The Megyn Kelly Show - June 04, 2025


KJP Pretends to Be Independent, and Elon Slams Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine | Ep. 1086


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 43 minutes

Words per Minute

185.01793

Word Count

19,078

Sentence Count

1,439

Misogynist Sentences

39

Hate Speech Sentences

31


Summary

Corrine Jean-Pierre is reinventing herself as an independent. Elon Musk is publicly slamming President Trump. The White House is sticking to its guns as the legislation makes its way through the Senate. Plus, Jim Acosta holds a town hall that is so bad, it has to be seen to be believed.


Transcript

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00:00:31.000 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.
00:00:42.400 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
00:00:45.600 Stay tuned because we have a packed show for you today.
00:00:48.280 Elon Musk publicly slamming President Trump's big, beautiful bill.
00:00:51.680 But the White House is sticking to its guns as the legislation makes its way through the Senate.
00:00:56.280 Plus, Jim Acosta holds a town hall in Washington, D.C. that's so bad, it has to be seen to be believed.
00:01:05.320 Unfortunately, no one did see it because no one showed up.
00:01:07.700 What happens when you throw a party and no one comes?
00:01:09.480 It's basically his high school experience relived all over again.
00:01:14.860 We're going to get to all the news today with Mark Halperin, host of Next Up with Mark Halperin on the MK Media Podcast Network, which is crushing it,
00:01:23.580 along with former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and former Democratic strategist Dan Turrentine.
00:01:29.580 Together, they are the hosts of Morning Meeting, the morning meeting on the two-way YouTube channel.
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00:02:54.300 Guys, welcome back.
00:02:55.500 All right, so we're going to talk about the big, beautiful bill and the Elon meltdown and all that.
00:02:59.380 Well, we got to start with the news that just hit on Corrine Jean-Pierre reinventing herself as an independent.
00:03:09.920 This from, it's everywhere, but this is just from the New York Post write-up.
00:03:13.080 That she claims she's no longer a Democrat.
00:03:16.540 She's coming out with a book, a memoir, hyping, says the New York Post, a, quote, broken Biden administration.
00:03:26.380 They go on to say that it's a tell-all she's working on now.
00:03:30.020 And it's going to be a look inside, independent is the name of it, a look inside a broken White House, outside the party lines, due in October.
00:03:40.420 Hachette, which is publishing, it says she didn't, Jean-Pierre did not come to her decision to be an independent lightly.
00:03:45.720 In this book, she may focus on her, focus her ire on figures aside from Biden.
00:03:53.740 Quote, she has served two American presidents, Obama and Biden.
00:03:56.260 She takes us through the three weeks that led to Biden's abandoning his bid for a second term
00:04:01.540 and the betrayal by the Democrat Party that led to his decision.
00:04:07.540 The tease goes, and she's going to regale us with a hard-hitting yet hopeful critique,
00:04:15.000 defining what it means to be part of the growing percentage of our fractured electorate that is independent,
00:04:20.120 why it can be worthwhile to craft, to carve a political space more loyal to personal beliefs than a party affiliation,
00:04:25.920 and what questions you need to ask yourself to determine where you fit politically.
00:04:29.620 Absolutely. You've got to be kidding me, guys.
00:04:33.080 Mark, thoughts on this?
00:04:35.340 Well, this could go any number of ways. Thank you for having us back.
00:04:39.140 I think, I think, I'm not sure how interested people are going to be on her view of being an independent.
00:04:44.120 I didn't see much independence from her as a spokesperson, but as Sean well knows,
00:04:48.880 in that job, you do need to, you know, say what the boss wants you to say.
00:04:52.440 There's a lot of story to be told.
00:04:54.960 You know, there's, I've got some information about, about what happened during those three weeks,
00:04:59.620 but no insider has really told the story.
00:05:03.040 And a number of the people who were central to the cover-up, and I don't think she was,
00:05:07.920 or the attempted cover-up, have never really been held accountable.
00:05:11.020 No one's really gotten to any of them to respond to what they did.
00:05:14.340 So it's possible that this could be the next big beat in the question of the attempt to cover up Joe Biden's cognitive decline,
00:05:23.240 and the effort to keep the nomination, which is, you know, went on for several weeks until Nancy Pelosi forced his hand.
00:05:30.200 So color me curious about her insider details, less interested in her view of what it means to be an independent.
00:05:36.980 What a lie.
00:05:38.860 She's, I mean, Dan, you're a Democrat.
00:05:41.800 She's, she's going to tell us what it's like to be an independent.
00:05:45.340 Why don't you talk to the Megyn Kellys of the world, who have literally voted until this last election,
00:05:49.720 which put me over the edge on voting more for Republicans.
00:05:52.640 But literally now I've done, I voted in nine presidential elections.
00:05:57.080 God, I'm getting old.
00:05:58.040 And I voted, it was four and four, four Dems, four Republican votes up until I voted for Trump again this last time.
00:06:04.660 So it was five, now five Republicans, four Dems.
00:06:07.180 I've been a registered Democrat.
00:06:08.640 I've been a registered Republican.
00:06:09.720 And now I've been a registered independent for 17 years.
00:06:12.680 That's what an actual political independent looks like.
00:06:15.320 Not like somebody who worked for two Democrat administrations until they got the stank of desperation all over them.
00:06:22.060 And she ran for the hills trying to pretend she knows what independence is.
00:06:26.580 Yeah, you know, just when I was hoping maybe that we wouldn't have to talk about Joe Biden in the fall.
00:06:31.020 Now I think we're going to be talking again about Joe Biden in the fall and what was going on.
00:06:35.780 I assume she's becoming an independent because she thinks the party's too moderate.
00:06:40.640 I mean, I'd be surprised if she comes out and says the party's become too liberal, which in my opinion, it has.
00:06:47.240 So I'll be curious kind of what her angle is.
00:06:49.960 But, you know, you're right.
00:06:51.360 I mean, it'll be interesting because as you and your viewers may know, she was in a lot of hand-to-hand combat with people within the White House who didn't think she was qualified, who didn't think that her performance was very good.
00:07:03.960 They basically said she often had to read from the briefing book and struggled to answer on her feet.
00:07:09.880 And, you know, she took a lot of pot shots.
00:07:13.000 And so is she going to attempt to, you know, settle scores with people that she thought were not supportive of her performance?
00:07:21.100 Obviously, she's going to talk about, you know, those those three weeks and what they were doing.
00:07:25.420 But to Mark's point, I mean, I'm going to be very curious which direction she goes.
00:07:30.500 And of course, this is just going to bring it back to the center as the party heads into the midterms and tries to move past the debacle of Joe Biden and have to relitigate what was going on inside.
00:07:41.420 It certainly sounds, Sean Spicer, like she's going to stick a knife in the people that helped push Biden out from this line, again, from Hachette.
00:07:52.080 She takes us through the three weeks that led to Biden's abandoning his bid for a second term and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his decision.
00:08:02.360 It certainly sounds like she's still on Team Biden.
00:08:05.400 And I guess we're going to get a bunch of nonsense about how he could have done it.
00:08:09.920 Yeah, no, no particular order, but a few points on this.
00:08:13.000 When you've lost Kryn Jean-Pierre as a Democratic Party, you're in big, big trouble.
00:08:17.740 I mean, it should not be this easy for us because I can't believe if she doesn't stick with them.
00:08:23.580 I don't know who that leaves you with, David Hogg.
00:08:26.320 This is a problem for that.
00:08:27.960 By the way, just for the record, this is her second memoir.
00:08:30.980 I was just Googling this.
00:08:32.400 She's only 50.
00:08:33.500 I didn't think you could write two memoirs that quick back to back.
00:08:37.600 Look, here's the deal.
00:08:38.540 I'll just put this out there.
00:08:40.340 If you buy this book, then you should take singing lessons from me.
00:08:44.920 And if you saw me dance, the singing's way worse.
00:08:48.360 Because if you are dumb enough to believe that she's giving you any insight into what was really going on, then you really should turn to me for singing lessons.
00:08:55.960 It's not good.
00:08:56.860 I mean, she was literally the most epically unqualified person to hold that position.
00:09:03.800 So if you are looking for her for any kind of insight or understanding as to what was going on, considering how unqualified and lack of access that she'd gotten, that's on you for wasting the $27.99.
00:09:14.880 The way they pitch this is like, it's incredible how they're talking about her.
00:09:21.560 I don't recognize the person they're describing.
00:09:23.940 They write from the promo from Hachette on this, a hard-hitting yet hopeful critique.
00:09:32.520 She defines what it means to be part of the growing percentage of our fractured electorate that is independent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:09:38.120 And then she says, they say, as a history maker, veteran public servant, political analyst, and independent thinker.
00:09:49.120 Political analyst and independent thinker.
00:09:50.680 By the way, the pitch went something like this.
00:09:53.760 All right, if Jake Tapper can sell a book about the original sin, then why can't I be independent?
00:10:00.340 I mean, that's how that went down, just to be clear, because there's no way that anybody thinks she's any of those things.
00:10:07.800 What's the point?
00:10:08.860 You have had press secretaries, yourself included, Dana Perino, Kayleigh McEnany, Tony Snow back in the day, who are smart people.
00:10:19.400 Ari Fleischer, who are not, you know, really, let's face it, utter morons who are just out there as mouthpiece.
00:10:26.060 Obviously, Caroline Levitt, too.
00:10:28.020 Very smart person.
00:10:29.040 But Kareem Jean-Pierre is not on the list.
00:10:32.540 All right, even Jen Psaki, she's not a moron.
00:10:34.560 But Kareem Jean-Pierre is a total moron.
00:10:36.700 You only need to have watched her for two days to have picked that up.
00:10:40.200 Any random days throughout the entire four years of Joe Biden.
00:10:43.160 Pick your days.
00:10:44.060 It doesn't matter.
00:10:44.580 You will see a complete moron up there.
00:10:46.940 So there is literally nobody in the country who wants to hear her political analysis on anything.
00:10:54.360 And just in case you doubt me, we just put this short little clip just to remind you of what we were subjected to during those very, very painful four years.
00:11:03.020 Watch.
00:11:03.220 The NORAD is part of like a part of a it's a it's a what you call a coalition, a course.
00:11:10.100 So a pact, exactly.
00:11:12.280 We did it in in in clearly in in step with Canada.
00:11:17.140 Three U.S. winners of the 2022 Nobel Prize who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, who won the Nobel Prize in physics, who won the Nobel Prize.
00:11:27.440 It's noble.
00:11:29.460 She thought it was noble.
00:11:30.640 She said it so many times, you know, and she thinks Canada is called Canada.
00:11:33.840 Go ahead, Mark.
00:11:35.440 Well, two things.
00:11:36.780 One is it's really unfortunate that they gave her the job because she did make history.
00:11:43.160 But a black woman is press secretary makes history.
00:11:46.120 They gave it to someone who wasn't qualified for the job.
00:11:48.420 And that's not a denigration of anything but her and the people who gave her the job.
00:11:52.640 It's really, really unfortunate.
00:11:54.300 They she should have been smart enough to turn it down.
00:11:57.460 They should have not given it to her.
00:12:00.120 And and so it's going to be interesting to see how she explains.
00:12:04.780 And we've talked about this in the morning meeting.
00:12:06.360 Sean's been particularly pointed on it is what was her role?
00:12:09.760 Because she's the one who said Joe Biden talked to a dead congresswoman at an event because, quote, she was top of mind.
00:12:17.520 She was top of mind.
00:12:18.620 Right. So I'll be curious to see how she addresses her role in standing at the podium and not telling the truth.
00:12:24.180 The American people, who, by the way, didn't need her to tell the truth because they could see with their own eyes his cognitive decline.
00:12:29.820 The pub date September. Right.
00:12:32.500 Yeah. October, they said.
00:12:34.100 October. So I wonder if it's done because most publishers demand this ridiculous three months in the can before they can publish a book.
00:12:41.600 So so clearly she's been working on it for a while.
00:12:44.960 And I wonder if she had a ghostwriter.
00:12:47.240 But I know for a fact that there are lots of people in the White House who will be worried about this because they recognize that it was a mistake to give her the job.
00:12:57.140 They tried to work around it. They wanted John Kirby, the national security spokesperson, to do more briefing.
00:13:03.140 She was very territorial about that. So there are people who did not treat her great.
00:13:07.920 And I suspect there may well be a correlation between who comes off poorly in the book and who didn't give her the respect she thought she deserved.
00:13:16.420 100 percent. Megan, real quick.
