The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 245 ｜ Should the US Own Gaza？ Ben Shapiro Explains Trump’s REAL Agenda ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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00:00:30.000 And now, a Blaze Media podcast.

00:00:34.180 Trump is turning Gaza into Vegas and we're in a constitutional crisis.

00:00:40.300 Panic! Or don't.

00:00:43.060 The media and the expert class told us no one can think outside the box in the Middle East.

00:00:48.600 They warned us that moving the embassy to Jerusalem would be a disaster.

00:00:53.000 It'll start wars. 0.97

00:00:54.200 They assured us that all of the surrounding Arab nations were very passionate about a Palestinian state.

00:01:02.400 Yeah, not so much.

00:01:03.980 Not so much.

00:01:04.820 All the experts have been wrong.

00:01:07.060 America is being shaken up like a snow globe right now.

00:01:10.380 And the deep state can't figure out what end is up.

00:01:15.160 My next guest is always good at breaking things down.

00:01:19.060 He'll make sure I've asked him.

00:01:21.420 Go really, really slow so bureaucrats can understand him.

00:01:26.440 Or maybe not.

00:01:27.560 Welcome, co-founder of the Daily Wire, number one New York Times bestselling author, wildly popular podcast host, and my good friend, Ben Shapiro.

00:01:38.940 But before we get to Ben, let me talk to you a little bit about pre-born.

00:01:43.360 Imagine for a second that you made a horrible decision that's going to cost your innocent child's life.

00:01:48.500 Now imagine that there's a way back machine.

00:01:51.920 You can undo that decision.

00:01:53.500 How grateful and relieved would you be?

00:01:56.320 We live in such miraculous times.

00:01:58.960 The abortion pill.

00:02:01.740 It's now responsible for over 60% of abortions.

00:02:05.700 It's available pretty much 24-7.

00:02:07.620 This is why pre-born is so important, because in addition to what they're doing with free ultrasounds, they're also administering this protocol for women who've attempted abortion but want to reverse it.

00:02:21.660 It's unbelievable.

00:02:23.660 Rescued over now 300,000 babies from abortion, and every day on average they rescue another 200.

00:02:31.620 When a woman is considering an abortion, she hears that baby's heartbeat.

00:02:35.240 She sees that baby on an ultrasound.

00:02:36.840 The baby's life, the chance of it being born doubles.

00:02:42.600 If you have the means, would you consider a leadership gift to save babies in a big way?

00:02:47.120 Your tax-deductible donation of $5,000 would sponsor pre-born's entire network all across the nation for 24 hours.

00:02:54.420 You would be directly responsible for saving 200 babies.

00:02:58.380 Donate.

00:02:59.140 Just dial pound 250.

00:03:00.400 Say the keyword baby.

00:03:02.440 250.

00:03:03.500 Pound 250.

00:03:04.680 Keyword baby.

00:03:05.640 Or go to pre-born.com slash Glenn.

00:03:07.960 Ben, great to see you.

00:03:24.640 How are you doing?

00:03:25.500 You too.

00:03:26.100 How's family?

00:03:26.440 Thank God, doing well.

00:03:27.340 Yeah, good.

00:03:27.880 Yeah, everybody's good.

00:03:29.040 Everybody's good.

00:03:29.640 And three weeks in, this is a hell of an administration.

00:03:31.400 Are you, I mean, he told me several times over the summer, he's like, I got it.

00:03:38.000 And I'm like, but you, I mean, we have four years and he's like, I got it.

00:03:42.720 I didn't expect this.

00:03:45.140 This has been phenomenal.

00:03:47.080 I mean, it is extraordinary.

00:03:50.640 I've never seen an administration move this fast.

00:03:53.200 And granted, I'm not as old as you, Glenn, but, but still, I've been alive for 41 years.

00:03:57.420 Okay, Frodo.

00:03:58.520 I've seen a fair number of, I've seen a fair number of presidents and I've never seen anything like this.

00:04:03.140 I mean, he is moving incredibly fast.

00:04:05.040 His team is really methodical.

00:04:07.060 I also have never seen a team defend itself this way.

00:04:10.240 I'm old enough to remember the Bush administration and I just remember being very frustrated with

00:04:14.440 Team Bush being totally ineffectual at defending its own agenda.

00:04:18.260 They would put out an agenda item and then they would sort of let it sit there in the legacy

00:04:21.440 media and let the legacy media spin everything from social security, privatization to the war

00:04:26.000 in Iraq and in the way that the media so chose.

00:04:28.100 And they would do nothing.

00:04:28.800 They would just kind of assume best faith.

00:04:30.980 And Trump's entire team is mobilized to defend his agenda.

00:04:34.420 Literally everyone, every single agency.

00:04:36.660 And it's not just that they're defending the, the agenda in that particular agency, it's

00:04:43.760 all connected.

00:04:44.700 And so there, I've never seen the agencies work together like this and be so coordinated.

00:04:51.400 I mean, I am, I'm blown away at how this, this is, this shows the businessman that he really

00:05:00.840 is, the negotiator that he really is, the businessman, the sharp mind that he has.

00:05:07.200 I've never seen anything like this.

00:05:09.600 I haven't either.

00:05:10.440 And I think that he's kind of a different person.

00:05:12.560 You know, it was kind of funny during his first term.

00:05:13.980 Yeah.

00:05:14.320 There's that kind of running joke.

00:05:15.500 Well, this was the day that Donald Trump became president.

00:05:17.580 Right, right, right.

00:05:18.440 Shed the real estate magnate side.

00:05:20.160 And now he's going to be.

00:05:20.820 But the truth is that him winning the second time, I think, has removed a lot of these sort

00:05:25.580 of personal questions that he had maybe about his role in the world or about himself.

00:05:29.380 And it feels like he's incredibly comfortable in his own skin.

00:05:32.740 He's much happier.

00:05:33.860 Right.

00:05:33.980 This sort of combative, angry Trump is not there.

00:05:35.880 It's just gone.

00:05:36.560 Like he knows precisely who he is, what his job is.

00:05:39.740 He knows what the agenda is and he is enacting it.

00:05:42.480 So all the democratic attempts that you've seen, for example, that might have been more

00:05:45.460 successful in the first term to try and put a wedge, for example, between him and Musk.

00:05:49.780 Right.

00:05:49.900 You'll have Elon in the Oval Office and he'll just delegate to Elon.

00:05:52.200 OK, talk about what Doge is doing.

00:05:53.660 And Elon will just go off.

00:05:54.760 Right.

00:05:54.920 And the entire media will say, oh, it's President Musk and Time magazine will put Musk on the cover.

00:05:58.680 That kind of stuff might have bugged Trump in the first term.

00:06:00.860 And this time Trump's like, well, yeah, I mean, he works for me.

00:06:02.720 Whatever.

00:06:03.400 What are you going to do about it?

00:06:04.820 And that's just that's so different and almost strange to watch.

00:06:09.180 And what they've done over the course of the first three weeks is the most transformative

00:06:12.460 move by a president in my life.

00:06:15.100 If he continues at anything remotely like this pace, he's going to go down in history as

00:06:19.500 probably one of the three most transformative presidents of the last century.

00:06:23.060 I agree.

00:06:23.560 And it's maybe the most transformative, depending on which way it goes.

00:06:26.380 Yeah, I mean, I think you could say he'll be next to Abraham Lincoln.

00:06:31.860 I mean, if he continues at this pace and everything gets done, I'm concerned about the economy

00:06:38.780 because and maybe you can help me on this.

00:06:40.920 I'm concerned about the economy because we are we're cutting spending.

00:06:44.440 But a lot of our GDP is coming from the government right now.

00:06:49.240 We're pumping money.

00:06:51.040 And as we cut that and we cut jobs in the government, you're going to see the numbers start to change.

00:06:58.780 And have you seen have you seen the doge of regulations yet?

00:07:04.840 Because I haven't seen the regulations on business.

00:07:08.160 I haven't seen the strong unleashing of small business people.

00:07:14.260 I haven't seen the tax cuts yet.

00:07:16.700 Are you concerned that that that should hurry?

00:07:20.100 Well, I mean, I think that everybody is concerned that it should hurry.

00:07:22.560 I think that, look, he's barely getting his nominees through at this point.

00:07:25.560 We're three weeks in.

00:07:26.280 His nominees are getting confirmed like today.

00:07:28.400 And so a lot of those regulations aren't going to get cut until those nominees are actually in place

00:07:32.660 at their various agencies cutting those various regulations.

00:07:35.860 I think that's going to happen.

00:07:37.500 Now, obviously, I think actually it'll be a militating factor against inflation

00:07:40.980 that will get these cuts from government spending.

00:07:42.740 I mean, you spend too much money into the economy via the government.

00:07:45.180 You end up artificially raising the prices of goods and services.

00:07:48.240 And so if you actually cut the amount of money that's kind of being flooded into the economy

00:07:52.180 and has been for the past, you know, 100 years, then what you will end up with is presumably

00:07:57.060 prices starting to stabilize, maybe going down a little bit.

00:08:00.220 I think that's what he is aiming for.

00:08:02.000 As far as the tax cuts being enshrined in the law.

00:08:04.900 Yeah, I mean, that's that's a major worry.

00:08:06.340 And I think that it'll be interesting to see whether the sort of one big, beautiful bill strategy

00:08:10.540 or the two separate bills strategy ends up being pursued here.

00:08:13.980 The way I've been talking about it on my show is that you can you can do it as two bills.

00:08:19.760 There's no guarantee you get both of them.

00:08:21.660 Yeah, right.

00:08:22.520 It's almost impossible to get two bills through under reconciliation.

00:08:26.300 And what that means that even if you do, let's say best case scenario, you get both of them

00:08:30.400 through, they will both be individually purer than the one big, beautiful bill.

00:08:33.920 It's just there's a lower chance of getting through.

00:08:36.180 If you did one big, beautiful bill, there's it's going to be more crap in the crap sandwich.

00:08:39.660 But you'll also get everything that you that you want on the upside.

00:08:42.200 So it's more downside, but also more upside.

00:08:44.960 And, you know, again, I'm sort of risk averse here, which is get everything you can early

00:08:49.100 on.

00:08:49.380 I think that's the way also Trump is approaching this administration.

00:08:51.820 He knows midterm is coming.

00:08:53.160 Midterms come up on you real fast.

00:08:54.940 By this time next year, everybody's running for reelection and basically everything stops

00:08:58.360 dead.

00:08:58.600 So he he doesn't have two years to get his agenda done.

00:09:00.880 He basically has a year to get the vast majority of his agenda.

00:09:03.520 I said to him, you know, you only have four years and really two years before the midterms.

00:09:09.860 And he said, Glenn, I have 100 days.

00:09:12.080 He said, I have to have the majority of stuff done in the first 100 days because then it

00:09:17.220 kicks in.

00:09:18.540 It needs time to kick in before those midterms because it's not going to turn around on a

00:09:24.060 dime.

00:09:24.320 Um, you know, it's, uh, it is refreshing to see the no nonsense.

00:09:31.960 And, and I, I have to tell you when he had Benjamin Netanyahu, uh, and they did that joint

00:09:36.700 press conference, I had a whole new level of respect for him, uh, a his negotiating power

00:09:45.360 with the tariffs and what he, he took, uh, oh my gosh, you're talking about a genocide

00:09:51.160 in, uh, with the Palestinians and you're just going to liquidate all of them and try to 1.00

00:09:56.020 send them all over, you know, the middle East. 0.99

00:09:59.020 No one was talking about that the next day.

00:10:02.120 He said, we want them to go someplace else.

00:10:05.020 It's only right and compassionate, but they got to go someplace else.

00:10:09.000 And then he said, and you know, maybe we'll build a Trump golf course, you know, maybe

00:10:13.660 we'll do it.

00:10:14.460 It's crazy.

00:10:15.420 That's what everybody in the middle East was talking about saying, no, no, no, no, no.

00:10:19.300 You can't do that.

00:10:20.600 That's brilliant.

00:10:22.140 I think.

00:10:23.500 I mean, I, I totally agree.

00:10:25.060 He totally changed the way everybody was talking about this because this is the thing that Trump

00:10:28.540 really understands about the middle East better than any president in my lifetime, bar none

00:10:31.620 and better than any president in American history.

00:10:33.600 So long as the middle East has sort of been an agenda item and that is, he just doesn't

00:10:37.140 buy into the sort of state department, foreign policy nostrums.

00:10:39.920 And this was clear from his first term, right?

00:10:41.740 The, the kind of centrality of the Palestinian question must be solved before anything else gets 0.75

00:10:45.680 solved.

00:10:45.900 He totally blew that out of the water in his first term when he brokered the Abraham 1.00

00:10:48.980 accords by basically taking that issue and putting it to the side.

00:10:51.880 The entire foreign policy establishment said there'll be the Arab street will rise up.

00:10:55.580 There'll be world war.

00:10:56.480 If you move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and Israel, and you just did it and nothing

00:11:00.540 happened.

00:11:01.380 And now what he's basically saying is, listen, I understand that y'all are pretending that

00:11:05.800 the Palestinian issue is central to your national calculus.

00:11:08.720 I know that it's not central to your national calculus.

00:11:11.200 And in fact, you wish it to be a thorn in the side of anything that happens in the

00:11:15.860 Middle East from here until the end of time. 0.92

00:11:18.200 And you have proposed no solutions at all for 80 years on this particular question.

