The Megyn Kelly Show - Left Pushes ＂Constitutional Crisis＂ Narrative, and Trump Brings Back Plastic Straws, with Charles Cooke, Rich Lowry, and Carol Swain ｜ Ep. 1005

00:00:00.620 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at noon east.

00:00:12.260 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:15.360 I'm not ready. I need like another 20 minutes because there's a ton of news happening and I'm getting my arms around it, but there's more I want to read.

00:00:25.100 There's always more I want to read before I talk to you guys.

00:00:27.060 The show needs to start at 2 o'clock instead of 12 o'clock. Oh, well, here we go. Let's do this thing.

00:00:33.000 It is day 22 of the Trump administration and the breakneck pace shows no signs of slowing down.

00:00:37.980 It's so fun. But the Democrats think they've found the speed bump they've been looking for.

00:00:44.320 Of course, they're filing lawsuit after lawsuit, I think 40 lawsuits so far.

00:00:50.080 And that has allowed them because they have some judges who are finding their way.

00:00:54.800 Or what I'm seeing more often is just they're winning temporary restraining orders to say you can't enforce that law until we have a full hearing on it.

00:01:03.580 Like I need it to be briefed and I need a full evidentiary hearing for me to understand what's going on.

00:01:08.340 And they're like, oh, it's a huge win.

00:01:11.800 We're shutting down Trump's ability to change the government.

00:01:14.620 And then they when Trump says, I don't think you'd actually do have the ability to stop me from doing this constitutional crisis.

00:01:21.660 It's a constitutional crisis.

00:01:23.680 He's not listening to the judiciary.

00:01:26.020 Meanwhile, there's literally only one example of him being ordered to resume payments to federal agencies where then the plaintiff said he didn't resume doing that fast enough.

00:01:42.240 And the Trump team filed a brief saying, actually, we are making all of these payments in the following few fields.

00:01:49.000 They were never affected to begin with, but we're still doing our assessments under the other fields that he wanted to see if the the funding is proper on.

00:01:57.020 And the judge did not say you're in contempt.

00:02:00.360 You you're in huge trouble for doing that.

00:02:02.780 The judge said you got to do it.

00:02:04.440 You got to you got to resume in all of it until we have our hearing.

00:02:08.300 So the judge doesn't think it's a constitution.

00:02:10.760 There's literally just one case in which the judge said, you didn't quite do what I told you to do.

00:02:16.520 Please do it.

00:02:17.620 And the Trump administration, I think, is going to do it.

00:02:20.220 They haven't said we're not going to do it.

00:02:23.580 If the judge says do it and the Trump team says we refuse, then we're closer to actually having a crisis between the branches.

00:02:33.140 This judge is going to get overruled.

00:02:35.000 And the the feds are allowed the executive branch is allowed to control a lot of how the money gets spent, whether it gets spent.

00:02:41.860 They can't shut down entire agencies that are authorized by Congress, but they do have a lot of control over money and whether to spend it.

00:02:49.160 And I realize that these various plaintiffs don't like that.

00:02:53.020 The Democrats don't like that, but it's going to play out in the courts.

00:02:56.680 And I think in, as I said last night, nine out of 10 of these cases is going to go Trump's way.

00:03:01.260 So we are not at a constitutional crisis yet.

00:03:03.440 He has not flipped the bird to any judge telling him he must do something yet.

00:03:10.320 Who has done that?

00:03:11.620 Joe Biden.

00:03:12.320 That actually was Joe Biden.

00:03:13.620 And I don't remember these same people freaking out.

00:03:16.040 But take a look at some of the coverage over, honestly, all Trump has done is issue executive

00:03:22.900 orders and then gotten sued so far.

00:03:25.840 And what we are experiencing is a power grab.

00:03:28.360 It is a constitutional crisis.

00:03:30.460 It means wholesale harm for everyone who calls this country home.

00:03:33.980 So we have to litigate.

00:03:35.700 We have to legislate.

00:03:37.040 We have to agitate.

00:03:38.100 We have to organize peacefully in these streets.

00:03:40.880 We are witnessing it's a constitutional crisis.

00:03:43.160 We are seeing an executive branch that has decided that they are no longer going to abide

00:03:49.320 by the Constitution.

00:03:50.580 And now these boys from Doge roll in in violation of the Constitution, in violation of the law,

00:03:57.840 in flagrant violations.

00:03:59.520 I think this is the most serious constitutional crisis the country has faced, certainly since

00:04:04.000 Watergate.

00:04:04.720 The president is attempting to seize control of power and for corrupt purposes.

00:04:10.140 The president wants to be able to decide how and where money is spent so that he can

00:04:15.040 reward his political friends, he can punish his political enemies.

00:04:19.460 That is the evisceration of democracy.

00:04:22.480 Now, where were all these people when Joe Biden was trampling on the Constitution?

00:04:29.240 I mean, repeatedly, but I'll just I'll give you one.

00:04:32.000 After the Supreme Court blocked his, quote, student loan forgiveness program, former President

00:04:38.440 Biden at the time, still in office, spoke openly about how proudly he was bypassing the high

00:04:45.600 court's ruling.

00:04:46.620 Watch.

00:04:47.440 We cannot let this decision be the last word.

00:04:50.600 While the court can render a decision, it cannot change when America stands for tens of millions

00:04:55.240 of people in debt were literally about to be canceled their debts.

00:04:58.500 And the Supreme Court blocked it and blocked it.

00:05:01.040 But that didn't stop me.

00:05:02.380 I announced we're going to pursue alternatives.

00:05:04.040 The Supreme Court blocked me from relieving student debt, but they didn't stop me.

00:05:08.120 I'm relieving the burden of student debt.

00:05:11.320 And the Supreme Court told me I couldn't.

00:05:13.820 I found two other ways to do it.

00:05:18.240 That was fine.

00:05:19.660 He added an amendment to the Constitution with a tweet.

00:05:22.200 That was fine.

00:05:23.580 OK.

00:05:24.020 And those were not the only examples of his lawlessness.

00:05:30.060 He was fond of ignoring the Supreme Court.

00:05:33.060 Remember his rent abatement program?

00:05:37.040 He that was another time and around the high court.

00:05:39.480 And we're not talking about a lower federal district court judge.

00:05:41.580 Let's be clear in the federal system.

00:05:42.900 You go you file your lawsuit.

00:05:44.460 You're at the you're at the district court level.

00:05:45.860 That's the trial court.

00:05:47.060 You lose there.

00:05:47.920 You go up to a federal court of appeals.

00:05:49.620 Now you're getting more serious and you lose there.

00:05:51.700 Or you go up to the U.S. Supreme Court if they'll take your case.

00:05:54.480 So far, all Trump has had against him is some federal district court orders.

00:05:58.440 Not a court of appeals.

00:05:59.700 Certainly not the Supreme Court.

00:06:01.160 That's the one Joe Biden was ignoring.

00:06:03.300 The Supreme Court of the United States.

00:06:05.780 There was not a Democrat meltdown.

00:06:08.760 Now, the Dems have had some success recently at the federal district court.

00:06:13.840 Judges have temporarily blocked Trump's spending freezes.

00:06:17.300 That's what I just referred to.

00:06:18.500 And then ordered him to resume the spending.

00:06:22.620 His executive order saying birthright citizenship is no longer going to be allowed for the children of illegals.

00:06:29.980 Let me just tell you, Trump 100 percent knew that that would be blocked.

00:06:33.540 There's zero doubt.

00:06:34.880 He understood that was going to be blocked.

00:06:36.420 He is trying to tee up an appeal that will go up to SCOTUS.

00:06:40.560 He's not dumb.

00:06:41.580 The lawyers advising him are not dumb.

00:06:43.560 They know that that's going to go up.

00:06:45.020 His buyout offer for federal employees has been paused.

00:06:48.600 That's the judge who said, I need this briefed.

00:06:51.140 I got to figure out what's what he is.

00:06:54.740 Trump has every chance of still winning that case.

00:06:57.520 And I actually think he will win that case either before the district judge or when it goes up an appeal.

00:07:01.520 And then there's Doge's access to the Treasury's payment system.

00:07:07.320 The Treasury Secretary Scott Bissett is saying the two people he allowed to access that were in read only mode.

00:07:13.020 They couldn't change anything and they work for Treasury.

00:07:16.260 So not all of these lawsuits are going to be successful.

00:07:18.860 And even the ones that have had preliminary like we do want to take a closer look are not success on the merit on the merits cases.

00:07:28.080 Having said all that, you're not surprised to hear President Trump's not afraid of this fight.

00:07:32.640 Tremendous fraud, tremendous waste and tremendous abuse and and theft, by the way.

00:07:41.620 And the day you're not allowed to look for theft and fraud, etc., then we don't have much of a country.

00:07:47.060 So no judge should be no judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of a decision.

00:07:53.140 It's a disgrace.

00:07:55.740 All right.

00:07:56.320 Well, that's Trump ripping on the judges. 0.77

00:07:59.540 No one's surprised to hear that either.

00:08:00.980 Joining me now on this and so much more.

00:08:03.600 It's an NR Day. 0.70

00:08:05.040 Charles C.W. Cook, senior editor and host of the Charles C.W. Cook podcast.

00:08:09.460 And Rich Lowry, editor in chief of National Review.

00:08:12.620 You can find all of their work ad free with an NR Plus membership, which I highly recommend.

00:08:17.800 One of my favorite things to do in the morning is to go on my phone.

00:08:21.640 I'm like doing my hair.

00:08:23.020 I'm doing my makeup.

00:08:24.200 And I pull up an article and they've got the wonderful read aloud feature.

00:08:29.020 Which very few websites have.

00:08:31.760 I don't know why more people don't do it.

00:08:33.200 It's a great feature.

00:08:34.980 And the nice lady will read me my NR smart, fair and balanced news while I get other things done. 0.99

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00:09:54.840 Guys, great to see you.

00:09:56.940 Thanks for having us.

00:09:57.860 Thank you.

00:09:58.200 Thank you.

00:10:28.200 Let me take it one at a time before I get to the really going.

00:10:30.740 I'm going to start with you on that piece, Rich.

00:10:32.860 And on just, I mean, I've been listening to some of your discussions with Andy on Trump's powers when it comes to money and the executive branch.

00:10:41.280 But do you think we are now, as the media is telling us, at a constitutional crisis point?

00:10:47.280 No, no, of course not.

00:10:48.960 It's absurd to hear Democrats complaining about a hostile power grab of the executive branch by the chief executive, who is elected to be the chief executive, who is elected to administer his administration, and has every right.

00:11:05.900 Presidents have done this from time immemorial to have informal advisors or people close to him review how the government's working and advise them on it.

00:11:17.060 Now, Elon Musk is a little bit more than that.

00:11:18.900 He's an actual government employee, right?

00:11:20.320 He's a special government employee.

00:11:22.940 And it's more than just a think tank the way we thought maybe Doge would be.

00:11:27.060 I mean, it's really an action squad that's going in and doing things.

00:11:30.940 So the executive has a lot of discretion.

00:11:34.040 He can fire people that he wants.

00:11:37.700 He can redirect resources if Congress isn't very specific about how they're going to be spent, which applies to most of these USAID funds.

00:11:48.660 So, and as you point out, he's mostly being delayed, right?

00:11:51.900 Congress is just, sorry, the courts are just looking at this.

00:11:54.560 And we've all sort of now accepted, like, the Elon Musk pace of things.

00:11:58.060 Like, if it's delayed a week, it's a terrible defeat because everything needs to move fast.

00:12:03.720 But in the scheme of things, things are still moving incredibly quickly, even with these little delays from the courts.

00:12:10.840 So you're right.

00:12:11.340 If he defies a court order, we'll have a constitutional crisis.

00:12:14.140 I don't see why he would feel impelled, compelled to do that.

00:12:19.860 I think he'd just fight this stuff out in the courts.

00:12:22.300 And we will eventually have a big dispute over impoundment.

00:12:25.820 Because when Congress is not very specific, there's a lot to give in terms of how you spend the money.

00:12:31.140 But whether you spend the money, that's a different question.

00:12:35.180 And you've got to spend a lot of it.

00:12:36.860 You just can't zero it out when Congress has said, no, you're going to spend $40 billion.

00:12:41.200 But Russ Voigt and others have a theory that the Impoundment Act that Congress passed in the Watergate era is unconstitutional.

00:12:49.480 And they want a test case to go challenge that.