00:13:17.920 I just I just want to say this. If you are a person.
00:13:21.460 Look, I will admit I made several mistakes during my tenure.
00:13:24.320 I've been very open about that. You and I actually had a very frank discussion back when when I published my first book about this.
00:13:31.920 But I'll say this. If you are concerned about how I describe certain things and then don't share equal criticism about her complicity in covering up the cognitive decline about Joe Biden and lying about it,
00:13:46.240 then your priorities are backwards.
00:13:47.960 And the idea that all these people that when I left the White House talked about banning me and canceling me and then are now trying to figure out how what opportunities to give her after she blatantly lied about his cognitive abilities and his physical abilities.
00:14:02.960 Because remember, one of the quotes was he runs circles around me. He tires me out.
00:14:07.360 I actually think maybe she should get some like checked by a doctor, because if that's the problem, then she's got some serious health issues.
00:14:14.200 Not Joe Biden's doctor, though. No, think about that. Let me just stay with you for a second on this, Sean.
00:14:18.720 After the Trump administration, Trump 1.0, they put Trump's staffers through hell.
00:14:26.040 They had more subpoenas dropped on them. They were dragged into these phony criminal cases.
00:14:33.020 Look what happened to poor Hope Hicks. They made her take the stand at that ridiculous show trial in New York City,
00:14:40.060 made his former staffers testify against him, not to mention just all the subpoenas around January 6th.
00:14:45.960 They got dragged in front of Congress, all these hearings.
00:14:48.360 Where are the congressional hearings on the cover up of the Biden mental decline and the subpoena and the shunning of Kareem Jean-Pierre?
00:14:56.420 Mark clearly wants to weigh in and then I'll go back to you, Sean. Go ahead.
00:14:58.580 Well, just they may be those subpoenas may be coming.
00:15:00.720 But the thing that's not on your list is employers in Washington and New York were told, do not hire these people.
00:15:07.740 If you hire these people, you will be in trouble.
00:15:10.260 People wanted to give people with Trump 1.0 experience positions at universities and they were told, no, you cannot work at a university.
00:15:20.080 And now it's a totally different story.
00:15:22.340 I mean, I got I got protested everywhere I went when I did get one or it was like, hey, can we run this agreement through a shell company, you know, in Abu Dhabi?
00:15:30.180 And then we'll allow you to do it after you sign the NDA.
00:15:32.440 And they're openly not even asking the questions of her and Psaki.
00:15:36.340 They both lied to our face.
00:15:38.100 They lied about his abilities.
00:15:40.260 They continue to lie.
00:15:42.020 And nobody says a word.
00:15:43.120 It's one thing, by the way, they're not even saying, well, we kind of saw it now.
00:15:46.300 They're sticking by those lies.
00:15:48.120 And Mark pointed this out earlier.
00:15:49.700 These are things that we all saw for ourselves.
00:15:52.400 So they're not even trying to come clean now and play it, do a tapper, which is, oh, but I didn't realize the extent of it before.
00:15:58.840 Right.
00:15:59.300 They're not even trying to make excuses.
00:16:00.660 They're sticking by the lies that they told then.
00:16:03.760 And that's going to be the headache in October.
00:16:06.500 She's got the same problem, Dan.
00:16:08.100 That Pete Buttigieg and others who are in the Obama cabinet, sorry, the Biden cabinet, are going to be facing, where she's going to have to answer for the lies she told.
00:16:17.220 We just pulled one.
00:16:18.120 I mean, we could be here all day with her defense of Biden.
00:16:20.640 He runs circles around me.
00:16:22.100 We can barely keep up with him.
00:16:23.640 But here's just one of the ones late in the tenure on cheap fakes.
00:16:28.760 They are cheap fakes video.
00:16:33.800 They are done in bad faith.
00:16:36.140 And in some of your news organization have have been very clear, have stressed that these right wing, the right wing critics of the president have a credibility problem because of the fact checkers have repeatedly caught them pushing misinformation, disinformation.
00:16:52.500 Unbelievable.
00:16:54.100 I say the same thing, though, that I said about the Tapper Thompson book.
00:16:59.540 Her job is to lie for the president.
00:17:01.500 It's unfortunate, but that's her job.
00:17:03.320 The reporters in that room should have said, no, our colleagues running those videos are not running cheap fakes or deep fakes.
00:17:10.920 They're running all that footage.
00:17:13.660 But look, it's not like, you know, Sean Spicer.
00:17:16.880 I've never heard Sean Spicer come out and be like every word I spoke as the as the press secretary for Trump was heartfelt and 100 percent accurate.
00:17:26.260 I have not heard him try to spin us like that.
00:17:28.220 He understands what that job was.
00:17:29.720 And so do we her trying to come out now and be like, I am a political independent and I see the corruption, Dan, of both parties.
00:17:38.000 And I will be your leader to the promised land of owning your own personal beliefs as opposed to just blind loyalty to these liars in office.
00:17:46.920 Yeah, I mean, you know, it has been cringe inducing on so many levels the last month or so.
00:17:52.140 Once Jake Tapper's book came out and you had Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, all these people who when asked, what did you know?
00:18:00.280 What did you see?
00:18:01.960 Literally, uh, uh, uh, and they tried to change the subject and moving forward.
00:18:08.640 Exactly.
00:18:09.280 When everybody knows and knew what was going on.
00:18:13.000 Now, this is going to come back up in October.
00:18:16.720 I think, Mark, you make a smart point.
00:18:18.400 If she already wrote this and it was before all the kind of media dust up that we've had now the last month, it'll be very interesting if she does dig in and try to convince people like Joe Biden still that all was well.
00:18:32.460 He should have never gotten out this ludicrous idea that he might have won.
00:18:37.020 I mean, I think we might have lost 47, 48 states.
00:18:41.180 I mean, the Senate would probably be 63 to, you know, uh, 37 or something of that nature.
00:18:47.960 So Dan, Dan, who's this book for then?
00:18:50.840 Like who you always have to think like, who's the constituency?
00:18:54.780 I mean, look, there's always a few, you know, Japanese soldiers on the island after the war ended that kept going there.
00:19:00.520 There are some in the Democratic base that, you know, want to never give an inch who think this is why we're talking about Joe Biden should all be about Trump and, you know, his mental capabilities.
00:19:10.820 And I don't know.
00:19:13.500 I think maybe she hopes she can, you know, buy a beach house or something if she sells enough books.
00:19:18.300 But to Sean's point, who would buy this?
00:19:22.560 I don't think.
00:19:23.300 And that's the thing.
00:19:23.900 I will tell you, I predict now that she doesn't hit 5,000 in sales.
00:19:27.800 Yeah.
00:19:27.980 I don't think anybody buys this.
00:19:29.780 No, because she doesn't have the access to know what really happened.
00:19:32.860 Well, I mean, she might sell a few copies if she, if she does name names and dimes and people out.
00:19:38.440 But I asked the same question about this book that I asked about most books, including ones by my friend.
00:19:42.520 What was the advance and how big is the first printing?
00:19:45.300 Because if they bet big on this, I think they're going to be disappointed.
00:19:48.600 Oh, well, and I will say this.
00:19:50.880 I've done a book with Hachette.
00:19:52.280 So I know this process.
00:19:54.360 And I will say I exactly I agree with everything that Mark just said.
00:19:57.360 They look at numbers very clearly on past sales.
00:20:00.820 They were very clear.
00:20:01.940 I mean, like, I'm not going to get into what my advance was.
00:20:04.360 But again, that's that's all predicated on that.
00:20:06.940 And I just don't see her being able to say I can sell this to to these people because I don't know that people who are pissed in the Democratic Party want to buy a book that that goes after John Kirby or Anita Dunn.
00:20:19.700 And that to me, that's inside baseball.
00:20:21.680 That's that's a book club, not a Sean's share screen and put up your book contract.
00:20:26.500 Yeah.
00:20:27.000 Which one?
00:20:27.660 I've done for the Hachette one.
00:20:29.520 We'd like to see it.
00:20:30.560 Yeah.
00:20:30.980 Look, she's never been an effective communicator.
00:20:33.760 That was the irony of her being chosen for this role.
00:20:36.520 She never, ever in the four years was able to get up there without reading, just reading whatever she'd written down before she got out there.
00:20:45.400 She doesn't have the ability to speak off the top of her head extemporaneously.
00:20:50.660 She's going to be a disaster on this book tour.
00:20:52.980 If anybody even mildly presses her, it's going to be really uncomfortable.
00:20:57.000 Hachette, you made a big mistake.
00:20:58.760 You could probably still get out of it.
00:21:00.060 I don't know, but I remember when I wrote my book, it came out in November of 2016, and the final changes had to be made by early August.
00:21:09.540 So that was a little bit of a window.
00:21:11.460 And if hers is coming out early October, she probably still can make some changes in the month of June to it.
00:21:17.280 And she should write down a bunch of changes, which read as follows.
00:21:21.180 Surprise.
00:21:21.880 I'm actually not an independent.
00:21:23.360 I'm still lying to you.
00:21:24.800 I'm still the same old Democrat partisan hack I've always been.
00:21:28.320 Yours truly, Kareem Jean-Pierre.
00:21:30.060 Okay, let's move on to the big, beautiful bill, which now the Democrats have come out with their own name for, the big, ugly bill, which is not clever.
00:21:38.460 And it doesn't work in an alliteration way.
00:21:40.780 Like, you've got to try harder.
00:21:42.180 Dan, tell them they have to try harder.
00:21:44.420 But what's happening around this bill is interesting because Elon came out and said this is an abomination, and he's going after it hard.
00:21:52.040 He said, like, I can't hold it in any longer.
00:21:54.700 I've got to say how I feel.
00:21:56.280 It's awful.
00:21:57.440 It's full of pork.
00:21:58.640 Look, I hate it.
00:22:00.320 And the White House is saying we know he doesn't like it, and really, Trump doesn't care is really what they're saying.
00:22:07.980 It's passed.
00:22:09.220 It's gotten through the House.
00:22:11.680 It hasn't yet passed the Senate.
00:22:13.460 But here's exactly what Musk posted yesterday.
00:22:17.140 I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore.
00:22:19.660 This massive, outrageous, pork-filled congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.
00:22:25.140 Shame on those who voted for it.
00:22:26.460 You know you did wrong.
00:22:27.840 You know it.
00:22:29.000 It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion, triple exclamation point, and burden American citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.
00:22:38.580 But Congress is making America bankrupt.
00:22:41.440 In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people, which in this particular case would mean virtually every single Republican in the House.
00:22:51.360 And so far, we believe virtually every single one in the Senate who are likely prepared to pass this thing, though that's slightly uncertain.
00:23:01.600 So what happens to the BBB?
00:23:04.820 Who would like to take that one?
00:23:08.260 I'll go.
00:23:09.040 No.
00:23:09.280 I think it passes.
00:23:10.120 I don't blame you.
00:23:10.520 I mean, look, in the Senate, look, there's two camps in the Senate right now.
00:23:14.280 You've got the spend more types, the Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, who want more assurances, especially on the Medicaid front.
00:23:21.180 And then you've got the sort of deficit debt group, which is four or five.
00:23:25.320 I mean, notably, Ron Johnson, Rand Paul, Rick Scott.
00:23:29.740 I think, look, I think that this thing squeaks it out like it's supposed to.
00:23:35.220 And then it goes back to the House.
00:23:36.260 So far, what I've found been comforted in is the Freedom Caucus, led by Andy Harris and several of those members, have not drawn a big line in the sand unless it's, hey, if you add more spending, we're going to have a problem.
00:23:49.280 So right now, I think we're in a pretty good place.
00:23:51.720 The bottom line is we have to extend those tax cuts.
00:23:54.200 And that's what's costing, quote, unquote, a lot of money.
00:23:56.820 The way Washington works is that they say tax cuts cost money.
00:24:00.960 So by extending the 2017 tax cuts, that is scored as a cost.
00:24:05.180 The second thing is, and we played this on the morning meeting this morning, right now, and I have the exact numbers here, that we spend $695 billion as a country on Medicare, $695 billion.
00:24:17.860 If we keep going down the path with the reconciliation, we're going to spend $835 billion.
00:24:24.040 That's a lot more.
00:24:25.740 In Washington, though, if you don't get as much as you want, that's called a cut.
00:24:29.160 The bottom line is $150 billion more in Medicaid is going to be spent under the House bill.
00:24:37.300 There is no cut in the bill.
00:24:39.220 And Republicans need to do a better job of articulating the importance of extending the tax cuts so that we don't have a tax increase.
00:24:46.980 And secondly, what we're doing to reduce control spending and hopefully reduce the deficit.
00:24:52.520 There's a bigger part of this with what they call the rescissions package, which is $9.5 billion in cuts.
00:24:58.140 That's too much.
00:24:59.540 With these guys, they need to—