00:11:23.180 And here I am saying, let's take some people who are obviously living in a hellhole.

00:11:27.040 I mean, there's nothing left in Gaza.

00:11:28.300 Everything is rubble.

00:11:29.100 And then let's move those people to a place where they're not living in rubble.

00:11:32.260 And by the way, then we can rebuild this place and actually turn it into a functioning

00:11:36.280 polity where people can, you know, vacation.

00:11:38.960 And everybody who's freaking out about this, I have a question.

00:11:40.880 What's your alternative?

00:11:41.500 Because it seems to me your alternative is pouring billions more dollars internationally

00:11:45.560 into a rat's nest of terror because Hamas is still running the place. 0.97

00:11:49.880 And what?

00:11:50.980 We do this whole shtick again in five or 10 years?

00:11:53.520 No, that's what he said.

00:11:54.160 That is not an acceptable.

00:11:55.380 Yeah, I mean, that's not an acceptable answer.

00:11:57.140 And so for him saying the thing that has been taboo for so long, which is this is unworkable.

00:12:02.820 This is unworkable.

00:12:03.520 It's not going to happen.

00:12:04.700 So why don't we live in the world of reality?

00:12:06.340 People see this as something different than what he's doing with, for example, Ukraine.

00:12:09.100 I see it as exactly the same.

00:12:10.100 Like, Trump is so pragmatic.

00:12:12.580 I mean, this is an actual pragmatic answer to a question.

00:12:15.400 The question is, you have a group of people who do not wish to live side by side in peace

00:12:19.180 with another group of people.

00:12:20.880 They elected a body of people who then launched a terror attack.

00:12:24.240 Many of the civilians were involved in the terror attack.

00:12:26.260 They lost a war.

00:12:27.100 There's nothing left there.

00:12:28.220 So how do you how do you solve for that?

00:12:30.160 What do you do so that the future looks better than the past?

00:12:32.600 He says, OK, well, some of those people are going to have to move and then we're going to

00:12:35.160 build it up and we'll invest and we'll make it nice.

00:12:37.060 Right.

00:12:37.380 That's a pretty good solution.

00:12:38.320 And when it comes to Ukraine, his solution there is, listen, we all known for several

00:12:42.120 years that Ukraine is not wanting back Donbass.

00:12:45.120 It's not wanting back Crimea. 0.95

00:12:46.520 And so what are we doing here?

00:12:48.220 Let's let's solidify the lines.

00:12:50.120 We all know how this is going to end.

00:12:51.680 And that's just a question of getting from point A to point B.

00:12:54.020 And by the way, all these all the sort of isolationist talk on the one end and the and

00:12:57.480 the sort of accusations of Trump being a Russian cat's paw on the other end.

00:13:00.700 He totally blew those up yesterday.

00:13:02.320 He said, listen, we are going to continue funding Ukraine sufficient.

00:13:05.300 So Vladimir Putin does not win this war.

00:13:07.360 That's what's pushing Vladimir Putin to the table.

00:13:09.060 But he does have to come to the table.

00:13:10.520 And so does Zelensky.

00:13:11.300 This is all perfectly common sense.

00:13:13.520 It's just that in foreign policy, common sense very rarely seems to take the four.

00:13:18.920 It's always establishment wisdom that tends to be tried no matter how often it's failed.

00:13:22.800 Well, I think him cleaning out USAID, which is a CIA State Department, you know, operation

00:13:30.720 and saying to the State Department, you work for me and we're not doing any of this crap

00:13:38.260 anymore.

00:13:38.960 That's the first time in maybe 100 years since Woodrow Wilson that the State Department

00:13:44.240 has been really put in its place.

00:13:46.140 No, we're not going down that road anymore.

00:13:49.980 It never, ever works.

00:13:52.800 I mean, I don't know if people really understand how transformative it's not just the size of

00:13:59.040 government.

00:13:59.880 It's the role of each of these agencies and the arm of the administration.

00:14:08.020 We're not doing that.

00:14:09.820 We've done it for 100 years.

00:14:11.340 We're not doing that anymore.

00:14:13.940 And what he's doing here, along with Elon, because both of them know how businesses work,

00:14:17.780 is what you would do if you ran a business and you spotted a part of your business that

00:14:21.080 was totally not working, which is you can't go in and pare around the edges.

00:14:24.080 You just have to break the thing and then you have to rebuild it.

00:14:26.840 And so if you look at USAID, for example, USAID was initiated in 61 by JFK in an attempt

00:14:31.180 to fight the Cold War.

00:14:32.060 And many of the things that it was doing were setting up, for example, pro-democracy organizations

00:14:36.080 in countries that were sort of wavering between the support of the Soviet Union and the support

00:14:40.440 of the United States.

00:14:41.300 OK, fair enough.

00:14:42.300 That's fine with me.

00:14:43.140 We want to fund pro-democracy organizations in Cuba, for example, or in Venezuela to,

00:14:47.860 you know, militate against the regime.

00:14:49.680 But that's after the Cold War that stopped and it suddenly became, for USAID, a giant

00:14:54.820 way to trans the kids in Guatemala.

00:14:57.280 It became just a way to spread sort of blue America values abroad without any reference

00:15:01.400 to actual American interests.

00:15:02.960 And so what Trump has said, and this is what Elon is saying, too, is, OK, we'll just we'll

00:15:06.000 zero it out.

00:15:06.880 Let's zero it out.

00:15:07.600 And then we'll figure out what was good because we can redo the good stuff.

00:15:11.060 But you have to zero it out first.

00:15:12.560 And this is a completely different approach than any Republican of my lifetime has taken.

00:15:16.500 Republicans tend to say, OK, we need to shift the sort of policy direction of a particular

00:15:20.080 agency.

00:15:20.640 We need to we need to pare around the edges.

00:15:22.700 We'll find the bad stuff and like cut like a little bit off the end.

00:15:25.300 That's like the bad part.

00:15:26.240 And we'll keep all the rest.

00:15:27.460 And what Trump is saying, listen, these institutions and this is not just USAID, it's a huge number

00:15:32.120 of institutions.

00:15:33.020 These institutions have been internally gutted by the left.

00:15:36.020 And the face of the institution has been worn around like a Hannibal Lecter mask.

00:15:40.420 And now the only way to cure this thing is to just break it.

00:15:43.700 You break the whole thing down.

00:15:45.100 And then if we want to rebuild parts of it that are good, we can rebuild parts of it

00:15:48.660 that are good, which is basically what Elon did, for example, with X.

00:15:50.880 He came and he fired 80 percent of the staff.

00:15:52.420 He broke all the systems.

00:15:53.620 And then he rebuilt kind of on an ad hoc basis how the systems had to work.

00:15:57.340 Trump is doing that with a lot of these agencies.

00:15:58.940 And so that's freaking people out.

00:16:00.940 But it's also one of the reasons why, as you say, he has to move fast because he has to

00:16:03.860 break it and then rebuild the parts that we want to keep.

00:16:06.240 He has to do that quickly before, you know, all of these sort of resistance sets in.

00:16:11.400 The tale that he's telling right now on a PR level is really smart.

00:16:14.100 What he's doing is he's he's saying, OK, listen, we have a mountain in Pennsylvania under which

00:16:19.880 we're filing manila envelopes and that needs to be stopped.

00:16:22.740 That's that's ridiculous.

00:16:23.320 And it's a waste of money.

00:16:24.240 Is that most of the waste and fraud and uselessness in the government?

00:16:27.540 No, it's like a tiny percentage.

00:16:28.500 But what he's doing is he's saying this is representative of the kind of thing that needs

00:16:31.820 to go away. 0.66

00:16:32.300 And the only way we can get rid of this thing is to chemotherapy.

00:16:35.380 Right.

00:16:35.520 With the only way to get rid of this cancer before it spreads and already has spread is

00:16:39.020 just chemotherapy, the thing.

00:16:40.520 And that's going to kill some good things, but it's going to kill the bad things, too.

00:16:43.460 And we can always redo the good things.

00:16:44.900 Right.

00:16:45.000 All the money is still that we can redo the good things.

00:16:47.020 But first, you have to kill the bad things.

00:16:49.580 You know, he's going to move into two new areas, which let's just start with the Department

00:16:56.480 of Education, he came out this week and said, you know, I just want to shut the whole thing

00:17:00.600 down when when he appointed Linda McMahon.

00:17:03.000 I didn't see her as a radical.

00:17:06.260 I saw her more as a manager.

00:17:08.320 I was talking to Betsy DeVos, our former secretary of education, and she said, no, Glenn, she'll

00:17:14.760 do exactly.

00:17:16.200 She is a manager and she'll manage the end. 0.99

00:17:19.600 If that's what Trump tells her to do, she will just manage the end.

00:17:23.600 And it looks like that's what's going to happen.

00:17:26.800 What are we going to find in the Department of Education and the teachers unions?

00:17:32.800 How how is this going to go, Ben?

00:17:35.940 Oh, man.

00:17:36.380 Well, again, I think that so much of this is going to be attached to a public relations

00:17:40.000 strategy that points out exactly the kind like the worst examples of the stuff the DOE

00:17:44.720 has has been doing.

00:17:45.720 I know my friend Chris Ruffo, we're going to have on tomorrow to talk about some of his

00:17:48.960 breaking news.

00:17:49.400 He's been talking about bringing out insane videos from the DOE and from DOE funded agencies

00:17:54.780 and what they've been doing.

00:17:56.360 And again, that is a very successful approach.

00:17:58.460 Right.

00:17:58.600 It's it's personalizing it.

00:18:00.100 It's making people understand the story.

00:18:02.000 It's one thing to say the DOE wastes hundreds of millions, hundreds of billions of dollars

00:18:05.140 on educational grants that just go down the toilet and the kids aren't getting any smarter.

00:18:09.200 But it's another thing to say, here is DOE money that is going to drag queen story out 1.00

00:18:13.440 at your kid's local school.

00:18:15.320 And this needs to be zeroed out and everything like it needs to be zeroed out.

00:18:18.360 Right.

00:18:18.480 Like you actually have to pick the examples.

00:18:20.160 And I think that's what they're going to do.

00:18:21.740 Linda McMahon was involved with the American First Policy Institute.

00:18:24.020 So it's kind of fascinating to see how Trump's actually staffed the administration.

00:18:26.880 He's drawing very, very heavily from AFPI.

00:18:29.020 Yeah.

00:18:29.600 AFPI was essentially created as a think tank, as an alternative to some of the other big

00:18:34.160 think tanks in Washington, specifically dedicated to trying to flesh out sort of the philosophy

00:18:38.240 of Trump and making, you know, putting flesh on the bones of sort of the Trumpian impulse.

00:18:43.520 And he's drawing very, very heavily from that group.

00:18:45.420 So, yeah, I'm sure Linda McMahon has been thinking about this for a very long time.

00:18:48.480 Yeah.

00:18:48.700 And I think the ad hoc-ery of the first administration is totally gone.

00:18:52.500 This thing is working like a smoothly oiled machine, which is the last thing anyone expected.

00:18:55.960 And it's why the Democrats are freaking out right now, because they were expecting

00:19:00.020 Trump to come in and randomly tweet things.

00:19:02.320 And then there'd be a mistake and they'd have to walk it back.

00:19:04.940 And then it would just be it would be chaos because the first Trump term, it was chaos.

00:19:08.360 And it was chaos because Trump didn't have a staff.

00:19:10.700 Right.

00:19:10.980 He didn't expect to win.

00:19:11.920 He won.

00:19:12.500 And then he was staffed up by a bunch of people he didn't like.

00:19:14.300 Right.

00:19:14.680 It's a completely different thing.

00:19:16.080 He told me himself over the summer, he said, Glenn, I wasn't prepared.

00:19:20.120 I thought I was.

00:19:20.920 I wasn't prepared to be president.

00:19:22.980 I didn't know how it worked.

00:19:24.960 I didn't know how many people were going to be put into my orbit that were stabbing me

00:19:30.700 in the back.

00:19:32.360 He's prepared.

00:19:33.220 I think the loss of 2020 turned out to be a huge blessing.

00:19:38.260 I totally agree.

00:19:38.920 I totally agree.

00:19:39.680 You know, it's one of those things where and this happens so much in life where you're

00:19:43.120 like, why would God allow a thing to happen?

00:19:45.440 Yeah.

00:19:45.640 And then only in retrospect can you actually look back and say, oh, thank God.

00:19:49.060 It turns out.

00:19:50.120 Yeah.

00:19:50.240 Right.

00:19:50.460 It turns out that you knew what you were doing all along.

00:19:52.820 Shocker.

00:19:53.380 Yeah.

00:19:53.600 Yeah.

00:19:53.840 I mean, in the moment, it felt terrible.

00:19:55.520 But now he had four years to sit and think, what do I do with my first hundred days?

00:20:00.280 And he is not wasting an hour.

00:20:01.940 I mean, there's stuff happening on it.

00:20:03.300 I mean, you're covering it.

00:20:04.200 I know.

00:20:04.760 Basically, you go off the air and within an hour, your show is dated.

00:20:07.960 I know.

00:20:08.180 Within an hour.

00:20:08.960 I know.

00:20:09.280 He's doing something else.

