken would be to undermine the regime at this point.
00:39:29.000According to the editorial board over at the Wall Street Journal, they say an effective U.S. policy would support Iran's people for as long as it takes for them to overwhelm their regime until it becomes paralyzed, shows cracks in its leadership, and can no longer hold back the crowds.
00:39:43.000So obviously the Iranian people are going to have to do the heavy lifting here.
00:39:47.000But I also do not think that the president is going to repeat Barack Obama's mistake in which he drew a red line in Syria and then did absolutely nothing before handing Syrian control over to the Russians, essentially.
00:40:09.000She presented him with her Nobel Peace Prize, which he accepted.
00:40:13.000Again, I totally understand the gesture from her.
00:40:15.000She's obviously attempting to change the actual regime in Venezuela, and she's very grateful to the president for having ousted Nicolas Maduro.
00:40:24.000The president taking the Nobel Peace Prize, again, would I do that?
00:40:31.000Trump said on social media, it was my great honor to meet Maria Cordilla Machado of Venezuela today.
00:40:35.000She's a wonderful woman who's been through so much.
00:40:37.000Maria presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect.
00:40:44.000We'll have to see whether the White House is going to put additional pressure on the Venezuelan regime to move toward elections.
00:40:49.000Right now, they're putting pressure on the regime to do what we want, economically speaking.
00:40:56.000The reality is that if the regime doesn't change before President Trump leaves office, there will likely be a reversion to type in Venezuela, meaning I wouldn't count on a Democrat, including Gavin Newsom, to keep the pressure on Venezuela in terms of prohibiting their transfer of oil abroad.
00:41:11.000I think that requires a Trumpian figure in order to actually do that.
00:41:15.000The reason that Trump has not backed Machado at this point is because he doesn't believe that she has the capacity to consolidate power in the country thus far.
00:41:25.000More than half of Venezuelans currently say Machado should lead, as opposed to 14% who endorsed Rodriguez.
00:41:32.000I think the basic idea here is that U.S. officials, according to Axios, see Rodriguez as the best candidate to reform the oil sector and comply with Trump's wishes without alienating regime insiders, the military, and armed gangs, all of whom could take the country into chaos.
00:41:49.000If the U.S. backed her as leader, then the United States might have to engage in a full-scale occupation of Venezuela.
00:42:07.000So this morning, the Trump administration brought out its new healthcare plan focusing on bringing down costs in the health insurance industry, particularly, but also drug prices, some other areas.
00:42:17.000What are sort of the key points that Americans need to know?
00:42:20.000Ben, this is about putting patients first.
00:42:23.000It's about making sure we put patients in front of profits and other Puritan self-interest that's hindered our healthcare system.
00:42:50.000What we don't want to do is to cap prices, which would drop productivity, reduce the number of innovative solutions that will cure cancer and drive Alzheimer's back and deal with all the crises that hurt the American people.
00:43:03.000Because the number one thing the president has said all along is keep us innovative, keep America on the cutting edge, because he knows that the big opportunity is to get Americans to want to work a little longer because they're so healthy, they're so vital, they're so productive.
00:43:17.000They want to still stay engaged with society.
00:43:19.000So that drives trillions of dollars into the U.S. economy.
00:43:25.000Keeping America healthy and vital and strong and making sure that we can afford it.
00:43:30.000Well, the president argued that it's feasible because right now he's paid and spend three times more than our European counterparts for the exact same drug, made in the same factory, bottled in the same place, and that doesn't make any sense.
00:43:43.000And so we went to the pharmaceutical companies and said, hey, look, look at me in the eyes.
00:43:47.000We know and you know that you've been getting away with price gouging and global freeloading from other countries as well for the last several decades.
00:43:57.000This president will not tolerate anymore.
00:43:59.000Work with us, be patriots, fix the problem.
00:44:02.000And to the last one, they've all said yes.
00:44:05.000They've been willing to participate the major companies.
00:44:07.000We haven't gotten to the smaller ones yet.
00:44:09.000And for that reason, we now have a bunch of contracts with pharmaceutical companies where they agree voluntarily to reduce their prices so they're the most favored nation pricing here in America.
