In this episode, Megynkel explains why we are in a constitutional crisis and why we should all be worried about it. She also explains why it is not a "custodial crisis" and what we should do if it becomes one.
00:00:00.620Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
00:00:12.260Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
00:00:15.360I'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.
00:00:25.100There's always more I want to read before I talk to you guys.
00:00:27.060The show needs to start at 2 o'clock instead of 12 o'clock. Oh, well, here we go. Let's do this thing.
00:00:33.000It is day 22 of the Trump administration and the breakneck pace shows no signs of slowing down.
00:00:37.980It's so fun. But the Democrats think they've found the speed bump they've been looking for.
00:00:44.320Of course, they're filing lawsuit after lawsuit, I think 40 lawsuits so far.
00:00:50.080And that has allowed them because they have some judges who are finding their way.
00:00:54.800Or 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.
00:01:03.580Like I need it to be briefed and I need a full evidentiary hearing for me to understand what's going on.
00:01:08.340And they're like, oh, it's a huge win.
00:01:11.800We're shutting down Trump's ability to change the government.
00:01:14.620And then they when Trump says, I don't think you'd actually do have the ability to stop me from doing this constitutional crisis.
00:01:26.020Meanwhile, 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.
00:01:42.240And the Trump team filed a brief saying, actually, we are making all of these payments in the following few fields.
00:01:49.000They 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.
00:01:57.020And the judge did not say you're in contempt.
00:02:00.360You you're in huge trouble for doing that.
00:02:35.000And the the feds are allowed the executive branch is allowed to control a lot of how the money gets spent, whether it gets spent.
00:02:41.860They 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.
00:02:49.160And I realize that these various plaintiffs don't like that.
00:02:53.020The Democrats don't like that, but it's going to play out in the courts.
00:02:56.680And I think in, as I said last night, nine out of 10 of these cases is going to go Trump's way.
00:03:01.260So we are not at a constitutional crisis yet.
00:03:03.440He has not flipped the bird to any judge telling him he must do something yet.
00:08:34.980And the nice lady will read me my NR smart, fair and balanced news while I get other things done.
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00:10:28.200Let me take it one at a time before I get to the really going.
00:10:30.740I'm going to start with you on that piece, Rich.
00:10:32.860And 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.
00:10:41.280But do you think we are now, as the media is telling us, at a constitutional crisis point?
00:10:48.960It'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.
00:11:05.900Presidents 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.
00:11:17.060Now, Elon Musk is a little bit more than that.
00:11:18.900He's an actual government employee, right?
00:14:22.940We are three weeks into the second Trump presidency, three weeks.
00:14:27.260And tonight there are warnings that the U.S. is dangerously close to a constitutional crisis.
00:14:32.560Constitutional law experts say this is the clearest sign that we might be creeping towards a constitutional crisis.
00:14:38.080Some legal experts say our country could be headed toward a constitutional crisis.
00:14:43.060The warnings of a constitutional crisis just weeks into Trump's second terms.
00:14:48.520So will the Trump administration comply with the courts or will the president drive the nation full steam ahead into a constitutional crisis?
00:14:58.580I think this is he's causing a constitutional crisis intentionally.
00:15:07.580Well, I don't think there's a constitutional crisis.
00:15:10.520If they ignore a court order, there might be.
00:15:14.020Although there are a lot of checks and balances within our system that declaring anything a constitutional crisis of the first hurdle is often premature.
00:15:24.600The issue here in most of these cases is that a judge is indulged what David French used to call Trump law.
00:15:34.780In a sense, they've said the executive has these powers, but Trump's not allowed to exercise them.
00:15:41.340The way you deal with that as an administration is you take it to higher courts and you make your case.
00:15:49.600I 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.
00:15:57.260But not doing so doesn't constitute a constitutional crisis.
00:16:00.920I saw Sheldon Whitehouse, of all people, suggesting that criticizing the court system, as J.D. Vance did, is beyond the pale.
00:16:11.140This is a guy who has spent the last five, six, seven years arguing that the Supreme Court is bought and paid for is illegitimate.
00:16:19.580A 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.
