Ep. 2141 - The Trump-Musk Show ROLLS ON
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Folks, tons of news to get to today. We're gonna get to the Trump-Elon interview on Sean Hannity's show. We're also going to be talking about negotiations over Ukraine, which are getting quite fraught. And of course, Hamas has now announced that the Bibas family is dead, which many people had suspected, but is going to be a sort of earth-shattering piece of news over in Israel. But begin today with a fascinating realization by Derek Thompson over at The Atlantic.

talking about the radical shift that has happened with young people in the United States as far as their voting patterns. What he finds is that COVID and BLM basically shoved an entire generation of people to the right. Quote, for decades, America's young voters have been deeply and famously progressive.

In 2008, a youth quake sent Barack Obama to the White House. In 2016, voters ages 18 to 29 broke for Hillary Clinton by 18 points. In 2020, they voted for Biden by 24 points. But in 2024, Donald Trump closed most of the gap, losing voters under 30 by a 51 to 47 margin. In one recent CBS poll, Americans under 30 weren't just evenly split between the parties. They were even more pro-Trump than boomers over the age of 65. So what exactly is happening?

Derek Thompson suggests that essentially this is a reaction to the government overreach during COVID-19.

that the bizarre institutional failures during COVID, ranging from the suggestion that you got to riot in the streets if you had the proper political credentials and COVID wouldn't attack you, to the idea that kids had to be locked out of schools, shoved an entire generation of young people to the right and radicalized them. And this, of course, is true. But this does demonstrate, again, this is the warning, that people are incredibly variable and vacillating when it comes to their politics.

Exogenous events can shove entire generations of people one way or another. And this has happened several times over the course of my lifetime. I remember after 2001, a whole new security boom happened in which people, particularly suburban moms who had traditionally voted Democrat, suddenly were voting Republican. And then COVID apparently shoved a bunch of young people to the right. Wokeness shoved a bunch of young people to the right.

That is a good reminder to everyone in politics that while you think that the pendulum will never shift back over to the other side, it absolutely will. And so two things ought to be taken from that. One, you ought to be very careful in how you use your political power. That doesn't mean you shouldn't move fast and break things. It means that you should be very careful that you don't set into motion a tripwire that is going to blow you up.

And number two, it means that you actually do have to move with alacrity while I got to power because the left always does and the right rarely does. This is one of the differences between MAGA and prior conservative Republican movements. Prior Republican movements have taken that first bit of advice, move cautiously, don't break too many things, but they've neglected that if you don't break enough things,

There's sort of a perfect mid point here that if you don't actually move fast enough and break enough things, well, then you don't get enough done. And the left comes back in. And when they get in power, they move fast and they break things. Barack Obama was not shy about using his power in 2009, 2010 in order to shove forward Obamacare and a vast expansion of the federal government. President Trump is doing precisely the opposite. So yesterday, President Trump set about issuing a number of new executive orders. Some of them are incredibly consequential.

One of them is just a reinstatement of his stated purpose, which is to create more governmental transparency. He put about an executive order titled Radical Transparency About Wasteful Spending. Quote, the United States government spends too much money on programs, contracts, and grants that do not promote the interests of the American people. For too long, taxpayers have subsidized ideological projects overseas and domestic organizations engaged in actions that undermine the national interest. The American people have seen their tax dollars used to fund the passion projects of the

of unelected bureaucrats rather than to advance the national interest. The American people have a right to see how the federal government has wasted their hard-earned wages.

President Trump therefore directed the heads of the executive departments to take all appropriate actions to make public, to the maximum extent permitted by law, the complete details of every terminated program, canceled contract, terminated grant, or any other discontinued obligation of federal funds. Again, this is all part and parcel of the sort of Doge approach to American government. As part of that, President Trump also issued an executive order yesterday, quote, ensuring accountability for all agencies.

The goal here is to re-enshrine the unitary executive theory of the federal government. You go back to the Constitution, there is no unelected fourth branch of government that is sort of half run by Congress and half run by the executive. If Congress delegates power to the executive, it is now the job of the executive to perform those powers, which means that if you have an executive branch agency, that executive branch agency is headed by the president of the United States. This, of course, is the point of this particular executive order.

Quote, previous administrations have allowed so-called independent regulatory agencies to operate with minimum presidential supervision. These regulatory agencies currently exercise substantial executive authority without sufficient accountability to the president and through him to the American people. Moreover, these regulatory agencies have been permitted to promulgate significant regulations without review by the president.

Therefore, in order to improve the administration of the executive branch and to increase regulatory officials' accountability to the American people, it shall be the policy of the executive branch to ensure presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch. And again, this is a restatement of the constitutional principle that the president runs the executive branch.

And so all of these sort of pseudo shock that you are seeing from Democrats on this particular point is because they had always assumed that an independent agency means it's run by Democrats. They'd always assumed the career bureaucrat means Democrat.

There was, in fact, a deep state. It was permanent political appointees who were supposedly insulated from any Republican president who would take power. And Trump is saying, nope, that's not the way this is going to work. As part and parcel of that, President Trump announced on Truth Social last night, quote, over the past four years, the Department of Justice has been politicized like never before. Therefore, I've instructed the termination of all remaining Biden era U.S. attorneys. We must clean house immediately and restore confidence. America's golden age must have a fair justice system that begins today.

