The Ben Shapiro Show - What’s In The Trump BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL?

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

00:00:02.000 President Trump over in Qatar.

00:00:04.000 What's happening over there?

00:00:05.000 Plus, the big, beautiful bill being negotiated.

00:00:07.000 What's in that on the House end?

00:00:09.000 Does it pass RFK in front of Congress?

00:00:12.000 We'll get to all of it.

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00:01:19.000 Alrighty, folks.

00:01:19.000 So President Trump's economic success rests on the passage of his one big, beautiful bill.

00:01:24.000 We've been talking about this for months.

00:01:26.000 And the timeline on the big, beautiful bill is still...

00:01:29.000 Somewhat in doubt, because obviously it has to pass through the House and then a version has to pass through the Senate.

00:01:33.000 And then there's going to be reconciliation between the House bill and the Senate bill.

00:01:37.000 And so whatever you see in the House bill might not end up in the final bill.

00:01:40.000 However, massive controversy already breaking out in the House over where the cuts are going to come from.

00:01:45.000 Many House Republicans are calling for cuts that are going to make up for the loss in revenue to the federal government that occurs when taxes are not increased.

00:01:55.000 As you know from sort of conservative discussions for the last 50 years, there's something called the Laffer curve.

00:02:01.000 The Laffer curve is a suggestion by the economist Art Laffer that if you're looking for sort of the proper rate of taxation, it can't be zero because then the government has no money to spend.

00:02:09.000 And it also can't be 100 because then the government has no money to spend.

00:02:12.000 No one will actually go out and do business if they are going to have all of their money removed by the federal government.

00:02:18.000 So the Laffer curve is a suggestion that there is, in fact, a point at which if you tax people more...

00:02:24.000 Then you will actually end up with declining government revenues as a result because people will simply work less in order to avoid the top tax bracket, for example.

00:02:32.000 And there's certainly truth to that.

00:02:33.000 It's unclear where exactly the inflection point is with regard to the Laffer curve.

00:02:38.000 However, it has been longstanding conservative economic dogma that if you increase taxes, you will end up quashing economic growth because you're taking money away from the more efficient private sector and sticking it in the public sector where it gets doled out by a bunch of politicians to their favorite pet projects.

00:02:54.000 Also, how you look at government revenue differs between conservatives and people on the left.

00:02:58.000 People on the left believe that the government basically owns your money and then allows you to keep some of it.

00:03:03.000 Conservatives believe you own your money, and then you have to give some of it to the government in order to do public services, for example.

00:03:09.000 So, when it comes to even the discussions of what government revenue looks like, the real discussion that should be had, and it's the discussion no one will ever have, is what is the proper role of government in our lives?

00:03:19.000 Why is it that our government is spending $6, $7 trillion a year On the federal level.

00:03:24.000 This was not the case when the original country was founded.

00:03:28.000 When the United States was founded, the original expenditures by the federal government were absolutely minimal.

00:03:33.000 And it stayed that way, except for times of war, like the Civil War, all the way up through, essentially, the end of World War I. And then government spending began to grow slowly.

00:03:42.000 And then with FDR, it just exploded all out of proportion.

00:03:46.000 And so now we have $7 trillion being spent every single year.

00:03:49.000 That's what's racking up the national debt.

00:03:50.000 And so there are a couple of sort of...

00:03:53.000 Different takes on what should be done.

00:03:55.000 A traditional, classical conservative might say, we need to cut massive reams of government spending.

00:04:00.000 I push it all back down to the states.

00:04:02.000 If the states wish to do things like Medicare and Medicaid, then the states can do that.

00:04:05.000 But it shouldn't be up to a taxpayer from Montana to pay for the health care of a guy from California because he's 70 years old, for example.

00:04:12.000 And then you have the sort of Republican Party position, which is, let's cut around the edges.

00:04:16.000 And then you have the Democratic Party position, which is, let's never cut anything ever for the rest of time.

00:04:20.000 The latter two positions are the ones the American people have opted for.

00:04:23.000 The latter two positions are, let's spend all the money in the world and let's spend just slightly less than all the money in the world.

00:04:30.000 And that's what a lot of the debate is with regard to this current GOP tax bill inside the Republican caucus.

00:04:36.000 There are a bunch of Republicans who believe that cutting spending in any way, shape, or form is detrimental to Republican electoral chances.

00:04:44.000 The American people don't want it.

00:04:45.000 And by polling, basically, there's truth to that.

00:04:49.000 By polling, the American people say they don't want the government to be so big and provide so many services.

00:04:54.000 And then when you ask them which services they would like cut, they scratch their head and really have no idea of the answer to that question.

00:05:01.000 Then you have sort of traditional Republicans who say, listen, if we're ever going to get to anything more like big restructuring of government, you have to start somewhere or we are going to plunge off the deck cliff.

00:05:10.000 So all of this is manifesting in the debate over the current big, beautiful bill in the Republican House.

00:05:16.000 There's no question spending is going to continue to increase.

00:05:23.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the Republican tax bill looks very different depending on your income and your political lens.

00:05:29.000 For the top sliver of taxpayers, it gives a permanent extension and expansion of expiring tax cuts from 2017, coupled with some new limits.

00:05:36.000 Middle income households would get permanent tax cut extensions as well.

00:05:39.000 They would also gain temporary tax cuts, including a larger standard deduction and child tax credit and targeted benefits for senior citizens and people receiving tips and overtime pay.

00:05:49.000 There's not much in the tax cut bill for people who are low income, mainly because people who are low income are not paying taxes in the United States.

00:05:55.000 That's why whenever people say, this tax bill disproportionately benefits the rich.

00:06:00.000 Well, I mean, I would assume because the rich absolutely overpay proportionally based on their income.

00:06:07.000 Like, wildly disproportionately.

00:06:10.000 The top quintile of income earners in this country pay all net taxes in the country.

00:06:14.000 All of them.

00:06:15.000 Net taxes meaning...

00:06:16.000 The amount you pay to the government versus the services you get back from the government.

00:06:19.000 A lot of middle-income people are paying taxes, but they're also receiving tremendous benefits back from the government in the form of various forms of welfare, social support, and all of the rest.

00:06:29.000 Representative Blakemore of Utah said this is not a bill for billionaire relief, but Democrats are casting the bill as an unacceptable giveaway to well-off people at the expense of most Americans.

00:06:39.000 So, there are a bunch of different provisions that are controversial here.

00:06:43.000 One is the tax data.

00:06:44.000 And then one is the question of where some cuts are coming from.

00:06:49.000 So if you look at the actual material in the bill, the Tax Foundation has a good rundown on the bill, taxfoundation.org.

00:06:55.000 And what they find through their preliminary analysis is that the tax provisions would increase long-run GDP by 0.6%, which is a solid increase in GDP and national growth.

00:07:06.000 It would reduce federal tax revenue by $4.1 trillion over the course of the next decade.

00:07:12.000 Again, what does that mean?

00:07:13.000 It means the federal government will take in less money than it would have if it left the top tax rates at a higher rate.

00:07:18.000 So you're increasing growth, but you're decreasing the revenue to the government, the amount of money that the government steals from the taxpayers.

00:07:24.000 On a dynamic basis, the revenue reduction would fall by 19% to $3.3 trillion over 10 years before the added interest costs.

00:07:32.000 So they're saying that basically that $4.1 trillion that you're missing, that's assuming a static level of economic growth.

00:07:38.000 If you include the economic growth, Then you end up with more revenue back to the government, but you're still going to end up with, in addition to the deficit, of some $3.3 trillion.

00:07:48.000 Overall, the bill would prevent tax increases on 62% of taxpayers that would occur if the Trump tax cuts were to expire.

00:07:55.000 But there are other provisions that are being eliminated, like, for example, bonus depreciation and research and development expensing.

00:08:03.000 So in some ways, this is a significantly more populist tax cut bill than the Trump tax cut bill the first time around.

00:08:10.000 This is why, for example, there's no tax on tips included, but they're getting rid of bonus depreciation.

00:08:16.000 The House passed budget resolution would allow a $4.5 trillion increase in the deficit from tax cuts over the next decade, so long as spending is also cut by $1.7 trillion.

00:08:25.000 But if they don't cut the spending, if that spending never materializes, then the cap on the tax cuts gets reduced dollar for dollar.

00:08:32.000 So the question is where those cuts come from.

00:08:34.000 This is where most of the controversy is occurring, not with regard to the tax rates per se, but with regard to the cuts.

00:08:40.000 Where are the cuts occurring to offset some of the loss in revenue to the federal government?

00:08:45.000 And the answer is in restructuring of Medicaid particularly.

00:08:49.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:11:03.000 So Medicaid has been a massive income suck.

00:11:07.000 for the United States for an extraordinarily long time.

00:11:09.000 It has basically become a massive welfare program, including for many people who don't want to work.

00:11:15.000 So Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mehmet Oz, Brooke Rollins, and Scott Turner, that'd be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Administrator for CMMS, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Secretary of Agriculture, and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

00:11:28.000 They have an editorial in the New York Times talking about what exactly is going to happen to Medicaid.

00:11:33.000 And the point they make is that there are a lot of people who are on Medicaid.

00:11:36.000 Again, Medicare is for the elderly, and Medicaid is for people who are too poor, basically.

00:11:42.000 They're very poor, and so they require government assistance on the federal level.

00:11:45.000 That's what Medicaid is for.

00:11:46.000 Again, the United States, the idea of the United States is somehow mean to the poor is ridiculous.

00:11:50.000 The United States has the most progressive tax system on planet Earth, meaning that the differential between what the top tax brackets pay and what the people at the bottom pay is the widest of virtually any OECD country.

00:12:04.000 The United States also has massively generous welfare benefits.

00:12:06.000 Whenever you see the so-called income gap in the United States, that is always ignoring the welfare benefits that go to people in the bottom half of income earners.

00:12:15.000 Because when you include that, a lot of the income gap actually erodes pretty quickly.

