Ep. 2152 - The Supreme Court ATTACKS DOGE Cuts!
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Well, folks, controversy over Doge, turmoil over the economy, new movement on Ukraine, a lot going on. As always, if you're not a Daily Wire Plus member, now would be the time to join the fight. Get exclusive breaking stories from our investigative journalism team, the stories the mainstream media will not cover. Enjoy ad-free, uncensored Daily Wire shows, plus live chat in the app with other members. And yes, even more.

access exclusive Daily Wire documentaries, movies, and series. Stay ahead with breaking news and instant reactions. Be the first to know what's happening at The Daily Wire. Head on over to dailywire.com right now and become a member. So the fallout continues from President Trump's

addressed to a joint session of Congress the other night. Again, I was there and it was an amazing experience. The enthusiasm in the room from the Republicans was off the charts and the radical depression into which Democrats have sunk is quite real. They are so disorganized, so unable to come to any sort of answer for President Trump's steamroller and sort of juggernaut of an early administration that it felt disorganized. It felt ridiculous. It felt as though a bunch of spoiled college students couldn't get it together.

And instead, they decided to sit on their hands. And so it was a big optic win for President Trump, which he is going to need because we are now about to enter the most tumultuous period of President Trump's presidency. I say most tumultuous because the first month, the president has a lot of political capital to spend. This is true for every president. When a president is first elected, that president usually has a pretty high popularity rating.

They have a bit of a halo effect from winning. And they spend the first month putting forward most of their sort of big agenda items. But then the rubber meets the road. Things start to get a lot tougher, ranging from how to fund the government to how to solve war. New crises emerge.

Sort of act two of any presidency doesn't begin a year in. Act two of any presidency begins about a month in, and that is where we currently are. So the sort of optic capital that President Trump earned from this joint address to Congress, I think was really, really strong. Yesterday, that continued at the White House. DJ Daniels, of course, very cute 13-year-old kid who's suffering from brain cancer. And he visited the White House. And then he went on Fox News and said thank you to President Trump. I'd like to say thank you to him.

And I hope he got his cowboy hat because I bought him a brown one from Texas, but I'm not sure if they got it out the thing that where they check it because the dog had to sniff it and stuff like that. So, again, this is a very big win for President Trump. Not only that, it was a big loss for the Democrats. So Caroline Lovett, the excellent White House press secretary.

In the White House press room yesterday, she trashed the Democrats over their reactions to the State of the Union. She said, I don't understand. The only people you can clap for are the Ukrainians, but like literally every other thing. Cancer-ridden children, victims of illegal immigrant crime, girls who've been hit in the face and suffered brain damage because a man hit a volleyball. Like literally nothing. You couldn't clap for anything. Here's Caroline Leavitt taking the wood to the Democrats.

We have an individual in our new media seat today, Mary Margaret Olihan, who is The Daily Wire's first ever White House correspondent. Congratulations, Mary Margaret.

The Daily Wire was founded 10 years ago by Ben Shapiro. The Daily Wire now has over 1 million paid subscribers, a monthly network reach of 138 million, and has evolved into a leading conservative multimedia giant. They are now the fifth largest podcast network in the world and home to some of the top-ranked shows. With that, I will take your questions, and Mary Margaret, why don't you kick us off? Thank you so much, Caroline. It's great to be here. Thanks. So I had two questions, if that's okay. Sure. The first one last night and the second on May. Okay.

You talked about behavior from Democrat lawmakers, a lot of disruptions, and I just wanted to kind of go back to that. We saw Democrat lawmakers not stand for Lakin Riley, for Peyton McNabb, for the son of a slain police officer and 13-year-old cancer survivor. What are the optics of that nationally, just in terms of not just the people who were in the room last night, but across the nation? And also, was President Trump expecting this type of behavior when he was crafting his speech?