00:20:10.460 I know.

00:20:10.780 And how do you even keep up with it?

00:20:12.540 And the Democrats certainly can't.

00:20:13.760 And that's the other thing Trump really understands.

00:20:15.420 He understands that the news cycle can't keep up with him.

00:20:18.080 And so on a day to day level, he will drop a new giant measure literally every day.

00:20:23.060 I mean, last week he ended transgenderism in college athletics.

00:20:26.300 And then like the next day, he announced that the United States was going to be effectively

00:20:30.280 taking over land ownership in Gaza.

00:20:32.680 And then the day after that, he announced that he was going to be zeroing out the Department

00:20:35.760 of Education every single day.

00:20:37.340 And so by the time there starts to be any sort of point of opposition that perhaps the

00:20:41.220 the enemy of his agenda can kind of coalesce around, he's already moved on to the next

00:20:45.320 thing.

00:20:46.060 And so they can't keep up with him.

00:20:47.380 He's moving too fast.

00:20:48.060 Well, I tell you, when I was at Fox, this is exactly what Obama was doing, but not at

00:20:52.280 this speed.

00:20:53.020 I kept saying over and over again, they're overwhelming the system.

00:20:56.200 You can't watch everything.

00:20:58.060 You can't stand guard at every gate.

00:21:00.320 There's just it's too fast.

00:21:02.840 That was in 2008.

00:21:04.880 This is hyper speed in comparison and massive, huge, massive, huge.

00:21:12.220 Yeah.

00:21:12.840 And I think this is the thing that the Democrats are so upset about in kind of their gut.

00:21:17.380 What they're really upset about is that the thing that he is now dismantling is the thing

00:21:21.280 that they built for themselves.

00:21:23.220 Yes.

00:21:23.580 There is a permanent blue pipeline that was created over the course of the last 120 years

00:21:27.340 in the bureaucratic state.

00:21:28.420 Yeah.

00:21:28.580 It was just a permanent taxpayer funded mechanism for funding their friends.

00:21:31.960 And when they were out of power, that mechanism kept working.

00:21:34.220 They just kept funding their friends.

00:21:35.280 They just kept sending money out to the American Federation of Teachers.

00:21:37.700 They kept sending money out via USAID to blue organizations that they knew were going to

00:21:41.800 help them get elected and change the culture.

00:21:44.460 And this is all done in the executive branch.

00:21:46.400 The legislature never had any real oversight over it.

00:21:48.760 And Trump comes in.

00:21:49.400 He says, well, hey, I'm the head of the executive branch, actually.

00:21:52.740 All these people work for me.

00:21:54.300 And that was the thing that no other Republican had done was basically say, well, if they're

00:21:57.860 going to treat the executive when they're in power like a unitary executive, but then

00:22:01.780 shout balance of power the minute a Republican gets elected, that doesn't work.

00:22:04.660 I think one of the differences between the Trump movement and sort of the MAGA movement

00:22:07.640 and everything else, and I think this is a function of that statement that people have

00:22:11.260 said, you know, what time it is.

00:22:13.380 Obama accelerated time.

00:22:15.800 The Obama era, I think, in many ways broke the country.

00:22:18.160 And I think what we're seeing now is a restoration.

00:22:20.220 That restoration can't take place unless the rules are equivalent for everybody.

00:22:23.620 I think Republicans kept saying, OK, we're going to play by the rules.

00:22:27.080 We're going to, you know, Marcus of Queensberry rules all the time.

00:22:30.620 And if they're bad, well, we'll be good.

00:22:32.580 You know, when they go low, we'll go high.

00:22:34.740 And Trump is saying, listen, they set the rules.

00:22:37.300 These are the rules they set.

00:22:38.760 And now it turns out mutually assured destruction.

00:22:41.080 If you don't like those rules being set that way, well, let's talk about switching the

00:22:43.900 rules for everybody.

00:22:45.160 But Democrats cannot in principled fashion claim that Barack Obama gets to use a pen

00:22:49.320 and a phone to rewrite the way American government has done.

00:22:51.240 And the minute Trump does the reverse, they start screaming constitutional crisis.

00:22:54.580 That's not the way that this works.

00:22:55.580 And we're not going to take that seriously.

00:22:56.820 And it's not a constitutional crisis.

00:22:58.280 But the administrator, the CEO, if you will, of the administration runs the administration,

00:23:06.900 the bureaucracy that is his branch of government.

00:23:10.680 If they don't work for him, who the hell do they work for?

00:23:13.960 Well, here's the other thing is that they keep saying constitutional crisis because J.D.

00:23:19.780 Vance tweeted about the judiciary.

00:23:21.160 First of all, the executive has struggled with the judiciary for literally the entire

00:23:24.660 history of the country.

00:23:26.220 I mean, going all the way back.

00:23:27.440 I mean, Marbury versus Madison, there's a solid case to be made, is legally erroneous.

00:23:30.440 But even assuming that Marbury versus Madison is legally correct, the extent of Marbury

00:23:34.620 versus Madison has been put into question.

00:23:37.200 And even if you accept the most maximalist version of Marbury versus Madison, the court says what

00:23:40.780 the law is, nothing in Marbury versus Madison says that a federal district court judge in

00:23:45.640 Washington gets to put a nationwide temporary injunction on a presidential measure for the

00:23:51.820 whole country because there's one judge in California or Washington or New York.

00:23:55.760 That is not the way this was supposed to work.

00:23:57.760 I mean, that, by the way, only became an issue in the 1960s.

00:24:00.320 Before that, nobody had ever assumed that a district court judge had the ability to issue

00:24:04.020 a temporary nationwide injunction on a gigantic piece of executive action.

00:24:08.440 Before that, it was basically there might be an injunction as applied to this plaintiff

00:24:12.100 locally, right?

00:24:12.780 So if you sue against a law in California, maybe they put a hold on it in California,

00:24:16.640 but they don't put a hold on it in Nebraska.

00:24:19.020 And so if you're creating a constitutional crisis, that's largely because the judiciary is

00:24:23.460 way out over its skis on this sort of stuff.

00:24:26.440 And if and by the way, it will be found to be over its skis if it reaches the Supreme Court.

00:24:30.860 So Democrats are picking the form of their destroyer.

00:24:32.960 If they really wish to launch 100 different lawsuits claiming that Trump is wildly overshooters,

00:24:38.420 including executive power, maybe they went on two of them and maybe that power gets

00:24:41.980 upheld on the other 98 by the Supreme Court.

00:24:45.040 And so you actually have not defeated Donald Trump at all.

00:24:48.460 All you have done is actually give the is the Supreme Court the opportunity to clarify

00:24:51.860 the unitary executive theory and actually spell out what the lines of that authority are.

00:24:56.440 Um, let me switch to, uh, well, before I leave this section entirely, let me go back to Israel.

00:25:08.460 Two things.

00:25:10.200 I don't want to be, I don't want to own Gaza. 1.00

00:25:13.720 I don't, uh, bad idea.

00:25:15.540 Nobody wants to own Gaza. 0.99

00:25:16.380 Yeah.

00:25:16.400 Nobody wants to own Gaza. 0.99

00:25:17.540 That's a bad idea.

00:25:18.380 Um, I think this is a massive, uh, negotiation tactic and like with everything with Donald

00:25:26.060 Trump, if they said, okay, you rebuild, would he do it?

00:25:32.060 Yeah, I think he would, but I don't think that's the, I don't think that's the plan, but he'd

00:25:38.100 do it if the world said, okay.

00:25:39.700 Um, I think this is a negotiation, um, and I'm, I'm hoping that's true, but I can't understand

00:25:46.840 how Israel would even be for this, that sacred land.

00:25:50.480 I think this would be so bad in the spiritual sense for the United States to take that land

00:25:56.760 that belongs to Israel.

00:25:58.760 Right.

00:25:59.220 So, you know, we can, my view on Trump with Middle East is basically just let him cook,

00:26:03.920 right?

00:26:04.100 I mean, like he seems to know what he's doing over the, right.

00:26:05.840 But I think that what he's told one, one of two things is happening with regard to his

00:26:09.200 Gaza proposal.

00:26:09.920 One is a syndicated real estate deal under no circumstances.

00:26:13.320 He's made this clear.

00:26:14.200 Will there be U S troops on the ground in Gaza policing the place?

00:26:16.980 Yeah.

00:26:17.340 Clearing it up like that.

00:26:18.580 That's not a thing.

00:26:19.460 What he has talked about pretty openly is having the IDF basically do all that work for him,

00:26:23.320 right?

00:26:23.900 Essentially having the IDF clear the ground, make sure that it's terrorist free. 0.74

00:26:28.380 And then, you know, the United States gets 99 year ground leases on all the really nice

00:26:32.280 beachfront property.

00:26:33.280 And you get a bunch of investors from the United States and from UAE and from, and from Saudi

00:26:38.300 and from all these other places to actually put in the money to build.

00:26:41.440 I think that's kind of what Trump is thinking actually.

00:26:44.240 And so what that means for the American taxpayer is not that the United States quote unquote

00:26:48.440 owns it in terms of like, it's the 50, Gaza is the 51st state or something.

00:26:51.740 No, it's going to be Canada.

00:26:52.400 The 51st state as we all know.

00:26:53.820 Right.

00:26:53.980 Exactly.

00:26:54.240 But if you're, but what it really, what he's talking about really is basically an American

00:26:59.940 economic interest in a place that could be, that could be lucrative.

00:27:05.180 So he's talking about an economic interest and he's saying that Israel should go guarantee 0.95

00:27:08.200 the security there.

00:27:09.180 I think Israel would, would be very much in favor of that because I don't think that

00:27:12.640 Israel would give up probably the ground rights to the area in that circumstance, mainly

00:27:16.220 because the United States again, does not want the ground rights because then the United

00:27:19.100 States has to provide security there.

00:27:20.380 I don't think the United States, I don't want us doing that.

00:27:22.500 No, I don't think Trump wants us doing that.

00:27:24.020 No, I mean, no, I don't want American soldiers on the ground over there.

00:27:26.860 What's our interest over there?

00:27:27.980 That doesn't make any sense to me.

00:27:29.660 But having the idea of clear something and the U.S. makes money off of it sounds pretty

00:27:32.660 good to me as an American.

00:27:33.660 You know, I kind of like that.

00:27:34.800 And then it's also possible that it's a bargaining gambit.

00:27:36.700 And basically what he's saying is, listen, I'll take it.

00:27:39.360 Right.

00:27:39.620 You guys kept shouting free Palestine and Trump said, OK, I'll take some. 0.96

00:27:43.280 But, you know, but if you guys, you know, I'm offering to like build it up.

00:27:48.420 If you don't want me doing it, I need an alternative plan.

00:27:50.940 What's your plan?

00:27:52.140 Are you going to build it up?

00:27:53.020 Are you going to provide security?

00:27:54.280 If you want to provide me alternative, I'm happy to hear your alternative.

00:27:56.800 And we'll see whether they come up with an alternative.

00:27:59.940 But yeah, again, without getting into sort of like biblical borders of historic Israel

00:28:03.720 and whether the Gaza Strip actually is within those biblical borders, there's some questions

00:28:07.440 about whether that's the case or not.

00:28:08.960 The truth is Israel has never wanted sovereignty over the Gaza Strip in terms of controlling that

00:28:15.560 amount.

00:28:15.720 In fact, in 1967, during the Six Day War, there was an open debate inside the war cabinet

00:28:20.900 in Israel over whether to go into the Gaza Strip.

00:28:23.260 They tried desperately to tell the Egyptians to keep it. 0.90

00:28:25.880 And the Egyptians like, nah, you got it. 1.00

00:28:27.220 All yours, man.

00:28:28.160 Like this is this has been like a perennial problem over there.

00:28:32.060 So whether it is an opening gambit for Trump to get the place rebuilt and refunded by other

00:28:36.260 people or whether it is a serious proposal that effectively that Israel is capable of

00:28:43.000 clearing the area.

00:28:43.840 And then the United States makes bank on the on the real estate upside.

00:28:47.500 Either way is is fine with me as an American.

00:28:49.980 And I think that, you know, the Israelis are probably OK with either one of those as well.

00:28:53.860 They're going into the DOD next doges.

00:28:57.380 And I love this because what are the Democrats going to say?

00:29:02.320 The right wing warmongers that just are always for defense every time.

00:29:08.340 When we start screaming from the rafters, are you kidding me?

00:29:12.480 You spent or you lost what?

00:29:15.500 What are the Democrats going to say?

00:29:18.900 Yeah, I mean, this is again, he's wrong footing them at every turn here.

00:29:22.840 And I think one of the big things that's going to happen in DOD, obviously, they're going to

00:29:25.700 be examples of screws that cost eight hundred thousand dollars and a million dollar gold

00:29:30.940 plated toilets and that kind of stuff. 1.00

00:29:32.680 Those tend to be a little bit overstated.

00:29:34.400 But what will happen is the giant weapon systems that are basically a waste of money are going

00:29:38.920 to get zeroed out.

00:29:39.520 What you're going to see is a shift in the kinds of weapon systems that the United States

00:29:42.860 is focusing on.

00:29:44.880 Aircraft carriers are aircraft carriers are a thing of the past.

00:29:48.900 This is right.

00:29:49.560 This is right.