00:12:52.460 But that's, again, it's the tectonic plates of the two branches rubbing up against each other.

00:12:58.380 And there's tension and there's give there.

00:13:00.600 And you're going to need a determination by the courts on that eventually.

00:13:03.760 But the idea that just we're in a constitutional crisis because some federal employees have been placed on leave.

00:13:09.600 And courts are examining whether the executive has that authority or not.

00:13:12.920 He does.

00:13:13.420 But that's not a constitutional crisis.

00:13:16.600 No, it's not.

00:13:17.700 One of the things that they're upset about is J.D. Vance issued a post on Sunday on X.

00:13:24.260 Literally, it was a Twitter post, OK?

00:13:26.020 It was an X post.

00:13:27.080 And it reads as follows.

00:13:28.260 If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal, which is correct.

00:13:34.420 If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal.

00:13:40.180 Judges are not allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.

00:13:45.520 He's 100 percent right about all of that.

00:13:48.720 But that's not the same thing as saying, and therefore we are going to defy the orders that have been issued against us.

00:13:56.120 That's saying this initial order was wrong.

00:13:59.860 We will appeal it and it will be overruled.

00:14:02.460 We are going to win on our legal fight that the Democrats started.

00:14:06.720 But that's not how it's being spun, Charlie.

00:14:08.900 Let me play you a little montage.

00:14:10.720 I played you some top Dems with the new line, which is very clearly constitutional crisis to try to scare people.

00:14:16.880 And naturally, the Democrat media is walking along in line.

00:14:20.960 Watch.

00:14:22.940 We are three weeks into the second Trump presidency, three weeks.

00:14:27.260 And tonight there are warnings that the U.S. is dangerously close to a constitutional crisis.

00:14:32.560 Constitutional law experts say this is the clearest sign that we might be creeping towards a constitutional crisis.

00:14:38.080 Some legal experts say our country could be headed toward a constitutional crisis.

00:14:43.060 The warnings of a constitutional crisis just weeks into Trump's second terms.

00:14:48.520 So will the Trump administration comply with the courts or will the president drive the nation full steam ahead into a constitutional crisis?

00:14:58.580 I think this is he's causing a constitutional crisis intentionally.

00:15:03.200 Your take on it, Charlie.

00:15:07.580 Well, I don't think there's a constitutional crisis.

00:15:10.520 If they ignore a court order, there might be.

00:15:14.020 Although there are a lot of checks and balances within our system that declaring anything a constitutional crisis of the first hurdle is often premature.

00:15:24.600 The issue here in most of these cases is that a judge is indulged what David French used to call Trump law.

00:15:34.780 In a sense, they've said the executive has these powers, but Trump's not allowed to exercise them.

00:15:41.340 The way you deal with that as an administration is you take it to higher courts and you make your case.

00:15:49.600 I think it might have been good politics if J.D. Vance had added one line at the end of his tweet saying, and we will win this at the Supreme Court.

00:15:57.260 But not doing so doesn't constitute a constitutional crisis.

00:16:00.920 I saw Sheldon Whitehouse, of all people, suggesting that criticizing the court system, as J.D. Vance did, is beyond the pale.

00:16:10.020 Are you kidding me?

00:16:11.140 This is a guy who has spent the last five, six, seven years arguing that the Supreme Court is bought and paid for is illegitimate.

00:16:19.580 A member of a party that spent the Biden years contending that the Supreme Court was not, in fact, an equal branch of government, but was a stain on the system that could only be remedied by court packing.

00:16:37.520 An idea so crazy that even Franklin Roosevelt was repudiated when he tried it in the 1930s.

00:16:43.480 So as of yet, there is nothing that gets close to a constitutional crisis.

00:16:48.060 And on the merits, I think the argument that's being made here is really odd in that the executive branch has been delegated a lot of authority in the realm of spending.

00:17:02.960 Now, I don't think it should have.

00:17:04.380 And I would go as far as to say, as you probably know, Megan, that some of that delegation is illegal.

00:17:10.580 I'm a non-delegator.

00:17:11.800 I think the Supreme Court has allowed this to go too far.

00:17:14.660 But it's been doing that since the 1930s.

00:17:17.560 This did not start yesterday.

00:17:19.600 If it was legitimate for Bill Clinton or George W. Bush or Barack Obama or Joe Biden to make spending decisions, not whether or not the money was allocated, not whether the department existed, but decisions within the department, then it is legitimate for Trump to do so.

00:17:36.680 And all that's happened thus far is you've had essentially an audit where Elon Musk and others have looked through the spending under the supervision of the president, who is in charge of the executive branch, and said, here is what's being spent.

00:17:50.240 There hasn't been an attempt to shut down or consolidate or move this agency.

00:17:55.080 If there is, there will be a genuine constitutional question.

00:17:58.420 And if the administration ignores the courts, maybe a constitutional crisis.

00:18:02.840 But this just strikes me as being wildly premature.

00:18:06.680 Okay, so there's so much misinformation being shoved down people's throats about this.

00:18:11.380 It's quite galling.

00:18:12.580 I want to stick on this question of constitutional crisis for a second, and then we've got to get to the Biden standard on what one may do when it comes to the U.S. Supreme Court, which I do believe is another favorite of yours, Charles C.W. Cook.

00:18:26.220 So, Rich, let me give you another example of how this is being spun in the media.

00:18:31.100 Last night, there was a debate between the great Scott Jennings and the terrible Abby Phillips.

00:18:36.280 Talk about being out of your dick.

00:18:37.840 I hate that show.

00:18:38.780 I love Scott, but I hate that show.

00:18:40.940 It's horrible.

00:18:41.560 Whatever they're paying him, it's far too little.

00:18:44.340 But here's an example of the media dialogue on this.

00:18:47.620 What I can't get with is you talking in these bizarre, broad generalities.

00:18:52.140 It's not bizarre.

00:18:52.920 Every single one of these cases deals with a discrete issue, okay?

00:18:56.340 When the court says Congress appropriated this money, you must unfreeze it while we litigate this, why can't Trump comply with that?

00:19:05.960 So you're saying that a judge should decide how and when money is spent for years?

00:19:10.560 A judge is saying-

00:19:11.560 For years and not the president of the United States?

00:19:13.660 Look, Scott, let me explain the-

00:19:14.840 You're a governor.

00:19:15.380 A little bit more.

00:19:15.860 Let me explain it a little bit more slowly.

00:19:17.580 A judge is saying-

00:19:18.280 You don't have to talk to me like that.

00:19:19.680 Congress-

00:19:20.160 I have a position on this and you have an opinion.

00:19:21.840 We can disagree.

00:19:22.180 Yeah, but I'm saying you listen to me because you're not listening and you're making claims that are not connected to the facts.

00:19:27.440 So while we litigate, while we litigate this, I'm a judge and I'm in charge of the executive branch and you're not, forget it.

00:19:32.800 So that gets to the question of whether the judge can force Trump to spend all the monies until he issues his ruling.

00:19:42.640 And now we're getting a little closer to this federal district judge overstepping his bounds.

00:19:48.740 I mean, for a week, sure, he can say that.

00:19:51.520 Like, I want to see it briefed, send me your briefs.

00:19:53.900 But this judge is not going to get away with slow rolling his opinion on this thing for the next year while this case plays out potentially with discovery and so on.

00:20:03.000 And effectively just undermine the president's power.

00:20:05.720 No federal district judge is going to get away with that.

00:20:09.240 Yeah, well, you go up and you appeal it.

00:20:13.860 And just, Megan, one reason this is so absurd.

00:20:17.100 Well, first of all, it's just another case, right, where they come up with a meme, a catchphrase that they repeat over and over again, and they hope they'll make reality, right?

00:20:25.700 We saw this all during the campaign.

00:20:28.180 Kamala Harris is joyful.

00:20:29.420 Everyone says joy and she's joyful.

00:20:31.120 And you hope that actually will make her joyful or people think she's joyful.

00:20:35.600 Right, brat. 0.99

00:20:36.320 Same thing here, constitutional crisis.

00:20:37.720 It's like the last 24 hours, the memo clearly went out and everyone's saying constitutional crisis.

00:20:43.240 But when they said that Trump was an existential threat to democracy for a year or two, I thought they were talking about he'd suspend congressional elections.

00:20:50.740 You know, he'd try to stay for a third term.

00:20:52.800 It turns out just carrying back foreign aid, that's the constitutional crisis.

00:20:57.720 And offering a buyout to federal employees saying, I'll pay you a lot more than you otherwise could get.

00:21:02.060 Yeah, so the Congress did not say, we have specifically appropriated money for a DEI program in Serbia, right?

00:21:13.000 If they said that, that would not have gotten through Congress.

00:21:16.060 So it's executive discretion to begin with on whether you're going to spend money on a Serbian DEI program, right?

00:21:25.280 So if the executive made that call without Congress specifically commanding it, why can't a new president, a new executive make the opposite call, right?

00:21:36.320 So they want to play this game where one side can do it and has discretion, has executive authority, and the other side doesn't.

00:21:44.460 And, of course, that should be intolerable.

00:21:46.780 No one should be willing to play that game.

00:21:49.080 And Trump and Elon aren't.

00:21:52.200 So, wait, I love what you just said.

00:21:54.400 I've been trying to raise this point, but not as articulately on this show.

00:21:57.780 They're so focused on what's, like, the good programs, like, the laudable, you know, the noble programs that are being stopped, like AIDS medication, if you listen to the Daily this morning, HIV medication to kids in Africa.

00:22:11.300 You know, they're relying on it.

00:22:12.520 Now we're stopping it.

00:22:13.360 Great.

00:22:13.660 You can spend all day long highlighting that.

00:22:15.460 What they don't highlight, and we'll get into the list, but is the absolute embarrassment of lists when it comes to what they used our money for that Trump is trying to stop while he figures out what the hell is going on.

00:22:29.920 And the fact that it was their reckless spending, Rich, on causes that no one over here supports that led to this crisis, that led to the next executive having to come in to say, hold on.

00:22:44.220 I'm pressing pause on all of this because you people, the Democrats who controlled this group before me, have corrupted the program beyond recognition.

00:22:55.280 No one's arguing, really, over HIV medication for children in Africa.

00:23:00.480 If that's all USAID was doing, Trump would not have shut it down.

00:23:04.520 But that's not what we have.

00:23:06.580 I mean, the list of the, you know, the opera in Ireland on trans issues and, you know, the—I'll read you the list, but can you just spend one more minute on that?

00:23:19.480 Like, they created this misuse of funds that's now being rectified by the guy who is in charge of the funds.

00:23:26.720 Right.

00:23:27.320 And he supposedly can't do anything about it, even though he was elected, in part to roll back this sort of insanity that's infected our government.

00:23:35.560 And just the left's idea—you know, we all believe in promoting American ideals abroad, right?

00:23:41.100 But they think our ideals are gender ideology and anti-racism and DEI.

00:23:48.540 This goes to a much more minor but important symbolic issue, whether we're going to fly any flag above our embassies and facilities overseas except for the American flag.

00:23:57.940 And they've flown all sorts of Black Lives Matter flags and various gay pride flags or versions of the gay pride flag because they think that is what this country is about in some sense at its root, and it's just not.

00:24:12.040 So I support funding, you know, HIV medicines.

00:24:15.480 It's good.

00:24:16.520 It doesn't cost us very much, and it does help our image abroad.

00:24:19.960 But the rest of this stuff is just total nonsense.

00:24:23.380 It's poisonous.

00:24:24.720 It's wrong.

00:24:25.380 It creates the wrong image of America abroad.

00:24:28.980 And again, unless Congress has specifically stipulated that this is what you're going to spend it on, Trump is fully within his rights saying, no, we're going to promote our image or help people in some other way.

00:24:39.900 Now, again, I don't think he can just zero out USAID on his own.

00:24:44.000 He's going to have to spend a lot of this money or most of it.

00:24:47.820 But they're objecting to him redirecting money that he has a right to.

00:24:52.000 Here are some of the examples that we pulled, and I hadn't heard of a lot of these.

00:24:58.440 I mean, some have given snippets, but this is a pretty good list.

00:25:02.500 1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia's workplaces and business communities.

00:25:08.600 1.5 million for DEI in Serbia.

00:25:12.640 Serbia's got a lot bigger problems than its DEI.

00:25:16.460 70,000 for production of a DEI musical in Ireland.

00:25:20.520 2.5 million for electric vehicles in Vietnam.

00:25:24.200 47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia.