00:12:19.000 In any case, these administrators and secretaries over at the Trump administration point out, welfare programs have now deviated from their original mission, both by drift and by design.

00:12:29.000 Millions of able-bodied adults have been added to the roles in the past decade, primarily as a result of Medicaid expansion.

00:12:35.000 Many of these recipients are working-age individuals without children who might remain on welfare for years.

00:12:40.000 Some of them do not work at all, or they work inconsistently throughout the year.

00:12:43.000 The increased share of welfare spending dedicated to able-bodied, working-age adults distracts from what This should not be the American way of welfare.

00:12:54.000 As leaders of the agencies, they say that oversee the largest welfare programs in the nation.

00:13:00.000 We see the data, hear the stories, and understand that these programs are failing to deliver results.

00:13:08.000 For able-bodied adults, welfare should be a short-term hand-up, not a lifetime hand-out.

00:13:13.000 But too many able-bodied adults on welfare are not working at all, and too often we don't even ask them to.

00:13:18.000 A recent analysis from an economist at the American Enterprise Institute examined survey data from December 2022, that's the most recent month available, and found that only 44% Of able-bodied, working-age Medicaid beneficiaries without dependents worked at least 80 hours in that month.

00:13:33.000 That's an insane statistic.

00:13:35.000 So only 4 in 10 Medicaid recipients, who are in fact able-bodied and working-age, were working at least 80 hours in the month.

00:13:43.000 80 hours, by the way, if you just do the math right there, 80 hours would be 20 hours a week, i.e.

00:13:49.000 5 hours a day.

00:13:50.000 And only 4 out of 10 Medicaid recipients were working 5 hours a day.

00:13:53.000 That is not because of lack of job opportunity, by the way, folks.

00:13:56.000 We still have more job openings in the United States than people applying for those jobs.

00:14:00.000 Establishing universal work requirements for able-bodied adults across the welfare programs we manage, they say, will prioritize the vulnerable, empower able-bodied individuals, help rebuild thriving communities, and protect the taxpayers.

00:14:13.000 And they point to the Clinton welfare reform as a model for this sort of stuff.

00:14:18.000 They say it's true a work requirement protects taxpayer dollars as it provides income to the worker and lessens dependence on government funding.

00:14:24.000 But it's not just about money.

00:14:25.000 Work provides purpose and dignity.

00:14:27.000 In other words, get off your butt and work.

00:14:29.000 Now, the counter perspective is being provided by Josh Hawley.

00:14:32.000 As I say, there is a debate inside the Republican Party between people who sort of side with Democrats, like we'll never cut any welfare spending ever, ever, forever because the American people don't like it, and people who say, we need to restructure some of this or we're going to hit the fiscal cliff sooner than humanly possible.

00:14:47.000 And then there are sort of true believers in the Republican caucus, the people who believe that the federal government has no role in virtually any of this.

00:14:54.000 And that would be people, Like, for example, presumably Chip Roy in Texas or Rand Paul in the Senate in Kentucky.

00:15:01.000 Josh Hawley is on the populist side.

00:15:04.000 And in a piece indistinguishable from that of any Democrat, he wrote in the New York Times just a couple of days ago, don't cut Medicaid.

00:15:11.000 And he says, polls show Democrats down in the dumps at their lowest approval level in decades, but we Republicans are having an identity crisis of our own.

00:15:19.000 You can see it in the tug of war over President Trump's one big, beautiful bill.

00:15:23.000 Will Republicans be a majority party of working people or a permanent minority speaking only for the C-suite?

00:15:28.000 So the question I have for Josh Hawley is, if to be the party of the working people means that you are supposed to basically allow tax increases and broader welfare spending, how does that distinguish you from the Democratic Party across the aisle?

00:15:41.000 And if you're going to get into a battle of who spends more on blue-collar people in terms of other people's money, Democrats are always going to win that race because they have no principles at all that hold them off from just continuing to expand benefits.

00:15:52.000 Howley says Mr. Trump has promised working class tax cuts and protection for working class social insurance like Medicaid.

00:15:58.000 But now a noisy contingent of corporatist Republicans, call it the party's Wall Street wing, is urging Congress to ignore all that and get back to the old-time religion, corporate giveaways, preferences for capital, and deep cuts to social insurance.

00:16:08.000 Again, this sounds exactly like what Elizabeth Warren might write. 0.99

00:16:13.000 So, again, he suggests that we should give more child tax credits, which, again, A child tax credit should be for people who pay taxes.

00:16:21.000 Right now, child tax credits go to people who do not pay taxes, which means it is just a handout, basically.

00:16:27.000 If you want to do a handout, by the way, a handout that actually works, there is a proposal in this bill that's quite great called Invest America.

00:16:33.000 That proposal basically says the federal government for every child who is born, that child gets a savings account with the federal government that is essentially invested in the S&P 500, and then it's just left there.

00:16:44.000 That, by the way, was actually the Social Security privatization plan.

00:16:48.000 That George W. Bush proposed back in 2006, except this time it's $1,000 for every kid in the United States.

00:16:53.000 That would actually be a smart investment play if you want the government investing in this sort of thing.

00:16:58.000 Because then you actually have people who are invested in, say, the stock market, and you get the natural growth along with the economy of those funds, as opposed to most other social welfare programs or pyramid schemes like Social Security, where the government just tells you that they're taking your money and putting it in a lockbox and they spend it on some other dude.

00:17:15.000 And then when you get real old, we tax somebody new to pay for you.

00:17:19.000 So that is the debate inside the Republican Party right now.

00:17:22.000 Again, the right side of that debate does include all of these secretaries in the Trump administration.

00:17:29.000 The attempt to get people back to work is really important.

00:17:33.000 Brad Wilcox, who does excellent work over at the Institute of Family Studies, he has statistics showing that before 1980, only about 5% Of able-bodied men age 25 to 40 were not looking for work.

00:17:49.000 Today, that number is 11%.

00:17:50.000 So it is more than doubled over the course of time.

00:17:53.000 And how can they not work?

00:17:55.000 And the answer is because the federal government is paying for them.

00:17:58.000 Nonetheless, this is creating an enormous amount of dyspepsia inside the Republican Party.

00:18:03.000 Some Republicans, particularly in purple districts or purple states, are upset about this.

00:18:08.000 They're afraid that maybe they're going to lose their seats if there are any sort of restructurings of Medicaid.

00:18:14.000 Meanwhile, those same Republicans very often are arguing about state and local tax deductions.

00:18:19.000 So the original Trump tax bill did not allow state and local tax deductions.

00:18:25.000 So the so-called SALT deductions basically allowed you to take off the taxes for your state government before you paid your federal income tax.

00:18:33.000 So if I was in California and I paid a 13% state rate on, say, a million dollars of income, just to make the statistics easy.

00:18:40.000 So I'd take $130,000 off my income before I submitted my federal tax return.

00:18:44.000 I paid the state tax first, and then I paid the federal income tax on the remaining income of $870,000.

00:18:51.000 Trump got rid of that because what he said is, why is it that a person who's in a zero-tax state like Florida should essentially be subsidizing a person who lives in California?

00:19:00.000 Why should the federal government be giving benefits to people who live in blue states that tax their citizens highly?

00:19:06.000 Well, now a bunch of Republicans who are in those blue states have been pushing.

00:19:10.000 For SALT deductions.

00:19:11.000 The current plan, approved by the House Ways and Means Committee, includes a $30,000 cap for individuals and married couples that starts phasing down when the income reaches $400,000.

00:19:19.000 That is a boost from today's $10,000, but it's still not high enough for some of the Republican lawmakers in places like New York, like Mike Lawler and Nick LaLoda.

00:19:27.000 They're trying to push for more, an increase in the so-called SALT cap.

00:19:32.000 But there are a bunch of Republicans in red states with zero tax rates who are looking at this and saying, why are we giving a bunch of tax breaks?

00:19:39.000 to people who live in New York and California.

00:19:43.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, it's a tables have turned moment inside the House GOP where the typical pattern is that hardliners draw red lines while moderates get in line.

00:19:51.000 Salt is one of several concerns conservatives have with the latest version of the Big Beautiful Bill.

00:19:55.000 They want faster repeal of clean energy tax breaks, a quicker start to Medicaid work requirements, and smaller federal support for the expanded Medicaid program created by Obamacare.

00:20:05.000 Meanwhile, there's all sorts of Hubbub inside the Republican caucus over what to do with the Doge cuts.

00:20:11.000 So Elon Musk and Doge have gone through.

00:20:14.000 They found a bunch of cuts that they have identified as potential cuts.

00:20:18.000 In order for those to become permanent, you need Congress, through a process called rescission, to actually vote on making those cuts in waste, fraud, and abuse permanent.

00:20:29.000 Russ Vaught of the Office of Management and Budget, he says that that's one of the goals here, is to make those Doge cuts permanent.

00:20:35.000 We intend to take the Doge agenda and the cuts and the momentum and the initiative and turn those into permanent savings.

00:20:45.000 That's what we believe is our responsibility.

00:20:50.000 There are a lot of Republicans in the House and the Senate who don't actually like many of those cuts.

00:20:54.000 Now, we should again point out, a lot of the cuts that we are talking about, yes, they are sizable in sort of the absolute.

00:21:01.000 In terms of comparison to the spending of the federal government, they are not, in fact, sizable.

00:21:05.000 At all.

00:21:06.000 If you really wanted to prevent fiscal crisis in the United States over the course of the next 10 years, it requires moves much bigger than simple work requirements for Medicaid.

00:21:14.000 Our Republicans, unless they have a broader majority, aren't going to be able to do any of that.

00:21:17.000 That's why you are seeing incrementalism, even from the conservatives inside the Republican caucus.

00:21:22.000 It's going to take, again, an act of political leisure domain, some political magic for Mike Johnson to pull this thing off.