Again, there's a lot of hue and cry over this, but this is not, in fact, a rarity. Barack Obama, when he came into office, cleared out the justice system of a bunch of people who were appointed by George W. Bush. The sort of changeover of career bureaucrats in these particular agencies, including the DOJ, is not a rarity. It is a regular part of American government. It's only Republicans who are chided about this. Well, one of the driving forces behind the sort of radical transparency slash and burn approach that Trump has taken so far is, of course, Elon Musk.

Elon has really contributed a huge amount to the government so far, again, with zero pay. And he has done so because he feels that it is necessary, presumably, to cut the regulatory burdens on the American people and on business, to get rid of the wasteful spending, the waste, fraud, and abuse, and to reorient the American people toward the idea that they don't actually need the government to take care of all of their problems. And President Trump, to his great credit as a human being,

has allowed Elon to take sort of a front leading role in doing all this. Now, that is smart politics by President Trump because it means that Elon is both going to get the credit and also mostly take the slings and arrows, which is what has happened so far. Also, President Trump does not actually have to fear for any reason that Elon Musk is a threat to him

Because Elon, of course, can't run for president. He wasn't born in the United States. Elon's the most successful businessman of our age, which means he's actually not dependent on President Trump for anything. Keeping Elon as part of the system is much better than having Elon outside the tent peeing in.

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So yesterday, President Trump and Elon Musk did a joint interview on Sean Hannity's show on Fox News. And it's sort of fascinating, the dynamic between the two of them and some of the statements they were making. So obviously, Trump's admiration for Elon Musk is quite real. Here was President Trump talking about Elon's hope to go to Mars.

He's going to go into orbit soon. Okay. Yeah. No, he's going to go to Mars. Starlink? At some point. Huh? Yeah. They always ask me, like, do you want to die on Mars? And I say, well, yes, but not on impact. Starlink is in 100 countries. This is going to be hard. I feel like I'm interviewing two brothers here. You go ahead. Star Shield, which could be used for national defense. Yeah, it is already being used for national defense. Okay, so again, you can see they have a pretty good dynamic between the two of them. They're very friendly. They get along. President Trump,

President Trump says, I couldn't find anyone smarter than Elon to help me out here, which, again, makes sense since Elon is pretty smart. You know, I wanted to find somebody smarter than him. I searched all over. I just couldn't do it. I couldn't. You really tried hard. I couldn't find anyone smarter, right? So we had it for the country. But this is the thing. We settled on this guy. Well, thanks for having me. I'm just trying to be useful here. This is the...

So again, the dynamic is pretty important here because President Trump likes to get along with the people that he works with. And one of the things about Musk is that Musk isn't a Trump sycophant. So one thing that President Trump actually does not like is people who are too sycophantic toward him. And you can see this with a number of his former staffers. There's sort of a fine line with President Trump between not offending President Trump. President Trump does not like to be insulted, for example, but also not just bending the knee to him at every possible turn.

He likes a little bit of independence. So that dynamic is good between Trump and Musk, despite all the attempts to divide them. Here was Elon Musk talking about Trump derangement syndrome in one of the more colorful moments of the interview.

They call it, like, Trump derangement syndrome. And you don't realize how real this is until, like, it's... You can't reason with people. So, like, I was at a friend's birthday party in LA, just a birthday dinner, and it was, like, a nice, quiet dinner, and everyone was behaving normally. And I happened to mention... This was before the election, like, a month or two before. I happened to mention the president's name, and it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained, like, methamphetamine and rabies, okay? And they're like, wow!

I'm like, what is wrong? Guys, you just can't have a normal conversation. And it's like they've become completely irrational. Now, hilariously, many members of the left took this particular clip and went nuts on it. Why is Elon making weird hand motions again, guys? Stop focusing on Elon's

hand motions and start focusing on the fact that he's going into every government agency and finding hundreds of millions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse. That seems a little more important than these sort of bizarre hand motions that he makes when he is talking about Trump derangement syndrome. Musk and Trump did talk

about the media's attempts to divide them one from the other. Here they were. They want you two to start hating each other and they try, oh, President Elon Musk, for example. You do know that they're doing that to you. Oh, I see it all the time. They tried it, then they stopped. That wasn't, they have many different things of hatred. Actually, Elon called me. He said, you know, they're trying to drive us apart. I said, absolutely. You know, they said,

We have breaking news. Donald Trump has ceded control of the presidency to Elon Musk. President Musk will be attending a cabinet meeting tonight at 8 o'clock. And I say, it's just so obvious. They're so bad at it. I used to think they were good at it. They're actually bad at it because if they were good at it, I'd never be president.

Now, Elon himself obviously went out of his way to point out that he and Trump were friendly. He was very praiseworthy of President Trump and Trump was praiseworthy of him. This dynamic is the thing that the media are having a very difficult time with because historically speaking, the best way to divide Trump from his advisors is to basically suggest that they have ambitions on the presidency or on controlling Trump. But Trump clearly does not feel controlled by Elon. And Trump feels like they're working in tandem together and that he is in fact Elon's superior, which is a pretty good feeling, right? If you're the president of the United States and

and your direct inferior, the person who reports to you, is the richest person on Earth who launches things into space and owns the most lucrative car company in existence. That seems like that's pretty flattering to President Trump, actually. So here is Elon talking about Trump. I think President Trump is a good man. And he's, you know... That's nice the way he said that, you know? There's something nice about it. It really is. You know, because, I mean...