00:16:37.520An idea so crazy that even Franklin Roosevelt was repudiated when he tried it in the 1930s.
00:16:43.480So as of yet, there is nothing that gets close to a constitutional crisis.
00:16:48.060And 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.
00:17:19.600If 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.
00:17:36.680And 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.
00:17:50.240There hasn't been an attempt to shut down or consolidate or move this agency.
00:17:55.080If there is, there will be a genuine constitutional question.
00:17:58.420And if the administration ignores the courts, maybe a constitutional crisis.
00:18:02.840But this just strikes me as being wildly premature.
00:18:06.680Okay, so there's so much misinformation being shoved down people's throats about this.
00:18:12.580I 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.
00:18:26.220So, Rich, let me give you another example of how this is being spun in the media.
00:18:31.100Last night, there was a debate between the great Scott Jennings and the terrible Abby Phillips.
00:19:22.180Yeah, 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.
00:19:27.440So 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.
00:19:32.800So that gets to the question of whether the judge can force Trump to spend all the monies until he issues his ruling.
00:19:42.640And now we're getting a little closer to this federal district judge overstepping his bounds.
00:19:48.740I mean, for a week, sure, he can say that.
00:19:51.520Like, I want to see it briefed, send me your briefs.
00:19:53.900But 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.
00:20:03.000And effectively just undermine the president's power.
00:20:05.720No federal district judge is going to get away with that.
00:20:09.240Yeah, well, you go up and you appeal it.
00:20:13.860And just, Megan, one reason this is so absurd.
00:20:17.100Well, 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?
00:20:37.720It's like the last 24 hours, the memo clearly went out and everyone's saying constitutional crisis.
00:20:43.240But 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.
00:20:50.740You know, he'd try to stay for a third term.
00:20:52.800It turns out just carrying back foreign aid, that's the constitutional crisis.
00:20:57.720And offering a buyout to federal employees saying, I'll pay you a lot more than you otherwise could get.
00:21:02.060Yeah, so the Congress did not say, we have specifically appropriated money for a DEI program in Serbia, right?
00:21:13.000If they said that, that would not have gotten through Congress.
00:21:16.060So it's executive discretion to begin with on whether you're going to spend money on a Serbian DEI program, right?
00:21:25.280So 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?
00:21:36.320So they want to play this game where one side can do it and has discretion, has executive authority, and the other side doesn't.
00:21:44.460And, of course, that should be intolerable.
00:21:46.780No one should be willing to play that game.
00:21:54.400I've been trying to raise this point, but not as articulately on this show.
00:21:57.780They'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.
00:22:13.660You can spend all day long highlighting that.
00:22:15.460What 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.
00:22:29.920And 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.
00:22:44.220I'm pressing pause on all of this because you people, the Democrats who controlled this group before me, have corrupted the program beyond recognition.
00:22:55.280No one's arguing, really, over HIV medication for children in Africa.
00:23:00.480If that's all USAID was doing, Trump would not have shut it down.
00:23:06.580I 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?
00:23:19.480Like, they created this misuse of funds that's now being rectified by the guy who is in charge of the funds.
00:23:27.320And 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.
00:23:35.560And just the left's idea—you know, we all believe in promoting American ideals abroad, right?
00:23:41.100But they think our ideals are gender ideology and anti-racism and DEI.
00:23:48.540This 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.
00:23:57.940And 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.
00:24:12.040So I support funding, you know, HIV medicines.
00:24:25.380It creates the wrong image of America abroad.
00:24:28.980And 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.
00:24:39.900Now, again, I don't think he can just zero out USAID on his own.
00:24:44.000He's going to have to spend a lot of this money or most of it.
00:24:47.820But they're objecting to him redirecting money that he has a right to.
00:24:52.000Here are some of the examples that we pulled, and I hadn't heard of a lot of these.
00:24:58.440I mean, some have given snippets, but this is a pretty good list.
00:25:02.5001.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia's workplaces and business communities.
00:28:34.320Now, again, I don't think they should be.
00:28:36.940I 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.
00:28:49.360I think Congress has got out of the habit of doing this.
00:28:52.300I 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.
00:29:03.680That is not what that law from 1998 or the executive order from 1961 says.