00:25:02.480 That rescissions package, forget the name, but basically it just says, so far, only $9.4 billion of the Doge cuts are being codified.
00:25:10.560 But that's a pathetic amount.
00:25:12.520 He was supposed to cut $1 trillion.
00:25:15.200 Doge and Elon said they'd be cutting $1 trillion.
00:25:17.680 $9.4 billion?
00:25:19.140 Please, Congress spends that in the lunch hour.
00:25:20.980 Go ahead, Mark.
00:25:22.340 Look, Musk is mostly right on the merits.
00:25:25.920 And I get why Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fighting is a great story.
00:25:30.120 It's interesting, and understanding their relationship is interesting.
00:25:33.040 But unless Musk does more and a lot more, three realities that were true before he spoke out are still true.
00:25:40.040 The bill must pass.
00:25:41.640 He can't fail.
00:25:42.520 Failure is not an option, or the Trump presidency is in huge trouble.
00:25:45.860 So it will pass.
00:25:46.780 The two is that there's very few Republicans in the House and the Senate who might possibly vote no.
00:25:53.540 We're talking about, in both bodies, maybe 20.
00:25:56.700 And this—Musk didn't increase the number.
00:25:59.360 And so they still have to round up most of those 20.
00:26:02.220 And then lastly, the bill is not perfect.
00:26:05.040 They'll have to sell it as the best thing ever, but it's not perfect.
00:26:08.340 Some of Musk's criticisms are true.
00:26:10.060 There's other things that are wrong with the bill from a public policy point of view.
00:26:13.200 But they can't make it much better.
00:26:15.200 If they did what Elon said, it wouldn't pass, because the votes aren't there to do what he wants to do.
00:26:20.260 Because what he wants to do is interrupt the delicate balance that got it passed through the House and has it on track to pass the Senate.
00:26:27.740 Yeah, what he also wants to do is get his EV mandates put back in.
00:26:31.260 I mean, let's not forget the personal part of this, which is, I'm not happy because you guys screwed me.
00:26:36.700 Yeah, we're cutting all these green energy incentives that were very popular under Democrats, and Trump is not into green energy at all.
00:26:47.640 Go ahead, Dan.
00:26:48.640 Yeah, and, you know, he was very angry about this AI deal that was signed in the Middle East with Sam Altman as the lead, his kind of arch rival.
00:26:57.000 So he's got some grievances.
00:27:00.200 And I think, you know, so far, Megan, no one has gone to war with Donald Trump in a primary and won.
00:27:06.540 So unless Musk thinks that he can kind of square off with Donald Trump and defeat him in terms of proxies and primaries, we talked about this earlier this morning.
00:27:16.880 Like, I don't see any way that he actually moves the needle to have somebody say, I'm with Musk and not with Trump.
00:27:24.040 And I think you have the yeah, and you have the CBO score just came out that 10.9 million people would lose Medicaid.
00:27:30.420 So if you do what Musk wants, that number goes higher.
00:27:33.720 And, you know, one cards out the whole the whole pile collapses.
00:27:37.180 So I just don't see how it stopped.
00:27:39.900 The thing about the Elon threats politically, like when before last November, was they had the implicit backing of Big Daddy.
00:27:51.160 You know, like what was scary about that pairing was Elon's money and Trump's political might.
00:27:56.500 But now if forced to choose, as these Republicans in the House and or Senate may be may have to, they're going to listen to what Trump says, not what Elon says.
00:28:07.380 Trump is the one who can really hurt them, not Elon.
00:28:11.480 Hundred percent.
00:28:12.340 What we know now is Musk is good at business when he teams with Trump.
00:28:17.420 He's good at politics, but he's doesn't there's no indication he's good at politics by himself.
00:28:23.120 He funds it.
00:28:25.160 He pays for it.
00:28:26.060 I mean, that's like saying like he's it's like dinner.
00:28:29.360 He funded the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin and he lost.
00:28:34.560 He's not he's just not that good at politics.
00:28:36.260 He's good at a lot of stuff.
00:28:37.660 There's no indication he's particularly good at this.
00:28:40.400 That's right.
00:28:40.900 That's the thing.
00:28:41.380 So it's like and what he's really threatening here clearly is to vote against all these.
00:28:45.680 These are all Republicans.
00:28:46.560 The Democrats are all going to vote against this.
00:28:48.500 So he's he's what he's saying like they're all they all need to be voted out.
00:28:51.080 He's talking about Republicans.
00:28:51.900 So does he really want to spend all of his money getting Republicans out of the Senate and out of the House?
00:28:57.860 He hasn't gone that far around the bend.
00:28:59.700 So I think that's an empty threat.
00:29:01.160 And even if it's not, it's not going to scare these guys, because when Trump wants them to vote for this BBB, I think they're going to do it.
00:29:08.920 I will say this from Stephen Miller, who works for the president, deputy assistant.
00:29:13.360 He says the BBB is not an appropriations bill.
00:29:16.080 No, no.
00:29:16.580 Sorry.
00:29:16.760 This is not the part I wanted to read.
00:29:17.880 He writes the following.
00:29:19.360 The lefty CBO says extending the 2017 tax cuts, preventing their expiration, increases the deficit.
00:29:26.180 Some critics have seen this figure and claimed or implied the bill increases spending.
00:29:30.400 Even according to the CBO, the bill cuts spending over one point six trillion dollars.
00:29:37.000 So when a libertarian, e.g.
00:29:38.920 Rand Paul, attacks the deficit impact of the bill, they're attacking the tax cut.
00:29:43.560 Honestly accounted, extending current tax rates has zero deficit impact, which is why the bill, because of its spending cuts, reduces the deficit.
00:29:51.640 The bill has three principal sections, tax cuts, welfare reform and immigration and border security.
00:29:57.140 It is a dream bill. And really, that that piece of the border security is what is getting a lot of people on board, because Tom Holman has been jumping up and down, saying, I need more money.
00:30:08.480 If you really want me to start deporting people at the rates, you're saying I need more money.
00:30:12.380 And that's in here. So I think that piece of it will be very popular.
00:30:16.040 I still don't think it's going to change the deportation numbers dramatically.
00:30:19.440 Does anybody disagree with me?
00:30:22.320 Yeah, not dramatic, not dramatically, but incrementally and consistently.
00:30:26.920 I mean, you know, this is a four year project and and there's still lots of people they'd like to deport.
00:30:31.880 They haven't gotten yet to the sort of the tougher choices of categories in a mass way that they'll have to make.
00:30:37.060 But they certainly have they certainly could deport more people with more resources.
00:30:42.140 I mean, that's true.
00:30:43.380 Bottom line is, by the way, on this, it's a philosophy, right?
00:30:45.980 I mean, what what Joe Biden did was say, come into the country, don't come.
00:30:50.680 But if you do come, you're going to get a free hotel, free gift cards, free phone, a ton of money.
00:30:55.360 Right. It was it was a way of life.
00:30:57.240 What Trump has done is send a very strong signal that not only don't come, but if you come, we'll send you back.
00:31:02.320 And that has acted as a massive deterrent for further legal aid.
00:31:06.260 It's it's hindered, hindered the cartels and a lot of the other groups that had sort of persuaded people to pay hefty fees to come into to try to come to America.
00:31:16.180 And so Trump has really shifted the entire tone and tenor of immigration so that people know that our country does not have open borders.
00:31:24.360 We will not tolerate you coming over into our country.
00:31:26.680 There will be no opportunity and you will be sent back.
00:31:29.020 All right. So let me stay on the on the subject of immigration, illegal immigration, because there's a stunner of a story via the Daily Wire today.
00:31:37.760 It's it's amazing when you think back and Sean, you were there.
00:31:40.660 But you think back on the amount of coverage the Trump administration got, one point oh, on the family separation problem that was happening, how they found some families were being separated.
00:31:51.360 And that was that took up so much ink in 2017, 2018, less covered was the Biden administration's separation program.
00:32:00.840 And their reporting brings it down to one example.
00:32:05.160 But this is happening all over the country, sadly.
00:32:08.200 A 37 year old illegal named Wilson Manfredo Lopez Carrillo was arrested by the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office in Florida on May 22nd.
00:32:17.520 What did this guy, Wilson Manfredo Lopez Carrillo allegedly do?
00:32:22.400 He took in at least one 16 year old girl who herself was here illegally.
00:32:29.740 She was a so-called unaccompanied minor who came across the border without a parent.
00:32:36.380 And the Biden administration, rather than turning these children around or doing something to make sure that they were protected once here.
00:32:45.220 And they were here because of the open border and the invitation that you just outlined, decided to place them with, quote, loosely vetted sponsors who had absolutely no relation to them.
00:32:57.560 They were literally taking young girls and putting them in the homes of single illegal immigrant men without vetting them.
00:33:06.640 What could possibly go wrong?
00:33:08.240 Police said in the charging documents, the victim arrived in the U.S. in August of 2023 as a 16 year old.
00:33:14.680 Health and Human Services was in charge of these kids.
00:33:17.840 And they put her in this guy's home.
00:33:21.820 The victim, quote, reported three instances of sexual battery, all occurring in February of 2024.
00:33:27.540 They go on to say that the suspect, Lopez Carrillo, grabbed her, took her into his bedroom, removed her pants and underwear, proceeded to sexually batter her.
00:33:38.920 Right, police?
00:33:39.880 A second incident unfolded similarly with the man offering her $100 to keep quiet, which she refused.
00:33:45.980 She did not report the incidents to police initially due to fear of retribution from the guy, of course.
00:33:50.700 Redacted police statements suggest the adult woman who was in the house became suspicious and confronted Lopez Carrillo.
00:33:56.220 The victim was given three days to leave the house and sought refuge with a friend from the church.
00:34:01.100 Police say they recorded a call where the victim called Lopez Carrillo and asked why he had assaulted her when she'd been a minor.
00:34:08.900 He responded by attempting to justify his actions.
00:34:11.220 He did not deny the incidents.
00:34:12.480 He tried to downplay their significance.
00:34:13.840 It sounds like they've got this guy dead to rights.
00:34:15.500 Um, and then even she confronted him about the possibility of a pregnancy and he mentioned giving her a pill.
00:34:22.220 So it's, I mean, this guy is, he looks guilty to high heaven.
00:34:25.740 So now he's in jail and a judge has determined he is an illegal himself.
00:34:30.880 And, uh, the daily wire reporting that more than 120,000 of these unaccompanied alien children entered the country annually during the Biden administration.
00:34:39.060 A hundred and 20,000 as part of a loophole that let illegal immigrants stay in the country.
00:34:45.400 If they said they were under 18 and not with their parents, they write there was, there were no safe homes waiting to take in hundreds of thousands of children.
00:34:53.060 So the Biden administration began sending them to live in the homes of illegal immigrant adults who often were not related to them.
00:34:59.240 It was impossible to vet them since the sponsors were illegal themselves.
00:35:04.200 And since HHS is not a law enforcement agency, uh, and they go on to say that HHS, uh, officials used makeshift vetting, such as having sponsors just text a picture of a foreign passport into HHS.
00:35:21.180 But there was no way of knowing anything about them.
00:35:23.960 And, uh, most of them had never even been seen by a government official prior to the young girl or young boy being dropped off to them.
00:35:33.000 Alejandro Mayorkas said after the children were delivered to these so-called sponsors, the federal government was no longer responsible for them.
00:35:39.280 He claimed that stopping the trafficking of children for labor was outside of my responsibility as the head of DHS.
00:35:46.960 This is horrifying and I don't see the wall to wall coverage now of the consequences of doing this, nor at the time when we knew it was a problem.
00:35:58.900 And by the way, the Democrat party got behind it as part of their platform.
00:36:03.080 They thought this was such a grand idea.
00:36:05.900 Tell it to the 16 year old girl whose life has been changed forever.
00:36:08.360 Here's why this is infuriating for two reasons.
00:36:11.160 First of all, every administration's policies that impact people, particularly kids, need to be scrutinized.
00:36:17.920 And as you suggested, there was excessive coverage of the Trump policy in Trump 1.0, but there needed to be a lot and there was.
00:36:27.280 Infuriation number one, the policy continued.
00:36:30.840 The policy continued and no one in the administration resigned over it.
00:36:34.540 In fact, the resignations were largely people who thought they were too draconian in how they were treating immigrant people coming to the country illegally.
00:36:41.460 And the media is infuriating because because it's obvious that this is one example, but an important one of the inhumanity of the Biden immigration policy.
00:36:52.180 Having the open border, people dying on the way to get here because the border was open, the way these kids were treated.
00:36:57.420 It was an inhumane policy, and yet it was constantly said by the press, well, the Biden policy may be flawed, but at least it's not inhumane the way the Trump policy was.