00:25:27.860 I'm sorry, but hard pass.

00:25:31.500 A transgender opera in Colombia.

00:25:34.860 Almost 50 grand.

00:25:36.300 32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.

00:25:41.700 What?

00:25:42.860 What?

00:25:44.420 2 million for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala.

00:25:51.880 Sex changes in Guatemala.

00:25:55.060 6 million to fund tourism in Egypt.

00:25:58.980 Hundreds of thousands of dollars for a nonprofit linked to designated terrorist organizations.

00:26:04.320 Millions to EcoHealth Alliance.

00:26:06.760 That's Peter Daszak's group that was funding gain-of-function research,

00:26:10.020 including in the Wuhan lab with the Bat Lady, 0.91

00:26:12.320 that was directly connected to the research that led to the lab leak.

00:26:17.240 Um, hundreds of thousands of meals that went to Al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria.

00:26:24.060 Funding to print personalized contraceptives in developing countries.

00:26:29.020 Like, Megan, you know, diaphragm.

00:26:33.200 Cool.

00:26:34.080 Like, what's that?

00:26:35.600 Who wants that? 1.00

00:26:36.960 Okay.

00:26:37.180 Um, hundreds of millions to fund canals, farming equipment, and fertilizer to support

00:26:45.680 poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan.

00:26:50.320 2 million for Moroccan pottery classes.

00:26:54.820 Trade assistance to Ukraine that paid for models to take trips to New York City and London Fashion Week.

00:27:00.440 2 million promoting tourism to Lebanon, a nation our State Department warns against traveling to

00:27:06.540 due to crime, terrorism, kidnapping, and unexploded landmines.

00:27:11.660 But at the same time, we're giving them 2 million to promote tourism there.

00:27:15.520 20 million to create a Sesame Street in Iraq.

00:27:19.480 And more than 9 million to feed civilians in Syria,

00:27:24.760 which ended up in the hands of violent terrorists, including an affiliate of Al-Qaeda,

00:27:30.960 which wants to kill us.

00:27:33.440 That's just today's list.

00:27:36.240 And so, and the Democrats' position is,

00:27:39.680 you can't tell the President of the United States that he can pause that.

00:27:43.820 He must continue funding it, and he has to continue funding it right now.

00:27:47.600 And if this federal judge says, yeah, continue funding it,

00:27:50.900 that it will be a constitutional crisis if Donald Trump does anything other than fund it, Charles.

00:27:57.400 If you read the law, you won't find any of the items that you just read out.

00:28:02.820 The USAID program was started in the 60s by John F. Kennedy as an executive order.

00:28:09.680 It then existed for 37 years.

00:28:11.360 And eventually, Congress got around to writing a law that codified it in 1998.

00:28:17.640 Now, that law has certain parameters.

00:28:19.360 The President can't use it, for example, to invade France.

00:28:22.540 He can't use it to build wind turbines in North Dakota.

00:28:27.200 But it doesn't contain any of the provisions that you just outlined.

00:28:32.020 Those are discretionary.

00:28:34.320 Now, again, I don't think they should be.

00:28:36.940 I would like Congress to pass laws with bullet points in them that allocated down to the minute level all of the funds that it wants to spend.

00:28:49.360 I think Congress has got out of the habit of doing this.

00:28:52.300 I think Congress has started to write the President shall or in the judgment of the secretary or in the opinion of the agency and all of that.

00:28:58.980 I've been arguing this for years.

00:29:00.260 I have not changed my view on this.

00:29:01.940 But it hasn't done that.

00:29:03.680 That is not what that law from 1998 or the executive order from 1961 says.

00:29:09.780 Now, if those things aren't listed in the law, that means the President can't do them at all unless there is another part of the law that says that the President gets to decide how the money is spent, again, within the broad parameters.

00:29:22.940 That's what that law says.

00:29:24.380 It's what it does.

00:29:25.240 We cannot have a constitutional order that only allows non-Donald Trump or non-Republican presidents the discretion that Congress has accorded.

00:29:37.160 I think that the administration has to abide by the judiciary.

00:29:41.860 I am not arguing otherwise.

00:29:42.960 But insofar as there is a proximate cause of any constitutional tension at the moment, it is from judges who are ruling that the President of the United States is unable to exercise the discretion that Congress has granted him.

00:29:59.760 That's the root problem.

00:30:01.160 Now, yeah, they have to wait.

00:30:02.280 They have to elevate this up the chain.

00:30:03.940 I think they're not going to like the results when the Supreme Court finally looks at this, which I hope is sooner rather than later.

00:30:09.640 But for now, the problem here is not the President.

00:30:14.300 It is the other entities that are trying to tell him what to do.

00:30:18.560 And one final thing on this, the secondary argument that you get is, well, OK, but Trump does have to spend money.

00:30:26.520 What he can't do is say, I am no longer spending money on USAID.

00:30:30.480 But there's a time component to that, right?

00:30:32.680 Trump has been president for, what, 20 days?

00:30:35.840 So suppose that you come in as a new administration and you want to evaluate what your predecessor has done and you run an audit, which is what Doge is, in effect.

00:30:44.840 You might, for a while, stop all payments.

00:30:47.560 You might say, well, we're not going to spend any money until we've worked out what we want to spend it on.

00:30:52.480 Now, at that point, perhaps you are obliged to empty the coffers and say, right, we are going to do what Congress has asked us to and spend this money on X, Y, and Z areas.

00:31:03.760 But you don't have to do it on day one.

00:31:06.480 You don't have to say, I'm cutting two and a half million here.

00:31:08.980 So tomorrow I'll be spending it on something else.

00:31:11.160 So this whole thing seems wildly premature to me, wildly selective.

00:31:15.760 And to call it a constitutional crisis if the executive branch is making, it's just bizarre to me.

00:31:20.540 Let me follow up with you, Charles, on the Biden precedent, which is just so galling.

00:31:28.780 I just can't, you and I, all of us have been talking about Biden's flouting of the Supreme Court's rulings for four years now.

00:31:38.820 I had a debate with Bill Maher on a week before the election over this when he tried to tell me Trump was going to ignore the Constitution and it was lawless.

00:31:47.040 And I was like, what about your guy?

00:31:48.400 He didn't know anything about it.

00:31:50.660 He, you know, kind of rolled his eyes at it.

00:31:54.080 I just went back just for kicks.

00:31:55.920 We played to the soundbite of, you know, Biden joking about how he, the Supreme Court didn't stop me, you know, bragging, I should say, not joking, boasting about how the Supreme Court didn't stop me.

00:32:07.240 But it wasn't just with respect to student loans.

00:32:09.940 It also was with respect to, I always call it the rent abatement program, but it was the eviction moratorium program.

00:32:17.520 Yeah.

00:32:18.100 Where the, the, basically what happened was the feds tried to tell local landlords they couldn't evict people who didn't pay their rents during COVID.

00:32:27.600 And there was a question about whether the feds could do that.

00:32:31.600 And the Supreme Court said they can't, that's not, they cannot do that.

00:32:36.560 That's not okay.

00:32:37.180 And Biden didn't listen to them and then bragged about how he didn't listen to them and was, and in another instance, they're really proud about how he really didn't give a damn what the Supreme Court said.

00:32:49.640 Not to mention the 28th Amendment by tweet, which he tried to do the days before he got out of office, that these same Democrats were not, I don't have a montage of them there, Charles, saying constitutional crisis because it didn't happen.

00:33:05.500 No, they completely ignored it.

00:33:08.840 Biden did two things that were bad in this area.

00:33:12.900 The first thing he did was manipulate the courts at best and ignore them at worst.

00:33:19.400 You mentioned the eviction moratorium.

00:33:20.960 You go back and you look prior to the announcement of the continuation of the eviction moratorium, which seems to have been the product of Cori Bush lying down outside the Capitol and crying.

00:33:33.080 Quite literally, that seems to have been what turned the tide.

00:33:35.840 The Biden administration said over and over again that it could not do it.

00:33:40.120 There are great quotes about this from Biden himself, where he says, we've crossed the T's and dotted the I's.

00:33:44.520 I've had my guys check it three, four times.

00:33:46.600 We don't have the authority.

00:33:47.840 They already had at that point a memorandum from Justice Kavanaugh in which he said that Congress would have to authorize it further.

00:33:56.160 And they did it anyway.

00:33:57.200 And they told Philip Wegman, Biden himself told Philip Wegman that he was doing it because it might take time to litigate and therefore he could at least buy people a month or so.

00:34:05.960 That is a flagrant violation of the court order.

00:34:09.860 And he went into it knowing what he was doing was illegal.

00:34:13.440 That was awful.

00:34:14.100 Another example of that was the OSHA regulation, the vaccine mandate for large companies.

00:34:19.660 He knew that was illegal.

00:34:21.000 Jen Psaki told the press corps that they couldn't do it six months before he did it.

00:34:26.800 With the student loan thing, you had a slight wrinkle, which was that Joe Biden was desperate to persuade the public that he was violating the law, even though he wasn't.

00:34:37.100 He had violated the law with his order.

00:34:40.500 He knew when he issued his student loan executive order that it was illegal because everyone knew that it was illegal.

00:34:46.400 Nancy Pelosi had said a year before that the president did not have the authority to do it.

00:34:51.020 Donald Trump's education department had said at the end of his first term that the executive branch did not have the authority to do it.

00:34:59.140 Every expert who had weighed in had told him you're not allowed to do this.

00:35:02.580 He did it anyway.

00:35:03.340 That is a massive violation of his oath of office.

00:35:06.080 He then gets his order struck down by the Supreme Court.

00:35:09.660 He moves to two different maneuvers.

00:35:13.340 It wasn't that he kept doing the one that had been struck down.

00:35:16.360 He moved to two different ones that would never got looked at by the courts because they were too long.

00:35:23.380 And then he he ran out of time.

00:35:25.460 But he told everyone that he was ignoring the court.

00:35:29.720 In other words, Biden wanted the American public to believe that he had ignored a court order, which is 100 times worse than what J.D. Vance said.

00:35:40.140 I think J.D. Vance should have said that we won't ignore the court or we'll take it to the Supreme Court or we're right on the merits and we don't mind litigating it, although it's annoying.

00:35:49.160 He didn't do that.

00:35:49.980 But Biden did something much, much worse.

00:35:53.140 He wanted Americans to believe that he was ignoring the court.

00:35:57.300 All of those clips that you played leave the average person with the impression that Biden was telling the Supreme Court, as Andrew Jackson famously did, now go enforce it.

00:36:08.480 Well, that wasn't quite what happened.

00:36:10.060 But that is so cancerous for our political system.

00:36:13.020 So for the same people who not only indulged that but cheered it on, go look at the clips of Democrats talking about the student loan case.

00:36:21.580 Go look at the video of Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden making their argument for it.

00:36:26.000 Go look at Chuck Schumer talking about it.

00:36:28.380 Elizabeth Warren talking about it.

00:36:29.740 For those people to have ignored it and then cheered it on, to say that J.D. Vance criticizing a judge has created a constitutional crisis is just too cynical for words.

00:36:39.060 Mm hmm. Yeah. And on the eviction moratorium, too, that I mean, that was equally disgusting where you had a situation where it was clear that the feds did not have this power to tell us the states and the local landlords you can't evict people.

00:36:53.580 Biden did it anyway. He did it anyway.

00:36:56.600 And then it wound up in the U.S. Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said, yeah, you can't do it.

00:37:01.740 This is not OK. And he doubled down on the doing of it.

00:37:06.180 There was a great piece by a lawyer, Robert B. Charles.

00:37:09.620 He's a Columbia Law School grad and worked in the State Department for a time.

00:37:14.460 And I pulled it. It was very well done.

00:37:16.380 And he he writes in part in this piece, OK, that.

00:37:21.260 Biden, after that Supreme Court ruling, was in a political quandary, legally, Biden, his White House counsel and every Democrat on the Hill knew that an executive extension of this eviction moratorium was illegal, worse, unconstitutional.

00:37:35.340 Incredibly, they did it anyway.

00:37:37.960 And he goes on to say all of this is more significant than even meets the eye.

00:37:41.060 Why, if the Biden White House can knowingly promote a direct slap in the face of the U.S. Supreme Court, brazenly ignore prevailing law, violate presumptive states' rights, the Constitution's text and an express Supreme Court ruling, where are the limits?

00:37:56.020 What are the clear parameters?

00:37:57.760 What will they not do?

00:37:59.860 Those are just two examples of him ignoring the highest court in the land, Rich.