00:29:09.780Now, 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.
00:29:25.240We cannot have a constitutional order that only allows non-Donald Trump or non-Republican presidents the discretion that Congress has accorded.
00:29:37.160I think that the administration has to abide by the judiciary.
00:29:42.960But 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.
00:30:02.280They have to elevate this up the chain.
00:30:03.940I 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.
00:30:09.640But for now, the problem here is not the President.
00:30:14.300It is the other entities that are trying to tell him what to do.
00:30:18.560And one final thing on this, the secondary argument that you get is, well, OK, but Trump does have to spend money.
00:30:26.520What he can't do is say, I am no longer spending money on USAID.
00:30:30.480But there's a time component to that, right?
00:30:32.680Trump has been president for, what, 20 days?
00:30:35.840So 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.
00:30:44.840You might, for a while, stop all payments.
00:30:47.560You might say, well, we're not going to spend any money until we've worked out what we want to spend it on.
00:30:52.480Now, 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.
00:31:03.760But you don't have to do it on day one.
00:31:06.480You don't have to say, I'm cutting two and a half million here.
00:31:08.980So tomorrow I'll be spending it on something else.
00:31:11.160So this whole thing seems wildly premature to me, wildly selective.
00:31:15.760And to call it a constitutional crisis if the executive branch is making, it's just bizarre to me.
00:31:20.540Let me follow up with you, Charles, on the Biden precedent, which is just so galling.
00:31:28.780I 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.
00:31:38.820I 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.
00:31:55.920We 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.
00:32:07.240But it wasn't just with respect to student loans.
00:32:09.940It also was with respect to, I always call it the rent abatement program, but it was the eviction moratorium program.
00:32:18.100Where 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.
00:32:27.600And there was a question about whether the feds could do that.
00:32:31.600And the Supreme Court said they can't, that's not, they cannot do that.
00:32:37.180And 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.
00:32:49.640Not 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.
00:33:08.840Biden did two things that were bad in this area.
00:33:12.900The first thing he did was manipulate the courts at best and ignore them at worst.
00:33:19.400You mentioned the eviction moratorium.
00:33:20.960You 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.
00:33:33.080Quite literally, that seems to have been what turned the tide.
00:33:35.840The Biden administration said over and over again that it could not do it.
00:33:40.120There are great quotes about this from Biden himself, where he says, we've crossed the T's and dotted the I's.
00:33:44.520I've had my guys check it three, four times.
00:33:57.200And 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.
00:34:05.960That is a flagrant violation of the court order.
00:34:09.860And he went into it knowing what he was doing was illegal.
00:34:21.000Jen Psaki told the press corps that they couldn't do it six months before he did it.
00:34:26.800With 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.
00:34:37.100He had violated the law with his order.
00:34:40.500He knew when he issued his student loan executive order that it was illegal because everyone knew that it was illegal.
00:34:46.400Nancy Pelosi had said a year before that the president did not have the authority to do it.
00:34:51.020Donald 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.
00:34:59.140Every expert who had weighed in had told him you're not allowed to do this.
00:35:25.460But he told everyone that he was ignoring the court.
00:35:29.720In 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.
00:35:40.140I 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.
00:35:49.980But Biden did something much, much worse.
00:35:53.140He wanted Americans to believe that he was ignoring the court.
00:35:57.300All 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.
00:36:08.480Well, that wasn't quite what happened.
00:36:10.060But that is so cancerous for our political system.
00:36:13.020So 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.
00:36:21.580Go look at the video of Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden making their argument for it.
00:36:26.000Go look at Chuck Schumer talking about it.
00:36:29.740For 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.
00:36:39.060Mm 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.
00:36:53.580Biden did it anyway. He did it anyway.
00:36:56.600And then it wound up in the U.S. Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said, yeah, you can't do it.
00:37:01.740This is not OK. And he doubled down on the doing of it.
00:37:06.180There was a great piece by a lawyer, Robert B. Charles.
00:37:09.620He's a Columbia Law School grad and worked in the State Department for a time.
00:37:14.460And I pulled it. It was very well done.
00:37:16.380And he he writes in part in this piece, OK, that.