00:44:34.000We don't want to cause any more problems for any pharmaceutical companies, for any parts of these negotiations.
00:44:39.000We just want to grandfather in people who have been there and make sure that going forward in future administrations, the drug companies stay committed to this deal structure and that the U.S. government doesn't overreach its needs and start to do crazy things like cap prices in the pharma space that actually would hurt their innovation.
00:44:58.000So that's the big first step, number one, most favored nation, acronym MFN.
00:45:03.000Second big area: how do you make insurance companies accountable?
00:45:06.000Well, first off, the money that they're getting, this is a good example for the Affordable Care Act, as the president calls it, the unaffordable care act, is a problem because they just take the money, their valuations go up.
00:45:18.000The money actually eventually some of it gets down to the people, but premiums still keep rising.
00:45:23.000So the president said, from now on, we want the money going to the people.
00:45:27.000We want to make sure that as much as possible, we drive down prices in the insurance space fairly.
00:45:33.000And there's a way of doing that called cost-sharing reduction.
00:45:37.000It was actually in the One Big Beautiful bill.
00:45:39.000The president put it in there, and yet Democrats stripped it out.
00:45:45.000It actually drops the prices for everybody by more than 10%.
00:45:48.000So we want to try and get those elements of the program back into this legislation.
00:45:52.000But we also want insurance companies to tell us how much are you taking home of the premiums and how much are you paying out for the benefits of the average American people?
00:46:02.000How many months do people have to wait to get a simple doctor's appointment?
00:46:06.000Tell us exactly what's going on behind the scenes so you're accountable and so people can pick the best companies out there.
00:46:12.000Because if we're given the average American money in their HSA account or in their pocket to buy insurance, they need to be educated about which ones to pick.
00:46:20.000And finally, Ben, and you're a big proponent about this.
00:46:51.000And what are the other options that you may have as a patient?
00:46:53.000This is all, by the way, stuff that we've been talking about.
00:46:56.000Let's just put it into a law that everyone can, for the foreseeable future, point to and say, because of that, you got to be fair with the American people.
00:47:05.000So, Dr. Oz, I want to ask you a couple of quick questions on each of these areas.
00:47:08.000So, when it comes to lowering the drug prices, for example, obviously the biggest problem we have with drug pricing is that Americans pay a different price than people in other countries are paying.
00:47:17.000And that's because of the collective bargaining in those other countries where governments are basically cramming down their own prices on the drunk companies.
00:47:24.000And then you squeeze the balloon in one area and it inflates in America, essentially, where we pay the remaining sort of market price.
00:47:30.000Is the presumption here that these companies are now going to go back to other countries and say, listen, the American people are not going to foot the bill for this.
00:47:37.000You're going to have to increase the price that you pay in France because we're having to decrease the price that we pay in the United States.
00:47:44.000It's exactly the message we're delivering: no more global freeloading.
00:47:47.000And I'll tell you a specific example where we've already done this: the UK, who may have been the worst offender.
00:47:53.000And just to underline what you're saying, when you get a cutting-edge new drug that saves your life, for example, with a bad cancer in this country, the Europeans don't get it for several years.
00:48:03.000So there's actually a significant delay because they're not willing to pay.
00:48:06.000So we're being very transparent with European leaders and people in those countries that what you think is the best possible medicine really isn't because you're not willing to pay towards the kiddie to save lives.
00:48:50.000Companies are seeing that there's results here because the president can use tariffs and other tools.
00:48:55.000He can say, listen, you may not care about medication prices.
00:48:58.000You're willing to shove it down the throats of these companies, but we're going to cause other problems for you using the other levers that our economy has.
00:49:06.000So don't hurt us on an area where you should actually be aligned with us by saving American lives.
00:49:14.000So, Dr. Oz, when you move to the area of lower insurance premiums, one of the big points here is send the money to the American people, sort of like an HSA, as opposed to sending it directly to the insurance companies.
00:49:24.000The question is that when it comes to the insurance industry, it is the regulations, not necessarily the subsidies.
00:49:30.000The subsidies are results of the regulations.
00:49:32.000The regulations under Obamacare make it so that you can't get certain types of plans.
00:49:37.000They also ensure that there's no upper limit on coverage.