00:37:06.340 Yeah, they said it was affirmatively humane.
00:37:08.380 And that was his stated goal in his executive orders, undoing the Trump immigration policies on day one, that we want a more humane immigration policy.
00:37:16.520 Correct.
00:37:16.840 Again, tell it to the young girls who are getting raped by their so-called sponsors.
00:37:20.660 Correct.
00:37:20.880 If you go back to why-
00:37:21.980 And just to say real quick, there's many other examples on the face of it.
00:37:25.520 You don't need lots of facts to know that the Biden immigration policy was inhumane.
00:37:31.360 The fact is, when we talk about family separation and Trump won, the reason that families were separated is that as young children, particularly women, girls, were brought over the border,
00:37:42.340 if the two adults or single adult couldn't identify them in a positive way as being their child, then they were separated to ensure that that person wasn't trafficking the young girl in particular, right?
00:37:55.280 That's happening so many times.
00:37:57.220 That was literally the reason why this was occurring, because we couldn't confirm that an individual, a young child, was who they said they were or that who the parent or the guardian said they said they were.
00:38:07.780 So part of it was for their exact safety.
00:38:09.700 This was the opposite of what Biden did, allowed them to come in and say whoever they wanted to say they were.
00:38:15.460 When you meet with border officials that I've done down in Arizona, they'll tell you stories of these young individuals, and not just kids, by the way, it's actually adults as well.
00:38:24.400 They are brought into this country through a variety of restaurants and other hospitality organizations, check, cash, and whatever, where they're saying that there's this funnel.
00:38:32.520 They get brought up, brought to cities and towns all over the country to perform these services, to work in different industries and different businesses that are run by cartels.
00:38:41.960 This is well known.
00:38:43.900 And what we were doing in the first Trump administration was trying to ensure that these people weren't bringing brought in for nefarious purposes.
00:38:51.240 Quite the opposite happened, as you described.
00:38:52.900 The Biden administration knew the same thing and said, let's take the guardrails off and just assume that they're all here for the right reasons, which we know by the very nature of how they're coming into the country isn't.
00:39:03.280 So what we're seeing right now, Dan, as Trump tries to clean up these messes that Joe Biden made, is the Democrats are out on the street, the left, out on the street, trying now to actively stop ICE as it goes from city to city and make arrests of people like this, Lopez Carrillo, trying to get them out of our country.
00:39:28.040 And we saw some extraordinary videotape yesterday out of Minneapolis.
00:39:31.760 It's South Minneapolis.
00:39:33.500 It was just before noon.
00:39:35.820 This is near Bloomington Avenue and East Lake Street, which is near the whole George Floyd-a-palooza problem, where ICE officers and DEA and Minneapolis police, not to mention local sheriff and FBI, were there looking for illegal immigrants.
00:39:51.260 And protesters came out, witnesses had called for people to show up, and they tried creating a human barrier.
00:39:58.400 The crowd grew within minutes.
00:39:59.940 They tossed traffic cones and trash cans in the way of law enforcement vehicles.
00:40:03.620 They shouted at the officers to go home.
00:40:06.120 We could see them laying hands on the cops and some of the videotape.
00:40:09.160 Let's watch some of what we saw.
00:40:10.760 A group right here trying to block the police from leaving once again.
00:40:17.120 They threw out a bunch of garbages.
00:40:18.920 Now people are trying to create a line out here to stop ICE and FBI.
00:40:27.220 That's your city.
00:40:30.480 So get the fuck out!
00:40:34.120 So that's what happened.
00:40:38.660 The mayor actually came out after the fact.
00:40:42.360 Jacob Fry, same guy who was kneeling at George Floyd's coffin with a mask on his face, said,
00:40:48.960 By the way, this actually wasn't related to immigration enforcement.
00:40:51.720 It was related to a criminal search warrant for drugs and money laundering.
00:40:56.000 So why don't you just calm down?
00:40:57.600 He was telling his own people.
00:40:59.260 But this is how they responded, and we're seeing in other cities, too, as ICE tries to go in there and do the job again of cleaning up the Biden mess.
00:41:07.560 Your thoughts on it, Dan?
00:41:09.320 Yeah, you know, two things come to mind.
00:41:11.400 The first is what you guys were talking about earlier in terms of the Biden administration and the press, kind of the Biden administration not accounting for these children, their terrible policy.
00:41:21.520 The press not wanting to talk about it.
00:41:23.480 The thought was that it was helping Democrats to push this under the rug, to not give it oxygen, when in fact it was hurting us.
00:41:31.500 Voters knew it.
00:41:32.520 Voters were hearing about it because there's alternative ways, you know, alternative media platforms like your own that are immensely popular.
00:41:39.020 So it wasn't being hidden.
00:41:40.520 It was actually festering and becoming a huge political problem until the party realized too late.
00:41:45.320 The second now is, you know, Democrats are all the rage right now in the party.
00:41:50.340 If you're in, you know, K Street or you're going to all these confabs they're holding about how do we win again, is we have to make changes.
00:41:57.980 We have to have ideas and we have to be bold.
00:42:02.260 The thing that's missing is nobody wants to take the first step.
00:42:06.280 This is not even 80-20, it's 90-10, right?
00:42:09.420 The public is overwhelmingly supportive of cracking down on drug dealers, of bad hombres, let's call them, and dealing with people who are here illegally.
00:42:19.240 It's one thing to say, I object, you know, in terms of like, just say you're on the Senate floor.
00:42:24.520 It's another thing to get in their way and stop federal agents from executing the law.
00:42:30.100 Like, that's politically insane.
00:42:32.400 And I think this is where some, yeah, somebody needs to step forward.
00:42:36.200 There's a whole host of issues this applies for and say, enough, we were wrong, they are right, and support cleaning up the broken illegal immigration system.
00:42:46.180 Yes, let's help, let's help.
00:42:48.380 I just want to give credit to the independent reporter, Nick Shirley, who was on the scene in Minnesota during that, was protesting and was doing the reporting there, so good for him.
00:42:57.400 Sorry, Mark, you were going to say?
00:42:58.980 Just some young reporter should put that video on an iPad and walk around Capitol Hill with a camera person and show that video to every Democratic member of Congress and say, what do you think?
00:43:09.380 Wouldn't that be telling?
00:43:10.340 So you should definitely go to Hakeem Jeffries and ask him, because he's out there right now trying to demand that ICE agents, who are now, in some cases, wearing masks, that they be identified.
00:43:26.720 He wants them to be unmasked, that they are masking to protect themselves and their families, which we'll get to in a second.
00:43:34.080 And Hakeem Jeffries well knows it, and nonetheless comes out and says this in Sot 9.
00:43:41.760 This is America.
00:43:44.100 This is not the Soviet Union.
00:43:45.740 We're not behind the Iron Curtain.
00:43:49.060 This is not the 1930s.
00:43:52.220 And every single one of them, no matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes, will, of course, be identified.
00:43:58.760 And here is what Homeland Security had said, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons had said 24 hours earlier, which made news everywhere.
00:44:08.080 It was on our AM update.
00:44:09.100 It was everywhere.
00:44:09.500 He knew.
00:44:09.980 He knew.
00:44:10.480 He's objecting to the rationale that Todd Lyons provided, Acting ICE Director, in this soundbite.
00:44:15.740 Here it is, Sot 10.
00:44:16.460 A lot of agencies were invited to come out two weeks ago in Los Angeles, where we ran an operation, where ICE officers were doxed.
00:44:26.120 So let's just say that again.
00:44:27.620 People are out there taking photos of the names, their faces, and posting them online with death threats to their family and themselves.
00:44:36.780 So I'm sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I'm not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line and their family on the line because people don't like what Immigration Enforcement is.
00:44:49.660 They are wearing those masks because we ran an operation with the Secret Service.
00:44:53.680 We arrested someone that was going online, taking their photos, posting their families, their kids' Instagram, their kids' Facebooks, and targeting them.
00:45:03.220 So let me ask, is that the issue here, that we're just upset about the masks, or is anyone upset with the fact that ICE officers' families were labeled terrorists?
00:45:15.500 DHS adding today, Sean, ICE officers now facing a 413% increase in assaults.
00:45:22.040 That's why they're wearing the masks.
00:45:23.460 Hakeem Jeffries, well aware of that fact.
00:45:26.980 Well, wait a second.
00:45:27.700 I thought that the Democrats loved people who wore masks.
00:45:30.540 They've been arguing for the last five years that everyone should be wearing a mask, and now they're anti-mask.
00:45:34.860 I didn't know that.
00:45:36.500 Secondly, they didn't seem to have a problem when all of the Antifa folks were running around vandalizing cities, destroying property, attacking folks.
00:45:44.120 They didn't seem to be concerned that the criminals were wearing masks, did they?
00:45:47.640 And I think the last thing is, and this is what you talked to Dan about, at the end of the day, why are they not siding with law enforcement, right?
00:45:54.400 This is so interesting to me.
00:45:55.880 When I started in politics, the big differences were philosophical in parties and policy.
00:46:02.140 We supported less government, lower tax.
00:46:04.980 The Democrats were more government, higher taxes, right?
00:46:07.920 Different approaches to different policies.
00:46:10.020 Now they're basically saying, we're on the side of criminals.
00:46:12.540 And I know that that sounds harsh to say, but at the end of the day, these people are in the country illegally.
00:46:18.600 So A, they broke the law, and in many cases have broken another law.
00:46:21.800 They're a member of a gang.
00:46:22.720 They're selling drugs.
00:46:23.480 They're accused of something else.
00:46:25.380 And the Democrats' concern is for the criminal, not the law enforcement individuals and their families who are putting their lives on the line to protect us and whose families are dealing with the consequences.
00:46:40.460 I never thought I'd come to a place in politics where one party would be for law and order and for protecting the country, and the other side would be for open borders and the criminals.
00:46:50.140 And for doxing the children of ICE agents?
00:46:53.360 I mean, Dan, these guys don't make a lot of money.
00:46:55.160 They don't have the kind of dough that would allow them to go out on the streets of America and protect us and also have a paid security guard back at home protecting their children because some lunatic leftist has doxed the family.
00:47:09.920 That's why they're wearing the masks, and yet they still offer identification to anybody when they're doing the arrest.
00:47:17.260 They make clear that they say who they are, what agency they're with.
00:47:20.600 It's not like they're trying to fool people that they're not ICE agents.
00:47:23.680 They're just not showing their individual identities because of this.
00:47:26.520 Yeah, look, it's complete insanity.
00:47:30.460 I mean, I think you can have the political argument about how are we going to treat the 20 million people who are here, right?
00:47:38.960 I think everyone, Trump deserves tremendous credit for stopping the inflow at the southern border, right?
00:47:44.740 It started at the end of the Biden administration.
00:47:46.800 It did.
00:47:47.460 Trump accelerated and has gotten it almost down to zero.
00:47:50.440 So now the question is, what do you do with the 20 million people here, right?
00:47:53.720 And I think some of them are truly, like, good citizens whose kids are in Little League and they own the local, you know, pizza stand or whatever.
00:48:01.740 What do you do with those people?
00:48:02.940 And then there are the people who are bad actors that we need to deal with.
00:48:06.380 That's a public policy conversation that should be having on the airwaves and, you know, in newspapers.
00:48:12.400 To get in the way of federal law enforcement is insane, right?
00:48:17.740 I support the New York NYPD.
00:48:19.420 They are trying to clean up New York City, right?
00:48:21.520 Are all of them perfect?
00:48:22.980 No, okay?
00:48:24.160 But as a rule, they're doing their job and they're trying their best.
00:48:27.640 You want to debate Donald Trump on it?
00:48:29.560 Fine.
00:48:29.960 But don't touch the agents.
00:48:31.820 Don't try to interfere with what they're doing.
00:48:34.100 Just as we said on January 6th, Capitol Police were, you know, trying to protect the Capitol.
00:48:39.100 We can't turn around and say, you know, go after these people.
00:48:42.680 It's insanity.
00:48:44.000 Can I just say this, politically speaking.
00:48:45.540 Policy.
00:48:46.520 Politically, though, Hakeem Jeffries is the leader of House Democrats.
00:48:50.060 He's putting them in a box.
00:48:51.440 It's one thing of AOC spouting off.
00:48:53.320 She does that all the time and not everyone has to care.
00:48:55.500 She's not in a position of leadership.