00:21:28.000 And even if he does in the House with this extremely narrow majority, in some ways, the narrow majority helps Johnson, right?

00:21:33.000 Because it means...

00:21:33.000 That every Republican is going to be pressured in order to vote for the bill.

00:21:36.000 If you had a broad majority, then you could see a bunch of people who weren't going to be identified as the problem who'd vote against it.

00:21:43.000 But if you need everyone, then in the end, President Trump is going to put his boot down and force a bunch of reluctant Republicans to support whatever the big, beautiful bill is.

00:21:52.000 But then you go to the Senate.

00:21:53.000 And again, the Republican majority in the Senate is not particularly large.

00:21:57.000 The Republicans currently have 53 seats in the Senate.

00:22:00.000 You could easily see.

00:22:02.000 Some of the quote-unquote moderate Republican senators, like, for example, Lisa Murkowski in Alaska or Susan Collins in Maine, drop off.

00:22:10.000 If the bill is not conservative enough, you can see people from the opposite side drop off.

00:22:14.000 This is a very complicated process.

00:22:15.000 Now, the markets right now have a tax cut already priced in.

00:22:19.000 They believe it's going to happen.

00:22:20.000 If this tax cut does not happen, if somehow this whole thing falls apart, disaster area for the Trump administration, quite obviously.

00:22:26.000 Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin on Wednesday, one of the more conservative members of the Republican caucus, He said that he's worried the House Republicans' reconciliation bill is going to go down.

00:22:36.000 I think that other ship with the big, beautiful bill, I think that's the Titanic.

00:22:40.000 I think that's going down because I think I have enough colleagues in the Senate that this has resonated with that are saying, yeah, we've got to return to a reasonable pre-pandemic level spending.

00:22:49.000 But I always add this, plus a process to achieve it and maintain it.

00:22:57.000 Okay, so again.

00:22:59.000 If somehow Trump pulls this off, major act of political magicing by the Trump administration and by Senator John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, and by Mike Johnson in the House.

00:23:10.000 It is pretty amazing that the United States is so addicted to spending that even talk about work requirements for welfare, this is incredibly controversial.

00:23:19.000 It's an amazing thing.

00:23:20.000 That, by the way, is the mark of a country that has been high on its own supply for far too long.

00:23:25.000 It is an unserious country.

00:23:26.000 That refuses to come to a reckoning with the reality that is, for example, our $37 trillion national debt that is not going to get smaller anytime soon.

00:23:35.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:25:46.000 So obviously a lot going on in Congress.

00:25:49.000 Congress is also considering measures to enshrine the Trump administration's moves against transgender propaganda and ideology.

00:25:56.000 Joining us online to discuss is Mary Margaret O 'Han, the Daily Wire White House correspondent.

00:26:01.000 Mary Margaret has been at the White House.

00:26:02.000 President Trump, of course, is overseas, but a lot is going on domestically as well.

00:26:06.000 Mary Margaret, thanks for joining us.

00:26:09.000 Good morning, Ben.

00:26:10.000 It's great to be here.

00:26:13.000 So the big news of the week in D.C., outside of the Middle East, obviously, is the Trump Justice Department moving against transgender grants.

00:26:20.000 Maybe you can tell us about what's going on on that score.

00:26:24.000 Absolutely.

00:26:25.000 So, of course, we know that since January, late January, February, the Trump administration has been taking steps to cut funding for things that they call like woke or ideological purposes, grants to things like transgenderism or DEI.

00:26:37.000 And we've seen this in the Department of Transportation, Department of Education, and now in the Department of Justice, where we reported this week exclusively that the Trump administration is hacking away, slashing away grants to...

00:26:53.000 We learned about this because Senator Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking for clarification on these grants.

00:27:08.000 There had been a big hubbub in the media about how the Department of Justice was slashing, I think, around $800 million in grants and retaking a look at those funds and if they weren't being And

00:27:37.000 some of those included some very woke causes.

00:27:45.000 For example, there was a massive amount of money going to the Washington State Department of Corrections to support that State Department of Corrections efforts to promote transgenderism in prisons where a young woman named Mozzie Clark had sued the state for allowing a man to sexually assault her in her woman's prison.

00:28:03.000 So a variety of different issues like this, Ben, the Department of Justice is cutting the funding towards those issues and saying we're no longer going to be funding these types of things and instead we're redirecting those funds.

00:28:15.000 And I think a lot of Americans, you know, we are very decidedly against these types of ideological purposes.

00:28:21.000 I'm very excited about some of the things we're hearing about protecting the border and supporting our law enforcement.

00:28:27.000 Mary Margaret, you've also been covering some of the stuff that's been happening in Congress.

00:28:30.000 Obviously Republicans are trying to follow on this in Congress.

00:28:34.000 They're trying to actually endorse what President Trump is doing via the executive branch in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill.

00:28:40.000 How are those negotiations going?

00:28:42.000 Yes, Ben, so we've been reporting this week.

00:28:45.000 My colleague Leif at the Daily Wire broke a big story yesterday on how Congressman Dan Crenshaw is taking steps to prevent any transgender surgeries, hormones, or puberty blockers to be funded by this reconciliation bill.

00:28:57.000 He knows, like I was just saying, that this is a very...

00:29:00.000 This is an unpopular issue for Democrats.

00:29:02.000 It's something they've been pushing repeatedly.

00:29:04.000 And he also pointed out that there has been no amendment introduced trying to block his measure here, which is really interesting and I think backs more than ever this understanding that this is an unpopular issue.

00:29:16.000 We even saw multiple Democrats kind of flip-flop on this issue and on men and women's sports during the 2024 election cycle right before the elections and say we no longer support this type of thing because they recognize how unpopular it is.

00:29:29.000 So Dan Crenshaw is taking steps in Congress to protect kids in this way.

00:29:33.000 And we're seeing all over the country legislation introduced as well.

00:29:36.000 So lots of steps being taken here.

00:29:38.000 And of course, this supports President Donald Trump's agenda to protect children and to keep men out of women's sports.

00:29:43.000 So a lot of cooperation between Congress and the president.

00:29:47.000 And I think President Trump is very excited about that.

00:29:51.000 That's Mary Margaret Olihan from the White House.

00:29:53.000 Mary Margaret, thanks so much for your time.

00:29:54.000 Really appreciate it.

00:29:57.000 Thank you, Ben.

00:29:58.000 And meanwhile, the markets continue to roil.

00:30:02.000 I know there's a widespread perception, particularly on the right, that the markets have now recovered.

00:30:06.000 Everything is hunky-dory.

00:30:07.000 President Trump backed off the most damaging aspects of his trade war, and now everything will be fine.

00:30:11.000 That is not what the markets are saying right now.

00:30:13.000 The markets are saying, we don't know where the hell this is going.

00:30:15.000 And it turns out that the tariff rates that President Trump left in place are still wildly higher than they were before Liberation Day.

00:30:23.000 As I said yesterday on the show, the removal of many of the provisions that Trump put in place Did not remove all of the provisions that Trump put in place, and the provisions he put in place leave the United States with an average tariff rate that is higher than any time since the 1930s.

00:30:36.000 What's the impact of that?

00:30:37.000 Well, Walmart apparently is now going to raise its prices.

00:30:39.000 This is what people have been predicting.

00:30:41.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the retailer said on Thursday it plans to raise prices this month and early this summer, passing along some of the costs as tariff-affected merchandise hits store shelves.

00:30:50.000 Walmart CFO John David Rainey said the magnitude and speed at which these prices are coming to us is somewhat unprecedented in history.

00:30:56.000 He said sales rose steadily in the latest quarter as shoppers flock to deals and fast shipping.

00:31:00.000 But the full impact of the trade war has yet to come.

00:31:02.000 He said it's a dynamic and fluid environment.

00:31:05.000 Already, for example, tariffs have driven up the price of bananas.

00:31:09.000 The U.S., again, has agreed to temporarily lower the tariffs.

00:31:12.000 But if we think that we are past the woods here, I do not think that that is, in fact, the case.

00:31:18.000 And again, President Trump continues to make comments that are likely to lead to uncertainty in the markets.

00:31:23.000 And uncertainty in the markets is its own form of damage.

00:31:27.000 For example, yesterday, President Trump said that he has a disagreement with Apple's Tim Cook about the construction of the iPhone.

00:31:33.000 So Tim Cook has been attempting to reshore manufacture of the iPhone away from China and toward India.

00:31:39.000 That's a giant win for the Trump administration.

00:31:41.000 Take the win, Mr. President.

00:31:42.000 That is a good thing.

00:31:44.000 India has been increasingly oriented toward the United States basically since the late 1990s.

00:31:49.000 China is a geopolitical enemy of the United States, moving... 0.93

00:31:53.000 The manufacture of the iPhone from China to India is a win.

00:31:57.000 But President Trump said in Doha Qatar yesterday that he is interested in reshoring the manufacture of iPhones completely to the United States, which would only increase the price of the iPhone by, what, double?

00:32:09.000 I mean, really, this sort of talk, just let Scott Besson talk about the economy.

00:32:13.000 Please, Mr. President, just let the Treasury Secretary do his thing.

00:32:16.000 Here's President Trump on Apple.

00:32:19.000 And I had a little problem with Tim Cook yesterday.

00:32:22.000 I said to him, Tim, you're my friend.

00:32:23.000 I treated you very good.

00:32:24.000 You're coming in with 500 billion dollars.

00:32:26.000 But now I hear you're building all over India.

00:32:28.000 I don't want you building in India. 1.00

00:32:29.000 You can build in India if you want to take care of India because India is the highest, one of the highest tariff nations in the world.

00:32:38.000 It's very hard to sell into India.

00:32:41.000 And they've offered us a deal where basically they're willing to literally charge us no tariff.

00:32:49.000 So we go from the highest tariff, you couldn't do business in India, we're not even a top 30 in India because the tariff is so high, to a point where they have actually told us, I assume you too, Scott, you were working on that also, that there will be no tariff, right?