00:29:50.240 So I was talking with Sham Sankar, who's the the CTO of Palantir, and he was talking about

00:29:55.160 the kinds of new technologies that need to be pursued by the Department of Defense.

00:29:58.740 And he has a website called 18 Theses, where he spells out what needs to happen with

00:30:02.840 the Defense Department.

00:30:03.500 He basically says this place is a bureaucratic nightmare.

00:30:06.280 It takes forever to get anything approved.

00:30:08.100 Everything moves through establishment proxies, which means that there's a bunch of people

00:30:11.900 who have a stake in just doubling down on the stuff that's already not working.

00:30:15.960 And basically, you need to break the system and you make it more innovative, faster.

00:30:19.620 You need to experiment in kind of a free market way with 10 different things.

00:30:23.360 And then two of them work.

00:30:24.400 And those two that work are just groundbreaking and dominant and are new technologies that nobody

00:30:28.260 else has.

00:30:28.740 And that's where the United States really can leverage our innovative workforce and the fact

00:30:32.620 that we are a leader in innovation in every sphere to really leap ahead of our of our

00:30:37.420 enemies.

00:30:38.360 That's the kind of stuff I hope that that Secretary of Defense Hegseth is going to do.

00:30:42.060 Aside from the fact, I think that it makes an absolutely enormous difference to have a

00:30:45.180 Secretary of Defense who isn't wearing a face mask to meetings.

00:30:49.600 And it's actually, you know, actually going and training with the troops and and is giving

00:30:53.320 off an image of what young men would like to be if they join the military.

00:30:57.280 I think that actually makes an enormous difference, both domestically as well as internationally.

00:31:00.940 I think Hegseth was a brilliant pick.

00:31:02.780 I think he's doing an amazing job so far.

00:31:04.560 And I couldn't be more enthusiastic about that.

00:31:06.660 But yeah, I mean, what are Democrats going to say when Hegseth and Doge go through and

00:31:10.520 they say, you know, we need to cut one hundred billion dollars from the defense budget

00:31:14.200 this year just to get rid of the waste, fraud and abuse.

00:31:16.260 And what happens then?

00:31:17.060 What is he doing with Canada?

00:31:23.860 I mean, I don't know.

00:31:25.400 This is what I can't read.

00:31:26.420 I don't know.

00:31:26.940 Right.

00:31:27.140 I can't read it either.

00:31:29.040 Yeah.

00:31:29.400 I mean, like, I have no.

00:31:30.460 Do we want Canada?

00:31:31.640 Like, do we want it as our 51st state?

00:31:33.420 I mean, I mean, kind of in the sense that, like, screw those guys for the Battle of Montreal.

00:31:37.640 But but I'm just like, and why are you?

00:31:40.160 Why are you a country in the first place?

00:31:41.400 Right.

00:31:41.780 Yeah.

00:31:41.880 But but yeah, aside from kind of generalized antipathy for

00:31:46.720 Canadian maple syrup, I'm not sure exactly what what this is about.

00:31:51.160 I think that it's more about giving off an image of maximalism.

00:31:55.440 And that, I think, is fine.

00:31:57.260 Again, I would prefer that it be directed against countries that we have more antipathy for and

00:32:01.560 more problems with.

00:32:02.320 I mean, I'm glad that he's putting serious pressure on Mexico. 1.00

00:32:04.360 I wish we're putting even more pressure on China. 0.97

00:32:06.420 Right.

00:32:06.540 I would like to see him actually ramp up the pressure on China. 0.60

00:32:09.200 I think so far we've been a little bit too soft for my liking with regard to some of the

00:32:12.420 measures that we're taking with regard to China, whether it's tick tock or a 10 percent tariff

00:32:16.060 rate on China, but a 25 percent threatened tariff rate on Canada and Mexico.

00:32:20.220 Right.

00:32:20.620 It seems to me that we should reverse that when it comes to Canada.

00:32:24.020 Now, listen, what I want out of Canada is Pierre Poliev to be the prime minister.

00:32:27.820 Me too.

00:32:28.380 And Justin Trudeau and the liberals to be out.

00:32:30.420 And so anything that gets in the way of that, I'm kind of against.

00:32:32.840 And anything that that facilitates that, I'm very much for.

00:32:36.280 Um, do you think he's running a risk with these tariffs?

00:32:40.780 Because I see them as negotiating tactics.

00:32:44.260 Um, he does believe in tariffs and he believes in tariffs in the way I think our founders did

00:32:49.860 get rid of the income tax, let tariffs pay for everything.

00:32:54.540 Um, but he also looks at him as a big stick to negotiate and, and, and maneuver.

00:33:02.340 Um, it, do you think he runs the risk of the world kind of going, Hey, why don't we all

00:33:11.660 get together, uh, and say, no, once they all start to band together and it's an actual trade

00:33:19.820 war, we're in trouble.

00:33:22.220 I agree with this.

00:33:23.160 So I think this is one of the mistakes that could be made here.

00:33:25.800 Uh, tariffs can serve a number of purposes.

00:33:28.400 You can raise revenue.

00:33:29.200 You're never going to be able to replace the income tax at the current levels with tariffs.

00:33:33.000 It's just not going to happen.

00:33:33.920 The amount that we brought in off tariffs last year was like $80 billion, right?

00:33:37.240 It was $80 billion and the amount of tax revenue to the federal government was, you

00:33:40.640 know, several trillion dollars.

00:33:41.860 So you're not going to replace that by any stretch of the imagination.

00:33:45.280 So the idea of substituting one for the other, I'm for it, but that also means you have to

00:33:47.980 cut the government by 98%, which I'm also for actually, but I don't think that that's

00:33:52.260 going to happen.

00:33:53.600 It's conservative porn.

00:33:55.240 Keep talking, baby.

00:33:56.940 Oh my gosh.

00:33:57.580 Yeah, exactly.

00:33:58.700 You know, I'll have what, I'll have what we're having.

00:34:00.700 Yeah, right.

00:34:01.460 You know, the, the, the, you know, so I think that, you know, as a, as a replacement mechanism

00:34:05.560 for revenue, I think unlikely to replace the income tax as a, as a threat.

00:34:09.300 Sure.

00:34:09.560 I mean, it worked on Columbia.

00:34:10.640 It seems to have worked a little bit on Canada.

00:34:12.200 It worked a little bit on Mexico as, as sort of negotiation tactic, you know, bullying 0.94

00:34:16.480 other countries into doing what we want, Panama.

00:34:18.420 Like I'm all for that.

00:34:19.560 I think that that's good.

00:34:20.280 I think it's a good negotiation tactic as a sort of principled war in favor of tariffs.

00:34:24.080 I think that's a pretty bad idea.

00:34:26.000 And the reason that's a bad idea is because exactly what you're talking about, the first

00:34:29.860 move that Canada and Mexico are going to make, if those tariffs were to go into place, say

00:34:34.200 permanently without a negotiated way out is to open their door to China because they're 1.00

00:34:38.700 going to have to have another market to which they can send all of their stuff.

00:34:42.160 And so actually it's going to open the door to China. 0.70

00:34:43.860 And this is one of the things that I think we have to be very careful about, even with

00:34:47.680 things like USAID, right?

00:34:49.300 USAID needs to get zeroed out.

00:34:50.560 And then we actually do need to rebuild some of the structures that were there, but in a

00:34:54.480 better way, because otherwise China will fill the gap in a globally competitive environment.

00:34:58.940 I think one of the mistakes that sometimes people on the right make is assuming, you know,

00:35:02.200 in a vacuum, in a vacuum, we're never in a vacuum.

00:35:04.560 I mean, if we actually create a vacuum, that vacuum is very likely to be filled by China. 1.00

00:35:09.780 I mean, we did create a vacuum, which is why China ended up taking over both ends of the 1.00

00:35:12.820 Panama Canal, for example, or ended up intervening pretty significantly in Mexico and so, or is

00:35:18.480 now taking over the South China Sea.

00:35:20.740 Vacuums are abhorred when it comes to international politics, and they're generally filled by our 1.00

00:35:24.260 enemies if the United States is not in a pinpoint accurate, not bloated way trying to

00:35:29.700 act in those areas.

00:35:31.120 But yeah, I mean, I'm deeply fearful that I don't think the trade wars are good or easy

00:35:34.900 to win as a general rule.

00:35:36.920 I think that they can be a good negotiation tactic.

00:35:39.160 And I think this is where Trump excels, is that he, you know, he plays chicken a lot.

00:35:44.240 This is something President Trump loves to do.

00:35:45.880 Oh, yeah.

00:35:46.140 One of the ways you win when you play chicken is before you play the game, you take a brick

00:35:50.180 and you hold it up and you say, this is going right on the accelerator.

00:35:52.860 You think I'm not willing to go over the cliff?

00:35:54.120 I'm not even in control, man.

00:35:55.160 The brick's on the accelerator.

00:35:56.160 We're going right toward that cliff.

00:35:57.660 And listen, my feet are up on the dash and the brick's on the gas.

00:36:02.400 And yeah, I'll do it, man.

00:36:04.060 I don't care.

00:36:04.660 I'll just do it.

00:36:05.680 And I think that that's a lot of Trump when it comes to tariffs.

00:36:07.820 I think he's like, listen, I love tariffs.

00:36:09.460 I love tariffs so much.

00:36:10.400 I want to do tariffs.

00:36:11.280 I'm begging to do tariffs.

00:36:12.660 Right.

00:36:12.860 So if you want to have this fight, like, man, not just don't threaten me with a good time.

00:36:16.580 Let's party, boys.

00:36:17.520 Right.

00:36:17.660 I think that's that's part of the negotiation tactic as well.

00:36:21.420 Except I think.

00:36:23.960 He is willing to go over the cliff.

00:36:26.400 You know, I mean, very well might be.

00:36:27.480 Yeah, he is.

00:36:28.180 We never get there.

00:36:28.720 Yeah, I hope so, too.

00:36:29.600 But it's going to be bad.

00:36:30.280 Yeah, I mean, his negotiation, the skill that he has in negotiating is the fact that people look at him and go, that son of a pit might just do it.

00:36:41.940 He might do it.

00:36:43.480 You have to take him seriously.

00:36:46.320 He told me he said he was having dinner with the leader of China.

00:36:53.440 What's his name?

00:36:54.880 Xi.

00:36:55.300 Yeah, Xi.

00:36:55.820 President Xi.

00:36:56.340 And he said, we're at Mar-a-Lago and we're having dinner.

00:36:59.460 And he said, I knew I was going to strike Iran. 1.00

00:37:03.940 And he said, so I scheduled that to happen right in the middle of our dinner.

00:37:09.320 He said, so they came, whispered in my ear, Mr. President, we're about to go.

00:37:13.540 He said, excuse me, just a minute.

00:37:15.640 He left.

00:37:16.760 20 minutes later, he sat down at the table and said, yeah, I just struck Iran, killed this guy, this guy. 0.84

00:37:22.640 And he said, President Xi looked at him like, whoa, you know, that that's not what the president usually does.

00:37:29.040 And you did it with me sitting here.

00:37:30.800 And then he said, as they continue to talk, President Xi said something that he was thinking about doing.

00:37:36.840 And Donald Trump said, you're not going to do that.

00:37:39.300 He said, it'd be bad for us.

00:37:40.960 You're not going to do that.

00:37:41.840 Because I could make Beijing disappear.

00:37:45.800 And Xi kind of laughed kind of half-heartedly and just stared at Donald Trump.

00:37:51.940 And Donald Trump just stared back.

00:37:54.960 And he walked away with not knowing if the president was serious or not.

00:37:59.240 I mean, that's great.

00:38:00.900 No, that's him.

00:38:01.840 And that's typical Trump.

00:38:02.940 I mean, when we did a fundraiser for him down here at Trump Doral, and we were kind of in the back room.

00:38:07.460 And he was talking about Ukraine.

00:38:08.660 And he said, they never would have gone to Ukraine if I'd been president.

00:38:11.780 Okay, why, Mr. President?

00:38:12.940 And he's like, well, because I told Vlad, I called up Vlad.

00:38:15.220 I said, Vlad, Vlad, if you go into Ukraine, I'm going to bomb the out of you. 1.00

00:38:19.600 Right.

00:38:20.040 And he said, and Vladimir Putin said, no, you won't, Mr. President.

00:38:23.480 And I said, well, I might.

00:38:25.920 And then he says.

00:38:26.860 Right.

00:38:27.820 Right.

00:38:28.140 And then Trump, you know, gives the punchline.

00:38:31.020 And the punchline is, he says, if there's a 5% chance the most powerful military in the world is going to bomb you, you don't do it.

00:38:36.300 Which, yes, but you have to be credible.

00:38:38.680 Right.

00:38:38.840 I mean, because Joe Biden is the least credible president in American history.

00:38:41.980 Joe Biden would say, no, all I'm saying is don't do it.

00:38:45.600 Don't do it.

00:38:46.280 Stop.

00:38:46.760 No, don't do it.

00:38:48.060 Everyone's like, well, he ain't going to do nothing.

00:38:50.060 I'm just going to walk right across.

00:38:51.200 Hell, I'm going to samba across that line. 0.98

00:38:53.420 Right.

00:38:54.040 Ain't nothing stopping me from going across that line.

00:38:55.880 Like, Trump, it's like if you get within 100 miles of that line, maybe he warned you and maybe he didn't.