So I gave a quote to one of the media outlets in this room yesterday that Democrats behaving like children would be the least surprising thing of the night. And unfortunately, that quote did turn out to be true. I think the president and everyone, frankly, was surprised by the Democrats refusing to stand for not the president's policies, because frankly, we expected that. But for the everyday Americans who President Trump was shining a light on their stories, Mark Fogle, for instance, an American school teacher who was

detained by the Russians, President Trump freed him. If Joe Biden had done that, they all would have been on their feet. But because of it came from President Trump, they weren't. So we think it's very sad, but we're very proud of the president today. And the American people are the people that this president cares about most, and the reviews are in, and everybody loved his speech.

Joining us online to discuss is Mary Margaret Olihan. She, of course, is our Daily Wire White House correspondent. She was in the hot seat yesterday. She got the first question at the press briefing yesterday. So how is that, Mary Margaret? That's pretty cool.

Good morning, Ben. It is a beautiful day at the White House today. And yes, I was in the new media seat in the briefing room yesterday and got not just one, actually, but two questions from there. And for the people in the audience who might not understand what that means, the briefing room is full of seats, but most of them are occupied by legacy media outlets. And a couple of weeks ago, Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt announced that

Some reporters who had been starting to cover the White House recently, including myself, would have access to the quote unquote new media seat, which is to the left of the podium. And it's usually occupied by her staff. But it's right up there by the front row where a bunch of the most prominent White House reporters are. So it gives you really good access.

So I was excited to be there yesterday, excited to hear Caroline tell the room and the whole nation actually how much influence and how big the Daily Wire has become because we are one of the most leading conservative news outlets in the world, not just the nation. So I asked her two questions. I asked her about the disruptive behavior from Democrats yesterday at the

a few days ago actually at the joint address that President Trump delivered and I also asked her about what's going on in Maine where the governor is refusing to comply with Donald Trump's executive orders.

And and she did give cogent answers to both. She's very, very good at her job, obviously. And what what has been the mood around the White House surrounding President Trump's speech? I mean, I actually was at the White House kind of walking around simultaneously yesterday with Matt Walsh. We got to visit and hang out in the White House comms office a little bit. People seem pretty high about President Trump's speech as well. They should have been, it seems.

Yeah, I mean, the Trump administration is viewing this joint address as one of the highs of the presidency so far. And Ben, I got a bunch of pictures of you texted to me, people saying, oh my gosh, Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh are in the White House. It was a big, big deal to have you guys on campus. But what I can tell you is around the White House, I'm hearing a lot of different emotions. Some people are saying that President Trump's guests, including people like Peyton McNabb, the family of

on the young girl lake and riley who was brutally killed by an illegal immigrants are there some people that are saying these were stunts i think a lot of other people would disagree and say that these were emotional moments uh... caroline levy defended them in the briefing room yesterday and said that these were important american citizens who had stories to tell uh... and she actually told me when i asked her that she expected that some disruptive behavior from democrats

And I asked her specifically, was President Trump expecting this behavior when he chose some of these guests? She said they were not expecting the level of disruptive behavior that they saw. And she condemned that behavior very strongly. Mary Margaret, you were on Air Force One last week with the president of the United States flying back down to Palm Beach. How did that go?

Well, that was really cool. I was able to travel on Air Force One last weekend as part of the travel pool. And what that means is I was part of a group of reporters who went on Air Force One and kind of tracked the president's movements over the weekend. Now, he went golfing at Trump International Golf Course in Palm Beach

On both Saturday and Sunday, he was meeting with prominent people, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his wife. He had lunch with them and golfed with them. And I'm told he was actually doing some speech prep for the joint address. So we weren't able to ask him questions, but that proximity is still really important. And one thing that I thought was super interesting was that when we got on the plane, we saw all these massive boxes being loaded onto Air Force One. And it was later revealed to us by Stephen Chung, who's one of Trump's advisors,

that those boxes were full of the president's personal property that had been taken from him by the FBI during the Mar-a-Lago raid. So they were loaded onto Air Force One and they traveled with us back to Palm Beach. And we were told that these were personal items. They were not significant items. They could have been as mundane as clothing and diaries and things like that. So that was really interesting and great to be there and get to experience Air Force One. They have really good food, which I was surprised by.