00:48:56.780 But when Hakeem Jeffries says what he said about law enforcement, every rank and file Democrat, every candidate for office that they're trying to get to run has to answer for that and has to understand where the position of the party is.
00:49:10.640 He's really screwing his own caucus when he does stuff like that.
00:49:13.840 Well, and that's, you know, I'll just say this quickly, Megan.
00:49:16.460 The problem Hakeem has is he's terrified of the base.
00:49:19.740 Nancy Pelosi was of the base.
00:49:21.600 The base trusted her.
00:49:22.800 They gave her rope to kind of move the party to the middle to try to win elections.
00:49:26.340 Hakeem's problem is he does not have the base.
00:49:30.560 And so, Sean, to your point, I bet in that in that caucus meeting, the majority of the party is saying WTF, Hakeem.
00:49:39.300 Like, what are you doing to us?
00:49:41.000 Because now we have to go home.
00:49:42.580 That is a fringe element.
00:49:43.800 Thank God, I believe, in our party.
00:49:45.880 But he makes it seem like they're the majority.
00:49:48.900 Right.
00:49:49.200 So you're saying the base is still that the base is normal or the base is not?
00:49:53.400 I can't like I can't figure out within the Democrat Party whether they're still normies or they've been completely taken over by the radical left.
00:50:00.080 Unfortunately, it may be the latter, but we're working on changing that.
00:50:04.280 We got a new tank.
00:50:05.040 All right.
00:50:06.520 There's one man who may be ready to take up that mantle.
00:50:11.480 You guys all know him.
00:50:12.200 His name is Rahm Emanuel.
00:50:13.240 We'll talk about what his plans seem to be after this quick break.
00:50:16.800 More with Mark, Sean, and Dan.
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00:51:57.940 All right, guys.
00:51:59.700 Let's spend a minute on some foreign policy issues, because there's a shocking, although not, story involving some Chinese nationals here in the United States in the press today.
00:52:09.000 You know, you hear this stuff, it's like straight out of a spy movie.
00:52:11.540 You can't really believe this crap goes on, but it does.
00:52:14.040 And the FBI is weighing in on it, Kash Patel in particular.
00:52:18.080 Here's the story.
00:52:19.600 Citing here, information from the New York Times and the Department of Justice.
00:52:22.920 Two people, Young Quinn Jian, 33, and Zun Yong Lu, 34, who are Chinese citizens, have been charged in a criminal complaint with conspiracy smuggling goods into the U.S., false statements, and visa fraud,
00:52:37.220 according to the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, Jerome F. Gorgon, Jr.
00:52:41.840 It appears that the male half of this, Mr. Lu, has fled back to China, so he's probably not going to be facing justice anytime soon.
00:52:50.500 But the female half of this couple, Young Quinn Jian, is in a whole lot of trouble.
00:52:55.060 The FBI arrested her in connection with allegations related to the pair's smuggling into America a fungus called Fusarium graminarium, Fusarium graminarium,
00:53:09.900 which scientific literature classifies as a potential agro-terrorism weapon.
00:53:15.160 Ms. Jian was arrested and booked in the federal courthouse in Detroit.
00:53:18.520 They were in a romantic relationship.
00:53:20.260 She's 33, he's 34.
00:53:22.740 U.S. authorities say when he arrived in the country carrying small bags of the fungus,
00:53:28.500 which causes a disease that can cripple wheat, barley, maize, and rice, not to mention make animals and humans extremely ill,
00:53:36.980 they were getting it on.
00:53:39.000 And he tried to lie.
00:53:41.600 A sharp-eyed customs agent at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport found the baggies.
00:53:46.180 So right on, sir or madam.
00:53:49.520 And Mr. Lu first denied that they were his.
00:53:52.300 That's it, Vanessa, that's not mine.
00:53:54.540 And eventually admitted to smuggling them so that he could conduct research on his little baggies
00:54:01.560 at the University of Michigan laboratory where his gal pal, Ms. Jian, was working.
00:54:06.540 According to the criminal complaint, he stated that while he was in the U.S.,
00:54:10.980 quote, he would have free access to the lab at the University of Michigan on some days.
00:54:15.080 Other days, his girlfriend would give him access to the lab to conduct his research.
00:54:19.640 The complaint also offers evidence of another instance, an earlier one,
00:54:22.840 in which the pair may have smuggled material.
00:54:25.520 Messages exchanged, listen to this, between the two,
00:54:28.440 indicate she may have successfully hidden material in her shoe on a 2022 trip, according to the complaint.
00:54:36.820 Other messages cited in the complaint suggest that in early 2024, Ms. Jian arranged for another associate in China
00:54:43.060 to mail a book with a plastic baggie hidden inside.
00:54:48.260 They also say they have a written pledge they found of hers,
00:54:52.300 pledging loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.
00:54:56.240 This fungus can be not only very damaging to winter wheat crops,
00:55:00.220 but can cause vomiting, liver damage, and reproductive defects in humans and livestock.
00:55:04.680 Kash Patel, head of the FBI, saying on X,
00:55:08.040 this case is a sobering reminder that the CCP is working around the clock to deploy operatives and researchers
00:55:13.420 to infiltrate American institutions and target our food supply,
00:55:16.460 which would have grave consequences, putting American lives and our economy at serious risk.
00:55:21.760 Your FBI will continue working tirelessly to be on guard against it.
00:55:25.300 I mean, I feel, I feel about this, like the, the way I feel about a lot of women in my Connecticut town,
00:55:38.240 where they talk endlessly about their fellow female friends,
00:55:42.240 more like their frenemies than that they're friends.
00:55:45.720 And we seem to want a relationship with China.
00:55:49.720 We seem not to want to recognize that they are out to undermine us at every turn
00:55:54.180 and they're buying up our aggro and they're, they've taken over our movie making industry,
00:55:59.220 that they've bought large portions of big sports like the NBA.
00:56:02.920 And we want to pretend that this is fine, but they actually are out to get us, Sean,
00:56:08.060 and not just out to like take advantage of us,
00:56:11.100 but like potentially to kill us and poison our food supply, which is a problem.
00:56:16.080 Yeah. Well, look, that's the, that's the fundamental thing.
00:56:19.840 China is an existential threat to our military and economic wellbeing.
00:56:24.360 Full stop. They do it with TikTok.
00:56:26.680 You mentioned our agribusiness, our tech transfers, stealing our IP.
00:56:30.660 I don't know why anybody needs to be reminded of this.
00:56:34.100 They are our enemy and I'll give them credit.
00:56:36.300 They stepped up their game, right?
00:56:37.740 With COVID it was like, Hey, let's develop this in a Wuhan lab and send it over this time.
00:56:41.820 They're like, Hey, let's just bring the fungus straight to America.
00:56:44.340 Right. I just, this is unbelievable that we're still trying to figure out how to have a dialogue
00:56:49.980 with them. They are our enemy. Now on a funny side, on a lighter note, Megan, I do,
00:56:55.660 when I see stories like this, I just imagine having to go in and brief the president on this
00:56:59.840 and just having to be like, Sean, you got to make it clear. There will not be a fungus among us.
00:57:04.200 Like that would be the, if there was a light part of it, but there's a serious,
00:57:08.460 there's a serious piece of this that I just, we keep trying to have this discussion about them
00:57:14.220 being a responsible stakeholder and a win-win solution. They don't want to have that.
00:57:20.780 They're, they want world domination. We stand in our way. Like, just to be clear,
00:57:25.020 this fungus was coming over to take out our ag industry, to wipe out our crops. If this doesn't
00:57:32.240 come through at some point after COVID, nothing will. And I'm also thinking guys about the Marco
00:57:38.600 Rubio policy of you're out of here. You're over here on a student foreign visa. And I have any
00:57:43.500 reason to suspect your interests are not consistent with those of us foreign policy. You're out. And he
00:57:49.540 got all sorts of blowback for that Mark. But you look at these examples, like the university of
00:57:53.660 Michigan, one of our best universities wide open to these Chinese nationals, like, come on in and
00:57:58.340 bring your fungus. Why don't you smuggle it in your shoe? Terrific. And bring your boyfriend too.
00:58:03.220 I love living in the freest country in the history of the planet. And I think it's important to
00:58:09.620 understand and have relationships even with our most bitter rivals, but they must just laugh at us in
00:58:16.080 Beijing. They, you talk about comic relief. They must just say, wait, wait, we just sent them over
00:58:21.280 in the university of Michigan, set them up in a lab and they brought the fungus there and they're going to
00:58:24.940 be able to, I mean, they just must laugh at us. And the balance between our security and freedom
00:58:30.320 is, it goes back to the founding of the country. It's, it's super complicated, but there has to be
00:58:36.220 a reevaluation of the ease with which we're allowing Chinese nationals with loyalty to the communist
00:58:42.120 party and spies to just waltz right into the United States, travel around the country, do whatever they
00:58:47.680 want. If we try to spend spies to China, which we do, they make it a lot tougher for them.
00:58:52.880 Yeah. Well, you even just look at the student visas and this has come up down in the context
00:58:56.620 of Trump's war with Harvard at the moment, where he says he's trying to crack down on anti-Semitism.
00:59:01.540 But, uh, we had a guest on recently pointing out that Harvard's, you know, it's at war, yes,
00:59:06.040 with Jewish students, but it's at war with the West, with Western ideals. And, um, we were talking
00:59:11.340 about that, you know, how they're cracking down on, uh, foreign nationals at Harvard, which now are
00:59:15.560 almost 30% of the student body because they'll pay top dollar and Harvard loves it. So we're taking
00:59:23.980 in half of China, educating them at our most elite universities. I mean, truly university of Michigan,
00:59:30.620 Harvard, I'm sure the list looks very much the same at all of these top schools. And then saying,
00:59:35.520 thanks so much for being here while we cash their checks, not wondering or monitoring whether
00:59:41.240 they're hardcore anti-Semitic, whether they're part of the Muslim brotherhood, whether they're
00:59:46.920 smuggling deadly fungi into the country that they're going to use to cripple American farmers.
00:59:51.700 Like our vetting program doesn't seem to be all that great. Yeah. And of course there was this
00:59:56.120 story. I think it was, uh, over the winter about the student, the Chinese students at the University
01:00:00.420 of Minnesota who were caught with drones around Norfolk Naval base, flying them over at night and
01:00:05.940 and said they got lost. It's a long way from Minnesota to Norfolk, uh, with what they were
01:00:11.440 doing. I've actually kind of come around on this. When, when, when the Trump administration first
01:00:15.720 started, my, my thought was like, okay, there may be a few bad actors, but you know, we are an open
01:00:20.360 country and, and shutting off students from around the world to come here. You know, they start
01:00:24.880 businesses, et cetera. It has really become apparent that the volume of Chinese students who are tied to
01:00:30.660 the communist party, who are the children of members of the communist party who have to go back
01:00:35.880 and serve in the government. It, it is concerning. And to Mark's point, and Sean said it too, the way
01:00:42.120 they've, they steal, uh, intellectual property, the way they've been accused of, of working with
01:00:47.660 universities and harvesting some of the nascent technologies that are being, you know, incubated
01:00:53.200 in those universities, something has to be done. I mean, they are a threat to us. We are trying to
01:00:59.440 decouple, uh, you know, our businesses from there and we need to do something about this. And I think
01:01:05.400 there's bipartisan support for it, by the way, I did Democrat, you know, Obama tried it. Trump in
01:01:10.680 his first term, Biden all talked about this pivot. If Trump were to really say like, this is going to
01:01:16.960 be the main focus of my next three years, I think you get a lot of Democrats that would, that would
01:01:20.920 completely agree with them. Wow. You know what? It's let's make America American again. That's,
01:01:25.860 that's the push. Um, I want to say one thing on the deportations while we're on the subject of
01:01:30.560 student visas, uh, and other visas on that Mohammed Solomon case that we've been covering out of
01:01:36.720 Boulder, Colorado, where that guy lit a bunch of Jewish people and others supporting the American
01:01:43.460 and Israeli hostages that had been taken by Hamas. He's, um, in for a world of hurt in the criminal
01:01:49.560 justice system. He's facing a federal hate crime charge. He's facing 16 state charges, including
01:01:53.640 attempted murder. And now, um, after Marco Rubio said, by the way, if you're here and you're not
01:02:00.620 legal and you've got a family that's here on visas, you commit some sort of active terrorism,
01:02:05.200 everyone's going, you're all out. And that's what they're doing. They arrested ice did all of his
01:02:10.340 family members and they're in federal custody right now and facing expedited removal. I doesn't,
01:02:15.420 it's not clear to me that they're here illegally. I can't tell with it, but the Trump administration
01:02:19.120 doesn't care. Your family member is a terrorist who tried to kill a bunch of people. You're here
01:02:25.640 on a temporary provision slip at best. You're out. Go ahead, Sean. No, I just, I think that I said this