00:39:00.160 But you don't know what's coming.

00:39:01.460 Right.

00:39:01.660 I mean, he could he could clock you.

00:39:03.000 He could give you a rose.

00:39:03.880 No one knows.

00:39:04.560 And I think that that's part of the magic of it.

00:39:06.000 So let me ask you, when this podcast is released globally, it will be Saturday noon.

00:39:17.260 The president said earlier this week, all hell will break loose.

00:39:20.880 And I don't mean some of the hostages.

00:39:22.440 I mean, every single hostage, if they if Hamas does not release them by noon on Saturday, all hell will break loose.

00:39:33.060 He's not one to paint a very vivid red line without backing it up.

00:39:38.700 If you if you cross it, what do you think is coming?

00:39:42.760 Right.

00:39:43.800 Well, I mean, I think that what he's doing there is something that's strategically quite smart.

00:39:47.800 So he's basically saying, listen, if there is no phase two of this negotiation, right, it was a hostage deal that was supposed to have a phase one with these kind of drips and drabs. 0.99

00:39:55.400 And then it goes to phase two, which is supposed to be, quote unquote, the end of the war and gradual release of more of the hostages.

00:40:01.060 He's saying, listen, I'm not invested in that deal.

00:40:03.060 That deal makes no difference to me.

00:40:04.640 Right.

00:40:04.760 If this deal goes sideways and Israel has to go back in, that's not on me.

00:40:07.500 That's on you guys.

00:40:08.360 You're the ones who are who are who are doing this.

00:40:10.540 So I think that's the first thing that he's doing is disconnecting himself from the, quote unquote, permanent end of the war nonsense that was supposed to be in phase two of this deal.

00:40:19.520 The truth is that, listen, I agree with Trump and I disagree with the Israeli government.

00:40:23.020 I think the Israeli government is wedded to the idea of trying to get back as many hostages as they can, even with drips and drabs and and releasing hundreds of terrorists in the past.

00:40:31.400 I think it's a dumb policy.

00:40:32.380 I think that they actually should do exactly what Trump is saying.

00:40:34.760 Either they all come out or we're going in.

00:40:36.860 Whether the government actually does that, I think it's wrong.

00:40:39.280 I think that I think that Trump is exactly right on this.

00:40:42.300 And that's precisely what Israel's position should have been literally day one.

00:40:45.220 I mean, it should have been their position October 8th.

00:40:46.900 Should have been either all those hostages go out or we're going in and we are not stopping for for love or money.

00:40:50.960 We are going all the way.

00:40:52.100 We will do whatever it takes to get our people back.

00:40:54.600 And we don't care what the rest of the world has to say.

00:40:56.420 Trump's basically saying it for them now.

00:40:58.040 For Israel not to actually enact that, I think, is actually a political miscalculation.

00:41:03.340 I understand.

00:41:03.940 Obviously, the politics are different in Israel.

00:41:05.640 The families of the people who are there in Israel.

00:41:07.320 If you're one of the families of the three people who are supposed to come out on Saturday and suddenly they're not coming out and it's full-scale war again and you've got to assume that those people are going to die, that's got to be extraordinarily difficult.

00:41:18.760 With that said, if I were advising it, I would say, listen to the president.

00:41:23.400 The president is right on this.

00:41:24.440 You know, you've got a window to do the things you need to do.

00:41:28.000 You need to go do the things that you need to do and you can't win a war with drips and drabs and negotiating with terrorists. 1.00

00:41:32.660 But that's been my position since literally day one.

00:41:34.800 So I have a friend who was part of an elite military team years ago and he said he was just in Israel and he said he saw all these operators that he knew.

00:41:49.800 And he said, he's like, Glenn, these are the people that don't write books.

00:41:52.820 These are the people that go in and kill people and then go to the beach afterwards.

00:41:57.100 He said, these are the elite teams.

00:42:00.140 And he said, I saw a few of them there.

00:42:04.380 And they're like, oh, we're just vacationing.

00:42:07.120 You're vacationing in Israel.

00:42:09.520 Huh.

00:42:09.760 OK, and his theory was he said, I don't know, but his theory was.

00:42:15.780 If they don't release him by noon, Trump will go in with our special forces, our special teams and get them and kill the people that had them.

00:42:27.960 Do you think that's a possibility?

00:42:30.740 I think it's less likely.

00:42:32.760 Yeah.

00:42:33.120 Again, I think that Trump is on the ground.

00:42:35.000 Americans in harm's way. 0.99

00:42:36.280 Yeah, right.

00:42:36.740 Exactly.

00:42:37.200 I'm not in favor of American boots on the ground. 0.69

00:42:39.260 Now, there are American hostages who are being held.

00:42:40.940 So I could see a world where Trump authorizes the attempted extraction of those hostages.

00:42:44.460 But from what I understand from from military intel on sort of both sides, meaning America and also Israel, is that the reason that Israel has not attempted a rescue of these people is because they're basically on hair trigger, meaning that all of the hostages they know.

00:42:58.520 Apparently, Israel is exactly where every hostage is in the Gaza Strip, like down to the room. 0.83

00:43:02.440 But the problem is that the minute that they go in, they're standing orders from Hamas to just shoot the hostages.

00:43:07.020 And so any any sort of operation, because Israel is excellent at these operations, like truly amazing at these operations.

00:43:13.520 So if Israel can't do the operation, it's going to be difficult to see what United States operators on the ground would be able to do that the Israelis can't, given Israel's experience with this sort of stuff.

00:43:25.280 But again, I think that Trump's baseline proposal is correct here, and that is that either they all come out or none of them come out and like release them now or all hell breaks loose is the proper approach.

00:43:38.540 Again, I agree in a conflict between Netanyahu's sort of slow rolling approach, trying to get as many hostages out for humanitarian purposes for the families and Trump's let them all out or we're going to kill them or you will not exist tomorrow.

00:43:51.660 Then, you know, I agree with Trump.

00:43:54.260 I've always agreed with Trump.

00:43:55.180 I think that Trump's perspective on this is exactly correct.

00:43:57.720 What do you think of the idea?

00:43:58.980 I mean, that that that press conference between Netanyahu and and Donald Trump was like almost two hours late.

00:44:06.900 I mean, they were in the office two hours after they were supposed to be talking.

00:44:11.720 And I and I saw him take to the stage and say things like all the Palestinians have to go. 1.00

00:44:19.740 Let me just move them out. 0.97

00:44:21.680 That's not something Benjamin Netanyahu can say.

00:44:25.040 That's that it that's not that's also not something that Benjamin Netanyahu proposed.

00:44:30.680 Correct.

00:44:30.980 OK, like I like.

00:44:31.760 No, I know.

00:44:32.200 Let's be clear about this.

00:44:33.180 Yeah.

00:44:33.300 Donald Trump literally told Netanyahu probably five minutes before they went on stage what he was going to say, if at all.

00:44:39.040 I mean, if you were watching that presser, Netanyahu looked like he'd been blindsided in the same way as the rest of us were.

00:44:45.320 Right.

00:44:45.460 I was watching it and I'm pretty in the know about these particular issues.

00:44:50.260 Like, I feel like I have good connections on pretty much all sides of these issues from literally like the Arab side to the Israeli side to the American side.

00:44:56.660 I talk to people all the time on this particular issue.

00:44:58.900 And I was like, what is happening right now?

00:45:02.140 I have never heard anything remotely like this, which, by the way, also shows, number one, Trump's the one in control.

00:45:07.380 It ain't nobody around him.

00:45:08.660 Nobody is controlling him.

00:45:09.600 He's nobody's puppet.

00:45:10.340 This is coming direct from Donald Trump.

00:45:11.620 And two, this White House is run like a machine, like a damn machine, because that, you know, that in Trump, number one, that thing is leaked three weeks before.

00:45:20.800 Oh, yeah.

00:45:21.020 Yeah.

00:45:21.160 Right.

00:45:21.280 That's in the front page of The New York Times, three weeks beforehand.

00:45:24.520 And this thing, not only didn't it leak, people like Susie Wiles, right, who is his chief of staff.

00:45:30.560 Who is don't cross her by what he was saying.

00:45:32.880 Yeah.

00:45:33.160 Yeah.

00:45:33.400 No, Susie's a professional.

00:45:35.060 I mean, she's great.

00:45:35.880 She's running this thing like clockwork. 0.85

00:45:37.560 She's tremendous.

00:45:38.680 And she looked like, OK, this is the first I'm hearing about all of this.

00:45:42.880 And, you know, it's all I can say is I've and I feel tired saying this, but I've never seen anything like it.

00:45:49.500 I was I will say Donald Trump lied to me.

00:45:51.340 He said that I would tire of the winning and I have not yet tired of the winning.

00:45:53.880 I demand more winning.

00:45:55.080 The winning must continue at this pace.

00:45:56.960 But it is supply of winning is insufficient to meet demand.

00:45:59.620 It's coming close.

00:46:00.240 It's insufficient.

00:46:01.100 Yeah, it is.

00:46:03.240 It's quite remarkable.

00:46:04.200 What does this say to you?

00:46:05.560 You know, people always said that he was stupid and, you know, he's not an intellect.

00:46:10.060 He's he's probably one of our dumbest presidents ever.

00:46:13.020 All that crap.

00:46:14.720 I look at him, especially in things like you were just saying that came from him.

00:46:22.080 He kept that quiet.

00:46:23.080 That's inside of him.

00:46:24.280 This whole approach is coming from him.

00:46:27.700 He's not being handled by anybody.

00:46:30.000 I think he is one of the most out of the box genius thinkers we may have had.

00:46:39.480 I mean, the thing about him is because he's undefined as a sort of political entity, meaning that he doesn't have a thoroughgoing ideology.

00:46:47.520 Right.

00:46:47.920 And like some of us have spent our entire lives creating a thoroughgoing worldview on politics.

00:46:53.880 And then things kind of fit within that worldview.

00:46:55.580 Trump is not a worldview guy.

00:46:57.000 He's a utilitarian when it comes to politics.

00:46:58.880 I want to get to point B.

00:47:00.140 How do I get to point B?

00:47:01.320 What is the easiest, best way to get to point B?

00:47:02.960 And that means he ends up cutting an enormous number of Gordian knots because those of us who are sort of in the business of how does this fit into our ideology?

00:47:09.180 It's like, OK, well, I want to do this policy, but it does kind of cross swords with this other thing that I think in general about the world and about kind of this principle that I have.

00:47:18.120 And these two principles are always in tension.

00:47:19.460 But how do how do I push them to the brink without break?

00:47:22.180 And Trump's like, listen, we need to get here.

00:47:24.200 OK, so we're going to go through here.

00:47:25.440 That's all.

00:47:25.920 We're just going to go right through here.

00:47:27.000 And so that is out of the box.

00:47:29.160 And that's what, you know, true innovators in a lot of spaces do is they think simply.

00:47:33.600 And by thinking simply, they end up cutting out all the complications.

00:47:37.020 It turns out that the Gordian knot.

00:47:38.900 Yeah, he's a disruptor.

00:47:40.300 He's breaking a lot of the systems that have existed before.

00:47:43.900 And it's also why I have a lot of faith that, of course, correct.

00:47:46.400 I think that there are a bunch of things that have changed between Trump one and Trump two.

00:47:49.220 I think the number one thing that has changed is just, as I say, his emotional state makes an enormous difference.

00:47:53.900 Cool, collected Donald Trump is so good at this.

00:47:56.240 He's so good at this.

00:47:57.840 And I think that was the thing that was missing in Trump term number one, both because he didn't expect to win and he was badly staffed at the beginning.

00:48:03.340 And then because he was running up against the Mueller investigation every single day and to impeachments and all the things that we know about, that's likely to stagger anybody and put them on the back heel.

00:48:11.580 Oh, sure.

00:48:11.900 Because if you have to spend eight hours a day talking about, you know, how you're not a tool of Russia and then being subpoenaed by lawyers, obviously that's going to kind of mess up your presidency.

00:48:19.780 Trump comes in.

00:48:20.620 He's got an overwhelming mandate from the American people.

00:48:24.080 He knows how to do this.

00:48:25.020 He has a team he trusts around him.

00:48:27.060 And he's had four years to sit there and think of the things that he wants to do.

00:48:30.300 He can't run again.

00:48:31.340 So it's not like he has to, like, win another thing.

00:48:33.500 He doesn't have his eye on that.

00:48:34.840 And so that means that he can just sit there knowing that his balance – he's playing with house money now.

00:48:40.180 And because he's playing with house money, he can be as cool – he doesn't have to actually throw out the big gamble or he can.

00:48:45.540 It doesn't really matter.

00:48:46.400 He can make those decisions on a sort of calm and collected basis.

00:48:49.800 But his Twitter account is more sane, right?

00:48:51.560 That was the thing that we thought would never change.

00:48:53.460 We always thought, okay, Truth Social is going to be the place where he just kind of throws out random ideas and angry tweets.

00:48:58.640 His Truth Social is not an angry place.

00:49:01.000 He's announcing actual policy.

00:49:02.240 Yeah, I know.

00:49:03.160 In a fairly meticulous way on Truth Social.

00:49:05.580 Something has changed, right?

00:49:07.100 And the thing that changed is that he won.

