00:07:00.060This could change in the hours and days ahead.
00:07:03.100I'm certainly glad that a major cartel leader who has been smuggling drugs into the United States has been responsible for killing Americans is no longer with us.
00:07:13.900But but it makes it very dangerous for the people of Mexico and potentially very dangerous for Americans as well.
00:07:20.680You know, you and I have talked about this and the concern, obviously, that that you and I both have is that the that the Mexico is being run by these cartels.
00:07:30.520We know that. And that's been one of the things that Donald Trump has been talking about is like, look,
00:07:36.240you guys are killing Americans with the amount of drugs coming across your border, the fentanyl and other things.
00:07:41.180We also know about the open border just from human smuggling and human trafficking and sex trafficking and child sex trafficking.
00:07:46.080Those combined. And the president made it clear to Mexico, you better act or we will act the same way that we acted.
00:07:53.480And we weren't bluffing in Venezuela, taking out a narco terrorist there.
00:07:58.000This is clearly, I think, Mexico's government signaling that we heard you and probably more so since what we they witnessed in Venezuela.
00:08:06.100And they're saying we would rather choose who we take out than you guys start doing it.
00:08:11.680I think that's a very fair assessment.
00:08:13.520As you'll recall, in August of last year, I went down to Mexico.
00:08:17.440I did a trip to to El Salvador and Panama and Mexico, and I met with senior officials in the Mexican government.
00:08:24.160And the message I conveyed to them is that they needed to get serious fighting the cartels to stop the drug trafficking into America, to stop the human trafficking into America.
00:08:32.600And the message I conveyed is if you don't get serious, President Trump is going to.
00:08:40.520But but but the Maduro raid was not a surprise in that it was clear the president was going to do what is necessary to keep America safe.
00:08:48.060And my message and the Mexican leaders did not like that when I conveyed that message.
00:08:53.100I said, look, we're not going to let you just sit there and turn a blind eye while these transnational criminal organizations flood poisons into America and kill Americans.
00:09:05.540And while they traffic in human beings and assault and sexually assault little children, we're not simply going to sit by and say, that's OK.
00:09:15.700These are not Democrats who are going to say we have no problem with thousands of children being molested by by human traffickers because it furthers our political agenda to get more people in America who will vote for Democrats.
00:09:27.660That is not what this administration is doing.
00:09:30.440And you and I talked about it in the wake of the Maduro arrest.
00:09:35.260I said, listen, this has changed the geopolitical power structure throughout Latin America.
00:09:40.880Every dictator in Latin America at 3 a.m. on January 3rd, they change their shorts.
00:09:47.980The leadership, the communist leadership in Cuba and Nicaragua, those guys are terrified.
00:09:53.720In Colombia, we saw Petro immediately calling and saying,
00:09:57.160Mr. President, I'm not I'm not resisting you at all.
00:09:59.560Like we saw the immediate reaction in Colombia.
00:10:02.280And look, I emphasized in nations like Brazil and Mexico, Brazil and Mexico stand on very different footing than a Cuba or a Nicaragua or even a Colombia.
00:10:12.360But they are headed by leftists who have been vocally anti-American.
00:10:17.380And I will say Mexico has pivoted sharply.
00:10:20.800And this is a real manifestation of that.
00:10:23.960And Ben, it's worth not losing sight of the fact.
00:10:26.920You might say, OK, well, why target these narco terrorists?
00:10:44.660Drug overdose rates nationwide have dropped more than 20 percent.
00:10:52.100There are literally this is not exaggeration.
00:10:54.660There are literally thousands of Americans who are alive today because Trump was reelected and Republicans were put in charge of Congress.
00:11:03.160If we had kept the Democrat open borders going, there would be thousands more Americans dead from murder and other violent crime and from drug overdoses.
00:11:14.060And I got to tell you, Ben, did you happen to read front page story in the Houston Chronicle a couple of weeks ago?
00:11:23.500And what's interesting about where you're going with this is most police departments and local governments celebrate a three percent drop in violent crime.
00:11:32.240That's like worth having a press conference over for you to say, look at this trend.
00:11:36.600And now you look at what you mentioned nationwide and go back to I know you're going with the story, but like these are numbers that traditionally would take three, four, five, six, seven years of every year doubling down to get the numbers down as fast as they've under Trump administration.