The president has been so unfairly attacked in the media. It's really outrageous. And I've spent at this point, spent a lot of time with the president. And not once have I seen him do something that was mean or cruel or wrong. Not once. OK, so again, is Elon laying it on maybe a little thick there? Sure. But you know what?

This working relationship is the most important working relationship in possibly modern political history. So, you know, it probably merits that. Here is Elon talking about Doge specifically. And he says, look, the goal here is to carry out the president's will. This is not an independent agency operating outside the purview of President Trump. This is working for President Trump. The president will make these executive orders, which are very sensible and good for the country. But then they don't get implemented, you know, so.

If you take, for example, all the funding for the migrant hotels, the president issued an executive order, "Hey, we need to stop taking taxpayer money and paying for luxury hotels for illegal immigrants." It's crazy. Which makes no sense. Like, obviously people do not want their tax dollars going to fund high-end hotels for illegals. And yet they were still doing that, even as late as last week.

And so, you know, we went in there and we're like, this is a violation of the presidential executive order. It needs to stop. So what we're doing here is one of the biggest functions of the Doge team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out.

Okay, so President Trump yesterday, he did another separate press conference in which he talked about some of the idiotic spending that he was targeting. Here he was yesterday. $20 million for fiscal federalism in Nepal. Listen to these numbers. This is all fraud. $19 million for biodiversity conservation.

in Nepal, $2 million to develop sustainable recycling models to increase socioeconomic cohesion among marginalized communities in Kosovo and Ashkali. And in Egypt, we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. I could -- by the way, I could read this all day long. I could go on all day long, and you'll see hundreds of billions of dollars, and we're doing it.

So, one of the things that Trump and Musk are now proposing is the possibility of what they call Doge rebate checks, which is all the money that they are saving, goes back to the taxpayer in the form of actual direct payments. That's something that Elon posted yesterday on X, that he would check with the president on the possibility of sending out Doge dividend checks.

This was suggested by the Azoria CEO and co-founder James Fishback, who said, we wanted to help make Doge real for millions of Americans. They deserve a portion of the savings Doge will deliver under President Trump's leadership. And again, smart politics.

Now, the opposing side, people who don't like these sorts of cuts, they are looking for any point of opposition. So they have tried, as we have seen over the past few weeks, to blame, for example, air crashes on cuts to the FAA or Doge going into the FAA. They have yet to actually make that connection. See, here's the thing. There are certain areas where Americans have direct interface with the federal government. Those areas usually come in the form of direct payments like Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid.

Those are the ways that people tend to interface with the federal government. Otherwise, in your daily life, you're really not interfacing with the federal government. If you're interfacing with the government, it's usually the local government, right? You're interfacing with the cops or with maybe the federal, maybe the post office, but you don't really go to the post office all that often anymore. So you just don't have that many sort of moments where you interface with the federal government and then are annoyed by a cut to the federal government. Because the reality is the vast majority of stuff that the federal government does is done indirectly, right?

So, for example, if you're looking at the Department of Education, they're subsidizing loans that go through a whole series of machinations and then ends up with the universities in the form of paid off grants or in the form of indirect payments or all the rest. The sort of direct interface that you have on a daily basis with the feds is usually relatively limited.

So given that fact, Democrats, if they're looking for kind of stories to focus in on, things they can say that are getting broken by the move fast and break things philosophy of the Trump administration, they have to focus in on parks and museums and that sort of thing. Because again, those are the only place where you might actually drive up and be told no

by somebody who's a federal employee. You just don't have that many opportunities in your normal life. That is why there's been outsized focus over the course of the last 48 hours on the supposed shutdown of the national parks. So according to the Associated Press, the Trump administration has fired about 1,000 newly hired National Park Service employees who maintain and clean parks, educate visitors, and perform other functions as part of its broad-based effort to downsize government.

The firings, which weren't publicly announced, but were confirmed by Democratic senators and House members, come amid what has been a chaotic rollout of an aggressive program to eliminate thousands of federal jobs. Adding to the confusion, the Park Service now says it is reinstating about 5,000 seasonal jobs that were initially rescinded last month as part of a spending freeze ordered by President Trump. So just to be clear,

They are getting rid of 1,000 new employees who were just hired like a moment ago, but they are reinstating 5,000 seasonal employees. So you really should not have a staffing shortage at the national parks just on the basis of those numbers. Seasonal workers are routinely added during warm weather months to serve more than 325 million visitors who descend on the nation's 428 parks, historic sites, and other attractions every year.

Parks advocates say that the permanent staff cuts will leave hundreds of national parks understaffed and facing tough decisions about operating hours, public safety, and resource protection. Okay, now, the sort of idea that the national parks are somehow going to be unworkable if they have a couple fewer employees, like 1,000 employees. You're talking about, on average, by the way, they just said 428. 428 national parks and areas under the governance of this particular agency. 1,000 employees cut. That's two.

Like two employees per national park. If you're just going to average it out. So supposedly this is going to mean that trash will pile up and restrooms won't be cleaned and maintenance problems will grow and guided tours will be cut back or canceled. And they say public safety will be at risk. No, I'm sorry. No. So first of all, they do this every time there's a government shutdown. So there have been several government shutdowns over the course of the last decade. And every single time there is some dumb ass story about how you can't visit the World War II Memorial because it's been shut down.