01:02:32.140 earlier, but I just don't, to me, whether it's the, the antisemitism that's run rampant on college
01:02:38.120 campuses and now is manifesting itself in, in the horrible incident that happened in Washington DC
01:02:43.120 and now in Colorado, whether it's how we're handling China, there's an element, which it's not
01:02:48.720 ideological. This isn't a conservative thing or a liberal thing. There's common sense.
01:02:53.480 The idea that you have to go, gosh, is it a good policy or a bad policy to let your sworn enemies
01:02:58.920 into your country? Is it a good idea or a bad policy to let people who are trafficking women
01:03:04.340 and children into the country? Is it a good idea to let people who are trafficking drugs into the
01:03:09.260 country or to back law enforcement or to stamp out antisemitism? It should not be ideological.
01:03:15.420 This is common sense. And when Trump talks about this and says, I'm for common sense,
01:03:20.600 he's right. I cannot believe that there are ideological breakdowns on these issues.
01:03:25.260 The notion that our sworn enemy post COVID is literally saying, oh, I just happened to bring
01:03:31.760 a fungus into my shoe. And we're like, guys, let's not jump to conclusions here.
01:03:35.420 I feel like that moment after Wuhan where everyone's like, how could you possibly think it came from a
01:03:40.540 biology lab in Wuhan that makes these kind of COVID? I mean, like, how dumb are we that we
01:03:46.480 have not learned our lesson? There's two kinds of Americans now. There's one that says,
01:03:50.260 this guy's got four kids and a wife in the United States, get them out. And then there's a kind that
01:03:55.700 says, what's their immigration status? What's the law say? What's the precedent? When's their due
01:04:00.640 process? When's their hearing? The poor kids, right? That's a division.
01:04:04.800 That is, you're right. But our side, which is the former, is winning. I mean,
01:04:11.100 the more and more examples we get of these radicals in our country, whether they're lighting
01:04:14.720 people on fire or they're smuggling in fungi to take down our agriculture, I think people have just
01:04:21.800 had it. They've had it. So those people who are out there harassing the ICE agents are in a distinct
01:04:27.060 minority. One other point on foreign policy now, you know, Trump, of course, ran for office saying he
01:04:32.020 could settle the Ukraine war in 24 hours. He now says he was being facetious. It hasn't happened.
01:04:36.920 And it seems near intractable. I mean, it just Trump is learning the hard way that Putin is
01:04:42.000 just a very stubborn actor and he wants what he wants. And he's not easily manipulated,
01:04:47.060 not with flattery, not with praise, not really with anything. And you can sense Trump's frustration
01:04:52.900 because he thought maybe we can make a deal that works for him economically that will get him off of
01:04:57.080 his rabid focus on expanding mother Russia. And he's learning that it's just doesn't work that way
01:05:02.360 in Russia. It's just, they're a very different minded people. Um, at the same time, he's trying
01:05:07.540 to strike this deal with Iran where he thinks he can get them to agree not to pursue a nuclear weapon
01:05:12.860 in exchange for us. Well, like not bombing them and potentially cooperating with them on some things.
01:05:17.680 And he just posted the following on true social. I just finished speaking by telephone
01:05:23.480 with president Vladimir Putin of Russia. The call lasted approximately one hour, 15 minutes.
01:05:28.020 We discussed the attack on Russia's docked airplanes by Ukraine and also various other
01:05:32.760 attacks that have been taking place by both sides. It was a good conversation, but not one that will
01:05:36.940 lead to immediate peace. President Putin did say, and very strongly, he will have to respond to the
01:05:41.480 recent attack on the airfields. We also discussed Iran and the fact that time is running out on Iran's
01:05:46.540 decision pertaining to nuclear weapons, which must be made quickly. I stated to president Putin that Iran
01:05:51.700 cannot have a nuclear weapon. And on this, I believe we were in agreement. President Putin
01:05:55.860 suggested he will participate in the discussions with Iran and that he could perhaps be helpful
01:06:00.080 in getting this brought to a rapid conclusion. It's my opinion that Iran has been slow walking
01:06:04.000 their decision on this very important matter. And we will need a definitive answer in a very short
01:06:07.540 period of time. Look, I don't know what's going to happen on Ukraine, but if Putin will help us
01:06:12.300 on the Iran problem, that's a plus. And we should be finding some areas where we can cooperate
01:06:20.240 with Russia as opposed to just treating them like they are enemy number one, which they really have
01:06:25.800 never, well, not never, but haven't recently been to the United States. What do you make of the truth,
01:06:31.880 Sean? Look, I appreciate, I really do. What President Trump is so sincere when he talks about getting
01:06:38.840 peace. He really, like I've seen him up close. He means it. And I appreciate that about him. I really
01:06:44.220 like how he wants that state back. He was so proud and rightly so of the four years that he had in
01:06:50.680 office initially where we really had a steady state around the world. Russia hadn't annexed or attacked
01:06:57.260 any land in four years, which wasn't the case prior. North Korea had settled down. China,
01:07:03.380 Hamas wasn't going the way it was now after Israel. So I appreciate everything he's doing,
01:07:08.880 but Iran is a sworn enemy. Just listen to what they say, death to America. Like I get everyone
01:07:15.520 wants to get a deal with them, but they can't be trusted and they want to kill us. So they'll kind
01:07:20.000 of, for those, you know, like as they would say at Shark Tank, for those reasons, I'm out. I do think
01:07:24.700 that on the Russia thing, again, I appreciate what President Trump's trying to do here, but Putin
01:07:30.000 isn't just stubborn. He's evil. And the man wants to do bad things. And I think we've said, Hey,
01:07:34.640 the clock is out. We've given you some time. We'll try to get there. At some point we have no
01:07:39.220 trend, no choice, but to really isolate you and feel the consequences of this really start putting
01:07:43.400 economic sanctions, not just on Russia, but on those that they do. He doesn't seem worried about
01:07:47.640 those shot. I get it. Trump's already said we might drop secondary sanctions, meaning we're going to
01:07:53.220 sanction all the countries that stay in business with you. And Putin seems to be like, I'm good.
01:07:57.980 Yeah. But, but we'll see what happens if he really does. I just think that Putin has shown his cards.
01:08:02.840 He's not interested in a deal. The best deal that he ever was going to get was offered by Donald
01:08:07.300 Trump to achieve a lasting peace. And he didn't take that. So at some point you, you walk away
01:08:11.980 and say, all right, now I'm going to show you what we're willing to do. But on Iran, I'm sorry.
01:08:16.860 What does that look like? Walk away is a win for Putin. If it's walk away from Ukraine, go ahead,
01:08:20.640 Mark. No, no. Walk away with sanctions. I'm sorry, just to be clear. I want full and secondary sanctions
01:08:25.740 on them to isolate them, to, to really sort of make him sweat it because his people, when they,
01:08:30.880 the only way feel he'll feel this is if his own people start rising up and they will feel the
01:08:35.300 economic consequences of full sanctions. I've got a new program. You may or may not have heard
01:08:40.200 of it, Megan, called Next Up. It's amazing. Everyone loves it. Thank you. I did an interview
01:08:45.440 with David Ignatius, the Washington Post columnist who knows as much about this war, I think, as anybody
01:08:49.540 on the planet. And he's been to Ukraine many times and he's very pessimistic about what could
01:08:55.580 possibly happen, right? We can, we can talk about scenarios, but there really doesn't seem to be a
01:09:00.540 positive scenario. There doesn't seem to be a best case for Ukraine or for the West, because right
01:09:05.100 now Putin's not feeling the heat on the economy. He's not feeling the heat from public opinion.
01:09:09.940 He's not feeling the heat for a shortage of, of men to send to the war. And those were the three
01:09:14.760 areas that were the, the, the West theory of the case was Putin will eventually start to feel the
01:09:19.700 heat in one or more of those. He's not. And he can talk about sanctions, but Putin doesn't want
01:09:25.700 to settle. Putin wants to win. Putin wants Ukraine to be a vassal state to him. So I don't know where
01:09:33.700 it's going to go. I do know that it's troubling for people can still that Donald Trump is friendly
01:09:39.640 to Vladimir Putin. And I get his posture. He's, he'll talk to anyone. He'll talk to North Koreans.
01:09:45.180 He'll talk to Iranians. I think that's the only rational posture, but there's a, there's a lack
01:09:50.100 of leverage now, which is frustrating for all Americans, I think, and for Europeans. And it's
01:09:55.420 particularly frustrating for some that the president talks in a favorable way about Putin. I know it's a
01:10:01.340 tactical thing, at least in part, but right now I don't see what his next play is. And it's troubling
01:10:06.700 because there's, as David Ignatius said, there's a real possibility that between now and the fall,
01:10:11.700 Putin will do substantial damage, substantial damage to Ukraine as if he hasn't already done
01:10:17.700 a lot. And then there's the question, Dan, about whether if he's leaning into having Putin help him
01:10:22.840 settle an Iran deal, whether he's prepared to sanction Putin at all on the non-cooperation when
01:10:29.820 it comes to settling Ukraine. Yeah. And I wonder if Putin didn't preview what his response is. And
01:10:35.460 there's an agreement like, Hey, don't, don't, don't overreact, you know, United States. And
01:10:39.940 I'll be curious. I mean, to Mark's point there, what leverage we have over Putin is really not very
01:10:47.700 much. I think other than, I don't think sanctions would make a difference. I think the only thing that
01:10:51.940 would really make a difference is to fully arm Ukraine with, you know, hundreds of billions of
01:10:57.160 dollars more of weaponry, but there's little appetite in, in our country for that. I'm not
01:11:03.560 sure the Europeans are capable of it. It's what I personally would love to see, but I don't think
01:11:10.240 Trump will go there. And then the question is like, do you let Ukraine disappear on your watch?
01:11:15.500 That's a tough pill to swallow. But, but Dan, what you just said though, that response thing,
01:11:19.920 Megan, you read the truth. That's critical. What, what they've already, I mean, basically Trump's
01:11:25.480 acknowledging that Putin saying, I got to do something. I got to fight back. And, and the
01:11:29.660 breadth and depth of that response is going to be critical because Dan's right. If what was
01:11:35.960 telegraphed, right? Did Trump say, here are the red lines. You cannot go after civilians. You can't
01:11:40.280 go. I mean, like where, where is that line that hopefully was put in place? Because I get it.
01:11:45.580 Everybody cheered the strike the other day and I get it. I was excited to see Ukraine show some prowess,
01:11:50.260 some strategic, uh, you know, insight into, uh, the long-term planning that, that they're capable
01:11:56.720 of. But this was, there was no way that Putin wasn't going to fight back. He can't, he'd be
01:12:01.960 humiliated if he didn't. We know that. And so how he responds and, and, and what he hits, Dan's
01:12:08.420 absolutely right. This is going to be, to me, we may have just taken a big step backwards, unfortunately.
01:12:13.620 Hmm. You can feel it. It's like Trump has good faith and really thinks that he's the ultimate
01:12:19.260 deal, uh, maker, but this is just, I mean, it's Vladimir Putin, you know, I feel like I know the
01:12:24.780 guy and I actually disagree with you, Sean. I don't think he's evil. I'm not defending his character,
01:12:28.620 but I do think he's just very strategic and he's got one goal and that it really is to restore
01:12:33.200 mother Russia to her former glory and a mass territory. And he doesn't view it in terms of like
01:12:40.100 good and bad and innocence and non-innocence. He views it in terms of what's best for his people,
01:12:46.140 his country. Um, which I do, I mean, I see it's like splitting hairs in some ways, right? And I'm
01:12:51.260 fully cognizant of the damage that he's done to women and children and civilians in Ukraine.
01:12:55.460 I just think if you ask me what I think is in his head, it's not some maniacal joy of killing or,
01:13:02.240 or, um, sociopathic absence of care. It's a goal. It's he's goal oriented in a way that he thinks,
01:13:10.100 is very justified and will restore something wonderful and important to his own people who
01:13:15.420 he's singularly focused on, uh, in any event. I mean, maybe you could make the same kind of
01:13:19.560 arguments about Adolf Hitler, but I just see him. I respectfully, I respectfully go with murderous
01:13:24.860 sociopath. Well, I, again, I just, I don't disagree with the goal part of it, but I will say that when
01:13:30.600 you kill innocent people in, in the, in the way that he has done it and to the extent that he's done
01:13:37.200 it, I don't really care. I just think that there's, you've got to have an element of just raw evil in
01:13:43.060 you that you think that that's a way to achieve your goal. Hmm. Um, okay. So we're not going to
01:13:49.200 solve that one, but I do have something fun for us to go back to guess who just weighed in on her
01:13:53.860 own book, Kareem Jean-Pierre. She's apparently watching the Megan Kelly show live on Sirius XM