00:38:05.620 So it's really hard to get super exercised over the left's argument now, which appears, if you want to talk about flouting court orders, to boil down to an ambiguous J.D. Vance tweet.

00:38:17.240 And in this one case of resuming federal payments to workers, saying, or sorry, not to federal programs, saying, we did, we did resume some, but not all.

00:38:30.760 And the court saying, that's not good enough.

00:38:33.340 You didn't resume anything.

00:38:34.300 You just left the others in progress and you have to let them all go in progress.

00:38:37.640 That's really where we are on that one case.

00:38:39.700 It's amazing that they want us to now need the vapors over this.

00:38:43.620 Yeah, so we didn't hear a peep about the Biden stuff.

00:38:47.380 And as you alluded to with Bill Maher, I think a lot of progressives weren't even aware.

00:38:51.740 It didn't even enter their ken because they, in their information silo, no one.

00:38:57.100 He thought I was being hysterical, Rich.

00:38:59.160 Sorry, keep going.

00:39:00.300 Yeah, yeah.

00:39:00.760 No one had ever even brought it up.

00:39:03.060 And both Obama with DACA and here with Nancy Pelosi, you had the president himself or high-level Democrats say, no, of course he doesn't have that authority, repeatedly, over and over again.

00:39:14.500 No, we can't do that.

00:39:15.540 And then turning around and actually doing it, which is a pretty good tell that you don't have the authority to do it.

00:39:20.700 Here, if you had asked Donald Trump prior to him taking off his second term, can you fire people?

00:39:26.480 He'd say, yeah.

00:39:27.660 Can you review government programs to see if they're in keeping with your priorities and whether they're wasteful or not?

00:39:34.100 He would have said, yeah, right?

00:39:36.340 And can you redirect money in keeping with your priorities?

00:39:40.000 He would have said, yeah.

00:39:40.700 He legitimately thinks he has this authority for legitimate reasons.

00:39:45.140 So on top of everything else, what Trump is doing is less cynical than what we saw from Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

00:39:53.120 Here's the other thing.

00:39:54.540 We didn't even talk about what the left was saying after the affirmative action ruling about college campuses, right, where the Supreme Court struck it down and said you can no longer use affirmative action.

00:40:03.880 And you tell me whether the left has been complying with that order.

00:40:09.480 It's a joke.

00:40:10.820 Of course they haven't been, and we all know they haven't been.

00:40:13.320 And they actually tried in the wake of that order at these college campuses to require video submissions of people's essays.

00:40:21.960 Right.

00:40:22.980 Yeah.

00:40:23.500 Well, okay, we're no longer asking you to check the box on your race.

00:40:27.800 But if you could please do an extreme close-up of your skin color, that would really help us out.

00:40:33.280 To get fairly considered, you have to be like a drug informant being interviewed on cable TV or something where your whole – on 60 Minutes where your whole face is covered up.

00:40:41.560 Your voice is low.

00:40:42.560 Yeah, so they can't tell.

00:40:43.620 So – and there have been so many similar efforts to that.

00:40:47.840 And actually, in the wake of this, I pulled this.

00:40:49.620 This is from a great Jonathan Turley piece that he wrote after the fact.

00:40:53.160 And the headline of it was Tyranny of the Minority.

00:40:55.360 Liberal law professors urge Biden to defy the courts and the public back in July of 23, which is when we got the affirmative action ruling from the Supreme Court.

00:41:05.600 And he points out that there were these two law professors, Harvard Law Professor Mark Tushnet, San Francisco State University political scientist Aaron Belkin, calling upon President Joe Biden to defy rulings of the Supreme Court that he considers mistaken in the name of popular constitutionalism.

00:41:26.860 Thus, in light of the court's bar on the use of race in college admissions, they argue that Biden should just continue to follow his own constitutional interpretation.

00:41:36.560 Weirdly, the New York Times, after it had its big piece about how we're in a constitutional crisis, citing Erwin Chemerinsky out at University of Berkeley Law School, saying he's defying court orders and that this is it.

00:41:49.080 Really, they didn't have the opposing view from their own pals, Aaron Belkin and Mark Tushnet, saying, actually, the high court or the president does have the ability to defy rulings of the Supreme Court that he considers mistaken in the name of popular constitutionalism.

00:42:07.460 You know what's so great about that term, popular constitutionalism, is that Mark Tushnet, who never seems to miss an opportunity to blow it for his own side, reserved it for the most popular Supreme Court decision in about 40 years.

00:42:23.760 In other words, he said that Joe Biden ought to channel the popular will to ignore a decision that was favored by 80% of Americans, by 65% of Democrats.

00:42:34.840 Yes. It's just perfect, isn't it? I, of course, don't want any president to ignore any Supreme Court decision, in part because one of the great virtues of the Constitution is that it protects minority rights.

00:42:45.380 That's the point in it. You want to have decisions that defend, say, the free speech rights of people who everyone thinks are just awful.

00:42:51.540 If you don't, there's no point in the First Amendment. Same with religion and so on. 0.85

00:42:55.660 But really, that's your popular constitutionalism, is getting rid of a Supreme Court decision that everyone likes.

00:43:01.980 And it just shows how completely incoherent they are with their language.

00:43:07.360 They have decided at some point in time that they are on the side of the angels and they're on the side of democracy and that they are popular and that they are constitutional and therefore everything they do must be those things.

00:43:18.640 And so they've started to say, well, what Trump is doing is undemocratic.

00:43:22.020 Well, not really. He won and he won the popular vote. They said Joe Biden should engage in popular constitutionalism, which just means doing what a minority of law professors wanted him to do.

00:43:33.000 And now they're talking about the bureaucracy and the money that it spends on foreign aid projects that are generally pretty unpopular.

00:43:41.660 That doesn't change the legality of it, but it's true, as if this is some great attack on the will of the people.

00:43:47.720 They talk about Elon Musk as if he's unelected, which he is, but so are the other 2.4 million government employees in Washington, D.C., excluding the military and the post office.

00:43:57.660 So I never quite know what it is that they mean other than this is what I want.

00:44:02.480 And the best example of this was the American Bar Association, which came out this morning and used the words rule of law at every juncture in its missive to mean what we at the American Bar Association like.

00:44:14.640 And it makes it very difficult to actually interrogate what the law says, which really, really matters.

00:44:19.260 The numbers, by the way, so just the juxtaposition.

00:44:23.840 Yes, the country overwhelmingly favored getting rid of affirmative action, which in its last vestiges, which were at the college admissions level.

00:44:32.480 And yet they wrote about popular constitutionalism as though that would support undermining that Supreme Court ruling, which was so favored.

00:44:39.900 It's not popular or constitutionalism.

00:44:42.620 Exactly. Neither one.

00:44:43.800 And now you look at what Trump is doing.

00:44:46.120 And he said to Brett Baer the other night, I ran on this, you know, like, sorry, people don't like what I'm doing with the bureaucrats and the spending.

00:44:53.860 But I ran on this.

00:44:54.580 And he's absolutely right.

00:44:55.860 And the latest the latest poll.

00:44:58.900 OK, listen to this.

00:44:59.880 This is from CBS News that gave him a 53 percent approval rating three weeks into his for his second term, which is amazing.

00:45:07.920 Fifty three percent is very high for President Trump.

00:45:10.240 He's never been that high.

00:45:11.120 And the highest, well, among the highest approval ratings are with ages 18 to 29.

00:45:19.580 He's up 10 approval over disapproval with the young people because they know the system doesn't work for them.

00:45:25.100 They they don't feel optimistic about their future.

00:45:27.660 And so it's he's up 10 with that group.

00:45:29.620 He's up four with 30 to 44.

00:45:31.640 He's up 12 with ages 45 to 64, up 12 points.

00:45:35.960 Boomers. 1.00

00:45:36.360 He's even 50 50.

00:45:38.220 But the approval numbers are very interesting because they then they asked, is Trump doing more than he was expected to or less than he's expected to?

00:45:50.040 And that's let's see, 49 percent say he's doing more than expected.

00:45:55.900 Forty one percent percent saying he's doing as much as accepted, expected and nine percent say less.

00:46:02.120 But 61 percent who say he's doing more than expected approve of it.

00:46:08.300 So you've got about half of the country saying he's doing more than I expected him to.

00:46:15.160 And 61 percent say and I like what he's doing.

00:46:18.920 He's got support for these programs, whether you like him or not.

00:46:23.560 Trump is doing what he promised or different from promised.

00:46:27.040 Seventy percent.

00:46:28.300 He's doing what he promised.

00:46:29.680 I see it.

00:46:30.540 And he's got a 53 percent overall approval rating.

00:46:32.600 And then last but not least, you look at some of the specifics on this, like Doge, which we've been discussing.

00:46:37.760 Musk and Doge influence over government operations and spending should be theirs.

00:46:43.020 Musk and Doge is a lot, some, not much or none.

00:46:46.540 A majority say he should have some or a lot of influence over government operations and spending.

00:46:55.220 Some say 28 percent say he should have some influence.

00:46:58.260 23 percent say he should have a lot of influence and only 18 percent say not much.

00:47:04.640 31 percent say none, no influence.

00:47:07.980 OK, and then just here's a capper.

00:47:10.660 Trump's focus on ending DEI.

00:47:14.240 Forty five percent say it's the right amount.

00:47:17.740 Thirty nine percent say it's too much.

00:47:20.180 Sixteen percent say it's not enough.

00:47:21.560 So 61 percent say it's perfect or do more, President Trump, which gets me back to a point we've been getting at it on the show, Rich.

00:47:30.840 And that's that the left decided not to melt down over DEI being removed from all these federal agencies, though CNN is still talking about it every night.

00:47:40.480 And I'm sure MSNBC is, too.

00:47:43.000 They don't seem they're definitely not upset about what's happening with illegal immigration.

00:47:47.240 The numbers are there, too, on this poll, showing that the people support that as well.

00:47:51.200 Fifty nine percent.

00:47:51.840 Yeah.

00:47:52.320 Yep.

00:47:52.920 And they're not upset about removing boys from girls sports.

00:47:57.460 Yeah.

00:47:58.740 What the left has decided to fight over is foreign aid.

00:48:03.840 Yeah.

00:48:04.260 And the firing of Europe, which had the Trump team when I saw them in their Super Bowl box.

00:48:11.420 Absolutely jubilant.

00:48:14.080 Yeah.

00:48:14.520 Well, given the alternatives, what would you fight on?

00:48:16.980 Would you really you want to fight on men competing in female sports or you want to fight on foreign aid?

00:48:22.880 I don't think either are great fights.

00:48:25.100 But by the way, the last three weeks have been the best three weeks the right has had in the cultural war in 50 years.

00:48:32.740 One, because a lot of what Trump is doing is going along with the grain of what was already a backlash against some of this insanity.

00:48:40.960 His election itself was a permission slip for institutions like Metta to say, you know, we don't want this.

00:48:48.020 We don't like this woke ideology.

00:48:49.740 It's kind of forced on us on us.

00:48:52.020 We don't want it anymore.

00:48:53.040 And he's using the hook of federal funding to turn some of this stuff around.

00:48:58.280 So that's been amazing.

00:49:00.140 And he took a small D Democratic approach to this election.

00:49:04.520 I'm going to tell people what I want to do.

00:49:06.420 And then if they approve it and elect me, I'm going to do it.

00:49:10.180 And even if at the margins people aren't excited about everything, they do appreciate that directness and that kind of approach.

00:49:18.960 And just, you're right, decisiveness.

00:49:21.620 You know, it's like today.

00:49:22.740 We're getting rid of the paper straws.

00:49:25.480 Good.

00:49:26.580 Good.

00:49:27.260 I think we all favor that.

00:49:29.140 And we're restoring the water flow to those showers.

00:49:32.540 What was the famous Bill Clinton line?

00:49:33.800 People would rather you be strong and wrong than weak and right.

00:49:37.180 And a lot of this stuff Trump's strong on, plus he has popular backing.

00:49:42.040 It's so true. 0.84

00:49:43.420 Yeah, we're going to save his restoration of the water flow to our showers and our dishwashers and our toilets and the return of the incandescent light bulb for the next segment.

00:49:53.260 Rich has got to go.

00:49:54.440 Charlie stays with me.

00:49:56.260 And at the end of the show, Carol Swain will be here.

00:49:59.680 Very much looking forward to speaking with her.