00:12:34.400It just magically unicorns flew from the sky.
00:12:38.800They spread pixie dust and the murder rates fell 18 percent.
00:12:42.080And it did not occur to the reporter, to these, quote, experts who are all left wing knuckleheads that may be arresting and deporting thousands upon thousands of murderers and rapists and gang bangers who are illegal immigrants.
00:12:57.300Maybe if there are fewer murderers, there will be fewer murders.
00:13:01.900This is not subtle or complex public policy.
00:13:05.140And yet the Houston Chronicle, this is is is is completely indecipherable.
00:13:11.620You know, I'm I've been in D.C. right now.
00:13:13.180You're coming back up here, obviously, for the State of the Union.
00:13:15.380And I'm up here for literally meetings on the State of the Union.
00:13:18.800And one of the things that was asked I was earlier today, what should the president focus on?
00:14:30.120I wouldn't make the focus, by the way, Venezuela or any other country.
00:14:34.500What I would make the focus is America, that that by standing up to narco terrorists, by standing up to people who are killing Americans, fewer Americans are dying.
00:14:44.820I think the entire speech on Tuesday should be all about how people's lives are materially better because of the policies President Trump has put in place and a Republican Congress has put in place.
00:14:57.720And I'd like to see crime and law and order as a major, major theme of the address.
00:18:15.100But there was also something interesting in there.
00:18:17.400Brett Kavanaugh wrote basically in there, and I found this incredibly interesting, that, hey, what we're saying you did, you can't necessarily do it that way.
00:20:14.360What actually happened is 6-3, the court struck it down.
00:20:18.000I also predicted that John Roberts would write the majority opinion.
00:20:21.360I guess that did prove technically accurate, but he wrote the majority opinion going the other way.
00:20:27.260Here's why I thought the court was going to uphold the president's tariffs.
00:20:31.000And I said there are massive reliance interests.
00:20:33.980There have been hundreds of billions of dollars of tariffs collected, and the court is reluctant to dramatically upset the status quo.
00:20:42.700And I did say if the court were deciding this issue a year ago, right at the beginning of the Trump administration, I said I think they'd come out the other way.
00:20:51.780But after a year plus, after this being central to the economic and foreign policy agenda of the president, I thought the court would not struck it down.
00:21:01.520That proved wrong, but at the end of the day, I don't think it matters a whole lot.
00:21:31.180And so the majority opinion concluded the president can ban an import from a country, can say we will import zero German cars into America.
00:21:43.320He could do that, but he can't say we're going to charge a dollar for each one of those German cars.
00:21:51.560And I got to say the dissents, Justice Kavanaugh wrote the lead dissent.
00:21:56.100Justice Thomas wrote an excellent dissent.
00:21:57.900I think the dissents get the much better of the argument that the words that Congress put in the IEPA statute regulate importation.
00:22:07.080And Justice Thomas had an originalist dissent where he goes through in the foreign policy area in particular, the ability to import goods from other countries was never viewed as a right.
00:22:19.200It was a privilege the government allowed you to do.
00:22:21.380And in fact, tariffs were a major tool government used to regulate importation from other countries.
00:22:27.460So I think the majority decision is wrong.
00:23:28.940And China was really celebrating this.
00:23:32.480And then they were talking about buying soybean crops from other countries instead of America.
00:23:36.180And that was like one of the big things that really blew up in the media and on social media.
00:23:41.280And then you have the same excitement from the Chinese Communist Party as you did from the Democratic Party.
00:23:46.720That tells me an awful lot about this tariff war issue.
00:23:51.700This is just to Democrats, not about what's best for America, not about us having better trade deals, not about saving American jobs or American manufacturing, protecting that, or bringing jobs back to this country in manufacturing and bringing back American businesses to our soil.
00:24:17.180Number one, there's going to be some chaos.
00:24:19.160One of the reasons I didn't think the court would do what they did is you've got hundreds of billions of dollars of tariffs that's going to be collected.
00:24:26.300There's going to be massive litigation.
00:24:27.840Everyone that's paid the tariffs is going to look at, do I go back?
00:24:32.920It's going to vary in terms of whether they filed a timely protest to the tariffs.
00:24:38.560I think some of those tariffs, the litigation result is going to be no.