00:33:05.000 Would you say that's the difference?

00:33:06.000 They're the highest and now they're saying no tariff.

00:33:08.000 But I said to Tim, I said, Tim, look, we've treated you really good.

00:33:12.000 We put up with all the plants that you built in China for years.

00:33:17.000 Now you've got to build us.

00:33:18.000 We're not interested in you building in India. 1.00

00:33:21.000 India can take care of themselves. 0.54

00:33:23.000 They're doing very well.

00:33:24.000 We want you to build here, and they're going to be upping their production in the United States.

00:33:28.000 Apple.

00:33:29.000 So Apple's already in for $500 billion, but they're going to be upping their production.

00:33:35.000 Okay, so what do markets do?

00:33:37.000 Markets are effectively prediction mechanisms.

00:33:39.000 And markets are trying to figure out what Trump means, what he's going to do.

00:33:43.000 And this sort of uncertainty, this is not tactical uncertainty.

00:33:46.000 This is not strategic ambiguity here.

00:33:48.000 This is actual confusion.

00:33:50.000 Treasury Secretary Scott Besson says a thing, and then it's immediately contradicted by Peter Navarro or Howard Lutnick or the president in this particular case.

00:33:58.000 That is not going to make the markets any more sanguine.

00:34:02.000 So what do we actually need if we want a successful economy?

00:34:05.000 We need the tax cuts to be made permanent, obviously.

00:34:07.000 If that doesn't happen, disaster area.

00:34:09.000 We need the trade barriers to continue to come down.

00:34:11.000 10% cannot be the minimum trade barrier.

00:34:13.000 It's not going to be good.

00:34:14.000 That will have some dire impact on, for example, pricing in the United States and small businesses in the United States that rely on imported goods.

00:34:22.000 Screwing around with the free market system, it's a lot easier to screw up that system than people believe it is.

00:34:29.000 It turns out that the basic theory of free markets, which is that diffuse knowledge is better and more efficient than centralized knowledge.

00:34:36.000 If you ignore that rule, you are going to do damage.

00:34:38.000 to the economic efficiency that the American people have come to rely upon.

00:34:42.000 And that is a problem.

00:34:43.000 Meanwhile, President Trump was in Qatar yesterday.

00:34:46.000 And President Trump did some good things.

00:34:48.000 Like, for example, he cut a deal with Qatar, apparently to generate $1.2 trillion in economic exchange, according to the White House in a fact sheet.

00:34:57.000 That agreement includes a $96 billion deal with Qatar Airways to buy up to 210 Boeing, 787 Dreamliners, and 777X airplanes with GE Aerospace engines, according to the fact sheet.

00:35:08.000 Also, a statement of intent that would lead to $38 billion in investments at Qatar's Al-Udeid Air Base and other air defense and maritime security capabilities.

00:35:16.000 Qatar, of course, wooed the hell out of President Trump. 0.68

00:35:19.000 They put on a big show.

00:35:21.000 They had a bunch of cyber trucks painted red.

00:35:24.000 They understand how to woo President Trump.

00:35:26.000 The way to woo President Trump is that you do big shows.

00:35:29.000 President Trump, obviously, loves that sort of thing.

00:35:31.000 And so they did.

00:35:32.000 They brought out all the camels.

00:35:33.000 Not even kidding.

00:35:34.000 It was basically the scene.

00:35:36.000 From Aladdin, where Prince Ali arrives in Agrabah.

00:35:40.000 They brought out the golden peacocks and everything.

00:35:43.000 Here's what it looked like.

00:35:45.000 *music* you you Thank you.

00:35:56.000 He's got 75 golden camels.

00:36:00.000 Purple peacocks, he's got 53. Yeah, that's what it was in Qatar.

00:36:05.000 President Trump loves that kind of stuff.

00:36:07.000 And then President Trump announced this sort of investment package, and Qatar itself announced that they would be purchasing a bunch of Boeing aircraft.

00:36:12.000 Here's what that sounded like.

00:36:13.000 Boeing purchase agreement signed on behalf of the state of Qatar by His Excellency, Bedram Hamad Almeer, CEO of Qatar Airways Company, and behalf of the United States, Kelly Ortberg, President and CEO of the Boeing Company.

00:36:28.000 Okay.

00:36:28.000 How exciting.

00:36:30.000 Okay, so people signing these defense contracts and all the rest.

00:36:33.000 Alrighty.

00:36:34.000 There's only one problem.

00:36:36.000 Qatar doesn't do this stuff without strings attached.

00:36:38.000 They just don't.

00:36:39.000 And pretending they do is silly.

00:36:41.000 And President Trump, when he does business deals, presumably there are strings attached.

00:36:45.000 That's true of every business deal.

00:36:47.000 Why would Qatar?

00:36:48.000 They have a population that is about one-eighth the size of the state of Florida.

00:36:52.000 And they are expending $100 billion to impact American policy.

00:36:57.000 And so just so we know, how big is Qatar?

00:37:00.000 The answer is it is tiny, tiny, tiny.

00:37:02.000 So I asked our friends and sponsors over at Perplexity.

00:37:04.000 What is the population of Qatar?

00:37:06.000 And then to compare that to the size of the United States state, so we know what we're talking about.

00:37:10.000 According to perplexity, Qatar's population in 2025 is estimated to be approximately between 2.75 million and 3.6 million people.

00:37:18.000 A bunch of different stats coming in, but that's roughly comparable to the population of Connecticut.

00:37:24.000 Okay, maybe 3.6 million people.

00:37:26.000 As far as the size of the state, Qatar covers about 4,500 square miles.

00:37:32.000 That is smaller than any American state except for Rhode Island.

00:37:34.000 So it is tiny.

00:37:35.000 It is a tiny country and it is expending tens of billions of dollars to impact American policy.

00:37:40.000 You think they're doing that without any strings attached?

00:37:42.000 Any?

00:37:43.000 I would love to hear the theory of what even Qatar is doing.

00:37:46.000 They spend more money.

00:37:47.000 They spend, I believe, two-thirds of the amount of money that China does lobbying.

00:37:51.000 China has one billion citizens plus.

00:37:54.000 Qatar has 2.6 million.

00:37:55.000 What are they doing?

00:37:56.000 And the answer is they are punching above their weight and basically buying people.

00:38:00.000 This is what they do.

00:38:01.000 The Wall Street Journal has an entire piece titled, How Qatar Spent Billions to Gain Influence in the United States.

00:38:07.000 And of course, they do.

00:38:08.000 That is exactly what they do.

00:38:09.000 Whether it's buying politicians like Robert Menendez, or whether it is subsidizing an American airbase in Qatar so as to gain control over American foreign policy in the region.

00:38:19.000 Whether it is subsidizing American universities to the tune of billions of dollars and subsidizing radicalism at those universities, or whether it is signing people on as foreign agents, which is literally what they do.

00:38:31.000 That have included in the past a former Qatar lobbyist, Pam Bondi, the current attorney general who just signed off on this 747 arrangement.

00:38:40.000 I mean, this is what Qatar does. 0.95

00:38:42.000 And then they throw their weight around.

00:38:45.000 And that has some impact.

00:38:47.000 So Qatar, for example, the prime minister of Qatar, he came out yesterday and he was talking about the situation in Gaza.

00:38:54.000 And he said the Palestinians want to end the war.

00:38:56.000 No, they clearly do not.

00:38:57.000 If by the Palestinians you mean the people, I'm sure many of the people do.

00:39:00.000 If by the Palestinians you mean the leadership, like Hamas, clearly they don't.

00:39:05.000 Hamas clearly does not actually want a deal.

00:39:07.000 If they did, all they would have to do is go into exile, give up their aspirations to rule the Gaza Strip, and release the hostages, and the war would be over today.

00:39:14.000 That was true October 8th, by the way.

00:39:17.000 But here is Qatar trying to promote its agenda.

00:39:20.000 And again, when you have your hands stuffing money into the pockets of Americans, it makes it a lot easier to make this sort of nonsensical play.

00:39:29.000 It's good that you have mentioned the case of Edan Alexander, whom we are happily seeing him free finally.

00:39:38.000 This took us like a long, you know, a lot of time and a lot of efforts and a lot of pressure without any exchange, which is basically something has never happened.

00:39:50.000 Now, we wanted this to be also as a first step toward having a complete hostage deal, unfortunately.

00:39:58.000 The next day being followed by a massacre on a hospital in Gaza.

00:40:06.000 The Israelis obviously said they were going after senior Hamas. 0.59

00:40:10.000 Yeah, but going after senior Hamas leader doesn't mean killing 70 people just as a collateral damage, which has just been the justification for the last year and a half.

00:40:21.000 We cannot reach a deal.

00:40:23.000 I'm sorry, what a joke these people are.

00:40:25.000 Seriously, what a joke these people are.

00:40:26.000 Pretending these people are on the side of Western civilization is a lie.

00:40:30.000 He literally calls it a massacre when Israel, in one of the most targeted strikes ever...

00:40:34.000 Killed, it appears, the entire leadership case of Hamas that is remaining in the Gaza Strip.

00:40:38.000 They were hiding beneath a hospital, the European hospital, in a tunnel beneath the European hospital.

00:40:42.000 They hit the area right outside the hospital and hit that tunnel.

00:40:45.000 And he calls that a massacre because he's on the side of Hamas. 0.88

00:40:49.000 How do we know?

00:40:49.000 Because they funded Hamas to the tune of $2 billion.

00:40:52.000 $2 billion.

00:40:53.000 And these are the people who we're praising and calling honest brokers.

00:40:56.000 It's a joke.

00:40:57.000 Of course they're paying lots of money into the United States to impact American policy.

00:41:02.000 That is the explicit goal.

00:41:04.000 What, are we pretending that these are charitable, wonderful people now?

00:41:06.000 Are you even kidding?

00:41:08.000 By the way, the only reason that any of these regimes continue to exist in the Middle East is because the United States props them up militarily.