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00:51:14.640 Before we leave the subject of spending and how Trump is using Elon to crack down on some of the fraud and waste, etc., a couple of things.

00:51:24.000 Listen to this from Trump.

00:51:25.100 He made this point.

00:51:26.260 I don't think he's wrong.

00:51:27.280 He saw his high approval ratings and weighed in.

00:51:29.480 Sod 18.

00:51:29.920 I have high approval ratings because I'm, you know, I'm using common sense, whether it's getting men out of women's sports.

00:51:39.620 I mean, have you seen what goes on with the boxers and with the weightlifters and with the swimmers and everything?

00:51:45.280 It's so ridiculous.

00:51:46.160 And I think it's a 90% issue.

00:51:49.900 And, you know, the amazing thing, the Democrats are still fighting for it.

00:51:53.200 It's crazy.

00:51:53.960 It's crazy.

00:51:54.520 I think we should go to Congress also, have that cemented and, you know, make it indelible.

00:52:00.540 But we, you know, it's, to me, it's all common sense.

00:52:04.260 Who wants an open border where prisons are dumped into our country, where prisoners are led into our country, many of whom are murderers, many of whom murdered far more than one person.

00:52:15.220 And they're now roaming our country.

00:52:17.540 Who wants that? 1.00

00:52:18.540 I mean, it's terrible.

00:52:20.340 And he's not wrong, right?

00:52:22.600 From immigration, where Rich accurately pointed out his approval rating is at 59% across all groups, factoring in, you know, all Americans there.

00:52:31.500 64% approve sending troops down to the U.S.-Mexico border.

00:52:36.320 To the trans issue, which he's right, is the latest poll showed 79% for barring boys from girls sports. 1.00

00:52:43.220 So it probably is more like 90% because some people don't tell pollsters exactly how they feel.

00:52:47.960 So he's doing things that make sense.

00:52:50.880 And that leads me to my first policy point of this hour.

00:52:53.520 And that is the $59 million that made its way to house illegal immigrants in Manhattan from FEMA.

00:53:06.500 So FEMA sent almost $60 million of taxpayer money last week to New York to house illegals here at nice hotels like the Roosevelt Hotel, which is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where back when I was free during the days, we would go do yoga.

00:53:26.500 It was actually, it was a nice life, I have to be honest.

00:53:28.560 I'd do yoga in the morning and then we'd go meet for coffee, all these Upper West Side moms. 1.00

00:53:33.020 Absolutely lovely.

00:53:34.180 Today, you wouldn't be caught dead near there.

00:53:35.840 You certainly wouldn't be popping in for coffee.

00:53:37.820 It's all illegals. 1.00

00:53:39.420 Hanging out in the lobby, staying there on taxpayer dimes.

00:53:42.020 So notwithstanding the Trump order not to do that, there were some top administrators at FEMA who did that and they've just been fired.

00:53:53.820 This is actually from a National Review article that was posted today, I think, talking about how DHS, which oversees FEMA, is now, you know, demanded an investigation into this, saying that the individuals who did this circumvented leadership unilaterally made this payment and that they will be fired, that that money, quote, is meant for American disaster relief.

00:54:16.880 This is actually, quoting Elon Musk, and instead is being spent on high-end hotels for illegals. 0.94

00:54:22.540 A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.

00:54:26.300 President Trump signed an EO during his first week to create a council to review FEMA operations and root out political bias.

00:54:32.340 The Daily Mail reporting this morning that the woman who did it, and I think the three aides working for her who made it happen, have now all been fired.

00:54:41.220 But that's direct insubordination.

00:54:43.000 And it's a lot of money.

00:54:44.760 And it makes complete sense for Trump to say, we're not using FEMA relief aides while people in North Carolina are suffering to house illegals in Manhattan. 0.92

00:54:55.120 It's funny, you mentioned your experience with the Roosevelt.

00:55:00.240 The Roosevelt's actually where I took my wife for a drink at the bar on our first date.

00:55:06.040 Yes, it's got a good bar.

00:55:07.620 I used to stay there.

00:55:08.520 Yeah, and I used to stay there when I would go to New York for TV or other events.

00:55:13.880 I think my sister stayed there before my wedding.

00:55:16.480 So it really is astonishing as someone who, like you, was used to that being a hotel, and a nice-ish hotel, too, with a good bar, to see it now as a repository of illegal immigrants. 1.00

00:55:31.940 So you mentioned the popularity of some of Trump's early actions.

00:55:37.500 As a rule, I don't like it in politics when people use the phrase common sense, because they're often trying to steal a base and pretend that their personal politics are common sense and their opponents aren't.

00:55:49.700 But really, there are so many things on which the Democrats have inexplicably ceded ground that are actual common sense.

00:55:59.780 I mean, we disagree on lots of things in this country, which is why we have two political parties and why we have elections and we have debates and so forth.

00:56:08.120 And a lot of those things aren't going to go away because they're just the product of different philosophies.

00:56:13.260 But then there are the things that you just described.

00:56:15.860 I mean, earlier, all of that spending on foreign aid that I think 90% of people would think sounded crazy, men in women's sports, spending $59 million to put up illegal immigrants in hotels. 0.83

00:56:32.880 There's a suicidal instinct in the current Democratic Party that has created this opening.

00:56:41.380 And Trump has just walked into it, and Trump has just walked into it, and he's benefiting from it.

00:56:46.460 On the specific FEMA point with the Roosevelt Hotel, that is a perfect example of how many people in the bureaucracy have come to see themselves.

00:56:59.380 This myth that was developed over time and that is so often parroted by the press, that the executive branch within itself has separation of powers or checks and balances, that the Department of Justice or the FBI are independent.

00:57:18.400 When you accept that false premise, you get to this point at which bureaucrats who operate at the pleasure of the president, who is the only elected official in whom power is vested, can make decisions on their own judgment.

00:57:36.140 They can't.

00:57:37.600 They exist to do what the president wants them to do.

00:57:41.100 Now, that is not the same thing as saying that the president has unlimited power.

00:57:46.120 Of course he doesn't, because Congress has most of the power.

00:57:49.400 But when it comes to decisions such as that one, the president gets to make that call.

00:57:54.480 So these people should be fired.

00:57:56.500 There should be an example made of them so that it doesn't happen again.

00:58:00.160 That money should be clawed back.

00:58:02.040 And anyone who complains about it should be given an eighth grade civics lesson.

00:58:06.180 This is not how our government works.

00:58:08.820 Trump has been abundantly clear on this.

00:58:10.840 There's no ambiguity.

00:58:12.100 He issued these orders on day one or day two of the new administration.

00:58:16.880 It is just crazy to me that there are people in the government who think they have the authority to spend $59 million against the wishes of the guy who's in charge.

00:58:25.760 And let's not forget, it's because the last guy, quote, in charge, issued this order to pay it.

00:58:31.860 But there's a new sheriff in town.

00:58:33.660 But this is Joe Biden's fault.

00:58:35.880 He's really to blame here.

00:58:37.540 All of this cleanup Trump is having to do is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's fault.

00:58:42.520 I shudder to think about those two having won again, either won, and continuing doubling and tripling down on these horrific policies.

00:58:51.440 Border crossings are down 95% since Trump took office.

00:58:56.440 This military recruitment is up tens of thousands.

00:59:00.580 You know, the country is in the midst of a rebirth.

00:59:03.420 As Rich points out, more conservative wins in the cultural wars than we've seen in 50 years, just in the past three weeks.

00:59:11.980 So it really does feel like a renaissance, and it's wonderful.

00:59:16.180 There's some missteps.

00:59:17.340 There's some things that will need to be cleaned up, but that goes with the territory.

00:59:20.980 The FEMA firings, I did find my note, it's their CFO, Mary Comins.

00:59:27.560 She's been CFO since 2017.

00:59:29.940 She has a master's in public education from NYU, a bachelor of arts in political science from Fordham.

00:59:34.700 And according to Open Payrolls, her salary in 2018, it's probably gone up since then, was $170,000.

00:59:41.520 So for $170,000, you should do what your boss wants you to do.

00:59:45.480 And your boss made really clear that he did not want this money being spent, and certainly not to illegals. 0.99

00:59:52.280 A New York City Hall spokesperson confirmed to Fox News that they had received these funds through the past week,

00:59:57.860 and that of the $59 million, $19 million went to direct hotel costs.

01:00:03.780 The balance funded other services, such as food and security, for the illegals.

01:00:08.700 I think Mayor Adams will probably work with Trump to get this clawed back and returned,

01:00:14.580 since it appears that the Trump Justice Department has pulled off the Southern District of New York

01:00:20.500 U.S. Attorney from the Eric Adams case.

01:00:23.940 I don't know exactly how it went down, to be fair, but suddenly Eric Adams is no longer under federal investigation, Charles.

01:00:30.200 My own take on it is, I don't know what they found on the case.

01:00:33.520 I don't know whether he did what they said he did with, like, I don't know, I think it was like bribes from Egypt.

01:00:38.980 But as long as that guy stops New York from being a sanctuary city and starts cooperating with the feds,

01:00:44.300 it's a much, much bigger and important goal than whatever he did,

01:00:48.480 which I'm sure he will stop doing now that he's had this scare.

01:00:52.080 Yeah, it is more important, but I don't like it.

01:00:57.940 I think they're two separate questions.

01:01:00.500 And I absolutely want to end this horrible tendency of spending huge amounts of money to house illegal immigrants in hotels. 1.00

01:01:08.700 And I think that Eric Adams, although I'm not a big Eric Adams fan, is an improvement over Bill de Blasio, because who isn't?

01:01:15.140 But I do worry a bit about this tendency of people who are under the threat of legal action or have been convicted of crimes

01:01:27.620 to try and find common cause of solidarity with Donald Trump, who I think really was treated badly by Bragg,

01:01:35.480 and use that to get a pardon or a commutation or their case dropped.

01:01:41.940 It's just not the case that our system is irredeemably corrupt or that every case is exactly the same.

01:01:47.100 And the information I read about Eric Adams suggested he did something pretty bad, as had Rod Blagojevich.

01:01:53.960 It did not look good.

01:01:54.900 No, and we've seen a bunch of these.

01:01:57.720 I mean, Rod Blagojevich just got his full pardon.

01:02:01.460 And what was the first thing that Bob Menendez, the New Jersey senator, who also committed terrible crimes,

01:02:07.340 said once he was sentenced to 11 years in jail?

01:02:11.600 He said, now I understand how Donald Trump feels.

01:02:14.340 Come on, dude.

01:02:15.400 You did it.

01:02:16.900 You took money.

01:02:17.740 It was so brazen.

01:02:18.880 Practically, on Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog, which we all went to.

01:02:24.320 Oh, yeah, it's another one.

01:02:26.000 Yeah, who he's definitely a leftist.

01:02:29.060 But then suddenly in November, while he knew, but we didn't, that he was under investigation

01:02:32.700 for allegedly not paying millions in taxes.

01:02:35.540 He was like this prolific gambler winning $29 million in one poker game.

01:02:41.460 While he's arguing before the Supreme Court, he's being investigated by the feds

01:02:45.040 and taking out mortgages without revealing his massive debts from these poker matches.

01:02:49.360 Those are the allegations.

01:02:50.200 He denies them.

01:02:51.240 But while, so he's always a leftist.

01:02:53.540 And then suddenly, well, he knows he's under investigation, but we don't.

01:02:56.400 This past November, after Trump won and became the next, you know, the president-elect,

01:03:01.000 he does a whole piece on how we really should abandon all the lawfare.

01:03:04.620 I mean, just all the charges against Trump should go away.

01:03:08.560 It's what's fair.

01:03:09.360 I was like, Tom, we're on to you.

01:03:12.720 Right, right.

01:03:13.640 So I don't like that, and I don't like how susceptible to it Donald Trump seems to be.

01:03:17.680 But sure, I mean, if we're separating those questions out, Eric Adams is preferable to

01:03:22.900 Bill de Blasio, and insofar as the new administration can work with municipalities and states to stop

01:03:29.500 this, that's good.

01:03:31.420 What is, I think, fundamentally important here is that the bureaucracy responds within

01:03:37.280 the law to the president's instructions.

01:03:40.540 And we're seeing a whole bunch of signs already that it's not.

01:03:44.120 And that is an attack on democracy.

01:03:47.000 The left talks a great deal about democracy.

01:03:49.540 Sometimes I agree with him.

01:03:50.760 As you are listening to know, I didn't vote for Trump because of how he behaved in 2020.