Barack Obama famously would do this. Every time there was a government shutdown, he would put out a bunch of pylons around the World War II Memorial and say, you can't walk here because of the federal government shutdown. I'd be like, well, why can't I walk there? It's literally just statuary. Why can't I just walk through this area where there are statues? If I go visit the Vietnam War Memorial, which is a giant wall, why exactly do I need federal employees there? Why can't I just walk over there? What exactly is the problem?

And by the way, if you are a regular visitor to national parks, and I've gone to several national parks with my kids and with my wife, when you go to a national park, the interface that you have with the employees at the national park, unless you're taking a guided tour, is typically you paying for parking at the opening. Producer Zach goes to the national parks. He says once every couple of months,

And so I'm now going to ask producer Zach to tell me in my ear, how often do you interface with federal employees at the national parks? Or is it mostly like you arrive and then you have to pay for parking and maybe, maybe they have like a gift shop and then you basically just go explore the park on your own. Yeah. It's pretty much just the people who take my parking money. It's the people who take the parking money. It's the people who take the parking money. So first of all, you can cut all those people by just having an automatic parking meter, like every other parking lot in America, which has had an automatic parking meter since 1972. Yeah.

You don't actually need, I mean, like, I like those people. They're nice people. But you don't actually need those people standing there and telling you it's five bucks to enter the national park, to go to the Everglades or something. So this idea that you're talking about like a wildly staffed, like deeply staffed agency at the national parks and you must shut down the entire, you have to shut down hundreds of acres because you don't have the dude who's taking the parking ticket at the front. That's an absurdity. That is ridiculous. That's it.

So what is this really? It's a mockery. It's just acting. It's just performative. It's, oh my God, we're going to shut down the one place you interface with the federal government in order to show you the cuts to the federal government can impact even you. In reality, could we run the national parks unless then we are currently running the national parks? I am sure that we could. Is it possible that all those people will be hired back or some of them will be hired back? I'm sure they will.

But again, this is the sort of thing that happens every time. Every time there is any level of funding gap in the government, from a government shutdown to what Doge is doing, the left immediately claims millions will die. They're like, okay, how? Like, well, the FAA. Like, no, that's not gonna do it.

Well, probably, probably you won't be able to go to a national park. Well, why not? Why can't I just go to that national? Like it's trees. The trees have been there for literally billions of years at this point. Why should I not be able to walk through the trees? I don't even use a guide. Like why? Well, but you can't, you can't because there'll be a fire probably. Will there be a fire? Probably will there be? And if so, won't they just hire back the fire? Like, aren't the firefighters the first people that are going to get hired back after these cuts?

The reason that you're seeing the outsides hysteria is because it is performative hysteria. Clearly performative hysteria. Well, people are going hysterical over the national parks. You know, they're worried about whether they can take their family to a national park. But here's the thing. If you're worried about your family, worry less about the national parks. Worry more about death.

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Again, the goal of the Trump administration is not to create bad headlines. That means that when it comes to things like the firefighters, I guarantee you within two days, there'll be a rehiring of many of these firefighters because President Trump doesn't want the bad headlines on that sort of stuff. But the people who are like, oh my God, I can't visit Yellowstone anymore. They're only shutting down Yellowstone in order to make you say that. You want to talk about actual deep state and media intervention. That's what this is. I promise you they can open Yellowstone without the guy who's the ticket taker at the front. I promise you it's fine.

And they're doing this with, like, everything. They're doing this with the FAA. Preemptive panic over everything. So, the Washington Post has a piece today. Quote, Oh, you see.

So now the bad guys are taking over to the FAA. You see, SpaceX is bad because it's regulated by the F probably this is regulatory capture. Probably SpaceX is just going to randomly blow crap up on the tarmac, you know, because they can. Does anyone truly believe that it is worse for SpaceX? One of the most technologically sophisticated companies on planet earth to have its employees taking a look at the FAA, which is using computers that are like Apple computers from 1997. Ridiculous. By the way,

The FAA has not laid off massive numbers of workers. It has laid off roughly 400 probationary employees. That represents a small fraction of the agency's workforce of almost 47,000. Frontline workers like air traffic controllers and radar technicians are spared. So they're all preemptively freaking out about cuts to the FAA that don't actually exist.

This is why, again, what Trump and Musk are doing here is deeply, deeply important. And it is extending, by the way, over to the contracting rules for federal contracting. So one of the things that the Biden administration did is they said, if you wish to have a company that contracts,

gets a grant from the federal government or does business with the federal government, you have to abide by DEI. The White House is now killing that. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is directing federal agencies to no longer consider a company's diversity, equity, and inclusion practices when deciding whether to procure its goods or services, according to an announcement from the General Services Administration.