00:41:14.000 That is true for UAE. 0.99

00:41:16.000 It is true for Qatar. 1.00

00:41:17.000 It is true for Bahrain. 1.00

00:41:18.000 It is true for Saudi Arabia. 1.00

00:41:18.000 It's true for Jordan. 1.00

00:41:20.000 It's true for Egypt. 1.00

00:41:21.000 It's true for all of them.

00:41:21.000 Otherwise, the Muslim Brotherhood would be in charge in most of these places.

00:41:24.000 So it's good that these regimes are in charge.

00:41:26.000 It also happens to be the case that all of these places would be dirt poor if it were not for the technological innovations.

00:41:33.000 Of the West that built their entire oil industry, all of it, is deeply irritating to be lectured on foreign policy by people who support terrorism everywhere they can find it, particularly Qatar.

00:41:46.000 Particularly Qatar.

00:41:48.000 Meanwhile, again, if you think there are no strings attached, there clearly are strings attached.

00:41:52.000 The reason Qatar is doing all of this is to influence policy everywhere, from the Houthis in Yemen to the Iran deal itself to Syria.

00:42:00.000 So yesterday, President Trump praised the new leader of Syria.

00:42:03.000 Okay, here is the thing.

00:42:04.000 If you want to make the case that we need to relieve sanctions on the Syrians temporarily to allow them to find some sort of more stable fiscal footing with actual strings attached, like, for example, all the things President Trump wants, normalization with Israel, expelling terrorists, allowing some level of religious diversity in Syria.

00:42:20.000 If you want those things to happen, then what you gradually do is release the sanctions as you have proof of concept.

00:42:25.000 What you don't do is relieve them all at once, and then meet al-Jelani, the new head of Syria, who is a terrorist.

00:42:32.000 He was a member of Al-Qaeda.

00:42:34.000 He's a member of ISIS. 0.72

00:42:35.000 And then he broke away from them and created his own terrorist group called HDS, which is sponsored by the terror-backing Turkish government.

00:42:42.000 But here is President Trump speaking in warm tones about a man who, just a few weeks ago, people were noting, was killing the Druze at an extraordinary rate and also possibly targeting Christians.

00:42:54.000 And yet here we are with praise for al-Jawani.

00:42:59.000 How did you find the Syrian president?

00:43:01.000 Great.

00:43:02.000 Right.

00:43:02.000 I think very good.

00:43:04.000 Young, attractive guy.

00:43:05.000 Tough guy.

00:43:08.000 Strong pass.

00:43:09.000 Very strong pass fighter.

00:43:11.000 Does that worry you at all?

00:43:12.000 He's got a real shot at pulling it together.

00:43:15.000 I spoke with President Erdogan.

00:43:18.000 I'm very friendly with him.

00:43:20.000 He feels he's got a shot.

00:43:24.000 Yeah, no wonder President Erdogan thinks he has a shot.

00:43:26.000 President Erdogan is in charge of Syria.

00:43:28.000 Erdogan is a dictator.

00:43:30.000 Who is a terrorist supporter of Hamas and HTS and a bunch of other Sunni terror groups.

00:43:36.000 Erdogan himself has Ottoman aspirations for the Middle East.

00:43:41.000 The reason HTS took over Syria is because they were sponsored by Turkey.

00:43:44.000 Yeah, no wonder Erdogan likes al-Jolani.

00:43:46.000 He is a client.

00:43:47.000 He is a proxy.

00:43:49.000 Pretending this is not happening is not a way to do policy.

00:43:52.000 And when you say has a strong past, do you mean like murdered a bunch of people?

00:43:55.000 Because that's what al-Jolani did. 0.96

00:43:58.000 And apparently continues to do with the Druze. 0.52

00:44:01.000 So much so that the Druze in southern Syria. 1.00

00:44:04.000 Remember, the Druze are not Jewish. 0.93

00:44:06.000 The Druze are openly appealing to Israel to go in and try and protect them in southern Syria from HTS and from other terrorist groups in Syria.

00:44:15.000 And you think there are no strings attached?

00:44:16.000 Of course there are strings attached.

00:44:19.000 I think President Trump is too smart to be played in this way.

00:44:21.000 I think he is too intelligent to be played in this way.

00:44:23.000 But certainly that's not what the Qataris think.

00:44:25.000 And certainly not what the Iranians think either.

00:44:28.000 Okay, speaking of people who think they can play the president of the United States, Iran clearly believes that they can outplay the president of the United States.

00:44:36.000 Yesterday, a top Iranian official said to Richard Engel of NBC News that they are ready to sign a nuclear deal with certain conditions with President Trump.

00:44:44.000 Ali Shamchani, a top political military and nuclear advisor to the Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, is one of the most senior Iranian officials to speak publicly about the ongoing discussions.

00:44:54.000 He said that Iran would commit to never making nuclear weapons.

00:44:56.000 Oh, maybe.

00:44:57.000 They're pledging to be goody-goody gumdrops.

00:44:59.000 Well, they're pledging to be just the best.

00:45:01.000 Probably they'll keep their word.

00:45:03.000 The Iranians have never lied to anybody.

00:45:04.000 The Iranian regime, the ITIL has never lied to anybody.

00:45:06.000 They are perfectly honest all the way across the board.

00:45:08.000 And if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that is for sale.

00:45:11.000 He said Iran would commit to never making nuclear weapons, getting rid of its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, which can be weaponized.

00:45:18.000 Agree to enrich uranium only to the lower levels needed for civilian use.

00:45:22.000 Okay, what does that mean?

00:45:23.000 If you keep your nuclear facilities and you can enrich to 3.67%, then you can also ramp up the centrifuges and enrich to 70 or 80 or 90%.

00:45:31.000 That is the whole point of keeping them.

00:45:33.000 Iran does not need nuclear energy.

00:45:35.000 It is one of the most oil-rich states on Earth.

00:45:37.000 Why are they looking for nuclear energy in Iran?

00:45:39.000 Because they're so green in Iran?

00:45:41.000 They're environmentalists, are they?

00:45:43.000 That's the suggestion?

00:45:46.000 All in exchange for immediate lifting of all economic sanctions on Iran.

00:45:51.000 Shamchani said they'd sign an agreement today if those conditions were met.

00:45:53.000 You bet your ass they would because those conditions mean that they get a nuclear weapon in short order and their economy is open.

00:46:01.000 And notice some of the conditions that are not placed there.

00:46:04.000 Using that economic foundation to build back its terror bases.

00:46:07.000 Using that economic foundation to build ballistic missiles.

00:46:10.000 Of course they'd sign on to that because it's just the Obama deal that Donald Trump called the worst deal in human history.

00:46:17.000 You can't just take the Obama deal, stamp a big T on it, and call it a good deal.

00:46:20.000 It ain't how this works.

00:46:23.000 President Trump, however, was expressing optimism about the Iranian deal yesterday.

00:46:26.000 Here he was.

00:46:27.000 Probably read today the story about Iran has sort of agreed to the terms.

00:46:34.000 They're not going to make out, I call it in a friendly way, nuclear dust.

00:46:38.000 We're not going to be making any nuclear dust.

00:46:40.000 In Iran.

00:46:41.000 And we've been strong.

00:46:43.000 I want them to succeed.

00:46:44.000 I want them to end up being a great country, frankly, but they can't have a nuclear weapon.

00:46:49.000 That's the only thing.

00:46:50.000 It's very simple.

00:46:51.000 It's not like I have to give you 30 pages worth of details.

00:46:54.000 There's only one sentence.

00:46:55.000 They can't have a nuclear weapon.

00:46:57.000 And I think we're getting close to maybe doing a deal without having to.

00:47:03.000 There's two steps.

00:47:05.000 There's a very, very nice step and there's a violent step.

00:47:07.000 The violence like people haven't seen before.

00:47:11.000 And I hope we're not going to have to do this.

00:47:14.000 I don't want to do the second step.

00:47:16.000 Some people do.

00:47:17.000 Many people do.

00:47:18.000 I don't want to do that step.

00:47:19.000 So we'll see what happens.

00:47:21.000 But we're in very serious negotiations with Iran for long-term peace.

00:47:27.000 And if we do that, it'll be fantastic.

00:47:32.000 Okay, so I'm just going to make one thing clear.

00:47:34.000 When he says, the only thing is they can't have a nuclear weapon, you don't need 30 pages of detail.

00:47:39.000 You absolutely need 30 pages of detail.

00:47:42.000 Abso-frickin-lutely, you need the detail.

00:47:44.000 They can't have a nuclear weapon, just means they can't have the actual nuclear weapon.

00:47:49.000 How about the centrifuges that can spin it up in two weeks?

00:47:51.000 Can they have those?

00:47:52.000 That's the question.

00:47:54.000 Do they have the capability to develop a nuclear weapon?

00:47:57.000 How about if we open sanctions on them?

00:47:59.000 Can they use that to rebuild Hezbollah or Hamas?

00:48:02.000 Or Islamic Jihad?

00:48:03.000 Or fund the Houthis?

00:48:04.000 What can they use the money for?

00:48:06.000 That 30 pages makes a big difference.

00:48:10.000 It turns out, putting on my lawyer hat for a moment, that when people structure the outline of deals, all the devil always is in the details.

00:48:20.000 Because the deal he's talking about right there is the Obama-Iran deal.

00:48:23.000 It is just the JCPOA.

00:48:24.000 Congress has already said that's not going to fly, by the way.

00:48:26.000 Congressional Republicans are saying, no, it's complete denuclearization.

00:48:29.000 And President Trump himself has said consistently, Complete denuclearization.

00:48:33.000 If somehow, his special envoy, Steve Whitcoff, or anybody else in the Trump orbit, tries to steer him in the direction of the JCPOA, it will be one of the most giant fails of Trump administration too.

00:48:44.000 The Iranians are counting on their ability to play these people. 0.99

00:48:47.000 That's what they are counting on.