01:03:54.660 But democracy does not mean things progressives like.

01:03:57.920 There are consequences to Trump's having won.

01:04:00.220 He gets to run the executive branch.

01:04:02.240 And this is an example of him running the executive branch.

01:04:05.360 So I just despair when I read about this because what you're essentially defending, if you defend

01:04:11.460 those employees who sent this money, is there being some fourth branch of government out there

01:04:16.940 that is accountable to nobody and that is spending your money as a taxpayer based on its own preferences.

01:04:23.540 Right.

01:04:23.860 But they think that's democracy.

01:04:25.080 That's literally the opposite of it.

01:04:27.240 Right.

01:04:27.600 Yes.

01:04:28.260 By the way, my team just sent me an update on Tom Goldstein.

01:04:30.780 I, Steve, do me a favor, find the episode number that we talked about this case in so

01:04:35.340 I can refer back to the audience.

01:04:37.800 It was, it's a great case.

01:04:39.200 Most people never heard of Tom Goldstein, but he's one of the most respected members of

01:04:41.940 the Supreme Court bar, which is his own special bar.

01:04:44.400 If you, that, you know, to get into, you have to get into it before you can have an argument

01:04:47.780 before the Supreme Court.

01:04:49.000 And one of the most successful lawyers in front of the Supreme Court and ran this very popular

01:04:54.600 blog called SCOTUS blog.

01:04:55.860 And then this shocking story comes out about all the alleged crimes he was committing while

01:05:02.800 showing up at the Supreme Court to argue some of the biggest cases that we've covered over

01:05:06.420 the past five, six years.

01:05:09.060 I mean, talk about being able to handle massive amounts of stress.

01:05:14.960 Litigation is stressful, Charles, at any level.

01:05:17.440 But like when you're arguing in front of the Supreme Court and the feds are breathing down

01:05:21.780 your neck and you think you're going to be charged with federal crimes, that guy's got

01:05:25.800 a steel of spine.

01:05:26.720 I don't admire him.

01:05:27.540 I'm just saying that the dynamic, it's, it's made for a movie.

01:05:31.140 Anyway, um, Reuters reporting today that he has just been arrested and detained after a

01:05:40.180 judge in Maryland said he violated the terms of his pretrial release.

01:05:43.320 He'd been out on bail, um, because he was a flight risk saying he may not remain free any

01:05:50.000 longer.

01:05:50.600 The prosecutor said he transferred millions of dollars in cryptocurrency assets using

01:06:00.860 accounts he concealed from the court.

01:06:03.940 I can't, I like, we have no idea who we are trusting out there in the public eye.

01:06:10.300 I'm here to tell you, ain't no felonies associated with yours truly.

01:06:14.560 And I feel like I can say the same on Charles's behalf.

01:06:16.900 We've all committed crimes.

01:06:18.020 Charles points this out all the time.

01:06:19.140 You commit many every day or week or month, like given the number of laws there are, but

01:06:23.880 I'm feeling good against the felonies.

01:06:27.140 Um, yeah, he argued more than 40 Supreme court cases before retiring in 2023.

01:06:31.340 And then he was indicted last month on 22 counts of tax evasion and other tax crimes.

01:06:35.440 The indictment said he won and lost millions of dollars in individual poker matches and

01:06:39.400 made improper payments through his law firm to cover the debts.

01:06:42.220 He pleaded not guilty and did have bail.

01:06:45.160 But now, uh, they allege that he has received more than 8 million in crypto currency and sent

01:06:51.940 more than 6 million in cryptocurrency over the last cent more of it, like to some accounts

01:06:57.560 that were not disclosed over the last five days.

01:07:00.160 He was obligated to disclose all of this to the court.

01:07:02.600 He did not.

01:07:03.900 Uh, they argued that this strongly suggests he is preparing to offshore his assets and

01:07:10.620 flee.

01:07:11.900 They also alleged that he tried to stop a potential witness who knew about his personal and law

01:07:16.020 firm finances from cooperating with the investigation by offering things of value, including crypto.

01:07:20.640 So the episode is number nine, eight, five.

01:07:27.500 It's in the middle of it.

01:07:28.940 And we spent about a half an hour on it.

01:07:30.240 Well worth your time.

01:07:30.960 It's crazy.

01:07:31.720 Trust no one, Charles.

01:07:32.660 Trust no one.

01:07:34.020 My life is so boring compared to that.

01:07:39.520 I've never done that.

01:07:40.860 I have to say.

01:07:41.640 No, I mean, you can't see it.

01:07:42.940 But if you, if you look just to my left is my desk and I've got all my 10 99s on there

01:07:48.380 and my W-2s and doing my taxes, and it never occurred to me to send that cash out into

01:07:53.340 Bitcoin as the precursor to leaving the country and maybe a non-extradition nation and fleeing

01:08:01.380 federal oversight.

01:08:02.620 Never occurred to me.

01:08:03.480 Maybe I should up my ambition.

01:08:06.160 Part of the story to me is just like, I really think he must be, if this is true, that takes

01:08:12.120 a sociopath to do this.

01:08:13.460 Somebody who's like somehow divorced from emotions.

01:08:15.920 Yeah, I mean, I do think that when you're evaluating whether or not someone is a flight

01:08:21.720 risk, just the fact of them being an extremely high stakes gambler probably bolsters the chances

01:08:27.100 that they are.

01:08:28.420 I had a friend at university who, yeah, he was a professional gambler.

01:08:32.940 And in our first year at university, he won 300,000 pounds playing poker.

01:08:37.320 What he would do is he would go down to these big London sort of gambling halls and he would

01:08:42.920 wait for Chinese businessmen to run in who just didn't care whether they won or lost.

01:08:46.180 They just wanted entertainment.

01:08:47.320 He was an amazing poker player.

01:08:48.600 So he would just win, right?

01:08:50.020 So year one, he makes this huge amount of money.

01:08:52.140 We're all students.

01:08:52.820 We just can't believe it.

01:08:53.700 And then in year two, he loses 150,000 pounds on that.

01:08:57.500 And I said to him, I said, I don't know how you could have carried on to the point at which

01:09:03.000 you lost money.

01:09:03.780 Because if I'd won 300,000 pounds, I'd have stopped, right?

01:09:06.540 Instead of keeping going and losing half of it.

01:09:08.380 And he said to me, well, it's a stupid thing to say, which it was, because if you had stopped,

01:09:13.040 you'd never have won it in the first place.

01:09:14.440 It's just not how gambling works.

01:09:16.000 You have to be prepared to lose everything you have at any given point.

01:09:19.760 And that's true.

01:09:20.380 And I've always remembered that.

01:09:21.660 Well, if this guy's playing $29 million stakes poker, I think the federal government might

01:09:27.140 be onto something when they think he could leave the country on a whim.

01:09:30.220 Yeah.

01:09:31.020 I'm glad they were watching.

01:09:32.300 Although Tom Gold's team potentially fleeing would have been a great story to cover.

01:09:35.580 We'll see what happens in this case.

01:09:36.940 I'm definitely covering that trial if there is one.

01:09:39.980 Okay.

01:09:40.560 Trump and common sense.

01:09:41.920 How about the return of water flow, plastic straws, and the incandescent light bulb, which

01:09:50.680 we all love.

01:09:52.020 The lighting is so much nicer.

01:09:53.580 They've improved the LED.

01:09:54.920 I will admit it's gotten a little better, but nothing compares to the incandescent.

01:09:59.620 Trump declared all of this via executive order and tweet and actually doubled down on the

01:10:06.720 plastic straws as only Trump can.

01:10:09.600 Listen to Sot 17.

01:10:11.040 We're going back to plastic straws.

01:10:14.080 These things don't work.

01:10:15.840 I've had them many times.

01:10:17.180 And on occasion, they break, they explode.

01:10:20.980 If something's hot, they don't last very long, like a matter of minutes, sometimes a matter

01:10:25.960 of seconds.

01:10:26.580 It's a ridiculous situation.

01:10:28.880 So we're going back to plastic straws.

01:10:31.940 Back to plastic, because he says in his EO, an irrational campaign against plastic straws

01:10:38.200 has resulted in major cities, states, and businesses banning their use, et cetera.

01:10:43.320 And it is there for the policy of the U.S. to end the use of paper straws.

01:10:47.380 I want this to happen nationwide.

01:10:50.320 And then he moves on to say he's instructing Secretary Lee Zeldin to immediately go back

01:10:56.740 to my environmental orders, EPA administrator or secretary, which were terminated by Crooked

01:11:01.540 Joe on water standards and flow pertaining to sinks, showers, toilets, washing machines,

01:11:06.000 dishwashers, et cetera, and to likewise go back to the common sense standards on light

01:11:10.420 bulbs that were put in place by the Trump administration, but terminated by Crooked Joe.

01:11:14.420 I look forward to signing these orders.

01:11:15.720 Thank you.

01:11:16.180 Your thoughts.

01:11:18.300 Well, first off, it is completely insane that the federal government gets to tell us what

01:11:24.520 straws and light bulbs and shower heads that we can use.

01:11:28.940 This should never have happened.

01:11:30.280 But it did take that power and then it delegated that power to the president.

01:11:36.060 So he's completely within his rights to do this.

01:11:37.960 I think it will be wildly popular.

01:11:40.760 The most annoying argument that I've seen against this from the left is why?

01:11:46.160 Why is he focusing on this?

01:11:48.140 You know, why, when there are so many issues, is he worrying about straws, which is a silly

01:11:54.960 question.

01:11:55.500 Why did you worry about it in the first place such that he had to reverse it?

01:12:00.040 You can't have it both ways.

01:12:01.260 If it doesn't matter what straws people use or what light bulbs people have or what showerheads or dishwashers people are allowed to buy, then you should never have started issuing executive orders and agency rules in the first instance.

01:12:15.440 You can't blame the guy who, with the backing of the public, comes in and reverses your rules and then say, it's so weird.

01:12:22.120 Why does he care about that?

01:12:23.660 And that is, of course, what they've done across a whole bunch of issues, what they did with the trans issue as well.

01:12:28.120 We had two and a half thousand years of sports in which men and women were not regarded as the same thing, in which the risks were understood.

01:12:36.360 The left came in and said, hey, maybe men should be playing in women's sports and anyone who disagrees with a bigot. 1.00

01:12:43.400 People stood up and said, I don't think that's a very good idea.

01:12:45.960 And they said, why do you care, you weirdo?

01:12:48.100 It's just so cynical.

01:12:50.240 So, like, this would never have happened if they hadn't tried to regulate this in the first instance.

01:12:54.360 So to go after Trump and say, why isn't he worrying about bigger issues, is, I think, is really unfair.

01:12:59.720 This is something that people are annoyed by because of over-government.

01:13:03.480 What I would like to see, and I don't think it's going to happen, but what I would like to see is, having issued these orders and got these rules through, is for Congress to step in and pass a law saying this is no longer the preserve of the presidency.

01:13:17.760 And that if the federal government is going to regulate this at all, it can't be changed until such time as Congress changes it.

01:13:24.460 Because you're never going to get a groundswell in America that wants Congress to outlaw plastic straws or LED light bulbs.

01:13:32.100 This has to come from the bureaucracy because people hate it.

01:13:36.460 Well, well said.

01:13:37.860 No, it's another version of Republicans pounce, right?

01:13:40.800 They do something absolutely crazy on the left.

01:13:44.400 Republicans say, well, you're crazy.

01:13:45.760 And it's the headlines, Republicans pounce.

01:13:47.700 Well, Trump pounced and is restoring, yes, common sense and order and the beautiful plastic straws that we all want.

01:13:55.580 He's right about the paper straws.

01:13:57.040 They're a disaster.

01:13:58.340 Charlie, great to see you.

01:14:00.260 Thanks for having me.

01:14:01.040 All right, coming up next, Carol Swain is here looking forward to talking to her.

01:14:06.780 Do you know that she was one of the victims of accused plagiarizer Claudine Gay, the Harvard professor who got bounced out and she's got a new book out?

01:14:18.360 She's going to talk about what that was like and more next.

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01:15:37.180 The Megyn Kelly Show.

01:15:38.400 Elevate your love with Cozy Earth.

01:15:41.560 I'm Megyn Kelly, host of The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM.

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01:16:39.540 Remember Claudine Gay?

01:16:45.400 It's been a year since the former Harvard president resigned from her position after refusing to say that anti-Semitic language on campus violated the college's code of conduct.