00:49:08.580 The thing that changed is that the American people – I've talked about this before.

00:49:12.040 Usually when you have a first presidency, and this is a second first presidency.

00:49:17.280 When you usually have a first presidency, it's unclear what the mandate is exactly for.

00:49:21.860 When Trump won the first time, was that a rebuke of Obama or is that a mandate for Trump's agenda?

00:49:26.780 And we tend to equate the two things, but they're not the same thing, right?

00:49:29.080 Because most elections are about rebuking the other party very often.

00:49:32.920 You can say that Biden was elected because it was a rebuke of Trump in some way.

00:49:37.100 Trump was elected the first time in some way because it was a rebuke of Hillary Clinton.

00:49:44.620 Exactly, exactly.

00:49:45.540 But here's the thing.

00:49:46.880 Normally, because he was elected the first – so the question remains, is it a mandate for Trump's agenda or is it a rebuke of the other guy?

00:49:53.200 In this particular case, because Trump had already won once, because he'd been president once, it wasn't like there was a roll of the dice.

00:49:59.680 What are you going to get from this guy?

00:50:01.240 We knew precisely what we were going to get from him.

00:50:03.960 Like down to the jot and tittle, like literally everything.

00:50:08.160 And so what that means is that is a mandate for his precise agenda.

00:50:11.520 He's not an untested quantity.

00:50:13.240 He's not a mystery.

00:50:14.380 We rejected Joe Biden in favor of a person that we knew better than any person on earth.

00:50:18.820 So what it's more like – it's not like a guy leaves his first wife for the second wife and then finds a third wife.

00:50:24.780 It's not like that.

00:50:25.420 What it's more like on sort of a personal level is a guy leaves his first wife for a second wife, and then he decides, no, no, no.

00:50:29.620 I had it better the first time.

00:50:31.040 I'm going back to my first wife, knowing all the flaws, knowing all the problems, knowing all the risks.

00:50:35.340 OK, so that's not falling out of love with the second wife.

00:50:37.880 That's buying back into the thing.

00:50:40.580 And I think that Trump acknowledges that and realizes that, and that's why the mandate feels different.

00:50:45.980 I've been watching politics my entire life basically, and I've never seen a just generalized feeling in the public like there is right now that a mandate has actually been given to the president.

00:50:57.880 Every president claims a mandate.

00:50:59.060 Obama claims a mandate.

00:51:00.020 But the mandate that he claimed in 2008, what was that about?

00:51:03.160 What it really was about is America wanted a black president.

00:51:05.320 We wanted to get past the sort of racial problems of the past in the United States.

00:51:08.640 It wasn't a mandate for Obamacare.

00:51:10.080 And as soon as he rolled out Obamacare, he got whomped, right?

00:51:12.520 The 2010 elections just go wildly the wrong way.

00:51:15.020 He loses 63 seats.

00:51:16.080 I mean, it's a disaster for him.

00:51:17.420 For Trump, right now, he's at somewhere between plus six and plus ten in the public approval ratings.

00:51:23.660 And 70 percent of Americans are saying he's keeping his promises.

00:51:27.060 Seventy percent of Americans.

00:51:28.440 And they knew what his promises were.

00:51:30.000 And this is the thing Democrats are having such a tough time with.

00:51:31.900 They're saying he's a chaos president.

00:51:33.420 We're all saying, no, he's doing exactly what he said he was going to do.

00:51:36.520 Like literally.

00:51:37.160 And you're saying, literally the thing, right?

00:51:39.400 They're saying, how dare you leave Elon Musk in these places?

00:51:42.060 We didn't elect Elon.

00:51:43.000 No, you actually did.

00:51:44.420 He campaigned with him.

00:51:45.360 He said he was going to do the Department of Governmental Efficiency.

00:51:48.320 During the campaign, he was a public speaker at the RNC.

00:51:52.440 Like, what are you talking about?

00:51:53.440 He's been at every single one of these big events for the last year.

00:51:57.280 What do you say?

00:51:57.940 Like, every single thing has been telegraphed.

00:51:59.600 And that means there's a mandate for those things.

00:52:01.200 Now, could Trump blow that mandate?

00:52:02.880 Sure.

00:52:03.100 Could there be an exogenous situation where the economy tanks, for example, and throws everything

00:52:07.540 into chaos?

00:52:08.080 And now that now everything swings.

00:52:09.540 Absolutely.

00:52:10.520 But Donald Trump has a mandate to do what he's doing.

00:52:12.920 And that's why the American people are giving him a lot of wherewithal to do it.

00:52:15.940 Do you think there is anything other than the economy that could slow this down?

00:52:25.540 I mean, I look at David Hogg as, you know, vice chair.

00:52:31.500 I mean, that is crazy.

00:52:34.100 That's crazy.

00:52:35.460 They haven't learned a thing.

00:52:38.120 And I can't imagine their strategy.

00:52:42.620 The only thing that I think can turn this is if things get, if they go poorly, really poorly

00:52:52.300 for the average person, the economy.

00:52:56.120 Where are the Achilles heels here?

00:52:58.780 I mean, that is the big Achilles heel.

00:53:02.200 I think that the economy is the thing that people really elected Trump based on.

00:53:05.900 And that was largely based on inflation.

00:53:07.380 If the inflation doesn't come down for another year, it's going to be a real problem for him.

00:53:11.280 You know, the inflation is still running too hot because we're in sort of the aftermath

00:53:13.900 of the Biden era.

00:53:15.920 I'm very hopeful that the inflation does come down.

00:53:18.000 But that's going to be a major issue.

00:53:19.280 The economy is really the big one because Trump promised to be a pro-business president.

00:53:22.520 And you can feel the mood.

00:53:23.580 I mean, you're a business person.

00:53:24.380 I'm a business person.

00:53:25.680 The mood right now in the country about business is, oh, my God, I can actually invest and

00:53:29.000 be sure the government isn't going to try to steal my money or destroy my business.

00:53:32.420 The NLRB isn't going to be just sitting on my shoulders every single day waiting for

00:53:35.900 me to make a boo-boo on air.

00:53:37.700 This is, it's a different field.

00:53:39.320 So if he's got all those things going for him and the economy tanks, it's going to be

00:53:42.360 a disaster, like a historic problem.

00:53:44.680 Like this is, this is the way it could go wrong is that it goes all wrong at once.

00:53:47.780 And that, that could be a really, really like enormously horrifying thing because right

00:53:53.200 now, the forces, as we've been discussing with all this, I mean, Glenn, you've known

00:53:56.460 me for a very long time.

00:53:57.440 I've never been an optimist, as you well know.

00:54:00.260 And yet a new sense of optimism has pervaded my being.

00:54:03.560 Me too.

00:54:03.840 I mean, but you're right.

00:54:05.200 I mean, and so when I get optimistic, I start to get a little worried because it's just

00:54:08.400 the way I am.

00:54:09.300 Yep.

00:54:09.520 And so it's like, okay, things are going really, really right.

00:54:11.540 How could they go wrong?

00:54:12.600 Right.

00:54:12.840 And if, if they do go wrong, here's what I see.

00:54:15.640 What I see is that he has perceived President Trump correctly as an incredibly pro-business president.

00:54:19.600 He's up there at the inauguration with the heads of all the big tech companies standing

00:54:24.000 right next to him, right?

00:54:25.820 The most powerful, richest people on earth standing next to him.

00:54:29.340 He has unleashed Elon Musk on the federal government.

00:54:32.600 If the economy were to tank, the claim that he was leading a greedy business oligarchy

00:54:39.420 and that capitalism is to blame would go through the roof.

00:54:42.960 Yeah.

00:54:43.280 And you'd get a progressive revolution very quickly, right?

00:54:45.940 You could, you could see the American people swivel from side to side and wouldn't take

00:54:49.020 that many votes to swivel it. 0.89

00:54:50.280 I mean, Trump won, he won by 10 million votes, right?

00:54:52.640 He won fairly, he won large, large in the electoral college, but relatively narrowly in

00:54:57.460 the popular vote.

00:54:58.100 Yeah.

00:54:58.300 And so you could easily see a world horrifying as it sounds where, you know, a Bernie Sanders

00:55:02.980 acolyte ends up running on a super progressive, a populist progressive agenda and ends up winning

00:55:08.300 if the economy goes south.

00:55:09.260 That, that to me is the most predictable bad thing that could happen.

00:55:11.840 And then of course there are unpredictable bad things that can happen, but I don't think

00:55:15.420 those really affect Trump in the same way.

00:55:17.860 I mean, only if they lead to an economic downturn.

00:55:20.180 So for example, China tries to take Taiwan, economic downturn breaks out, right?

00:55:24.640 Like that, like that, that sort of thing could, could, but that would be more of an economic

00:55:27.320 issue than a security issue.

00:55:28.540 I think security issues tend to play in favor of Republicans generally.

00:55:30.820 So if there's an economic downturn due to war or a strategic move by somebody else, you

00:55:40.940 think that hurts him as much as just an economic downturn?

00:55:45.480 I think that the willingness to attribute economic downturn to whoever is in office is almost

00:55:53.340 overwhelming, right?

00:55:54.540 And it almost doesn't matter even if a recovery begins, right?

00:55:57.160 We learned this from George H.W.

00:55:58.300 Bush, where there, there was an economic downturn in 91 by 92, the economy was already recovering.

00:56:02.480 Didn't matter.

00:56:03.240 His approval rating had dropped from 73% down into the thirties.

00:56:06.580 And the American people are really unforgiving of bad times economically.

00:56:10.680 And they tend to attribute it to whomever is the president, regardless of sort of the underlying

00:56:14.840 rationale for that thing.

00:56:17.500 And so, you know, whether it's China attacking Taiwan, disrupting all of the microchip markets

00:56:22.160 and, and disrupting the trade routes, and that leads to a bad thing, or, or whether it's

00:56:26.280 just the bottom falls out of the price earnings ratio, uh, you know, any one of those things

00:56:31.760 could really hurt president Trump, obviously.

00:56:33.460 So, um, you know, you look at, you look at this and, um, it is the strategy.

00:56:42.760 If I were evil on the other side, the strategy was how do we trigger that?

00:56:47.940 How do we trigger that?

00:56:49.780 You know, because we're losing all of our money, all of our funding.

00:56:53.340 We've lost the pipeline to forever blue.

00:56:57.220 We've lost all this.

00:56:58.600 We have nothing else to lose.

00:57:00.960 We've got to collapse this.

00:57:03.900 How, what are the odds that there are those of our own country that are thinking that way?

00:57:11.100 You know, I, I always hesitate to call anybody a traitor because what you're talking about is

00:57:16.280 actual treason, right?

00:57:17.260 If you're attempting to tank the economy in order to get a president out of office, like

00:57:21.320 deliberately tank the American economy and hurt all of your fellow Americans in order 0.92

00:57:24.820 to get a president out of office, that makes you a traitor by definition.

00:57:27.960 Uh, so I'm always hesitant to sort of accuse people outright of, of treason.

00:57:31.660 Uh, I'd be more worried about a foreign adversary doing it. 0.82

00:57:33.740 I mean, China has an enormous amount of control.

00:57:35.700 China has tentacles nearly everywhere.

00:57:37.240 Uh, China has bought an awful lot of people in this country and, and a lot of people have 0.99

00:57:41.660 made themselves willing to be bought by, by China.

00:57:43.960 Um, again, I think all it would take to trigger a global economic downturn, if that's what

00:57:47.920 China wanted to do, would be some sort of blockade of Taiwan.

00:57:50.820 And that, that, that's sort of the most predictable action that could be taken that would almost

00:57:56.460 overnight destroy a huge percentage of the world economy.

00:58:00.360 Because people don't understand it's not about the United States intervening in Taiwan.

00:58:02.880 It's about the fact that 92% of all sophisticated superconductors on the planet are

00:58:07.100 made in Taiwan.

00:58:08.800 And so if, even if the flow stops, forget about trying to get in control, even if the

00:58:12.000 flow stops, then stuff stops working really, really, really quickly.

00:58:16.260 It's one of the reasons why president Trump is trying to reshore a bunch of this stuff.

00:58:19.460 The problem is it takes a long time to reshore a lot of that stuff, right?

00:58:22.440 He's trying to convince TSMC, which is the chip maker in Taiwan to start building domestically

00:58:26.460 in the United States.

00:58:27.340 But the ramp up period there is fairly significant.

00:58:29.580 It's not like it happens overnight.

00:58:31.340 It takes a while to get there.

00:58:33.000 So to me, that is the single greatest risk is that China decides to go for it with Taiwan

00:58:37.740 simply to screw Trump, feeling that their window is closing.

00:58:42.120 That to me is the single greatest, which is one of the reasons we really need to upgrade

00:58:44.760 our defenses in the South China Sea.

00:58:46.580 We need to start thinking creatively about the kinds of, you know, to get back to what

00:58:49.880 we were talking about with the Department of Defense, we need to modernize a lot of the

00:58:52.260 ways we're thinking about this.

00:58:53.180 Aircraft carriers ain't going to do it anymore. 1.00

00:58:55.520 There's a lot that needs to be done.

00:58:57.100 The aircraft carrier is the horse of World War I.

00:59:00.080 I mean, we'll send them in and they'll all be dead.

00:59:03.440 It'll all be dead because it's just, it's not feasible anymore.