00:48:48.000 Qatar is counting on its ability to play these people.

00:48:51.000 The Trump administration.

00:48:53.000 That's what they are counting on.

00:48:55.000 And right now, right now, President Trump...

00:48:59.000 Should make clear that he is not going to be played on all of this.

00:49:01.000 This means conditions attached, for example, to the de-sanctioning of Syria.

00:49:05.000 It means actual pressure on Turkey, which needs our F-35s to stop its support for terrorism. 0.82

00:49:12.000 It means, for example, that Qatar should be cut off at the knees in its support for terrorism. 0.91

00:49:18.000 And frankly, if Qatar wanted tomorrow, what they just showed by the release of Yidan Alexander, is that if Qatar decides to tell Hamas what to do, Hamas actually listens. 0.51

00:49:25.000 If the United States actually wanted to end the conflict in Gaza, they could do it literally today.

00:49:30.000 The Trump administration could just say to Qatar, here's the deal, the airbase goes away.

00:49:34.000 It moves over to UAE.

00:49:36.000 Unless all the hostages come out and Hamas goes into exile.

00:49:39.000 That'd be the end of the war.

00:49:40.000 Today.

00:49:41.000 Literally today.

00:49:42.000 But that would require seeing Qatar clearly for what it is.

00:49:46.000 Which is a deceitful state that plays both sides and stuffs cash wherever it can find it.

00:49:50.000 Oil cash that they're digging out of the ground.

00:49:53.000 And meanwhile, In other non-saluatory news, Tulsi Gabbard, who is the Director of National Intelligence, she is consolidating control of the President's Daily Brief.

00:50:04.000 Why does that matter?

00:50:04.000 Well, because the information that President Trump receives when it comes to intelligence matters an awful lot to his decision-making.

00:50:10.000 So Tulsi Gabbard is now attempting to sort of centralize the power over the Daily Brief. 0.95

00:50:15.000 And she's doing so in ways that seem to sort of be geared toward confirming the President's priors on a wide variety of issues.

00:50:24.000 Gabbard's decision, according to the New York Times, comes as President Trump has openly mused to aides over time about whether the office she leads should actually continue to exist.

00:50:34.000 Gabbard's office announced the decision internally on Tuesday.

00:50:37.000 The memo said there was much to be worked out about the transition timelines and our own processes.

00:50:43.000 Again, the goal here with regard to the daily brief is to take control away from, for example, the CIA, whose current director is John Ratcliffe.

00:50:53.000 One of the reasons that she is doing that, presumably, is because there was a controversy that arose over Venezuela.

00:51:01.000 So, for example, Gabbard removed the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council, Michael Collins, and his deputy.

00:51:09.000 Why?

00:51:10.000 Well, because he had actually written, along with the rest of the council, that Venezuela is not, in fact, actively deploying members of Trenda Aragua, MS-13, into the United States.

00:51:22.000 And President Trump has used that idea as a lever for using the Alien Enemies Act for deportations.

00:51:28.000 Well, it's either true or it's not.

00:51:31.000 If it's not true, then sure, fire them.

00:51:34.000 But if, in fact, it is true, then simply censoring the intelligence that reaches the president because it doesn't match with his priors, that is not a good way to make policy.

00:51:42.000 Reality continues to exist whether you like it or not.

00:51:46.000 In February, the intelligence community circulated an assessment that reached the opposite conclusion.

00:51:51.000 The administration asked the National Intelligence Council to take a second look at the available evidence.

00:51:55.000 And the National Intelligence Council reaffirmed what the intelligence community was saying.

00:51:59.000 And so Laura Loomer then attacked the National Intelligence Council as career anti-Trump bureaucrats who needed to be replaced if they wanted to promote open borders. 1.00

00:52:07.000 Again, the job of the DNI, the job of the intelligence community is to provide best available intelligence.

00:52:13.000 It is not supposed to be politically driven.

00:52:15.000 It is not a good thing.

00:52:16.000 If you are firing people not based on your belief that they are doing a bad job, but based on the idea that the facts that they are presenting to the president don't match with the things you want the president told, that is not a good thing.

00:52:26.000 It turns out intelligence bubbles have had some pretty dire ramifications over the years, the most obvious being the invasion of Iraq, which was based on an intelligence bubble suggesting universal support for the idea that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

00:52:37.000 What you want is the best available intelligence available to the president full-time, all the time, without some sort of political bias or censorship.

00:52:48.000 The president, when given full information, makes good decisions.

00:52:51.000 If you deprive him of full information, that is a problem.

00:52:54.000 Meanwhile, on the foreign front, there were talks that were supposed to be happening in Turkey with regard to Ukraine.

00:53:00.000 Vladimir Putin originally said that he was going to show up in Ukraine.

00:53:03.000 Vladimir Zelensky said, I'd like a 30-day ceasefire, and then I'll show up.

00:53:07.000 President Trump pressured Zelensky.

00:53:08.000 Zelensky said, okay, and then he showed up in Turkey.

00:53:13.000 And Putin then didn't show.

00:53:15.000 Instead, he sent a second-tier team of negotiators to hold peace talks with Ukraine.

00:53:19.000 Spurning keeps challenged to go there in person to meet with Zelensky.

00:53:22.000 Of course, the reason that Putin won't meet with Zelensky is he claims that Zelensky is an illegitimate leader, which is an amazing statement from a man who has consolidated his power over the course of the last two and a half decades by murdering nearly all of his political opponents or jailing them.

00:53:35.000 In any case, President Trump Kind of changed his tune on this.

00:53:40.000 Originally yesterday, he was saying that maybe he would fly to Turkey if Putin showed up to help broker this thing.

00:53:44.000 Here's what he had to say yesterday.

00:53:45.000 Well, I don't know if he's showing up.

00:53:48.000 I know he would like me to be there.

00:53:51.000 And I said, Musk, Bill, if we could end the war, I'd be thinking about that.

00:53:57.000 Tomorrow, we're all booked out.

00:53:59.000 You understand that?

00:53:59.000 We're all sent.

00:54:00.000 But you'd go.

00:54:01.000 He goes.

00:54:01.000 I'm going to go to UAE tomorrow.

00:54:03.000 And so we have a very full situation.

00:54:07.000 Now, that doesn't mean I wouldn't do it to save a lot of lives and come back.

00:54:12.000 But yeah, I think they're thinking about something.

00:54:15.000 Okay, and then President Trump reversed himself after Putin said that he wasn't going to go, and he said, ah, he was never going to go.

00:54:26.000 So originally President Trump was like, maybe he'll go, and then I'll show up and we'll actually make a deal.

00:54:29.000 And then Putin said he wasn't going to go, and Trump said, no, no, no, it was never going to happen.

00:54:34.000 Mr. President, are you disappointed in the level of the delegation that the Russians send to Turkey?

00:54:39.000 I don't know anything about it.

00:54:40.000 I'm not disappointed in anything.

00:54:42.000 Who are you from?

00:54:43.000 BBC News.

00:54:44.000 I'm not disappointed.

00:54:46.000 What would I be disappointed?

00:54:46.000 We just took in $4 trillion, and he says, are you disappointed about a delegation?

00:54:51.000 I know nothing about a delegation.

00:54:53.000 I haven't even checked.

00:54:54.000 Look, nothing's going to happen until Putin and I get together, okay?

00:54:58.000 And obviously he wasn't going to go.

00:55:00.000 He was going to go, but he thought I was going to go.

00:55:02.000 He wasn't going if I wasn't there.

00:55:04.000 And I don't believe anything's going to happen, whether you like it or not, until he and I get together.

00:55:09.000 But we're going to have to get it solved because too many people are dying.

00:55:14.000 Okay, so, you know, again, this sort of idea that too many people are dying, we need to get...

00:55:19.000 So if Putin never shows up, what's the plan then?

00:55:23.000 Russia continues to make outsized demands, by the way.

00:55:25.000 Russia is demanding territory it hasn't even occupied yet in Ukraine, according to its newest round of proposals.

00:55:32.000 According to the New York Times, Andrei Kartopelov, the head of the Defense Committee in the lower chamber of Russian parliament, reiterated his message on Tuesday, saying Ukraine needed to recognize that the Russian military was advancing in 116 directions.

00:55:44.000 If Ukrainians did not want to talk, they must listen, quote, to the language of the Russian bayonet. 0.73

00:55:49.000 And so Putin continues to sort of run around and...

00:55:54.000 Not go to the negotiations while constantly maintaining a vigilant and increased military presence in eastern Ukraine.

00:56:03.000 What is the alternative going to be?

00:56:05.000 I mean, presumably it's going to be President Trump saying that we continue to support the Ukrainians to prevent them from collapsing.

00:56:12.000 And to President Trump's absolute credit, he is recognizing what Putin is doing right now in some ways.

00:56:19.000 So President Trump, in recent weeks, Asked advisors if they think that Putin has changed since his last time in office and expressed surprise at some of Putin's military moves, including bombing areas with children.

00:56:29.000 That is according to the Wall Street Journal.

00:56:31.000 So at least he's waking up to the reality.

00:56:33.000 That is a good thing.

00:56:35.000 It also happens to be that he is, I think, becoming increasingly concerned with the simple fact that the Russians have kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children back into Russia for some sort of radical indoctrination.

00:56:47.000 Now, all of that, again, reality just exists.

00:56:51.000 And as I've said before, President Trump is very much attuned to reality.

00:56:55.000 And so the more he is attuned to the reality, the better his policies will be.

00:56:58.000 Here are some realities on the foreign front.

00:56:59.000 Vladimir Putin is not going to come to the negotiating table unless he believes he has no other real alternative.

00:57:05.000 Two, Qatar is attempting to manipulate the president of the United States and American foreign policy. 0.60

00:57:10.000 Three, Iran is not going to denuclearize.

00:57:12.000 They are not.

00:57:14.000 They've openly said this.

00:57:15.000 This is not conjecture.