01:16:57.260 Here's a reminder of her disastrous testimony before Congress.

01:17:02.180 I assume you're familiar with the term intifada, correct?

01:17:04.400 I've heard that term, yes.

01:17:08.180 And you understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews.

01:17:20.860 Are you aware of that?

01:17:23.260 That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.

01:17:26.940 Do you believe that type of hateful speech is contrary to Harvard's code of conduct, or is it allowed at Harvard?

01:17:35.160 It is at odds with the values of Harvard.

01:17:38.200 Can you not say here that it is against the code of conduct at Harvard?

01:17:44.400 We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.

01:17:53.060 It's when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassing.

01:18:00.280 Does that speech not cross that barrier?

01:18:02.780 Does that speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the elimination of Israel? 0.90

01:18:07.080 Do not get on Elise Stefanik's bad side.

01:18:09.520 She's amazing.

01:18:10.460 I interviewed her at the Republican National Convention, and I just assumed she had legal training.

01:18:15.020 I'm like, where'd you go to law school?

01:18:16.100 She's like, I didn't go to law school.

01:18:17.540 Um, she's going to be our new UN ambassador, and she's perfectly suited for that job. 0.88

01:18:24.500 Uh, in addition, in addition to Claudine Gay's problems, responding to those questions on Capitol Hill,

01:18:30.840 she was accused of serial plagiarism, which really kind of was the death knell, put the nail in the coffin.

01:18:35.580 And one of the authors that she is accused of plagiarizing is with me today.

01:18:40.560 You and I love her.

01:18:41.820 Her name is Dr. Carol Swain.

01:18:43.100 You know, Carol, she has a new book detailing this plagiarism.

01:18:46.880 And her own ensuing battle with Harvard.

01:18:50.280 You see, she says she was one of Claudine's victims.

01:18:53.580 It is called the gay affair. 0.98

01:18:55.680 I like, I like it.

01:18:56.640 The gay affair. 0.87

01:18:57.660 Harvard plagiarism and the death of academic integrity.

01:19:02.560 Carol, welcome back to the show.

01:19:03.500 Great to see you.

01:19:04.940 It is great to see you too.

01:19:06.760 And I understand you were at the Super Bowl.

01:19:09.840 Yes, I was rooting for your Eagles.

01:19:13.140 Well, and they won.

01:19:15.260 They won.

01:19:15.660 I know.

01:19:16.140 That's right.

01:19:17.160 Yeah.

01:19:17.820 You have that in common with my husband.

01:19:19.340 He's from, well, he's from Philly.

01:19:20.760 So that's why he loves them.

01:19:21.840 But yeah, they were great.

01:19:23.240 It was super fun.

01:19:24.640 And I really, I don't think I'll ever do it again, but I certainly enjoyed the one time.

01:19:29.460 So you've spent a lifetime in academics.

01:19:31.860 When you came on before we detailed your rise, I mean, at the most elite institutions like Vanderbilt.

01:19:36.860 And you have to, if you're going to go that route, write a lot.

01:19:41.780 You have to get published, which you did.

01:19:44.880 And so how did you find out that somebody else who's gotten published, though not as prolifically as you have, did it in part by allegedly copying and stealing your ideas and words?

01:19:56.820 And that would be Claudine Gay, the one-time president of Harvard.

01:20:00.060 Yes, and before I was at Vanderbilt, I was tenured at Princeton, early tenure, and my prize-winning first book, Black Faces, Black Interests, The Representation of African Americans in Congress, was the book that was plagiarized.

01:20:14.820 And I found out, along with the rest of the world, on December 10th, 2023, when Dr. Art Laffer gave me a phone call and asked if I had heard that the president of Harvard University had been accused of plagiarizing her dissertation.

01:20:33.800 And then he said, guess who she plagiarized?

01:20:37.160 You.

01:20:37.680 And so he referred me to Christopher Ruffo's X page, Twitter, and I went there.

01:20:45.880 I saw the article, and then I started getting phone calls, and I read the work.

01:20:51.360 First, I was, you know, shocked.

01:20:54.160 It happened 26 years earlier.

01:20:56.560 Then I was deeply sad because she's a Black woman, I'm a Black woman, and I didn't think it was a good look for Black women.

01:21:03.400 And then that sort of morphed into anger.

01:21:07.680 Which is not something that I usually engage in.

01:21:11.600 When Harvard came out and said that it wasn't plagiarism, it was duplicative language without attribution.

01:21:20.420 Right.

01:21:21.080 And how did you feel about that?

01:21:23.220 I was angry.

01:21:24.920 And that anger, again, it's not good to be angry.

01:21:29.560 And I gave, I believe, 80-some interviews between December 10th and the middle of January.

01:21:37.900 But I calmed myself down for Christmas.

01:21:40.300 This happened December 10th.

01:21:42.080 I'm angry, angry, angry, but I want to have a good Christmas.

01:21:45.720 I'm a Christian.

01:21:47.000 Calmed myself down.

01:21:48.200 Started posting scriptures on X, which I still do, because it was consuming me in a way that was not healthy.

01:21:54.980 But January 2nd, Claudine Gay resigned.

01:21:59.120 She has a letter, I believe, in the New York Times, and she blames racism.

01:22:05.020 And when she blamed racism, then I'm angry all over again.

01:22:08.760 And I called an attorney who had offered to take the case pro bono, and I told him to pursue it.

01:22:16.660 And so it was an attorney from Austin.

01:22:19.280 And then later, I moved from him to a paid legal team.

01:22:26.140 And doing all of this, Claudine Gay never reached out to me.

01:22:29.380 I had heard of her while I was at Princeton.

01:22:31.960 I was a hot shot when I was hired, and I got early tenure, got it in three years.

01:22:38.200 First book, three national prizes.

01:22:40.100 It's been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.

01:22:42.680 But I started questioning affirmative action in the mid-1990s.

01:22:47.980 And that was not popular with the people who had loved me for my first book.

01:22:52.740 And that was interesting how quickly you can fall out of favor.

01:22:55.780 But I started falling out of favor, and it felt to me that Claudine Gay was being thrown up to me,

01:23:03.420 this brilliant, brilliant Black woman from Harvard University.

01:23:07.980 And I was not interested that much in what she was doing.

01:23:12.360 And my work moved in a different direction.

01:23:14.860 I had been a congressional scholar.

01:23:16.380 That was how I was tenured.

01:23:17.720 But then I got interested in affirmative action and white nationalism and other issues.

01:23:23.640 So I wasn't paying attention.

01:23:25.800 I stopped attending the conferences.

01:23:29.080 So it was a shock to me to find out that Claudine Gay had sort of built her early career

01:23:35.380 around the theses and arguments of Black faces, Black interests. 0.77

01:23:42.080 And many of our audience members may be asking themselves, how can this possibly be?

01:23:46.660 Because you, I think it's fair to say, are a more conservative thinker.

01:23:50.520 Maybe heterodox thinker is a better way. 0.90

01:23:52.660 And she is a far lefty.

01:23:54.540 So why would she be plagiarizing Carol Swain if, in fact, she did?

01:23:59.160 Well, I was the hotshot back then.

01:24:01.080 And I was a Democrat up until 2009.

01:24:04.440 But I like to say that I was a Democrat with common sense.

01:24:08.760 Because back then, when I started, before Black faces Black interests, 0.98

01:24:13.800 and when I did my dissertation, my research question was,

01:24:19.000 is it really true that only Blacks can represent Blacks?

01:24:22.380 And so I studied Black representation in Congress.

01:24:25.200 And I argued that political party was more important than the race of the representative.

01:24:30.200 And I also argued that whites could represent Blacks and Blacks could represent whites. 0.66

01:24:35.420 And that when Black candidates lost, it was because of their views and not their race.

01:24:41.460 And at the time I did that study, 40% of the Blacks in Congress were elected in districts that were majority white on election day,

01:24:53.020 when you factored in turnout levels and registration.

01:24:56.400 And so the book, one of the reasons it got a lot of attention is, in my concluding chapter,

01:25:03.660 I talked about what would happen to Black power if the Democrats lost control of Congress.

01:25:09.040 And it happened a year after my book was published.

01:25:11.860 That's so interesting.

01:25:15.520 I love, well, you're, you know, you're bent toward conservative thinking, especially on issues of race,

01:25:20.560 like concluding that it's okay for Blacks to be represented by whites and so on.

01:25:23.700 This led to the beginning of your cancellation.

01:25:25.440 We went over that when you came on, like, slowly but surely, the universities decided,

01:25:29.840 maybe you're not all that brilliant.

01:25:31.340 These don't seem like brilliant ideas to them.

01:25:33.400 They'd much rather go with the Claudine Gay, who knocks down those ideas and says all the right things, 0.97

01:25:38.720 and then keeps getting promoted.

01:25:41.120 And then, even though she's made it to the top of Harvard University,

01:25:45.660 when she comes under fire, along with two white women from other universities

01:25:51.220 who are saying similarly dumb things at those hearings, she blames racism.

01:25:55.260 What did you, I mean, like, your reaction when she, like, decided to blame her problems on that?

01:25:59.320 Well, I mean, I'm not a racist, and I was among the people.

01:26:04.340 There were 47 instances of plagiarism.

01:26:07.600 In the book, I have a side-by-side.

01:26:09.920 There were five verbatim concerning my work,

01:26:12.900 but my argument is that she used Black Faces, Black Interest to set up a straw man.

01:26:18.780 She took one of my conclusions, and her work was designed to counter my work.

01:26:24.340 And so there were verbatim plagiarism,

01:26:27.040 but the bigger theft, I think, was that instead of doing it,

01:26:30.640 like if you or I were going to do a research project and we thought someone was wrong,

01:26:35.700 we would say, you know, Dr. So-and-so argues, such and such, they are wrong.

01:26:41.700 And then you lay out their argument, you dissect it, you take it apart.

01:26:46.680 She didn't do that. 0.99

01:26:47.660 She tried to avoid citing me, and the places where she did cite me,

01:26:51.880 it was not to give credit for the core of her idea.

01:26:56.260 And so in at least three articles, because she did not, she never had a major book,

01:27:02.440 I would argue that she drew on my ideas without giving proper attribution.

01:27:08.320 And I learned in this process that under copyright law,

01:27:12.960 the theft of ideas are not protected.

01:27:15.920 Copyright law protects copyrights, but not the theft of ideas.

01:27:19.600 And her lawyer argued that it was the minimus, which she took from me,

01:27:24.640 that it was fair use, and that she had argued the opposite of what I did.

01:27:30.960 And so that was pretty much their position.

01:27:33.380 And then the university itself, they had an attorney,

01:27:36.240 and their attorney said that they were not responsible for the dissertation

01:27:40.000 because ProQuest published it.

01:27:42.880 And, but they referred me back to the letter by Neil Roman.

01:27:49.420 Yeah, I mean, the bottom line is, no one took responsibility.

01:27:52.380 She didn't say she was sorry.

01:27:53.740 She said when she came under fire that these were just mere errors.

01:27:57.720 Nothing was done intentionally.

01:27:59.500 I'm sure that she and Harvard don't act that way when a student gets caught plagiarizing work.

01:28:06.760 You can just say it was a mere error.

01:28:09.620 And, you know, she's, I know when you were thinking about filing this lawsuit,

01:28:13.300 but ultimately decided not to for the reasons you just discussed,

01:28:16.820 you took a look at where Claudine Gay is now, 0.98

01:28:20.540 and you reminded me of something too, which is she's actually doing pretty darn well.

01:28:26.440 She is.

01:28:27.420 I don't, well, you know, plagiarism isn't a crime or a misdemeanor.

01:28:33.680 It's like an ethical, moral breach.

01:28:36.860 And institutions, whether it was journalists, journalistic organizations,

01:28:41.160 or colleges and universities, they used to police that. 0.92

01:28:45.400 But when it comes to elite, it's not being policed.

01:28:48.240 Harvard doesn't allow its students to plagiarize.

01:28:50.900 They hold them to a strict standard, except if they get away with it.

01:28:55.520 And so in the case of Claudine Gay, they didn't catch it back when she, when it occurred.

01:29:01.460 And so they defend it now that she's on the faculty.

01:29:05.000 And one of the things that really bothers me is that Claudine Gay, you know, she, 1.00

01:29:11.340 I mean, she comes from Haitian aristocracy. 1.00

01:29:15.080 She went to Phillips Exeter Academy.

01:29:17.560 She has an undergraduate degree from Stanford.