00:49:39.000They also ensure the elimination of quote unquote pre-existing conditions.
00:49:43.000The combination of all that means that insurance companies are no longer insurance companies.
00:49:47.000They're basically health cost providers, meaning that if you walk in and you have stage four cancer, they are expected to cover you and they're going to defray that cost by charging somebody else a higher price.
00:49:57.000And we're making sure that people don't quote unquote escape the system if you're young and you're healthy by forcing them to buy a comprehensive insurance plan they wouldn't otherwise normally buy.
00:50:04.000If I'm 21 years old, I really don't need a comprehensive insurance plan in the same way that I do when I'm 65 years old.
00:50:10.000So how much can we help just by sending people checks directly as opposed to really rewriting the regulatory structures around Obamacare?
00:50:17.000And are there plans to rewrite those regulatory structures?
00:50:22.000It's not an either or, we need to do both.
00:50:24.000You've raised all the issues Republicans have been barking about for the last 15 years.
00:50:28.000We have got to make this real insurance.
00:50:32.000And so what you described, for example, are association plans where companies can bond together and say, hey, listen, we got enough purchasing power now.
00:51:04.000You want to sort of get them as they leave Medicaid and enter the workforce, give them some level of coverage.
00:51:09.000But the other half of the people in these Obamacare ACAs, the Affordable Care Act created entities were supposed to be from the private sector.
00:51:17.000You know, small businesses, mom and pop shops.
00:51:33.000But if the federal government is throwing money at the problem and whatever it takes to buy more and more coverage with rules that don't make sense, as you point out, all of a sudden it's too expensive for that guy who runs a diner.
00:51:43.000So he has to now forego buying health insurance because he couldn't do that and pay his employees a living wage and afford to have his business.
00:51:52.000And so we're actually hurting the people we're trying to help most with this.
00:51:55.000So the things you mentioned have already been discussed.
00:51:57.000We want that ideally to be part of this plan.
00:52:01.000He wanted to architect the ideas that we believe are so fundamental to making healthcare affordable in America that he won't compromise on them.
00:52:11.000Within that framework, to make it work more efficiently, all the things you point out need to be included.
00:52:16.000By the way, the cost sharing reduction that I mentioned is another one of those examples.
00:52:19.000You would never run an insurance company without being able to make sure that people can pay their copay and their minimums and all that stuff.
00:52:26.000And it just helps deal with that in a more sophisticated way than what's going on right now, which is the insurance companies just game the system to drive up prices in one area, which of course, people who know it take advantage of it, people don't get taken advantage of.
00:52:43.000When it comes to the transparency point that you're making, obviously one of the great frustrations is you go into the hospital, you get a bill, it's a bajillion dollars for a broken leg for an x-ray or whatever it is.
00:52:53.000And that's not the end price that you end up paying.
00:52:55.000Now, obviously, the insurance companies are part of that bargaining process, but the other part of the process, and maybe the bigger part of the process, is the hospitals and the healthcare providers, because what they are doing is they are negotiating different rates with different insurance companies.
00:53:08.000And so they are very often putting out a price that they know they're never going to get from the insurance company.
00:53:14.000And then it looks like the insurance company covered this gigantic price.
00:53:17.000And so there's this whole game that's being played.
00:53:19.000How much of the focus on transparency should be placed not on the insurance companies, but actually on the healthcare providers themselves?
00:53:28.000As you point out, the game is played in many different ways.
00:53:31.000And the gaming of the system happens in different ways for that reason.
00:53:34.000But remember, the marketplace is not just individuals going to a doctor and deciding which physician is going to give them a better value because it's not just what they charge, but what do they get for that money?
00:53:43.000But right now, you get a discounted insurance policy, but you can't find a doctor.
00:53:47.000That's why you want the transparency to include all the things that you might want to know about.
00:53:50.000But the real market bend is made by commercial employers, right?
00:54:17.000We're also, by the way, going to stop down the middlemen who are getting paid an inordinate amount of money just to connect the pharmacy benefits companies into the workplace.
00:54:28.000So there are these brokers that make deals.
00:54:31.000They're working this whole, it's like stockbrokers, right?
00:54:33.000They're behind the scenes making all these deals happen, but you don't know who they are.