00:57:16.000 They are not going to denuclearize in any way, shape, or form.

00:57:20.000 That provides any sort of security for the Saudis, for the UAE, for the Israelis, or anyone else the Iranians are targeting. 0.83

00:57:27.000 Four, Al Jelani in Syria needs to be held to account before you start shoveling money into his pockets.

00:57:34.000 Five, Erdogan in Turkey is a disaster area, and trusting Erdogan in Turkey with American foreign policy is about as bad an idea as I can think of.

00:57:42.000 Those are all realities.

00:57:44.000 And so whether or not those realities are acknowledged, they will continue to exist.

00:57:49.000 Reality is undefeated.

00:57:50.000 And again, the reason President Trump historically has done well is because he recognizes reality.

00:57:54.000 I think he will again.

00:57:56.000 I hope sooner rather than later.

00:57:58.000 Meanwhile, RFK Jr. headed over to the Hill for a grilling from lawmakers on a wide variety of topics.

00:58:04.000 Actually, one of the people who was kicked out at the very beginning of his grilling on Capitol Hill was Ben& Jerry's co-founder, Ben Cohen, who was recently on Tucker Carlson spewing about his views of foreign policy, which obviously are trash, but you know, his ice cream is tasty.

00:58:18.000 We'll say that.

00:58:19.000 In any case, RFK showed up and made some really good points, and then he was grilled on some not-so-wonderful points.

00:58:26.000 On the good points, RFK Jr. had been ripped by Rose DeLauro. 0.96

00:58:30.000 She had the purple hair from Connecticut because she was upset with how grants were being held up or spent under HHS, and here is RFK slamming her back.

00:58:41.000 Allow me to answer that by pointing out the absolute cataclysmic Disorganization of this agency under your oversight for 40 years.

00:58:54.000 We had nine separate offices of women's health. 0.89

00:59:00.000 When we consolidate, then the Democrats say we're eliminating them.

00:59:03.000 We're not.

00:59:04.000 We're still appropriating the $3.7 billion, but we're not keeping all nine.

00:59:09.000 We had eight separate offices for...

00:59:12.000 Minority health. 0.74

00:59:13.000 We eliminated one.

00:59:14.000 We had 27 HIV officers.

00:59:17.000 We had 59 behavioral health programs.

00:59:23.000 Okay, so again, good for RFK Jr.

00:59:26.000 Also, Democrats went after RFK Jr. for supposedly cutting into Medicaid, and he made the point that we were talking about earlier, which is that what they're actually attempting to do is get people who are on Medicaid to do the work that they are supposed to do to be eligible so that they're not engaging in Medicaid fraud.

00:59:40.000 He obviously is right about that.

00:59:42.000 He also talked about some of the changes that he's been making that even some Democrats are happy with, especially concerning things like food dyes.

00:59:49.000 Anybody thinks that we did gold standard medicine in this country from these institutions, look at our children.

00:59:57.000 They're the sickest children in the world.

01:00:00.000 Laura, you say that you've worked for 20 years on getting food dye out.

01:00:09.000 Give me credit.

01:00:11.000 I got it out in 100 days.

01:00:12.000 I'll give you that credit.

01:00:13.000 All right, so let's work together and do something that we all believe in, which is have healthy kids in our country, for God's sake.

01:00:21.000 We can all put that together.

01:00:24.000 There's no such thing as Republican children or Democratic children.

01:00:28.000 There's just kids.

01:00:30.000 Again, this is the stuff that makes RFK Jr. popular across the aisle, is the fact that he does talk in these sort of universalist terms.

01:00:36.000 Now, where he did get himself in some hot water is he was talking about vaccines.

01:00:40.000 And his comments on the COVID vaccine and whether it should be on the child vac schedule, of course the COVID vaccine should not be on the child vac schedule.

01:00:46.000 That's ridiculous.

01:00:47.000 As I've said before, I took the COVID vaccine originally because we were told by the Pfizer's and the White House, actually, that it was going to prevent transmission, which it turns out there was no data to support and was not true.

01:00:59.000 But when it came to my kids, none of my kids were vaccinated because the statistics on vaccination for children were sketchy at best and damaging at worst.

01:01:10.000 A lot of counterproductive data suggesting that.

01:01:13.000 In fact, one of the people who we had on routinely during the pandemic, Dr. Marty McCary, is now one of the heads of President Trump's health division.

01:01:21.000 Well, Senator Kennedy went beyond that.

01:01:22.000 He was asked specifically about the measles vaccine, and he started talking about the problems with the measles vaccine.

01:01:27.000 And here you get into hot water because some of the stuff he's saying here is not factually accurate.

01:01:32.000 You also promised Chairman Cassidy that the FDA would not change vaccine standards from, quote, historical norms.

01:01:40.000 But what happened as soon as you were sworn in?

01:01:42.000 You announced new standards for vaccine approvals that you proudly referred to in your own press release as a radical departure from current practice.

01:01:51.000 And experts say that that departure will delay approvals.

01:01:55.000 You also said specific to the measles vaccine that you support the measles vaccine.

01:02:00.000 But you have consistently...

01:02:02.000 And undermining the measles vaccine.

01:02:04.000 You told the public that the vaccine wanes very quickly.

01:02:07.000 You went on the Dr. Phil show and said that the measles vaccine was never fully tested for safety.

01:02:12.000 You said there's fetal debris in the measles vaccine.

01:02:15.000 And this morning...

01:02:16.000 All true.

01:02:17.000 All true.

01:02:17.000 This morning in front of...

01:02:19.000 Do you want me to lie to the public?

01:02:20.000 That's not...

01:02:21.000 None of that is true.

01:02:23.000 Of course it's true, Senator.

01:02:25.000 Senator, you do not know what you're talking about.

01:02:32.000 Okay, so, you know, the idea that the measles vaccine has not been extensively tested, I mean, it's been deployed for literally decades.

01:02:37.000 So actually, we do have really good evidence on the measles vaccine.

01:02:41.000 The notion that there's fetal tissue that's in the measles vaccine.

01:02:44.000 No, in the development of the measles vaccine, fetal stem cells from lines that were developed in the 1960s have been used.

01:02:53.000 But that's not the same as like fetal tissue.

01:02:55.000 You don't have like fetal tissue roaming around in the measles vaccine.

01:02:58.000 Or whatever.

01:02:59.000 And it's that sort of stuff that actually undermines a lot of the good stuff that I think RFK Jr. is attempting to do.

01:03:04.000 Overall, Democrats really did not lay a significant glove on RFK Jr. in the end.

01:03:09.000 Meanwhile, how much is President Trump winning on issues like immigration?

01:03:14.000 He's winning so much that Gavin Newsom is now backwalking an enormous part of his own agenda.

01:03:19.000 So he has now proposed scaling back health care for illegal immigrants, according to the New York Times.

01:03:25.000 Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday called for California to scale back health care coverage for undocumented immigrants to help balance the state budget, retrenching on his desire to deliver universal health care for all.

01:03:34.000 That move came two days after the Trump administration targeted a different state-funded program for immigrants in California and signaled it would continue to scrutinize benefits for undocumented individuals.

01:03:44.000 Again, it's always the New York Times saying undocumented individuals.

01:03:47.000 They're called illegal immigrants. 0.97

01:03:48.000 In a budget presentation on Wednesday...

01:03:50.000 Mr. Newsom proposed freezing the enrollment of undocumented adults in the state's version of Medicaid, known as Medi-Cal, as soon as January.

01:03:56.000 So he's backwalking a lot of this stuff, which, of course, is perfectly predictable for a man who wants to run in the sort of moderate lane for the Democratic Party for president.

01:04:05.000 Fascinating to watch him revise all that.

01:04:07.000 Speaking of his home state of California, the Daily Wire is now reporting on continued discrimination at UCLA Geffen School of Medicine.

01:04:17.000 That's actually where my wife... 1.00

01:04:18.000 went to medical school.

01:04:20.000 Apparently, according to the Daily Wire, on May 8th, 2025, Do No Harm sued the Geffen School of Medicine for racial discrimination in admissions.

01:04:29.000 The Geffen Dean of Admissions has both publicly and privately said she uses race as a factor in making admissions decision.

01:04:36.000 A white Do No Harm member was unfairly rejected by Geffen despite stellar academic achievements and whistleblowers describe how the Geffen Admissions Committee routinely gives Black and Latino applicants a pass for subpar metrics.

01:04:47.000 Saying that whites and Asians need near-perfect scores to even be considered. 1.00

01:04:52.000 They continue, by the way, not to produce MCAT scores in response to public records requests.

01:04:56.000 So MCAT scores would be a great way of telling whether there are people getting in who should not be getting in.

01:05:00.000 If there are a bunch of people who aren't getting in with high 30s MCAT scores, and a bunch of people getting in with 20s MCAT scores, so long as they have the right race, that's obviously racial discrimination.

01:05:09.000 So I would presume this isn't going to stay a civil lawsuit.

01:05:13.000 Obviously, if this sort of thing is happening at UCLA School of Medicine, That's a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

01:05:19.000 The DOJ could step in.

01:05:21.000 So we will stay on top of that case, obviously.

01:05:24.000 And meanwhile, in sort of the biggest nice news of the day, Klaus Schwab, who was the bizarre James Bond villain, mastermind of the World Economic Forum.

01:05:35.000 It turns out that he may have been a scam artist.

01:05:38.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, Schwab was seemingly headed for a graceful exit from the organization he founded more than a half century ago after a 2024 investigation by the Wall Street Journal exposed evidence of a toxic culture at the Forum for Women and Black Employees, which again, it's delicious to watch all of these people who push wokeness and DEI and all this nonsense now be eaten by the machine they created. 0.87

01:06:00.000 By Friday, April 18th, the Trustees Audit Committee recommended opening a probe Instead, that letter,

01:06:29.000 that threatening letter, backfired on Schwab.