01:29:19.940 She has the PhD from Harvard.

01:29:21.940 She won two prizes for her writings.

01:29:26.420 And, and so it's a reflection on the elites because they educated her.

01:29:30.440 She was their product.

01:29:32.260 And, and people like me that come from the other side of the track,

01:29:36.380 there's less interest in me and Roland Fryer, people like us.

01:29:41.200 And Harvard had been accused some time ago of preferring the offspring of immigrants and

01:29:49.600 to native born black Americans.

01:29:53.140 And so, I mean, they chose her carefully, chose her, chose her, they're protected her.

01:29:59.180 And as far as I know, she's still earning that $900,000 a year salary. 0.95

01:30:04.260 And my book is not just about Claudine Gay.

01:30:07.800 I would say that we have a pandemic in academia of plagiarism.

01:30:13.560 And if you are an elite, you can get away with it.

01:30:16.920 And I could not pursue justice with Harvard.

01:30:19.800 And Harvard's always ignored me.

01:30:21.420 Even when she made corrections to her dissertation,

01:30:24.760 she never made any corrections as far as I know to the, to my work,

01:30:28.940 nor has she ever reached out to me.

01:30:30.700 If she had reached out to me, I would not have written the book.

01:30:35.760 And the reason I didn't file the lawsuit is because under copyright law,

01:30:41.060 loser pays.

01:30:41.960 And I was not going to use my retirement and my social security to pay Harvard's lawyers.

01:30:47.460 Absolutely right.

01:30:48.320 Or hers when she's making $900,000 a year. 0.99

01:30:50.700 Just so our audience knows.

01:30:53.420 Carol was born in Bedford, Virginia.

01:30:55.200 One of 12 kids grew up in a very poor house,

01:30:58.580 living in a shack without running water,

01:31:00.260 sharing two beds with her 11 siblings, did not finish high school,

01:31:03.540 dropped out in ninth grade, earned a GED,

01:31:05.960 worked as a cashier at McDonald's.

01:31:07.380 Carol actually worked at McDonald's as a door-to-door salesperson, 0.53

01:31:10.980 an assistant at a retirement facility,

01:31:12.800 now holds five degrees, including a PhD from the University of North Carolina,

01:31:17.440 a master's from Yale,

01:31:18.960 got tenure as an associate professor at politics and public policy at Princeton,

01:31:22.440 and also taught at Vanderbilt, as I mentioned.

01:31:25.160 So, I mean, you have worked your way up from nothing.

01:31:28.900 That doesn't get rewarded by these.

01:31:30.960 They don't look at you and say it's wonderful.

01:31:32.680 Now, if you had somehow managed to turn out liberal, it might.

01:31:36.580 They might want to celebrate that, you know, rags to riches story.

01:31:39.400 But no, you questioned the one thing you really can't question.

01:31:43.540 You mentioned Roland Fryer.

01:31:45.640 Race.

01:31:46.120 A black person who's heterodox on these racial issues beloved by the left 0.95

01:31:51.000 makes you public enemy number one.

01:31:55.220 I mean, I just think that the racism that I know you've had to endure from leftists, right,

01:32:00.340 who it's like, I don't know what the term is for a woman, but it's like an Uncle Tom. 0.97

01:32:04.180 That's what they call people like Roland and Clarence Thomas, is absolutely shocking.

01:32:09.700 It's true.

01:32:10.960 And they call the women Aunt Jane.

01:32:13.380 And the progressives were always uncomfortable with me.

01:32:17.420 And also, many of the black people that I worked alongside, they would tell me,

01:32:23.560 you know, you don't need to tell people where you came from.

01:32:26.980 And there seemed to be a lot of embarrassment that somehow I had slipped through the cracks

01:32:31.200 and entered those places.

01:32:33.540 And I am a person of faith.

01:32:35.980 And I believe that God somehow opened those doors.

01:32:38.640 I was able to get in there and get credentialed and to see exactly what takes place behind the

01:32:44.860 closed doors.

01:32:46.320 And there's a lot of racism.

01:32:48.180 And much of it came from the, all of it came from the white progressives.

01:32:52.620 And I can tell you that my attitudes about race has always been that, I mean, I've never

01:32:59.920 been on, I wasn't in the black student union.

01:33:02.820 I was in the honor societies.

01:33:05.040 And my mentors, and many of them were older white men and people, no one, you know, no one

01:33:11.620 encouraged me to feel like I was handicapped because I was black.

01:33:15.120 I'm a woman.

01:33:15.840 I have children.

01:33:17.260 I come from poverty.

01:33:18.700 Um, I had to get to graduate school and start studying theories of oppression to learn that

01:33:25.960 because I was black and a woman and with a family that I wasn't supposed to have been

01:33:31.120 able to do the things I had already done.

01:33:33.660 And it was like poison.

01:33:35.320 And I think that we poison young people's minds today that all of that diversity, equity

01:33:40.060 and inclusion and what affirmative action became, all of that has held black people back because

01:33:46.260 in my day, I would say I benefited from the civil rights act of 1964, the equal protection

01:33:52.080 clause of the constitution and environment that focused on non, non-discrimination outreach

01:33:59.240 and equal opportunity.

01:34:01.200 And I had equal opportunity to get into places.

01:34:04.820 I was recognized because I defied the stereotypes, but I could have failed anywhere along the way.

01:34:11.300 There was no equity in my day.

01:34:14.180 That comes through so clearly in our earlier episode together where we, I'll give the audience

01:34:20.020 the number, um, where we, we went through it all.

01:34:22.820 And it's an amazing success story.

01:34:24.620 Uh, I, I do have to ask you, I mentioned you last week because we were having this discussion

01:34:28.800 about these absurd panels that are happening over on CNN and the woe is me attitude of these

01:34:34.840 very successful black women who are running the discussion and Abby Phillips case and the

01:34:40.000 panelists she has still acting like it's 1954 and we've made no progress and we haven't had the

01:34:46.600 civil rights.

01:34:47.100 I mean, here's a little, this is a different cut from the one we ran last week, but here's a sample.

01:34:51.560 I got a law degree, a master's and two bachelors, probably more education than all y'all added up

01:34:56.660 together at this table, right?

01:34:57.800 And I have always been the least paid person on payroll at every institution I have worked

01:35:04.300 in.

01:35:04.780 And it's not because-

01:35:05.220 Even in the White House?

01:35:06.320 Even in the White House.

01:35:07.440 Well, whose fault is that?

01:35:08.880 I don't think he worked for George W. or Trump.

01:35:10.520 Well, guess what happened when I was there?

01:35:12.500 D.I.

01:35:12.920 I have faced this.

01:35:13.860 I just said I was the least paid person, even in this moment sometimes, to my counterparts.

01:35:20.100 I do believe I'm qualified.

01:35:21.260 I know I'm qualified.

01:35:22.220 You won't ever tell me I'm not qualified.

01:35:24.340 But the system that I live in doesn't matter about my qualification.

01:35:29.100 Black women are one of the most educated demographics in this country and one of the least paid. 1.00

01:35:33.740 Why would that make any sense?

01:35:34.620 Why would that make any sense?

01:35:36.360 And don't talk to me about the judges you stand before.

01:35:38.440 Talk to me about the theory.

01:35:39.360 Hold on.

01:35:39.880 Talk to me about the world in which we live in and the system that we live in.

01:35:41.900 Let's look at the United States Supreme Court.

01:35:43.500 How can you say we're not going to look at that from the top to the bottom?

01:35:46.580 I'm talking about the least.

01:35:47.380 Okay, New York is a more progressive state.

01:35:48.680 And we just got a black woman. 1.00

01:35:50.160 Hold up.

01:35:50.620 Let me-

01:35:51.120 We just got a black woman on the line. 1.00

01:35:52.360 You had a black man from the 70s.

01:35:55.040 You brought up the Supreme Court.

01:35:55.920 Or the 60s.

01:35:56.500 You won.

01:35:57.040 Did you know, Arthur, that there are many-

01:35:58.760 Hold on.

01:35:59.520 Why is it so hard to understand why something like diversity, equity, inclusion needs to

01:36:04.000 be a part of what we do in a system that never even acknowledged a group of people,

01:36:07.700 never saw us as a human commodity, literally never noticed who we were?

01:36:12.700 And now here we are years later asking for some simple rights, some simple civility.

01:36:17.440 She's asking to be paid like you get paid. 1.00

01:36:19.560 She's asking to be acknowledged like you get acknowledged.

01:36:22.680 And she knows that that is not the case because she is a black woman. 0.98

01:36:25.800 Your thoughts on it, Carol?

01:36:30.180 What an interesting thing about, you know, all these degrees that she has. 1.00

01:36:34.740 We know that colleges and universities are not equal.

01:36:39.040 We also know that they have lowered the standards so much, especially at the, even the Ivy League,

01:36:44.540 that once you get your foot in the door, they pass you along.

01:36:47.700 It's almost impossible to fail.

01:36:49.760 And so a person having a lot of degrees, that tells me nothing about their knowledge base

01:36:55.680 or their work ethic.

01:36:57.280 And I think the work ethic is key.

01:36:59.500 And just having a degree and showing up, that doesn't mean anything.

01:37:03.320 Do you show up?

01:37:04.520 How hard do you work?

01:37:06.560 Those women that were featured, they seem to be doing pretty well.

01:37:11.080 Absolutely.

01:37:11.340 And yet still want us to be, I mean, Abby, there's no question Abby Phillip makes millions

01:37:16.200 of dollars and she still wants us to feel sorry for her because somehow there's an invisible

01:37:21.580 ceiling.

01:37:22.180 She keeps bumping up against, you know, she has a primetime show. 0.71

01:37:25.920 Like, I don't know what she's bitching about. 1.00

01:37:27.680 And this other woman, I have no idea what her work ethic is. 1.00

01:37:29.980 Good point.

01:37:30.600 I don't know how smart she is just because she has these degrees. 0.61

01:37:33.120 And I don't know whether she's outshining her competitors either. 0.94

01:37:35.920 You know, it's like maybe you're great, but you're not as great as your colleagues.

01:37:39.480 It just automatically has to be gender and race.

01:37:44.700 Well, I can tell you, Megan, I identify more with you just because we are two women that

01:37:49.880 had to reinvent ourselves because we ran up against the forces that be and we did so

01:37:55.120 successfully.

01:37:56.180 Most of the liberals don't have to worry about that.

01:37:59.340 That's exactly right.

01:38:00.640 Thank you.

01:38:01.320 I appreciate that.

01:38:02.380 And I feel very much the same, Carol.

01:38:04.220 And I'm thrilled that you're going public with this story about Claudine Gay because honestly,

01:38:09.520 she should have called you long ago to apologize at the bare minimum she could do.

01:38:13.300 Support Carol.

01:38:14.700 The book is called The Gay Affair.

01:38:17.000 Love it.

01:38:17.500 Good turn of phrase.

01:38:18.360 It's very memorable.

01:38:19.520 The Gay Affair by Carol Swain, who we want to support, who will not get a single appearance

01:38:24.440 on CNN to promote this book or MSNBC, hopefully Fox, but she needs our support and she deserves

01:38:31.380 it.

01:38:31.840 The book is The Gay Affair.

01:38:32.900 It's wonderful to have you back.

01:38:34.980 Thank you so much.

01:38:36.640 All right, Steve.

01:38:37.040 What was the episode number our first time with Carol?

01:38:39.120 Oh, 281.

01:38:39.780 Number 281.

01:38:41.280 And it's a great one.

01:38:42.360 You will fall in love with Carol if you haven't already.

01:38:44.580 And we are back tomorrow with Adam Carolla and Anna Kasparian.

01:38:48.640 Before we go, I just want to point this out very quickly.

01:38:51.180 Last Friday, we dropped a special episode on Brian Kohlberger and all of these big developments

01:38:56.180 that happened in that case when we weren't looking about two weeks earlier.

01:39:00.180 It's huge.

01:39:01.120 It's blowing up online.

01:39:02.220 The episode's only, it's less than an hour, I think.

01:39:04.020 It's well worth your time.

01:39:05.540 Go back and take a look at it, youtube.com slash megankelly.

01:39:08.600 We will see you tomorrow.

01:39:12.200 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. 0.94

01:39:14.040 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - February 11, 2025

Left Pushes ＂Constitutional Crisis＂ Narrative, and Trump Brings Back Plastic Straws, with Charles Cooke, Rich Lowry, and Carol Swain ｜ Ep. 1005

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