01:13:59.040 Triumph channel listening. And she, by the way, you better have her on after what you did to tap
01:14:03.780 after that interview with Tapper, please. I will just say this. I want this so bad. I will. I'm,
01:14:09.840 I'm endorsing the Megan Kelly interview with Kareem Jean-Pierre. I just asked it to be a special
01:14:15.720 pay-per-view episode. Yeah. I mean, at least Tapper had the guts to come here. I don't think
01:14:20.520 she's got the guts to come here. She's not, she's not strong enough, but she's welcome anytime.
01:14:24.920 Um, here is what she is saying now on Instagram. Watch. But since I have left the people that come
01:14:33.500 up to me, strangers that come up to me just across the country as I'm traveling and sometimes right in
01:14:39.780 my neighborhood at a grocery store, supermarket, airport, my daughter's school, the number one
01:14:44.980 question they ask me is Kareem, how do we get out of this? How do we protect our democracy? How do we
01:14:50.720 protect vulnerable communities among us? What do we do next? Cause we don't have answers here.
01:14:56.900 That's what they ask me. And this is my answer. And what I mean by that is in an era of misinformation,
01:15:04.660 disinformation, the regressiveness of social policy, what we're seeing a fake book or the actual book,
01:15:10.380 what I had decided to do. And I really have thought long and hard about this is to follow my own compass.
01:15:17.180 Oh Lord. I wonder if she's going to run for office. I wonder if this is all teed up for the fall to get
01:15:24.300 into a primary. Is she a DC resident or she live in Maryland or I thought New York. Somebody better
01:15:30.060 bring me the smelling salt. What? What did you just say, Dan? I do. I mean, I'm hearing that message.
01:15:38.640 It makes me think she is thinking of running for office. This book is her launch. But is she,
01:15:43.780 but did she leave the democratic party? Cause if she did, she'd have to run for office as an
01:15:46.980 independent. This is the big one, Elizabeth. This is the big one. Elizabeth, I'm coming home.
01:15:53.000 By the way, if you are looking for answers, if you're looking for answers to anything in
01:15:58.540 Corinne John Pierre's book, it's the equivalent of looking for like medical advice at a home Depot.
01:16:04.800 You will not find it. Okay. But was she holding like a fake book with empty pages on the,
01:16:09.380 and the cover or is that, is the book party? She knows how to do that. Well, fake book with
01:16:13.540 he lives in Queens. You're right. Good point. It's all my, but yeah, you raise a good point.
01:16:19.620 Why would she leave the democratic party to run as an independent? Why? I mean, it would
01:16:23.620 cause mayor Adams is like, cause she's looking at the, the Eric Adams political strategy.
01:16:30.120 Great job here. I mean, I realize we have like Jasmine Crockett, Maisie Hirono and other absolute
01:16:35.960 morons in our, in our Congress, but she is too dumb to hold office. We cannot keep playing down
01:16:44.900 to the lowest common denominator. These people actually do have a little bit of power. They
01:16:49.940 must be stopped. The candidacy must die in its crib. That's all that there is to say,
01:16:54.860 but she cannot have a political career. No, or AOC. I was just looking to see, cause AOC is part of
01:17:02.260 Queens. I was just looking up here quickly. Who, who, who else represents part of that district?
01:17:07.040 Stay tuned. Yeah. That would be spectacular. Actually. I would love to watch those two. I mean,
01:17:13.380 AOC can run circles around Kareem Jean-Pierre when it comes to her oratory, her rhetorical skills.
01:17:18.840 And she's actually tried to do some things as a Congresswoman. Kareem Jean-Pierre is just,
01:17:23.400 all she's going to do is get up there and say, I'm a first, I'm a first, the first black and the
01:17:27.400 first lesbian and the first woman ever to hold this job or ever to run against AOC in this particular
01:17:33.260 district. I don't know. That only gets you so far. Good luck with that, madam. Okay. Somebody who does
01:17:38.860 appear qualified to run for president, I don't know that he's going to do it. And I don't know
01:17:45.920 that he could win, but he's the first one who's possibly raising his hand, who has interested yours
01:17:51.800 truly. I don't care about any of the rest of them. But I do think Rahm Emanuel is an interesting name
01:17:58.540 to have in the mix. And I'll tell you what I find interesting about him. He's strong. He's not one
01:18:04.760 of those wussy, pathetic, soy boy Democrats who you're like, ew, what is that? That's not even a
01:18:11.540 man. He's tough. You know, Hannity used to call him Rahm Deadfish Emanuel. He's a ball buster. He's not
01:18:18.940 somebody like Chris Murphy who's got to be like, and I fucking mean it. You know, Rahm Emanuel can
01:18:25.780 swear. He knows how it comes naturally. He is kind of a bully, which is okay. I mean, that's fine that
01:18:31.680 you can get some shit done being that way. So I got to tell you guys, he's not woke. Um, he seems
01:18:38.140 interesting to me. And if I were a Democrat, I'd be feeling somewhat hopeful about him. Dan, where am I
01:18:43.380 going wrong? Well, I think everything you said is right. I think he's serious. I think the fact
01:18:50.280 that he's a bully, his biggest problem would be getting through a primary because about half the
01:18:55.660 party despises him. And, you know, this is, this is over 30 years of being in the trenches. Some of it
01:19:02.680 is from when he was mayor of Chicago. There was a young boy that was murdered or killed by a police
01:19:09.280 officer. He would not want McDonald. Yeah. He would not release the video camera. So there's
01:19:15.460 some that have not forgiven him, but you go back to 2005 when he took over the democratic congressional
01:19:21.640 campaign committee. We had just lost 2004 to George W Bush. We didn't control the Senate. We
01:19:26.780 didn't control the house. One of the first things Rahm Emanuel did when he took over the D triple C is as
01:19:32.780 it's known was full of all these contracts that were just complete political patronage, right? There was a
01:19:39.340 black firm and a Latino firm and like money was handed out all over, not because of your performance, but to
01:19:44.700 take care of constituencies. Rahm fired all of them. He said, we're all about winning. I'm going to hire the
01:19:51.060 best and the brightest. If they're all one gender, one race, whatever, I don't care. It's about winning. Now he ran
01:19:58.740 an excellent set of campaigns. We won, but he's made enemies with that type of, you know, damn the
01:20:05.060 torpedoes. I'm going to do what I think is right. I think he's one of the smartest people there is in
01:20:09.580 the party. I think what he's saying that we don't have any agenda that we're culturally disconnected,
01:20:14.780 that we need to not just be anti-Trump. He's a hundred percent right. I haven't heard what it is
01:20:20.320 that Rahm is going to focus on. I imagine it's coming, but his biggest challenge is going to be
01:20:24.940 getting through a democratic primary. A hundred percent. Wait, I'll give you the floor. I just
01:20:30.580 want to tell people why I'm talking about him. It's not just an admiration society. He gave an
01:20:35.700 interview to the Wall Street Journal last week and teased a possible White House run. They pointed out
01:20:41.660 he's secured contracts with CNN and the Washington Post to provide commentary. He's been on the speaking
01:20:46.180 circuit. He appears to be laying the groundwork for a presidential bid. He'll be a headliner at a
01:20:51.380 September fish fry for Democrats in everyone altogether. Iowa. Yeah, he he calls the party's
01:20:59.700 brand toxic, weak and woke. A nod to culture issues that he thinks the Democrats have been losing. He's
01:21:05.800 positioning himself as a savior for the party. He's playing the populist card. The American dream has
01:21:10.920 become unaffordable, inaccessible. The system's rigged. It's corrupt. And on the subject of whether
01:21:17.280 he might potentially have to take on a friend of his, J.B. Pritzker, who's the current governor of
01:21:22.700 Illinois, in a possible run for the Democratic nomination, they say, let's see, they'll have a
01:21:30.860 real debate. Voters will be lucky. We'll have a debate that we didn't have in 2024. So he certainly
01:21:35.940 doesn't like tamp it down. By the way, if the Democrats nominate J.B. Pritzker for their nominee,
01:21:42.280 I'll be thrilled. Do it. I can't wait to talk about the Pritzkers and their love of transing
01:21:50.560 children. We will talk about it ad nauseum on the show and is weird. I think it's first cousin who's
01:21:57.040 a man pretending to be a woman and really wants your little boy to be female, too. So good luck
01:22:02.040 with that. Keep going. You were going to say, Sean, your thoughts on. Oh, I agree with Dan's
01:22:07.040 assessment. He's a political animal. I've known Rahm a long time. He was on the budget committee when I
01:22:12.140 asked the comms director there 20 something years, 20 years ago. The guy is an animal. He's a fighter
01:22:16.980 and he none of this woke crap would be in his lexicon. He understands what it takes. And for
01:22:22.600 all of those reasons, they will never get him through a primary. He's he I mean, and I also
01:22:28.400 think the other issue is he's too far now. You know, he's the opposite of Elizabeth Warren. He's
01:22:33.860 hung out with all the private equity guys. He hangs out with the wrong people, to put it bluntly.
01:22:38.840 And for those reasons, he won't be able to get through a Democratic primary. He's not woke
01:22:43.440 enough. He's not progressive enough. But look, I judge candidates on the Democratic side is do
01:22:47.980 they make do they worry me? He's got the political gravitas, the instincts, the messaging to do well.
01:22:54.340 But if I ever thought that he'd get through there, I'd be a little bit more worried. He will not make
01:22:58.420 it through a primary full stop. So it's a very it's a very it's a very weak field. So anyone who's got
01:23:03.600 any strength, you can't dismiss. And and the other the other thing about Rahm that hasn't come up is
01:23:09.460 one way it's a very weak field is most of them cannot raise 20 million dollars.
01:23:14.260 Rahm can raise, I think, with the exception of Pritzker self-funded.
01:23:18.240 Yeah, exactly.
01:23:18.840 His brother Ari could write it to it. Ari could write a 200 million dollar check and might.
01:23:23.300 So so you can't this you did. You can't discount Rahm because of what's been said and because of
01:23:28.220 money. However, in addition to his record as mayor, in addition to how much the base hates him,
01:23:34.380 he's got no narrative that's compelling. As Sean said, he's saying he's hanging out with bankers.
01:23:38.700 He's hung out with politicians. He can claim he's an outsider, but he's not. There's no story to tell
01:23:44.540 that's, you know, you know, Barack Obama's origin story or Donald Trump's origin story.
01:23:50.040 He was born to privilege. He's lived in privilege. He's he's a he's a multimillionaire.
01:23:54.420 And I just think it's going to be difficult for him to find something to say to Democrats,
01:23:59.480 except vote for me because I can win a general election. And I don't believe that that's enough
01:24:04.600 right now for him to overcome the way the base feels about him. And by the way,
01:24:09.120 we know a lot of that is record in Chicago. Most Democrats do not. If he's a serious threat,
01:24:15.940 some smart candidate on the left of Rahm will make everyone in the Democratic Party well aware
01:24:21.480 of his record as mayor. And it goes far beyond a few high profile cases of things that will not
01:24:27.860 be appealing to the left. Yep. A hundred percent. Is it they're in a tough position because, you know,
01:24:33.360 he is somebody who could potentially take on a strong Republican candidate, a J.D., a Marco. But
01:24:39.060 yeah, they won't let him make it through the primary process. Maybe we'll see. But it's interesting to
01:24:43.920 see some people starting to raise their hands, starting to say maybe maybe me consider me going to Iowa.
01:24:49.760 Like we just got through this, but it's starting already. Okay. We've got to take a break. We're
01:24:54.000 going to come back and then we're going to have some fun at Jim Acosta's expense. I mean,
01:24:57.760 who doesn't want to do that? We'll be right back. Homeowners, you need to listen to this.
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01:27:37.260 I'm Megan Kelly, host of The Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM. It's your home for open,
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01:28:36.660 Okay, so Jim Acosta, after he voluntarily left CNN, is now trying to have like a, I don't know,
01:28:52.100 a tour of sorts where he's going to have people come watch him or so he thought. The free beacon
01:28:57.900 with an amazing piece on how it's going. Andrew Stiles wrote the piece, Jim Acosta throws lamest party
01:29:04.520 ever, even by DC standards. You're kind of expected to be somewhat of a loser. Okay, this guy wrote a
01:29:12.880 great piece. I'm going to read some from part of it. There are some tickets left. Jim Acosta told his
01:29:17.580 Substack followers a few hours before taking the stage at Lincoln Theater in Washington, DC to host
01:29:22.480 a live town hall version of his online chat show he started after his voluntary exit from CNN earlier
01:29:29.060 this year. He wasn't kidding. The lineup for the first and apparently only stop on the fire within
01:29:36.080 tour would struggle to draw a crowd almost anywhere else in the country. Rosie O'Donnell,
01:29:42.460 Jasmine Crockett, an assortment of professional Trump haters whose names you would not recognize