00:37:21.260Biden, 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.
00:37:37.960And he goes on to say all of this is more significant than even meets the eye.
00:37:41.060Why, 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?
00:37:59.860Those are just two examples of him ignoring the highest court in the land, Rich.
00:38:05.620So 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.
00:38:17.240And 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.
00:38:30.760And the court saying, that's not good enough.
00:39:03.060And 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.
00:39:54.540We 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.
00:40:03.880And you tell me whether the left has been complying with that order.
00:40:23.500Well, okay, we're no longer asking you to check the box on your race.
00:40:27.800But if you could please do an extreme close-up of your skin color, that would really help us out.
00:40:33.280To 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.
00:40:43.620So – and there have been so many similar efforts to that.
00:40:47.840And actually, in the wake of this, I pulled this.
00:40:49.620This is from a great Jonathan Turley piece that he wrote after the fact.
00:40:53.160And the headline of it was Tyranny of the Minority.
00:40:55.360Liberal 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.
00:41:05.600And 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.
00:41:26.860Thus, 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.
00:41:36.560Weirdly, 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.
00:41:49.080Really, 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.
00:42:07.460You 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.
00:42:23.760In 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.
00:42:34.840Yes. 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.
00:42:45.380That'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.
00:42:51.540If you don't, there's no point in the First Amendment. Same with religion and so on.
00:42:55.660But really, that's your popular constitutionalism, is getting rid of a Supreme Court decision that everyone likes.
00:43:01.980And it just shows how completely incoherent they are with their language.
00:43:07.360They 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.
00:43:18.640And so they've started to say, well, what Trump is doing is undemocratic.
00:43:22.020Well, 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.
00:43:33.000And now they're talking about the bureaucracy and the money that it spends on foreign aid projects that are generally pretty unpopular.
00:43:41.660That doesn't change the legality of it, but it's true, as if this is some great attack on the will of the people.
00:43:47.720They 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.
00:43:57.660So I never quite know what it is that they mean other than this is what I want.
00:44:02.480And 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.
00:44:14.640And it makes it very difficult to actually interrogate what the law says, which really, really matters.
00:44:19.260The numbers, by the way, so just the juxtaposition.
00:44:23.840Yes, the country overwhelmingly favored getting rid of affirmative action, which in its last vestiges, which were at the college admissions level.
00:44:32.480And yet they wrote about popular constitutionalism as though that would support undermining that Supreme Court ruling, which was so favored.
00:44:39.900It's not popular or constitutionalism.
00:44:43.800And now you look at what Trump is doing.
00:44:46.120And 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.
00:45:38.220But 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?
00:45:50.040And that's let's see, 49 percent say he's doing more than expected.
00:45:55.900Forty one percent percent saying he's doing as much as accepted, expected and nine percent say less.
00:46:02.120But 61 percent who say he's doing more than expected approve of it.
00:46:08.300So you've got about half of the country saying he's doing more than I expected him to.
00:46:15.160And 61 percent say and I like what he's doing.
00:46:18.920He's got support for these programs, whether you like him or not.
00:46:23.560Trump is doing what he promised or different from promised.
00:47:21.560So 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.
00:47:30.840And 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.
00:49:43.420Yeah, 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.
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00:51:14.640Before 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.
00:51:54.520I think we should go to Congress also, have that cemented and, you know, make it indelible.
00:52:00.540But we, you know, it's, to me, it's all common sense.
00:52:04.260Who 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.
00:52:22.600From immigration, where Rich accurately pointed out his approval rating is at 59% across all groups, factoring in, you know, all Americans there.
00:52:31.50064% approve sending troops down to the U.S.-Mexico border.
00:52:36.320To the trans issue, which he's right, is the latest poll showed 79% for barring boys from girls sports.
00:52:43.220So it probably is more like 90% because some people don't tell pollsters exactly how they feel.
00:52:50.880And that leads me to my first policy point of this hour.
00:52:53.520And that is the $59 million that made its way to house illegal immigrants in Manhattan from FEMA.
00:53:06.500So 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.
00:53:26.500It was actually, it was a nice life, I have to be honest.