That new policy reverses a Biden administration initiative that asked the government to weigh a company's internal DEI practices as one of many factors when considering whether to purchase that company's products or services. The GSA is also ending federal efforts to get rid of plastic straws in favor of the worst thing ever invented, paper straws which do not work, turn into pulp, and make your drink taste like trash. And all of this is going to be popular stuff. So the Trump administration thus far is finding that balance between

Being careful enough not to, for example, mass fire all the FAA employees and also moving fast enough to actually break many of the things that need to be broken. Now, the other big story of the day from the Trump administration is the ongoing negotiations over the end of the Ukraine war. And there are some slightly different messages that are emerging from Trump world over these negotiations. On the one hand,

You have people like, for example, the special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, who's now arrived in Kiev, who says, quote, we understand the need for security guarantees. We're very clear about the importance of the sovereignty of this nation and the defense of this nation as well. Which, of course, is a very pro-Ukraine message. And then there's some of the messaging that's being put out by President Trump himself. So according to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. and Russia agreed to appoint teams to negotiate a settlement of the war in Ukraine.

Mike Wall is the national security advisor. He says we are now talking to the Russians. We are also talking to the Ukrainians. Here he was yesterday. It's common sense. If you're going to bring both sides together, you have to talk to both sides. And we'll continue to remind everyone literally within minutes of President Trump hanging up with President Putin.

he called and spoke with President Zelensky. So shuttle diplomacy has happened throughout history, it's happened all over the world. We are absolutely talking to both sides. The Secretary of State just met with President Zelensky days ago, along with the Vice President, seven cabinet members in Europe at the same time, really showing the importance of engaging our allies.

Mike Walz added that the goal here is to just get to the end of this war, like continue death and destruction. That's not in the interest of the United States or anybody else. The president has stated his desire, his determination to end this war, to end the killing that is going on, the death and destruction that is happening as this war continues.

you know, goes on and on month after month after month. And the killing fields of eastern and southern Ukraine is unacceptable. It is not in the interest of either country. It's not in the interest of the world and certainly not in the interest of the United States and Europe.

That, of course, is true. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was there as well. So was the special envoy Steve Witkoff. Here was Rubio explaining that, you know, the Europeans are complaining about not being part of the negotiations. Guys, you could have involved yourselves at any point over the last four years. For three and a half years while this conflict has raged or three years while it's raged, no one else has been able to bring something together like what we saw today.

because Donald Trump is the only leader in the world that can. So no one is being sidelined here, but President Trump is in a position that he campaigned on to initiate a process that could bring about an end to this conflict. And from that could emerge some very positive things for the United States, for Europe, for Ukraine, for the world. But first it begins by the end of this conflict.

And so the only thing President Trump's trying to do is bring about peace. It's what he campaigned on. It's something the world should be thanking President Trump for doing. As we discussed yesterday on the show, one of the goals of the Trump administration in this negotiation is to get the Europeans to actually involve themselves in the process. He wants the Europeans in. He wants the Europeans to pay more. He wants the Europeans to take care of peacekeeping. In fact, President Trump did a presser yesterday and he said this. He said, listen, you want European peacekeepers there? Sounds great. You know, pony up. In other words, you want to be part of this negotiation. Anytime you want to put some skin in the game, guys, we're willing to hear it.

Do you support stationing European peacekeeping troops in Ukraine as part of this peace deal? If they want to do that, that's great. I'm all for it. If they want to do that, I think that's that'd be fine. I mean, I know France has mentioned it. Others have mentioned it. UK has mentioned it. But yeah, well, if we have a peace deal, I think having troops over there for from the standpoint of Europe, we won't have to put any over there because, you know, we're very far away.

But having troops over there would be fine. I would not object to it at all. So again, all this is part and parcel of a solid negotiation. And then there is the sort of public facing side of the negotiation. And here is where things get a little bit complicated. So yesterday, President Trump in this particular press conference went extraordinarily hard on Ukraine.

much less hard on Russia. Now, you can make the case that pragmatically what he is attempting to do is sort of wheedle Vladimir Putin into coming to the table. That basically what he's saying to Vladimir Putin is, listen, I'm not taking an antagonistic position toward you. I share some of your concerns. Let's just get to the end of this thing. That is a positive read. The negative read is that President Trump is getting some of this stuff wrong.

And that includes some of the demands that he is now making on Ukraine, which are harsher than the demands that he is currently making on Russia. Now, again, from a pragmatic point of view, perhaps the idea here is that it's harder to bring Russia to the table than it is to bring Ukraine to the table. After all, the United States has the ability to cudgel Ukraine. The United States is giving billions and hundreds of billions of dollars in aid. The United States has power over enormous swaths of the European continent.

And it's hard to get Russia to come to the table. And so you have to make more – maybe that's the pragmatic concern here. However, negotiating from a position of weakness with regard to Putin is likely to result in a worse deal in the end, unless you think that basically the terms of the deal are already set and we're all just dancing to the tune until the clock runs out, essentially, at which point everybody knows what happens. There are security guarantees to Ukraine, including money flying to Ukraine, European peacekeepers in the region, Russia keeping Donbass and Crimea safe.

So here's President Trump saying some stuff about Ukraine. Again, I have some moral objections to the stuff that he is saying about Ukraine here because I don't think that it is true. So for example, at one point during this press conference, he made the signally false statement that Ukraine started the war. This is not true. Ukraine absolutely did not start the war. You can argue with Ukrainian policy toward both Europe and Russia over the period 2013 to 2022, but Russia invaded a sovereign country

and tried to take Kyiv and has killed tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people. Here's President Trump suggesting sort of the opposite, that somehow Ukraine is the problem here. Today I heard, oh, well, we weren't invited. Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land and

Everything, almost all of the land and no people would have been killed and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down. But they chose not to do it that way. And President Biden, in all fairness, he doesn't have a clue.