00:24:42.740You can't get it back because you didn't timely protest it.
00:24:46.620Some of the people who paid tariffs will have timely protested it.
00:24:50.400And so there's a very good chance this is going to cost American taxpayers billions of dollars, maybe even tens of billions of dollars or more.
00:24:57.680That litigation chaos will unfold for years.
00:25:01.560I didn't think the court would do that.
00:25:03.180But in terms of the president's ability to do this, so let me walk through some of the different statutes that are available.
00:25:09.760There is, number one, section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930.
00:25:14.020That's actually the Smoot-Hawley Act, which authorizes the president to impose tariffs of up to 50 percent on imports from any country that, quote, discriminates against U.S. businesses.
00:25:26.860The statute is vague, and it is short, and no president has used this authority.
00:25:33.380So it's uncharted area, but it remains on the statute book.
00:25:38.040Another area, which is where the president went pretty much immediately, is section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.
00:25:48.580The section 122 gives the president the power to impose duties of up to 15 percent for up to 150 days in order to address, quote, large and serious balance of payments deficits.
00:26:02.580Congress has to vote to extend them past the 150-day limit or else the duties expire, but the president is able to reissue them on expiration.
00:26:12.500This is what the president used as a result immediately to impose the 15 percent tariff.
00:26:23.340And then there are a couple of others.
00:26:25.140Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 authorizes the U.S. trade representative to investigate and act upon results of an investigation revealing unfair trade practices.
00:26:37.860Section 301 has been used quite a bit.
00:26:40.140In 2024, the Biden administration opened three investigations under Section 301 and determined that the countries had violated the provisions there.
00:26:55.480That's also what, in Trump's second administration, U.S. trade representative's office has opened a 301 investigation into Brazil and China, and they're considering one for Korea.
00:27:06.540So Section 301 takes an investigation.
00:27:09.760It's a little slower, but it gives more potent tariff authority.
00:27:13.300There is also Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, and that allows the president to impose restrictions on goods and imports.
00:27:24.360And following an investigation, if it's found that the imports, quote, threatened to impair U.S. national security.
00:27:34.360So Trump has used that for steel imports and aluminum imports.
00:27:38.700In 2025, he expanded steel and aluminum tariffs, increasing the aluminum rate to 25 percent, eliminating all country exemptions.
00:27:47.320To date, the Trump administration has launched 12 different Section 232 investigations, concluded five.
00:27:56.660And then there's finally Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974, which permits temporary safeguard tariffs to protect domestic industries from serious injury caused by import surges.
00:28:11.240Trump has used Section 201 to put tariffs on solar cells, on modules, and in residential washing machines.
00:28:18.940Look, the long and short of it, you guys don't need to memorize all those different section numbers.
00:28:23.860The point is there are a bunch of different federal laws that give the president a bunch of authority to impose tariffs.
00:28:32.240The lawyers and the administration will work a little bit harder, as Justice Kavanaugh said in dissent.
00:28:38.460At the end of the day, the Supreme Court said, well, you check the wrong box and you pick the wrong statute, so these tariffs don't apply.
00:28:45.660But the bottom line is going to be the president's going to be able to get there using other means.
00:28:50.440Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how the president also responds on the State of the Union to this.
00:28:54.940I have a feeling it's going to be pretty blunt.
00:28:56.320I love when they ask, what do you say, Justice is still invited?
00:28:59.960He goes, yes, but barely, which kind of made me laugh.
00:29:02.700It's like, yeah, that's never a dull moment with Donald Trump on this stuff.
00:29:06.120I have a feeling it's going to be a very fun State of the Union to watch.
00:29:09.720Canadian women are looking for more, more out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world around them.
00:29:15.940And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
00:29:21.820And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.
00:29:31.600So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:29:34.840Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:29:40.520All right, Catherine, finally, we get to end on a really, really fun note.
00:29:44.620The hockey game and the Olympics, like America versus Canada.
00:29:49.420I love how sports brings everybody together.
00:29:52.760I'm sitting there in the green room about to get ready to do Fox News Sunday.
00:31:12.140They are playing for the country in a way that just makes you proud.
00:31:16.120That's what you want to see our athletes, like, standing up for our country, not using it for whatever their particular political agenda is for the moment.