01:29:46.900 unless you're the sort of mentally deranged liberal who owns an Anthony Fauci prayer candle and refuses to
01:29:52.220 watch CNN because it's right wing propaganda. Only the most delirious of hyper online partisans could
01:29:57.500 stomach the pretentious tagline fueling courage, defending freedom, igniting truth.
01:30:07.320 Shockingly, people weren't drawn to it, guys, and didn't show up. Venue staff informed the free
01:30:14.300 beacon that the upper balcony comprising nearly half of the venue's 1,200 seats was closed for reasons that
01:30:20.260 were soon obvious. Generously estimated the lower section was roughly three quarters full, about 500
01:30:25.320 people. As the night wore on, it became clear that a significant portion of them were either members
01:30:29.880 of a federal employee union invited to denounce Trump or had personal or professional connections
01:30:34.300 to one of the, quote, performers. First up, Michael Fanon. This was the guy we were told we were not
01:30:40.880 allowed to criticize because he was a cop on J6 and you were not a patriot and you hated cops. If you
01:30:46.400 noticed that he was a rabid partisan who was suffering from very serious TDS, you weren't, you were a cop
01:30:52.860 hater if you said, I don't really believe him. He sounds deranged. So he gets up there and, um, do we
01:31:00.180 have a, uh, okay. Okay. And I'll just tell you what he says. Um, okay. Setting the tone for the show,
01:31:07.640 Fanon laments, we're in a tough fucking spot. Acosta agrees. We are, we are. He's not afraid to express his
01:31:14.200 feelings with expletives. House Speaker Mike Johnson is a petty bitch surrounded by cock sucking
01:31:19.360 colleagues, not to be confused with the unelected Trump supporters who are dick sucking ass clowns.
01:31:26.360 Forgive me. This is dirty even for me. Um, then came someone named Olivia Troy, a Troy, a, I don't
01:31:34.020 know her, but she was a, okay. Thank you, Troy. She's a former Republican who spoke at the Democratic
01:31:38.640 National Convention. Um, she's lamenting the loss of the federal bureaucrats who got fired
01:31:43.520 thanks to Doge and Trump saying, um, it's super upsetting. And I have to say to you that the
01:31:49.620 American people, they may not recognize it right now, but they will realize it in time.
01:31:54.460 The incredible treasure that they've lost. Okay. That wasn't it. Um, Jim Acosta welcomed from
01:32:02.260 across the pond, Rosie O'Donnell, who has moved to Ireland to flee Trump and all of his supporters.
01:32:08.700 And here's a little bit of how that went.
01:32:12.480 This is going to feel like, like it's right out of the Jim Acosta show on Substack. We're bringing in
01:32:17.660 a live guest, my friend, your friend. It is the wonderful and talented Rosie O'Donnell. There she is.
01:32:26.340 How you doing, Jim?
01:32:27.580 I'm doing great. Rosie, how are you?
01:32:30.060 I'm well, everybody showed up. How did it, how's the crowd?
01:32:32.920 Not too bad. It's looking good. There's one person in Washington who's probably not pleased
01:32:37.940 that Rosie O'Donnell is being beamed into the Lincoln theater just down the street from 1600
01:32:43.320 Pennsylvania Avenue. I can't imagine what's going through his mind right now.
01:32:46.280 The Irish have taken you in there. Top of the morning to you, Rosie.
01:32:50.880 Oh my God. Yes, I'm sure Trump was very upset, guys, to see Rosie O'Donnell appearing in front of
01:32:58.340 a couple hundred people at a Jim Acosta town hall. What is he doing? And you tell me why so few people
01:33:06.680 want to help him in his quest to fuel courage, defend freedom, and ignite truth.
01:33:14.240 Do we know what the ticket price was?
01:33:16.700 Free.
01:33:17.220 We must have it somewhere. I don't, it's not in front of me. It was probably free because usually
01:33:21.720 at those events when they can't put butts in seats, they run around trying to find people who
01:33:25.760 will just possibly sit there. I'd be curious what the VIP seats went for.
01:33:32.260 There weren't. Let me just say that.
01:33:34.060 Why are you laughing? That's a serious question. I want to know.
01:33:37.520 Who's a VIP at a Jim Acosta town hall? She says, by the way, she loves living abroad.
01:33:42.960 She loves living abroad and she points out that she loves it in part because the only people who
01:33:47.000 like Donald Trump are taxi drivers, those disgusting losers who have to drive cars for a living,
01:33:51.840 unlike Rosie, who's on record as saying that she got so famous she didn't think any laws or rules
01:33:55.580 applied to her. So she's not like a loser taxi driver. That's Rosie, woman of the people. Go ahead,
01:34:00.020 Sean.
01:34:00.880 So I know something about crowd size. And let me tell you, that was not worrying Donald Trump.
01:34:06.600 Okay. I'm going to tell you right now that that is not even getting on his radar. Number two,
01:34:13.940 I will just help him for the next one. And I'm just thinking of how we can connect the dots in
01:34:19.320 some of these segments. What if he leads Corinne Jean-Pierre's book launch? Because I think that
01:34:25.380 together that would be a huge audience for her. So, I mean, I know it's not a lot at all, but like
01:34:31.640 that's probably as many books as she'll sell total. That's a good point. That'd be a great way for her
01:34:35.920 to launch. She could go on Chuck Todd's podcast or streaming show, which has fewer viewers than are
01:34:43.900 present as guests on this show right now. They gave out awards. They gave out awards to Miles Taylor,
01:34:52.520 the mid-level bureaucrat who wrote the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times about being part of
01:34:57.000 the resistance. He got an award. Tara Setmeyer, the former Lincoln Project advisor, got a Defender of
01:35:01.640 Woman Award. Aaron Parnas, a 26-year-old TikTok influencer, recognized as a Defender of Gen Z
01:35:08.620 and denounced members of the media, including Jake Tapper, for being more focused on selling books
01:35:13.880 about a former president than they are about telling the truth. And Jim Acosta really wanted people to
01:35:19.540 lean in on the taco messaging around Trump, which is the lamest attempt to take him down. It stands for
01:35:28.380 Trump always chickens out. And they're trying to make this a thing. Acosta attempted some jokes,
01:35:35.720 and this is in part how he started the night in Sot24.
01:35:39.360 I know this, but it's taco night here at the Lincoln Theater in Washington, D.C. There's a taco right there.
01:35:46.480 This gentleman's wearing a taco on his head. What is going on? My God. The tacos only come in one flavor.
01:35:55.000 That would be chicken. That's right.
01:35:59.560 Oh, my God. That is so cringy, Dan. I insist you take responsibility for him as a fellow Democrat.
01:36:05.880 Yeah. You know what's hard about it is for all those who want to say that he and others during
01:36:12.180 the first Trump term were serious journalists and that they had no partisan bent, it's really hard when
01:36:17.400 they turn around and start doing this and have people like Rosie O'Donnell and the like. I don't
01:36:24.860 know what he's doing. I guess he's trying to make some money and he lost his job. And I can't imagine
01:36:31.120 he's going to make a lot of money doing this. But, you know, this is not helping the Democratic
01:36:35.840 Party move forward. I'll just leave it at God. No, here. Here he is trying to get like a rock concert
01:36:42.100 thing going with the lights. OK, just like when you know you're dying on the vine, just wrap it.
01:36:46.700 You could just wrap it. You don't have to do cell phone lights. But he did. Here it is.
01:36:50.740 It may feel like we are surrounded in darkness right now, but I think what you just heard here
01:37:00.880 from these gentlemen up here, from Tara, from Aaron, from Miles, is that there's still a lot
01:37:07.160 of light left in all of us. Oh, my God. And it would mean something to me if you carry that message
01:37:15.580 with you as we leave this theater here tonight, that this is not a country that is being plunged
01:37:21.500 into darkness. This is a country that can find its way back to the light. You know, a few months ago,
01:37:28.280 that guy was the host of a news program on a network on a network that claims to be objective.
01:37:34.520 And he should I don't know, should be aware that Trump's approval ratings are at record highs right
01:37:39.460 now. No one's buying this nonsense anymore. We're in darkness. Remember the light. We have to stick
01:37:45.140 together. All the terrible expletives from Fanon, whatever. You cut that short, though, because then
01:37:51.380 he led them in a full on version of the Macarena, which really got them excited. And I think
01:37:58.240 that's where he wowed the crowd is is his moves there. So I think that this is here. Wait, just
01:38:05.920 to give you actually how it went down. Here's here's a little bit more between Rosie and Acosta.
01:38:10.560 Saw 26. It's like wrong with your voice. Why can't you say you're making no sense, Mr. President?
01:38:19.200 Do you not know what the Declaration of Independence point? Well, maybe because they saw that I used to do
01:38:26.880 and then you saw what happened to me. So I have to ask me, was this was this is this whole thing I generated?
01:38:33.600 I'm messing with you. I must I must ask. As a journalist, I must ask this because I see indications in
01:38:41.280 that it's not a plausible that that's a real video. So I'll ask. I'll ask directly.
01:38:44.960 He's trying to say that the press is not more aggressive because they're worried about getting
01:38:50.960 Jim Acosta by Trump. That's why they're giving Trump this pass. Go ahead, guys.
01:38:56.000 No. What would you have to ask chat GPT for something that's stupid? Because I feel like
01:39:01.360 whenever you're entering it, come up with Jim Acosta as acting like Jim Acosta.
01:39:04.960 Oh, yeah. Well, maybe it is that simple then. Here's here's how it ended. Here's how it ended,
01:39:11.840 because continuing his theme, you know, primacy and recency, he really wanted them to remember it.
01:39:15.760 Saw 28. I forgot to recognize insurance. Take a taco hat. Interns, taco hat, taco hat.
01:39:24.480 We're going to recognize him and thank them. Take a taco hat. I'm like Oprah. You get a taco hat and
01:39:30.640 you get a taco hat. No, you're not like Oprah. See, if you look closely, he's got six fingers in
01:39:36.160 that shot. It's not real. It can't be. Sadly, it's real. Get used to it, guys. Thank you. A
01:39:46.240 pleasure as always. Good to see you. See you soon. Okay. I want to tell you before we go, first of
01:39:52.240 all, subscribe to next up with Mark Halperin on YouTube and wherever you get your podcast.
01:39:55.360 But I wanted to give a shout out to my friend Justin Wells' new season of Art of the Surge.
01:40:02.440 He's been behind the scenes with Trump since before Butler, like on the campaign trail,
01:40:07.220 getting incredible exclusive footage of our now president. And he was airing this over on Tucker's
01:40:13.700 network. Now, this next season, the first three episodes just dropped on Fox Nation. And I know
01:40:20.940 that the first couple of episodes focus on the night before the election where he was with Trump.
01:40:26.860 And I know that because I saw him when we went to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I spoke for Trump.
01:40:34.060 So he got some of the behind the scenes moments on cam. And I'll show you a couple of those that he
01:40:38.920 sent to us. Here is the moment I was backstage greeting Trump as he arrived at the venue. And you
01:40:45.660 will hear the music playing in the background that Trump has playing wherever he shows up.
01:40:50.940 11 hours till polls open.
01:40:59.020 You haven't lost the snap. Oh, wait, can I get a selfie?
01:41:02.020 Yes.
01:41:02.320 It was very cool. I have to say he pulls up in the beast and well, it wasn't officially the beast
01:41:08.960 because he wasn't yet president, but like the big motorcade and you're backstage and you can hear the
01:41:13.140 crowd going wild waiting for him to come. And, you know, he comes in, could not have been more gracious,
01:41:17.880 of course, and then a little bit more with between yours truly and Justin Wells before I was about to go out and speak.
01:41:25.540 This exchange was with one of Trump's guys, but about what to expect, because I had no idea whether I was going to speak
01:41:31.580 alone. Was Trump? They were like, he might call you up. Like, what does that mean? Here's a little bit of that.
01:41:36.840 I've never done this before. So like, when I get up there, should I keep it tight? Should I like do? How long should I go for?
01:41:44.380 Keep it somewhat tight, but trust me, he'll kind of lead you in the right direction. I'm sure he's going to throw things at you and you guys are probably going to communicate.
01:41:50.020 Okay. I'll get some more clarification. Will it be like a co-bit?
01:41:53.200 It very well might be. It very well might be. Okay. I'll be right back. Thank you guys.
01:41:58.220 Thank you.
01:41:58.760 It was fun. I, for part of that, I had my family backstage with me and, uh, they were super excited
01:42:08.320 and then they went out into the venue and, you know, in those moments before, you don't know. I mean, I,
01:42:12.760 I too can get, I don't know, I'm not totally nervous, but like a little, like I, it was unfamiliar.
01:42:18.200 So I didn't know what to expect and I didn't want to let the president down, the then candidate Trump down.
01:42:23.680 Um, and you know what? It wound up going very well. And most importantly, it wound up going very well
01:42:29.500 for him the next day. And as a result for all of us. So good luck to Justin Wells with the
01:42:34.500 art of the surge now airing on Fox nation. Check it out.
01:42:40.820 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
01:42:53.680 Thank you.
01:43:04.760 Thank you.