President Trump there saying Ukraine never should have started it. Ukraine did not, in fact, start it. You can blame them for not coming to the table sooner. You can say that a deal should have been taken sooner. I've said that myself. But Ukraine absolutely did not start the war and Russia should have stopped this war at any point. President Trump then continued by suggesting that he wants elections in Ukraine. This has been in demand of the Russians, mainly because the Russians wish to intervene in that election. It turns out it's very difficult to hold an election in wartime conditions where literally hundreds of thousands of fighting age men are still on the front lines.

in Ukraine. That is a situation rife for election manipulation by the Russians, who, of course, are bordering on Ukraine and many agents inside Ukraine as well. It is also noteworthy here that if you're going to call for new elections, perhaps Russia at some point should hold, you know, an actual decent election in which Vladimir Putin does not win 98% of the vote while throwing his opponents off third-story buildings. Here's President Trump.

We're hearing that Russia wants to force Ukraine to hold new elections in order to sign any kind of a peace deal. Is that something that the U.S. would ever support? Well, we have a situation where we haven't had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law, essentially martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine, I mean, I hate to say it, but he's down at 4% approval rating.

And where our country has been blown to smithereens. When they want a seat at the table, you could say the people have to

Wouldn't the people of Ukraine have to say, like, you know, it's been a long time since we've had an election? That's not a Russia thing. That's something coming from me and coming from many other countries also. OK, it is not coming from any other countries. I mean, the reality is, by the way, that Vladimir Zelensky's approval rating. And again, I think Zelensky has botched many things here, including his relationship with President Trump. But his approval rating is at 52 percent. It is not, in fact, at 45.

at 4%. The election was due in May of 2024. They are currently under martial law. Again, it is very difficult to hold an election in the middle of a gigantic existential war with your much larger neighbor. And if he's talking about how the people should really sound off on whether or not they liked the war,

You kind of have to have that on both sides. There needs to be an election in Russia as well. But Trump, I think that some of this is just personal peek at Zelensky. I think that President Trump does not like Zelensky's approach to him. He doesn't like Zelensky's approach to Joe Biden. And so he's sounding off about that. And again, I don't disagree with him on how Zelensky has approached both Biden and President Trump. But when he is ripping on Zelensky in the middle of the negotiation, that obviously is going to strengthen whatever hand Vladimir Putin thinks he has to play here. Here's Trump saying that Zelensky is not getting the job done.

How would you counter the perception, because Russia's pushing for this obviously, they don't really hold true elections, that that would be a capitulation of some sort? How would you guard against potentially Russia installing a puppet government? And then finally, how would that new election have an impact on getting Zelensky to sign the rare earth minerals deal? Look, you have leadership and I like him personally. He's fine.

No, he doesn't. I don't care about personally. I care about getting the job done. You have leadership now that's allowed a war to go on that should have never even happened, even without the United States. Again, this sort of this sort of reversal of blame here that they've allowed a war that never should have happened.

Again, why exactly is he doing this? Now, again, there are a couple of different reads here. One is the personal peak read. He doesn't like Vladimir Zelensky. He's going to say whatever he wants about Vladimir Zelensky. It makes no difference to the final status of negotiations because in the end, the United States' realist position in the world is that Russia should not take over Ukraine and we should pay for as little of that as possible. There's the sort of personality clash between

Then there's the strategic possibility that maybe there's actually something going on here in which Trump is basically dumping Zelensky under the bus here in order to achieve some sort of deal with the Russians. And then Zelensky can go back to his people and say, listen, I got undercut by the president who's openly attacking me in the middle of this. Now that wouldn't be unprecedented either. I mean,

And the fact is that we've actually seen something like that with regard to Joe Biden and Bibi Netanyahu in Israel. Joe Biden, in the middle of an existential war that Israel is fighting with its enemies, deployed all of his Democrats to basically call for a new election in Israel in which Netanyahu would be ousted. And Netanyahu used that as the basis for increasing his own popularity in Israel. So it's possible something like that could be going on, whether that is conscious or unconscious between Trump and Zelensky. And then finally, there's the possibility, which is that

Everybody just kind of saying things. And in the end, none of it's really going to matter very much. Whatever the reality, Vladimir Putin is in fact a cruel dictator. He's a vicious dictator who kills his political opponents domestically and internationally. He is in fact an expansionist. He's always been a territorial expansionist. Whether you're talking about Georgia, whether you're talking about Ukraine, whether you're talking about Crimea, he likes territorial expansion because the history of Russia is a history of a territorially expansionist power. I mean,

For President Trump to put the blame on Ukraine, again, I am not in favor of that. I don't think that that's a good thing. Is that going to sink negotiations? Is that going to have any real effect? I think the real effect of that is going to be to scare the hell out of them. It might actually have one more counterintuitive impact, which would be salutary, which is that it might force the Europeans to actually step up. If they don't like all the stuff that Trump is saying, anytime in here, they can step up and say, listen, we're going to take the lead here. We're going to pay the money. We're going to provide the peacekeeping forces.