01:06:32.000 So again, he had handpicked executives at the forum and then fired employees who crossed him.

01:06:37.000 And his wife was granted wide leeway as the head of a forum link foundation.

01:06:40.000 But it turns out that probably there was intermingling of funds, or at least those are the allegations.

01:06:47.000 There are allegations that he was using private flights, for example, that he was having enormous fees paid to people associated with him and all the rest.

01:07:00.000 It is perfectly on brand that all of this is now backfiring on Klaus Schwab, that one of the great elitists of all time, who believe that basically the world should be remade from the top of Davos, is now falling apart.

01:07:15.000 Behind the scenes, tensions ran high, and in August 2024 email to trustees, Schwab defended his legacies, quote, I could have created the forum as a commercial company.

01:07:24.000 Since I carried the full entrepreneurial and financial risk when creating the forum, I would now probably be celebrated as a self-made Billionaire.

01:07:31.000 However, again, the controversy continued to roil.

01:07:35.000 There are 11 areas of complaints, ranging from allegations of misuse of forum resources to Klaus Schwab's behavior with female employees, including personal remarks and other communications that made the women uncomfortable, and his son Olivier Schwab's handling of the sexual harassment issue.

01:07:48.000 It expounded on other alleged governance failures, including lavish spending on a luxury property called Villa Mundi, a project overseen by Hilda Schwab.

01:07:56.000 The Forum spent $30 million on the mansion next to its headquarters overlooking Lake Geneva and launched into a roughly $20 million renovation, and Hilde steered the project.

01:08:05.000 And she maintained control over how the World Economic Forum could use that property, limited an entire floor just for the Schwab's exclusive use.

01:08:15.000 So, yeah, unsurprising, but delicious nonetheless.

01:08:20.000 All right, meanwhile, a brand new poll shows...

01:08:23.000 That the Democratic frontrunner, I've been saying this, the Democratic frontrunner for 2028 for the Democrats, AOC, according to a new poll taken by Coefficient from May 7th to May 9th, 26% of those surveyed say they think no one is the face of the Democratic Party, but 26% say that it's Alexander Ocasio-Cortez.

01:08:44.000 Bernie Sanders receives 12%.

01:08:45.000 So you combine those two, and you're talking about 38% of the Democratic vote believes.

01:08:51.000 That either Bernie or AOC is the face of the Democratic Party.

01:08:55.000 Bernie's not running.

01:08:56.000 He's going to shift that support over to AOC.

01:08:58.000 So you could theoretically be talking of upward of 30% support for AOC going into the Democratic primaries in 2028.

01:09:05.000 That is a disaster area for all of these other candidates.

01:09:08.000 And it shows how wildly to the left the Democratic Party is swinging.

01:09:11.000 Meanwhile, AOC continues to posture for the cameras.

01:09:14.000 So she had a bit of a run-in in Congress the other day after Representative Randy Weber Accused AOC of grandstanding for the cameras, which is, of course, her M.O. Here she was responding.

01:09:28.000 There are 13.7 million Americans on the other side of that screen right there.

01:09:45.000 Hello?

01:09:47.000 Hello?

01:09:48.000 I'm talking to you because I work for you.

01:09:52.000 And they deserve to see what is happening here.

01:09:58.000 Because there are plenty of districts, including Republican ones, where 25% of your constituents are on Medicaid.

01:10:06.000 40% of your constituents are on Medicaid.

01:10:09.000 And yes, I am talking to them.

01:10:10.000 Will the gentlelady yield?

01:10:11.000 I am talking to them.

01:10:12.000 And I will not yield because it was a terribly disrespectful comment.

01:10:17.000 And I will not yield to disrespectful men.

01:10:20.000 Thank you very much.

01:10:23.000 Oh my gosh.

01:10:24.000 You will not yield to disrespectful men.

01:10:25.000 This is the kind of stuff that earns you street cred inside the Democratic Party.

01:10:30.000 And still she persisted.

01:10:31.000 We saw this routine with Kamala Harris. 0.99

01:10:33.000 We saw this routine with Elizabeth Warren.

01:10:35.000 And now AOC is trying to play this card as well.

01:10:37.000 Stephen A. Smith, for his part, he's saying, here's the problem.

01:10:40.000 AOC, even if she were to get to a general election, is going to have a problem in that general election. 1.00

01:10:47.000 AOC, who is 35 years of age, has emerged as a leading voice for Democrats.

01:10:52.000 But some within the party are concerned she'll turn off centrist voters who are needed in the swing states.

01:10:58.000 That Trump swept in November.

01:11:01.000 For the record, they are absolutely right.

01:11:04.000 She will turn off centrist.

01:11:06.000 If you believe that higher taxes is the way to go, that a focus shouldn't be on securing the borders, if you believe those kind of things and that's where you stand ideologically, AOC is your candidate.

01:11:26.000 And not to be literal, not to be taken literally, but she gives the impression that when you talk about universal health care and you talk about other things, if it equated to taxing Americans 70% of their income, she wouldn't be against it.

01:11:40.000 That ain't gonna win you elections. 0.85

01:11:45.000 So, again, I think he's right, but will Democrats be able to escape that?

01:11:52.000 It's going to be difficult to see how Democrats escape the AOC juggernaut that is coming. 0.97

01:11:56.000 Meanwhile, amidst all of this economic uncertainty, one consistent winner has been gold.

01:12:01.000 I've talked about this before.

01:12:02.000 Obviously, Birch Gold is one of our big sponsors here at the Ben Shapiro Show.

01:12:06.000 I, full disclosure, personally invest with Birch Gold.

01:12:09.000 Philip Patrick is a precious metal specialist and spokesman for Birch Gold Group.

01:12:13.000 He joins us right now to discuss the status of the American dollar and where we are.

01:12:17.000 Philip, thanks for taking the time.

01:12:19.000 Thanks for having me, Ben.

01:12:21.000 So let's talk about the status of the dollar right now.

01:12:24.000 There's been a significant amount of de-dollarization over the course of the last couple of months, but it's been going on for years at a time.

01:12:30.000 First of all, why don't we talk about what that means?

01:12:32.000 Why is the global reserve status for American currency important?

01:12:36.000 Yeah, look, it's very important.

01:12:38.000 It gives the US what's called exorbitant privilege, right?

01:12:42.000 It's allowed cheap borrowing, thanks to huge global demand for our dollars, massive control over global financial flows.

01:12:49.000 In essence, the US has the veto power over any nation's ability to engage in international trade.

01:12:56.000 It's allowed the federal government, of course, to run massive deficits without facing immediate collapse.

01:13:02.000 So ultimately, I think it's made...

01:13:05.000 American capital markets dominate the globe and ultimately made us the wealthiest nation in history.

01:13:11.000 So I think it's hard to overstate how important global reserve currency status is.

01:13:15.000 It underpins our economic, diplomatic, and I think military power worldwide.

01:13:22.000 Okay, so let's talk about the status of the dollar, given the fact that there's a lot of economic uncertainty.

01:13:27.000 We've been hearing rumors about an upcoming meeting of the so-called BRICS nations, that'd be Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.

01:13:35.000 We're meeting in Rio de Janeiro this summer.

01:13:37.000 What is the goal?

01:13:39.000 Look, I think officially it's another working session between bureaucrats talking about economic cooperation.

01:13:46.000 Unofficially, though, the BRICS leadership are expected to announce major advancements, essentially in a shadow financial system, a 21st century alternative to the existing dollar-denominated system.

01:13:58.000 Inside sources are hinting now at a coordinated push to link the various systems that they've created over the last decade, things like Enbridge and Bricks Pay and commodity settled trade, with the goal of making dollar free international transactions.

01:14:14.000 possible at scale.

01:14:16.000 Ultimately, I think it's a culmination of their ongoing project to reduce the dollar's monopoly as global reserve currency.

01:14:24.000 So given the fact that There are all these nations aligning against the American dollar.

01:14:31.000 That obviously means that you would expect that gold will be more in demand.

01:14:35.000 I mean, there's an attempt by all these nations to find some sort of new global reserve.

01:14:41.000 The Russian currency is not strong enough to withstand that.

01:14:44.000 Neither is the Chinese currency.

01:14:45.000 All these are subject to manipulation.

01:14:47.000 And so you're seeing people rush for various safe havens.

01:14:49.000 Gold, obviously, historically has been one of the big safe havens, maybe the key safe haven.

01:14:54.000 It's exactly correct, and we're seeing it.

01:14:56.000 So US dollar holdings by central banks are at 30-year lows.

01:15:01.000 Gold buying by central banks have hit records year on year on year for the last three years.

01:15:08.000 And actually, last year, officially, gold overtook the euro as the number two global reserve asset.

01:15:14.000 And it's for the exact reason that you mentioned, right?

01:15:16.000 Russia, China, countries like this, they want to de-dollarize.

01:15:20.000 They want to take that non-kinetic weapon away from us, but they don't have a viable alternative.

01:15:26.000 So they're using gold as a means to de-dollarize.

01:15:29.000 The longer that happens, the more that gathers steam, ultimately, the weaker the dollar becomes.

01:15:34.000 So it's becoming problematic for sure.

01:15:36.000 Thank you.

01:15:38.000 All right.

01:15:39.000 Well, that is Philip Patrick, precious metals specialist and spokesman for Birch Gold Groups.

01:15:43.000 You say they're a sponsor on the show.

01:15:44.000 If you wish to check them out and get involved, then you should actually check out Birch Gold Group.

01:15:49.000 You can text my name, Ben, to 989898 to get started today.

01:15:53.000 Philip, thanks so much for the time.

01:15:55.000 Thank you.

01:15:56.000 All right.

01:15:57.000 Coming up.

01:15:57.000 We're going to be reviewing the brand new Superman trailer.

01:16:00.000 Plus, Dove is in trouble because they're now Dylan Mulvaney-ing themselves.

01:16:05.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

01:16:06.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - May 15, 2025

What’s In The Trump BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL?

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