00:59:08.620 You know, you're talking about chips.

00:59:11.140 The race to AGI, ASI is profound.

00:59:18.600 I was struck this week with our vice president compared to our last vice president who sat with

00:59:25.720 the tech moguls and said, AI is, it's two letters, but it actually means artificial intelligence.

00:59:32.860 And I'm thinking, oh my dear God.

00:59:36.820 And then, and then here comes JD Vance this week, laying out our position on AI.

00:59:44.060 Our energy, where we don't have the power systems at this point to be able to really actually command

00:59:55.040 ASI.

00:59:56.780 We're going to need new power plants, new nuclear power plants, most likely, and server farms that 0.97

01:00:03.780 are beyond the imagination.

01:00:06.040 China is already building all of the power.

01:00:08.580 I mean, they're, they're building it like, I think they have 14 nuclear power plants under

01:00:13.300 construction right now.

01:00:14.800 Do we win this race?

01:00:16.360 Is it possible to win this race?

01:00:18.960 Yes.

01:00:19.460 I mean, I think that it's certainly possible, but it will require an effort to, as you say,

01:00:22.960 the energy grid is one matter.

01:00:24.580 And then there's just the innovation.

01:00:25.720 And the truth is that China, because it essentially has a fascist economy, top-down directed, largely 0.81

01:00:32.880 based on sort of intellectual property theft.

01:00:35.360 I mean, even, even some of the claims that were being made about DeepSeq originally, that

01:00:38.460 it was running, you know, they built it for a few million dollars, or they weren't using

01:00:42.500 NVIDIA sophisticated microchips.

01:00:44.140 They were using the crap that was in your Teddy Ruxpin from 1992.

01:00:47.700 All of that, right?

01:00:49.720 All of that was nonsense, right?

01:00:51.060 A lot of it was being made with NVIDIA chips that had been basically pirated or bought through

01:00:54.900 third-party sources.

01:00:56.420 The innovation that could be unlocked in the American economy is always, I think, going to put

01:01:01.000 us ahead.

01:01:02.140 But China is going to pour tremendous resources into one type of specific AGI, right?

01:01:07.580 There are a bunch of kind of angles that you can take.

01:01:09.940 And it's not that they didn't do something clever.

01:01:11.280 They actually did something quite clever with DeepSeq.

01:01:12.860 I mean, for those who are sort of interested in AI, you know, AI has been seen as sort of

01:01:16.800 a giant data crunch.

01:01:17.760 It's, you know, it combs the internet.

01:01:19.040 ChatDB is basically reading all the internet and then trying to predict.

01:01:22.740 It's effectively a very, very sophisticated predictive text mechanism, trying to predict what would

01:01:26.500 be the most likely and more useful next word.

01:01:28.660 What DeepSeq did is it basically siloed information into, I think, 17 different silos and then said,

01:01:35.100 OK, this question belongs in this silos.

01:01:36.700 That meant it was faster because it was now referring to the experts within this silos.

01:01:40.340 You don't have to comb the entire internet.

01:01:41.400 You're just combing this particular section of human knowledge.

01:01:44.980 But the sort of constraints that are going to be put on AI in China for political reasons

01:01:49.140 are going to be pretty significant and pretty severe.

01:01:52.100 And that's not true with all of the iterations that we're seeing.

01:01:54.740 I mean, I am constantly astonished by what the AI can do now and whatever it can do now.

01:02:00.080 Remember, you are seeing the worst version it will ever be right now.

01:02:02.860 Oh, yeah.

01:02:03.160 Right.

01:02:03.320 Today is the worst version of it.

01:02:04.740 Tomorrow is going to be better and it's going to be better the day after that.

01:02:07.060 The stuff that this stuff can do is, I mean, it's world breaking what it's going to be able

01:02:11.940 to do in a bunch of ways, both good and bad.

01:02:14.720 And the other day I was working with Perplexity, which is another one of these AIs. 1.00

01:02:17.580 And Perplexity, I wanted to summarize the arguments in like a three hour YouTube video.

01:02:21.680 I found the YouTube video.

01:02:22.920 I put the address into Perplexity.

01:02:25.120 I said, summarize the main points of this video.

01:02:27.320 And within two seconds, two seconds, it had scraped the entire video and provided me a

01:02:32.620 full breakdown and outline form of the arguments that were being made on both sides.

01:02:37.080 I mean, that sort of that sort of efficiency is insane and radical.

01:02:42.560 If we don't win that race, then China is going to win because they're just going to be 1.00

01:02:47.120 able to do things faster and better than we are.

01:02:49.600 And if you want to see what that looks like, just look at Europe.

01:02:50.980 Europe, there are all these memes online about China is having like a wrestling match with

01:02:55.180 the United States and Europe is over there playing with a TI-82.

01:02:59.680 Like Europe has no clue what's going on.

01:03:01.400 They've regulated themselves out of the game, which is the point that JD was making.

01:03:04.260 I mean, the thing about JD that people forget is JD's a tech bro, right?

01:03:07.420 I mean, he got started by going over to Silicon Valley and working with Peter Thiel and starting

01:03:11.460 his own firm.

01:03:12.280 And like JD knows all the people who are doing the AIs.

01:03:15.580 So it's not as though JD is some sort of like backwoodsman from Ohio.

01:03:18.820 You know, he's never seen a computer before and he's not old either.

01:03:21.620 He's a kid.

01:03:22.340 I mean, he's younger than I am and he's the vice president of the United States.

01:03:25.360 So, yeah, again, I think that I'm optimistic about the future of AI in the country.

01:03:30.580 And I think the Trump administration understands that if we don't win that battle, we're going

01:03:33.380 to lose the war.

01:03:33.880 And that's a bad one.

01:03:36.740 Let me let me talk to you about.

01:03:40.740 Different figures.

01:03:42.160 Let's start with Fauci.

01:03:44.360 I didn't think Fauci would go to jail.

01:03:47.940 I didn't think there'd ever be an investigation.

01:03:50.300 I was so jaded and so blackpilled on these people get away with everything.

01:03:55.200 I think there's a chance Fauci goes to jail and it may happen through the states.

01:04:02.700 Your thoughts?

01:04:05.640 Yeah, I could see an attempt.

01:04:07.780 I think that to peg him down to a particular crime, just putting on the lawyer hat for a

01:04:12.400 second, to peg him down to a particular violation of particular statute is much more difficult

01:04:17.720 than to sort of generically say he's a criminal.

01:04:19.980 I think that many of the things that he did were criminal.

01:04:21.860 I think that he effectively committed perjury when he was talking about the funding of the

01:04:27.280 Wuhan laboratory overseas.

01:04:30.780 I think that his attempt to suppress alternative methodologies of addressing the pandemic by

01:04:35.680 going after people like the new head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, those should be criminal.

01:04:40.840 But again, putting on my lawyer hat, I'd have to find which statute he actually violated.

01:04:45.300 And then what is the likelihood that you can actually convict him on violation of the statute?

01:04:48.760 That really is more of a legal question.

01:04:50.520 Will there be desire?

01:04:51.660 Absolutely.

01:04:52.220 I mean, there'll be it'll they'll go down a lot of paths.

01:04:54.420 I think there'll be a lot of paths going down with Fauci.

01:04:57.160 What about what about others?

01:04:59.840 What about what about the Bidens?

01:05:04.960 Is there going to be anything done on the Bidens that that seems to keep rearing its head

01:05:09.380 strangely?

01:05:11.640 Yeah, well, I mean, I think that, you know, presidential we now are in an era where Trump on his way out

01:05:16.780 the door is going to pardon himself and his kids, because now that Biden has done it,

01:05:20.200 he's going to have to.

01:05:21.560 That's just going to be the way this goes from now on, because Biden breaking that sort

01:05:25.160 of taboo by accusing Trump of wanting to prosecute his kids and him.

01:05:28.940 It means that Trump can't now leave it up to chance, whether that's going to happen with

01:05:32.500 him or with his kids.

01:05:33.720 And so this is just going to be the way that it goes from now on, probably to the end of

01:05:36.720 American history.

01:05:37.820 Whenever that is a thousand years from now, it's going to be every president who is, you

01:05:41.580 know, pardoning his kids and himself on the way out the door.

01:05:44.500 The only person that Biden didn't pardon, obviously, was himself.

01:05:48.220 Right.

01:05:48.420 I think the idea that Trump is going to put Biden in the dock, I don't think that Trump

01:05:51.780 here's the thing about Trump.

01:05:53.060 I don't actually think that in this particular way, he is that vindictive.

01:05:56.780 I don't think there is.

01:05:57.660 There's this kind of feeling in the public that he sometimes is.

01:06:00.540 And you can see evidence of it and removing security details from people that he feels

01:06:04.040 is crossed and that kind of thing.

01:06:05.200 But when it comes to like actually putting Joe Biden in jail as an 80 some year old man who's

01:06:10.600 clearly seen out, I think that his judgment is probably the same as Robert hers was.

01:06:13.660 And that judgment lost Joe Biden like history's judgment has already been made on Joe Biden.

01:06:18.480 And it could not be a worse judgment.

01:06:20.460 I mean, Joe Biden is going to go down in history as the interregnum between two Donald Trump

01:06:24.500 terms.

01:06:25.140 And as a person, Joe Biden's entire image, which was based on this lie that he was sort

01:06:30.040 of a garrulous, kindly, you know, well-spoken, glib young man who then became a nice uncle,

01:06:36.500 like every bit of that was destroyed.

01:06:38.120 He leaves office as one of the most disgraced people in American history, both on a scandal

01:06:42.600 level, from a pardoning his own family level, to not being able to speak words out of his

01:06:46.620 face hole, to just, you know, to being effectively dead and being wheeled around.

01:06:51.040 I mean, the minute that Donald Trump was elected, he was president and he wasn't president yet.

01:06:54.620 Right.

01:06:54.700 I mean, November 5th, Donald Trump was effectively the president of the United States.

01:06:57.780 It was amazing.

01:06:58.580 It was such.

01:06:59.400 Yeah.

01:06:59.600 It's unbelievable.

01:07:01.300 And so, yeah, I think that any more, you know, kind of jumping on the corpse, it's we're

01:07:07.480 now in the Simpsons.

01:07:08.260 Stop, stop.

01:07:09.060 He's already dead, but he's actually already dead.

01:07:10.640 Right.

01:07:10.960 Is there is there something to be said with setting the precedent that no, we're at least

01:07:20.600 going to expose you if we can't put you in jail?

01:07:23.460 We are going to expose this whole thing.

01:07:25.660 Well, that I think will happen.

01:07:26.460 I think there'll be House investigations of Joe Biden.

01:07:29.540 I think that there should be investigations into nearly every aspect of the Biden administration.

01:07:32.920 I do too.

01:07:33.340 I think the amount of money that was flowing around the Biden administration is insane.

01:07:37.680 I think that the amount of misappropriation of funds to, again, these, I think what Doge

01:07:42.840 is uncovering is for purposes of cutting.

01:07:45.380 What Congress should be uncovering should be for purposes of prosecution.

01:07:48.740 And I think that a lot of what was going on inside the Biden administration, I think,

01:07:52.880 probably does violate statute and it needs to be investigated every which way.

01:07:59.140 The Epstein files.

01:08:01.800 I talked to Alan Dershowitz today and, you know, he was adamant.

01:08:06.020 I want everything.

01:08:06.980 I want every tape.

01:08:07.920 I want absolutely everything released.

01:08:10.960 He said nothing can be held back.

01:08:13.160 I agree with that.

01:08:15.640 However, I am a little concerned on how these lists are being made.

01:08:22.600 Is it a phone book?

01:08:24.280 Is it a client list that we're signing up for the massages?

01:08:28.640 I mean, I don't want to witch hunt.

01:08:31.360 You know what I mean?

01:08:32.200 But I do think that all of it needs to come out.

01:08:36.020 It's too much information and power for anyone to hold.

01:08:40.940 I mean, I totally agree with that.

01:08:42.300 Every single bit needs to come out.

01:08:43.840 And absence of information isn't going to cut down on the conspiracy theorizing.

01:08:46.860 It's going to increase it.

01:08:48.080 So if you say, well, we don't want to let out the list because we're afraid that somebody

01:08:51.260 who's mistakenly mentioned on the list is going to then become a target of ire.

01:08:54.900 I promise you that person has probably already become a target of ire just because people

01:08:57.780 are speculating about who the hell's on the list.

01:09:00.000 Right.

01:09:00.140 And so more information is generally better.

01:09:02.240 Like, let's get it all out there.

01:09:03.460 Listen, Dershowitz is a case in point, right?

01:09:04.900 I mean, Dershowitz has been mentioned in sort of proximity to Epstein Island.

01:09:08.440 And the reason he's saying that is because he's saying, OK, put all of it out there.

01:09:11.580 And then if you find me guilty, find me guilty.

01:09:13.040 But that's actually the way that an innocent person would act.

01:09:14.940 Right.

01:09:15.020 If you were on the list or if I were on the list, I'd be like, I want all the information

01:09:18.240 out there.

01:09:18.640 I don't want anything held back because you guys are just sitting there speculating about

01:09:21.680 me all day long.

01:09:22.260 Like, put everything out there, every single little bit of it.

01:09:24.540 Of course, the American public have a right to see all that information.