You don't want to lead the way on this peace deal? Fine, don't lead the way on this peace deal. We'll do it. Maybe the Europeans will finally do the thing they should have done all along in this war. And again, the Europeans have been dilly-dallying around all this stuff for quite a long time.

wild incompetence from Europe. According to Axios, Europe has experienced subpar economic growth for a generation and has underinvested in its own defense. Both problems are coming to a head with the Trump administration's hostility as the catalyst. European elites are increasingly acknowledging a lack of competitive fire in both the economic and national security arenas, which has resulted in over-dependence on both U.S. companies to drive innovation and the U.S. government to defend Europe from Russia. So if President Trump's

language about Zelensky causes Europe to step into the gap, that is actually a very good thing for Europe, for Ukraine, and for the United States as well. All right, in just a moment, we'll get to the latest on the illegal immigration front. Plus, Hamas announces that they killed a couple of babies, which is, of course, not a shock at all. If you were with us for election night or the inauguration,

You already know the Daily Wire doesn't just show up. We take over. Now we are headed back to D.C. to do that at CPAC. Join me, along with Matt Walsh, Michael Moles, Andrew Klavan, and Jeremy Boring, all on stage live tomorrow night, February 20th. Check it out.

No scripted talking points, no corporate-approved narratives, just real conversations that actually matter, streaming live on Daily Wire Plus. And we are taking your questions. Don't just watch CPAC, be part of it. Live tomorrow night, February 20th, on Daily Wire Plus. Meanwhile, President Trump is moving forward with alacrity with regard to illegal immigration. And one of the things that has happened is that the signals sent by this administration...

are very consistent and very strong. Do not come here illegally. You will not get in. Illegal border crossings have plummeted even further in the first weeks of the Trump administration, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Border Patrol made roughly 29,000 arrests in January, according to newly released government data that is down from 47,000 in December. Those arrest numbers continue to drop precipitously because no one is showing up at the southern border. President Trump calls it the Trump effect. And of course, that is exactly right.

The kind of notion that this is all a coincidence is clearly wrong. Meanwhile, Democrats are freaking out because it turns out that actually it's pretty popular for illegal immigrants not to mass immigrate to America.

According to Politico, the close relationship between congressional Democrats and immigration advocacy groups has grown strained since last year's election as lawmakers shift rightward on border issues. Now those groups are asserting themselves as Republicans prepare to pursue a crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities. Failing to rally together in opposition to planned GOP legislation, they say, would risk a more profound break between the Democratic Party and its progressive base.

So it's fun to watch Democrats. They're now caught between a rock and a hard place, the rock of reality in which Americans really do not like illegal immigration and the hard place of all of these interest advocacy groups that they have been feeding for literally decades who now are angry at them. Again, this administration continues to be incredibly aggressive about its approach to all of these issues. Meanwhile, in other international news, horrifying news, Hamas has now announced, as was suspected, that it would release

dead bodies four dead bodies in exchange for these four dead bodies israel is going to release all palestinian women and minors under the age of 19 who are detained in gaza after october 8th and who quote-unquote weren't involved in the fighting but again those are detentions when they say under 19 you're talking about 16 17 18 year old people and recognize that in the gaza strip for hamas those are like military age recruits many women are also involved militarily with hamas

The bodies that are being released include the bodies of Shiri Bibas, who's 33, and her two children, Ariel and Kfir, who were four years old and nine months old when they were kidnapped, not by Hamas. Okay, this is important. They were not kidnapped by Hamas. They were kidnapped by Palestinian civilians who joined in on the murder spree of October 7th.

The reason this is important is because the great lie that there is a vast gap between the civilian population in the Gaza Strip and Hamas, that has always been a lie. It remains a lie. That does not mean that Israel and any other military power shouldn't attempt to distinguish between members of Hamas and civilians. Israel has expended hundreds of its own soldiers in efforts to do precisely that, which is why it's achieved such a signally successful kill ratio in terms of terrorists killed to civilians killed in battle.

With that said, the civilians in the Gaza Strip supported Hamas. They supported the agenda of Hamas for a year, for a year. The bodies of a mother, a toddler, and a baby were held as hostages in the Gaza Strip, and not one Palestinian turned over information to the Israelis. While these people were alive, they were taken alive into Gaza. They were coming out dead. While they were alive, there was no attempt by any Palestinian to achieve their liberty.

There was no attempt to shield them from the predations. In fact, they were held by civilians, as we know. Many of the hostages were, in fact, held in civilian homes. Just so you remember who these people are, here is a video of the kidnapping of Shiri Bibas and her toddlers. This is who, this is what Hamas is. This is who the people who celebrate Hamas and have sided with Hamas are. Human trash. The people who do this kind of stuff and who support this kind of stuff. Here's the imagery from October 7th.

There's a mother, a terrified mother, who is now dead, who's been murdered, carrying a toddler and a baby. She's being kidnapped by, again, these are people in civilian garb. These are not people in Hamas terrorist garb. Those children are dead. The mother is dead. Anybody who suggested Israel's war in Gaza is not, in fact, justified.

is morally blind at best and complicit in evil, much more likely. Now, there are still hostages who are being released, apparent live hostages. Some six hostages are supposed to be released on Saturday. That includes Ethiopian-born Israeli Avera Menjistu and Bedouin Israeli Hisham Al-Sayed. Okay, that's an Arab and an Ethiopian. So for all of those who claim that Israel is sort of homogenous, that, of course, is not true.