00:53:28.560I'd do yoga in the morning and then we'd go meet for coffee, all these Upper West Side moms.
00:53:39.420Hanging out in the lobby, staying there on taxpayer dimes.
00:53:42.020So notwithstanding the Trump order not to do that, there were some top administrators at FEMA who did that and they've just been fired.
00:53:53.820This 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.
00:54:16.880This is actually, quoting Elon Musk, and instead is being spent on high-end hotels for illegals.
00:54:22.540A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.
00:54:26.300President Trump signed an EO during his first week to create a council to review FEMA operations and root out political bias.
00:54:32.340The 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.
00:54:44.760And 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.
00:54:55.120It's funny, you mentioned your experience with the Roosevelt.
00:55:00.240The Roosevelt's actually where I took my wife for a drink at the bar on our first date.
00:55:08.520Yeah, and I used to stay there when I would go to New York for TV or other events.
00:55:13.880I think my sister stayed there before my wedding.
00:55:16.480So 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.
00:55:31.940So you mentioned the popularity of some of Trump's early actions.
00:55:37.500As 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.
00:55:49.700But really, there are so many things on which the Democrats have inexplicably ceded ground that are actual common sense.
00:55:59.780I 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.
00:56:08.120And a lot of those things aren't going to go away because they're just the product of different philosophies.
00:56:13.260But then there are the things that you just described.
00:56:15.860I 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.
00:56:32.880There's a suicidal instinct in the current Democratic Party that has created this opening.
00:56:41.380And Trump has just walked into it, and Trump has just walked into it, and he's benefiting from it.
00:56:46.460On 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.
00:56:59.380This 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.
00:57:18.400When 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.
00:58:12.100He issued these orders on day one or day two of the new administration.
00:58:16.880It 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.
00:58:25.760And let's not forget, it's because the last guy, quote, in charge, issued this order to pay it.
01:12:01.260If 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.
01:12:15.440You 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.
01:12:23.660And that is, of course, what they've done across a whole bunch of issues, what they did with the trans issue as well.
01:12:28.120We 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.
01:12:36.360The left came in and said, hey, maybe men should be playing in women's sports and anyone who disagrees with a bigot.
01:12:43.400People stood up and said, I don't think that's a very good idea.
01:12:45.960And they said, why do you care, you weirdo?
01:12:50.240So, like, this would never have happened if they hadn't tried to regulate this in the first instance.
01:12:54.360So to go after Trump and say, why isn't he worrying about bigger issues, is, I think, is really unfair.
01:12:59.720This is something that people are annoyed by because of over-government.
01:13:03.480What 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.
01:13:17.760And that if the federal government is going to regulate this at all, it can't be changed until such time as Congress changes it.
01:13:24.460Because you're never going to get a groundswell in America that wants Congress to outlaw plastic straws or LED light bulbs.
01:13:32.100This has to come from the bureaucracy because people hate it.
01:14:01.040All right, coming up next, Carol Swain is here looking forward to talking to her.
01:14:06.780Do 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?
01:14:18.360She's going to talk about what that was like and more next.
01:14:21.880Well, we're right around Valentine's Day, right?
01:14:23.520And everyone's thinking about love, maybe a little bit more than normal.
01:14:26.680And what does that bring to mind for you?
01:15:41.560I'm Megyn Kelly, host of The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM.
01:15:45.800It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today.
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01:16:45.400It'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.
01:16:57.260Here's a reminder of her disastrous testimony before Congress.
01:17:02.180I assume you're familiar with the term intifada, correct?
01:17:08.180And 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.
01:19:24.640And I really, I don't think I'll ever do it again, but I certainly enjoyed the one time.
01:19:29.460So you've spent a lifetime in academics.
01:19:31.860When you came on before we detailed your rise, I mean, at the most elite institutions like Vanderbilt.
01:19:36.860And you have to, if you're going to go that route, write a lot.
01:19:41.780You have to get published, which you did.
01:19:44.880And 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?
01:19:56.820And that would be Claudine Gay, the one-time president of Harvard.
01:20:00.060Yes, 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.
01:20:14.820And 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.
01:20:33.800And then he said, guess who she plagiarized?