01:09:27.660 We have a right to see what the hell.

01:09:29.080 What I want to know is where the hell the guy's money was coming from.

01:09:31.900 Right.

01:09:32.100 Well, how did he get so rich?

01:09:33.980 Like, nobody ever talks about, like, where his money was coming from.

01:09:36.720 I mean, I want to know that.

01:09:37.700 Like, what the hell was – there are too many questions, right?

01:09:41.260 I'm the least conspiracy-minded person that I personally know in this space.

01:09:44.820 I mean, you know, as we discussed this before, I tend to believe that conspiracies require

01:09:48.340 actual intelligence and a coherent ability to put together a plan.

01:09:52.440 And I think most people are morons with no ability to do any of that.

01:09:54.920 Right.

01:09:55.080 And so I tend to attribute nearly everything to human stupidity, frailty, and idiocy as

01:09:59.860 opposed to, you know, kind of malevolence and people in back rooms.

01:10:03.180 But when you look at Epstein, you're like, um, something was going on.

01:10:06.480 I would love to know all the things that were going on.

01:10:08.360 Of all the sort of scandals and conspiracy theories that are floating around, I always

01:10:12.520 found the Epstein ones to be the most plausible and most credible as opposed to many of the

01:10:16.060 others.

01:10:16.300 Yeah, I think there was – I mean, I don't know if he was gathering information.

01:10:20.320 He was getting people that, you know, are CIA, you know, needed to have in their pocket.

01:10:26.520 I don't know what it was, but something – it was very, very wrong.

01:10:31.340 I mean, besides the children's stuff, something was very wrong.

01:10:35.680 How do you get away with that for so long?

01:10:38.520 I agree.

01:10:39.260 And you can't – and the problem is I can't – I like debunking conspiracy – I like

01:10:43.100 good explanations.

01:10:43.780 So, like, give me the material so I can debunk it or give a good explanation or at least

01:10:48.500 get to the – as you know, I'm not a fan of just asking questions.

01:10:52.120 I think just asking questions is very often cover for people pushing an agenda without

01:10:56.020 actually having to provide information.

01:10:57.920 It's one thing if my children are just asking me questions, they're children.

01:11:00.800 If I'm an adult and I'm just asking questions, typically it's because I have an idea of what

01:11:03.900 I think the answer ought to be.

01:11:05.300 But in this particular case, I think that we're allowed to just ask questions because I have

01:11:08.360 no idea what the hell is going on.

01:11:09.720 Right.

01:11:10.000 And it's hard for me to determine what's even a plausible conspiracy theory.

01:11:13.780 At this point, with regard to this story.

01:11:16.520 JFK files.

01:11:18.900 They come out.

01:11:19.700 I mean, release all of it.

01:11:20.740 Yeah.

01:11:20.940 I mean, release all of it.

01:11:22.440 Release all of it.

01:11:23.080 I mean, listen.

01:11:23.500 I'm a super big believer that Lee Harvey Oswald shot the president.

01:11:26.860 There was no second shooter.

01:11:29.060 If there is any conspiracy related to Lee Harvey Oswald, by far the most plausible theory

01:11:33.540 is that he was working with the communists.

01:11:35.120 The communists were very much afraid that that was going to be the conclusion that was drawn

01:11:37.880 by the United States government in the aftermath of JFK's assassination.

01:11:41.880 I mean, Lee Harvey Oswald had literally been in the Soviet Union.

01:11:44.140 He went to the Cuban embassy shortly before he went and tried to assassinate JFK.

01:11:48.560 At the same time, he did have a screw loose.

01:11:50.160 He tried to assassinate somebody like a week before he failed.

01:11:52.760 Right.

01:11:52.900 There was a general in Texas, and he shot through his window and missed him.

01:11:55.500 So I've never been a believer in the sort of like dark CIA, JFK wanted him dead kind

01:12:01.980 of stuff.

01:12:02.320 I've never seen the plausible evidence for that.

01:12:04.220 And the sort of Oliver Stone, it was everyone.

01:12:06.760 It felt very, you know, bizarrely Agatha Christie to me.

01:12:10.020 Right.

01:12:10.280 Okay.

01:12:10.420 So, yeah, we're all on the train and we're all combining to stab this guy.

01:12:13.120 Like, okay.

01:12:14.280 Or maybe all the forensic evidence stacks up in one particular direction.

01:12:18.700 And I've done a fair bit of reading on the JFK, like every other American.

01:12:23.220 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:12:23.680 We've all done a better reading.

01:12:24.960 I just, I find the conspiracy theories surrounding JFK the least plausible because we have the

01:12:29.400 most information, but not all of it.

01:12:31.220 Right.

01:12:31.320 I mean, put all of it out there.

01:12:32.440 Yeah.

01:12:32.560 And if I'm wrong, then okay, let's talk about it.

01:12:36.440 I would be, I think, remiss if I don't, if I have you on a disruptor, early disruptor of

01:12:46.840 the media, and me, an early disruptor of the media, you did Daily Wire, I did Blaze.

01:12:56.180 I have to ask you, Ben, the state of the media and the power of the, what now is, I think,

01:13:07.220 mainstream, but was called the alternative media, it's astonishing what's happened, isn't

01:13:14.640 it?

01:13:14.820 But, yes, I mean, it's amazing.

01:13:18.080 There are people who are claiming all the way back in like 2004, I remember when Dan

01:13:21.420 Rather put out that fake letter about George W. Bush.

01:13:24.740 Yeah, yeah.

01:13:25.280 And people on our side were like, ah, the mainstream media is dead.

01:13:28.680 And then they spent the next, you know, nearly 20 years proving they certainly were not dead

01:13:32.260 and they could define narratives and they could lie and they could really define how Americans

01:13:36.120 thought on a wide variety of issues ranging from BLM to COVID to Russiagate to all of that

01:13:42.000 sort of stuff. I think 2024 was definitive nail in the coffin, maybe the last nail in

01:13:46.420 the coffin for the legacy media. The legacy media's ratings are awful, awful. It doesn't

01:13:51.600 mean their numbers are awful, meaning they're a fan club, right? The New York Times is a

01:13:54.500 left-wing fan club. It's no longer seen as the sort of objective source of news. The New

01:13:58.560 York Times is what we are, but for the left, right? I mean, everyone knows we're conservative.

01:14:03.280 And so if you're conservative, maybe you subscribe to Daily Wire, you're subscribed to the Blaze.

01:14:06.240 And if you're a lefty, you subscribe to the New York Times. It's the paper of record for leftists.

01:14:11.180 But no one perceives the New York Times as a sort of middle of the road, objective newspaper that's

01:14:15.380 simply trying to separate the facts from the opinion. No one perceives them that way.

01:14:18.800 And with that, they lose an enormous amount of their sort of brand leverage.

01:14:22.380 That's even more for the Washington Post, which doesn't have the circulation of the New York Times

01:14:25.580 and is beclowning itself every single day. And I think one of the things that the media are

01:14:29.660 struggling with right now is they keep trying to turn the ship and they don't realize that the

01:14:33.120 wheel has been disconnected from the rudder. They actually don't have control of the ship

01:14:37.460 anymore. That rudder is not connected to the thing they're trying to steer. And so they keep

01:14:40.760 trying to create and craft new narratives and throw them out there. So they went from

01:14:45.100 it's a threat to democracy to constitutional crisis. And everybody's just like, no, no,

01:14:50.100 no. The answer is no. And I think that that is a tribute to what all of us in the alternative

01:14:56.480 media have done. Weathering, by the way, an extraordinary number of storms thrown at us by the federal

01:15:01.700 government and its apparatchiks in social media. I mean, I think people need to understand we've

01:15:06.260 spoken about this before between us and also just generally the amount of pressure that was put on

01:15:11.600 social media by Democrats in the federal government to shut down alternative media was extraordinary.

01:15:16.180 And it was real. It was an attempt to destroy all competition to the legacy media. And that was the

01:15:21.240 prevailing way that social media acted basically from 2017 all the way until 2024. There were

01:15:27.540 intermittent periods where they sort of let up the boot off the neck briefly and then the Democrats

01:15:32.680 would threaten them and they put the boot right back down on the neck. And I think that 2024 by

01:15:36.860 Trump winning in spite of all of that, by Democrats not being able to control the narrative, I think

01:15:41.760 that the legacy media has been definitively castrated here. And I think, by the way, the turning point

01:15:47.200 is not just the perseverance of people in the alternative media, which obviously is a huge thing.

01:15:52.640 The thing is that Joe Biden is guilty. Joe Biden did this. And the reason Joe Biden did this,

01:15:56.860 I think that the most undercover story of the last election is maybe the most covered story,

01:16:01.800 but still, I think people underestimate its significance. Joe Biden effing that debate with

01:16:06.140 Trump was the single most important political moment probably of our lifetimes because it wasn't

01:16:12.740 just that it forced him out of the race. What it did is it exposed the entire legacy media

01:16:17.880 infrastructure, all of them, all at once, right? They had been saying for years, for years,

01:16:22.460 you and I were talking about Joe Biden being senile in like 2019, right? And they were like,

01:16:27.860 no, no, no, he's fine. He's totally fine. It was a cheap, like weeks before, literally weeks before

01:16:32.360 that debate, they were saying it was a cheap fake to show tape of him on stage with Obama,

01:16:36.440 Obama guiding him off stage because he didn't know where the hell he was, right? Like that.

01:16:40.440 So they were, they were maintaining that narrative consistently. And then Joe Biden was stupid

01:16:44.980 enough to get on that debate stage. And I was like, well, maybe he knows something we don't,

01:16:49.880 maybe the media knows something we don't, because what moron would go on a debate stage

01:16:53.440 knowing he's senile only to, I said, I remember, cause we were covering the debate for, for Daily

01:16:58.660 Wire. We'd be there backstage and then we covered the debate. I remember saying right before,

01:17:01.980 and well, the one thing we know is not going to happen is he's not going to just die up there,

01:17:04.840 right? I mean, like he wouldn't do it if you were going to just die up there. That'd be crazy if

01:17:08.140 you were just going to go up there, like they'll shoot him up with something, right? We were all

01:17:10.480 having these conversations between us. It's like, okay, what, what sort of concoction are they

01:17:13.940 going to pump meth? Like what's it going to be? What, what, what's the, what's the jab that goes into him

01:17:17.900 to keep him fairly alive throughout this debate? Cause we'd seen it before, right? State of the

01:17:21.960 union, you get him a little bit pumped up. It's like eight Oh five at night. He could go for like

01:17:25.400 30 minutes. He'd start to wind down, but he wasn't going to like die up there. And then he went up

01:17:29.180 there and he died. I mean, he almost literally died on the stage. Almost immediately. Right out

01:17:34.060 the gate. I mean, it started and there was a picture of him staring at the grim visage of death

01:17:38.160 off screen with the, with the goggly eyes. And you were like, oh my God, death is going to take him

01:17:44.020 in the middle of this. Like he can actually see the grim reaper with the Sid standing off to the

01:17:48.820 side. No one else can see it. It's an episode of the twilight zone and he's staring at it and we're

01:17:53.160 watching him on split screen. And I think in that moment, the legacy media died in that moment,

01:17:58.220 it became clear that they were not surprised by this because none of us had access to Biden,

01:18:03.460 right? You had an interview, Biden, I didn't interview Biden and they wouldn't give us access

01:18:06.580 to Biden, but all these guys had access to Biden. And so that means they knew they were in the

01:18:10.360 know for years. And then the story started coming out about how the legacy media actually did

01:18:13.900 know for years about how they'd been at events with him where he'd had to be basically guided

01:18:17.880 out or he would blankly stare at people, not understanding that he was in the middle of a

01:18:21.320 conversation. And so at that very moment, the entire American public was subjected to the

01:18:26.020 reality, which is these people lie and they lie with an agenda. And you can't put that genie back

01:18:30.420 in the bottle. They tried to do it by pretending they were shocked. They went on TV that night. Oh my

01:18:33.880 God, we're so shocked. No, you're not. You all knew him. You saw him last week. You went to the

01:18:38.400 White House and watched him fall asleep and his face fall into his gruel. Like you watched it happen.

01:18:42.120 And then you lied to us with motivation. And so, you know, you don't get back your credibility

01:18:46.400 after that. You blew it and you blew it irreparably. Ben, it's great to talk to you in a, I mean,

01:18:52.240 because we're both optimistic for the first time in our relationship. I haven't been optimistic

01:18:58.840 since, I don't know, 1974, maybe. I don't even know. It's been a long time, but it's a nice

01:19:09.140 respite and nice to have the faith that there are people who are actually looking out for the future

01:19:17.740 of our country and freedom. I hope this continues for a very long time, but it's good to have this

01:19:24.820 and good to be with you. Thank you. You and me both. And I hope that we look back on this in a

01:19:29.020 couple of years and we say that that was just the beginning of the good stuff. And then we don't look

01:19:32.080 back in a couple of years and think, man, were we, were we optimistic at that point?

01:19:39.960 Said like a true pessimist. Thanks, Ben. God bless. Thanks. You too.

01:19:51.080 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it

01:19:57.100 can be discovered by other people.

The Glenn Beck Program - February 15, 2025

Ep 245 ｜ Should the US Own Gaza？ Ben Shapiro Explains Trump’s REAL Agenda ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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