Hamas is famous for staging these celebratory releases of hostages and hostage bodies. Just horrifying, horrifying stuff. And by the way, there's still an American being held hostage. The last American being held hostage is a young man 20 years old named Idan Alexander. I know his family. His family lives in Tenafly, New Jersey. I introduced them to President Trump on the anniversary of October 7th, and they're still waiting for their son to come home.

Hamas is evil. Hamas needs to be extirpated. That is something that President Trump full well understands. And President Trump also understands that the great lie that there will ever be a two state solution involving the sorts of people who kidnap babies and celebrate their kidnapping and cheer in the streets is the body of Shani Luke. The broken, murdered body of Shani Luke is paraded through the streets of Gaza City.

that that is not going to be a peaceful two-state solution in any way, shape, or form, because one side is interested in peace and the other side is interested in murdering every Jew they can find and extirpating the state of Israel utterly. Meanwhile, some clouds on the horizon with regard to the economy. So inflation continues to hover around 3%. There are significant worries that it might go the wrong way. President Trump did, in fact, address this a little bit yesterday. He was talking about inflation during his interview with Elon Musk, and he suggested that

that inflation is in fact back, but he also suggested that it would militate and that he had nothing to do with that. Now that's true. He suggested during this interview that we inherited the inflation. Inflation is back. I'm only here for two and a half weeks. Inflation is back. They said, oh, Trump, I had nothing to do with it. These people have run the country. They spent money like nobody's ever spent. That is true. That is 100% true. But moving forward, it's going to be on his permanent record. So obviously inflation is going to be an issue.

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There are a couple of ways of bringing down inflation. One way is through productivity growth. When you have brand new products and services and more competition, the prices are going to come down. That is something that President Trump is trying to do by having more companies founded in the United States, deregulating. Tariffs are probably not going to help that purpose.

Tariffs at the best are going to be neutral in terms of pricing. They're certainly not going to lower prices. So when President Trump says that tariffs are somehow going to lead to an economic boon that somehow lowers inflation, he's playing a little bit with fire here, economically speaking, just in terms of the basic doctrine. Here's President Trump saying companies want to return to the United States specifically because of tariffs. I've been contacted by some of the biggest companies in the world.

And because of what we're doing economically and through tariffs and taxes and incentives, they want to come back into the United States. And we'll be announcing various very large companies, the biggest, actually. And they'll be coming back having to do with chips and having to do also with cars and lots of other things. We're going to be announcing some very, very big things.

Very big, momentous, I think, momentous decisions are being made by companies all around the world, the biggest, and they want to come back into the U.S. And by the way, it is true that as we become a more deregulatory environment with lower taxes, businesses will want to come back here. But if the idea is that we were a short business because of tariffs, that also means that there is limited supply. Limited supply with retained demand tends to increase prices over

over times when President Trump is pledging more reciprocal tariffs. Again, if he's doing this as a tactic, I've said this all along, tariffs as a tactic to get other countries to lower their tariffs, not a bad idea. Tariffs is sort of a panacea that that is not a great idea. Here's President Trump on tariffs. What can the EU do to sort of avoid the reciprocal tariffs that you've talked about? And, you know, you've talked a lot about the VAT. Do you expect them to reduce that?

Well, they did already, as I understand it, reduce their car tariff all the way down to what we have. And a lot of that will take place. And I think some won't do it and some will do it. But the EU had a 10 percent tax on cars and now they have a two and a half percent tax, which is the exact same as us. So already we've saved a tremendous amount. That would be great if everybody would do that. Then we'd all be on the same playing field, because essentially what we're doing with the tariffs is, you know, they charge us, we charge them same amount.

And it's called reciprocal, actually. And whatever they charge us, we're charging them. Again, not a bad idea to get them to lower their tariffs. If the idea is that somehow makes us stronger, economically speaking, that tends not to be true, which is why many Republicans are trying to curb Trump of some of the tariff talk. According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. Trade Representative nominee, Jameson Greer, still doesn't have a slot for confirmation before the full Senate. Commerce Secretary nominee, Howard Lutnick, was confirmed last night.

But in their absence, a singular figure has risen as leader of the trade agenda. You'll remember him from Trump at number one. That would be Peter Navarro, the president's special counselor on trade and manufacturing, known for his pugnacious personality and maximalist approach to tariffs. Now, again, I think that the influence of Navarro is, in fact, going to be sort of washed out in terms of the rest of the cabinet. The rest of Trump's cabinet understands that meritless tariffs only increase prices in the United States and make things significantly less expensive.

affordable and efficient. However, we'll have to make sure that we keep an eye on that because the last thing we want is some sort of economic downturn under President Trump. Joy Behar, who is entirely an idiot, she is making a case about inflation. And right now it's a stupid case. But if the inflation remains this way for another year, then it's going to be hung around Trump's neck whether he likes it or not.

There's incompetence and chaos going on and we should not put up with it. Well, I will say. And by the way, egg prices are supposed to come down, not airplanes. Okay, now again, that's a stupid take because the airplanes are not coming down because of President Trump and the egg prices are up because of Joe Biden.

But inflation is an all-purpose acid that eats through everything. Everything. It is the single biggest factor in Joe Biden losing his re-elect. So that does need to come down and come down quickly. All right, coming up, we'll get to Democratic responses. Their desperation is setting in at pretty much every level.

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