That's Mary Margaret Olihan at the White House every day as our Daily Wire White House correspondent. Congrats on, again, being in the new media seat yesterday and I look forward to checking in with you soon. Thanks, Ben.

Again, gigantic failure by Democrats. And President Trump did something quite brilliant in the speech. I talked to many people in the White House yesterday, and they said that the most brilliant thing in the speech, which was President Trump deliberately calling out the Democrats and saying they won't clap for anything I'm about to say. It put them in such a difficult position because then if they clap for what he was saying, they might prove him wrong, but they'd be clapping for what he said. And if they didn't clap for what he was saying, then they look like Jackie.

Because many of the things that he was saying were totally unifying and apolitical. Like, for example, renaming a national park after a 12-year-old who was murdered by illegal immigrants. Like, how exactly is that something you don't clap for? How do you not clap for the kid getting into West Point? These are things that happened in the speech, and Democrats couldn't clap because Trump had trapped them between a rock and a hard place. That was an excellent piece of strategy by President Trump. Again, he actually thought of that and put it in the speech himself, apparently. Democrats...

The smarter ones understand that they are wrong footed. David Axelrod, who, of course, was the top adviser to Barack Obama when he was running for president in 2008, ripped into the Democrats for their optic failures. So there's it's one thing to mine our differences. It's another thing to try and heal our differences. And that is, you know, that that's the difference between real leadership and.

political expedience. Would it have been healing to stand for Mark Fogle? Might have been. No, I agree. You know, you are absolutely right. I will do what you will not. I will say I thought Democrats, I thought that was just I think there were times when they should have risen. I think what Al Green did was despicable.

Okay, so again, Axelrod is living in the world of reality, but many Democrats are not. Smart Democrats are going to have to start living in the world of reality if they actually wish to win back the presidency or the Congress or the Senate of the United States. Top Senate Democrats, this would be Blumenthal, Dick Durbin, Cory Booker, even they were saying, yeah, our behavior in there was not particularly good. We need to start actually offering some solutions here instead of just holding bingo signs or Brazilian steakhouse signs to bring more steak.

I wouldn't have necessarily done all the things that were done, but I understand the emotion. He's offering showmanship and bluster and bullying. We need to provide real solutions and avoid taking a bait. There wasn't any conscious strategy. You know, in terms of responding to his speech, I think there are better ways to do it. Stick with the basics. Look, I believe firmly that that should be a room of decorum.

So, again, these are these are Democrats who at least are smart enough to read the tea leaves a little bit. And then there are the Democrats who, of course, are not like, for example, Democratic Representative Latifa Simon from California, who claimed that Al Green, he's the 77 year old gentleman who rose to scream at President Trump about Medicaid while shaking his cane at him. And then was removed by the sergeant at arms in a bizarre move. Here is a congresswoman suggesting that the reason Al Green was removed was way for a way for it wasn't because he was yelling at Trump.

for like solidly minutes on end. It wasn't because of that. It's because racism. Here we go. I got to say, as a new member of Congress, I was shocked at what seems like a blatant disrespect for the House. And it wasn't coming from Representative Green. It was coming from the men behind him on the right side who were telling him and yelling, sit down. I mean, it felt like

I was watching something in a history class of racists yelling at an elderly black man challenging the president of the United States not to cut medical care for the sick.

OK, these folks are so off their rocker and they're off their rocker on the easiest issues in the world. I mentioned yesterday that the the most obvious issue Democrats should clearly drop just for pragmatic reasons. I mean, for moral reasons, they should because it's it's absolute insanity and idiocy. But for pragmatic reasons, they also should, because most Americans recognize that it's idiocy is the boys can be girls routine. But it was just a couple of days ago where Republicans pushed a bill.

to bar transgender women and girls, meaning like boys and men, from school sports teams designated for female students. The measure stalled in the Senate on a party line 51 to 45 vote. Every single Democrat in the Senate voted against that bill. Every single one, which is insane. It's totally crazy.

Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said, quote, What Republicans are doing today is inventing a problem to stir up a culture war and divide people against each other and distract people from what they're actually doing. And then he said the bill was, quote, unquote, totally irrelevant to ninety nine point nine percent of all people across the country. Well, it's irrelevant. Then why don't you just vote in favor of it? And it's obviously relevant to you. As stated, the Democrats look crazy because of this particular issue. They're crazy on a lot of issues.

But there were two big issues in the last election cycle. They just looked befuddlingly insane. They're ones that are clearly just political games that are bad for the country, like leaving the border open or blowing money into an inflationary economy. And then there's stuff that's just bleep lunacy, like bad bleep lunacy.

Those are things like boys are girls and also maybe Hamas isn't that bad. Those are like things where people look at them and they go, you must be out of your mind. Like totally crazy. And Democrats keep doubling down on the crazy. They're going to have to recover some semblance of sanity if they wish to move forward. Now, meanwhile...

the president of the United States' plan to cut into USAID spending. Doge basically wiped out about $50 billion in USAID spending, saying that this does not comport with American standards of foreign policy. And so a temporary federal freeze, an impoundment was essentially put on those funds. And a district court judge then put a freeze on the freeze and said, no, no, no, the money has to go out the door. And this raises a very serious constitutional issue. As we've

as we've discussed. That constitutional issue is whether a district court judge has the capacity to simply shut down a presidential nationwide action.

Can one low-level district court judge actually do that? We'll get to more on this in a moment. First, let me ask you a question. Do you trust your internet service provider? There's good reason not to. Depending on where you live, ISPs may be required to keep logs of your online activity just in case the government wants to take a peek. In the United States, it's even worse. ISPs can legally sell your browsing history to whomever they want. So what can you do about it? Well, the solution is to get a VPN. The one I use is ExpressVPN. It's an app that reroutes my online traffic through encrypted servers so my ISP can't access it.

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Branch.com slash Ben to save 15%. Exclusions apply. See site for details. And that's BullenBranch.com slash Ben to save 15%. Well, yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States on a 5-4 vote essentially remanded the case back to the district court and said we need clarification as to why and how you are actually doing this. So according to the Supreme Court majority opinion, it was a 5-4 decision that was joined on the right side of the aisle by

by Justices Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. This order essentially said that the District Court for the District of Columbia had issued a temporary restraining order enjoining the government from enforcing directives pausing disbursements of USAID assistance funds. The present application did not challenge the government's obligation to follow that order. The District Court ordered the government to issue payments for a portion of the paused disbursements, those owed for work already completed.

So this doesn't apply, by the way, to forward-looking monies. This is to like, there was an invoice because the work was already done. Does the federal government have to pay the bill? The chief justice entered an administrative stay shortly before the 1159 deadline and then referred the application to the court. The application has been denied.

But when the application was denied, it doesn't mean that's the end of the story. The district court needs to now clarify what obligations the government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timeline. So again, sort of unclear the scope of this. It is remanding back to the district court to figure out exactly what it is that they are saying has to be paused and what doesn't have to be paused. Are they saying that the part that has to go out is the part that's already been paid for? Or are they saying that literally you can't pause federal spending at all?

And so we're going to need clarification on that. This drew a very, very marked dissent, a hot dissent from Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. And Alito, who is just awesome. If I have to rank my favorite Supreme Court justices, there's some people who rank their favorite baseball players. I rank favorite Supreme Court justices. And for me, it goes Clarence Thomas and then Samuel Alito.

So Justice Alito, who is terrific, wrote the following, quote, does a single district court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the government of the United States to pay out and probably lose forever two billion taxpayer dollars? The answer to that question should be an emphatic no. But a majority of this court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned. Justice Alito not pulling any punches. He says in capsule form, this is what happened. Respondents are a group of American businesses and nonprofits that receive foreign assistance funds from the State Department and USAID.

They brought suit and claimed the current administration's temporary pause of foreign assistance payments is unlawful. The district court issued a temporary restraining order requiring the government to then halt the funding pause, meaning spend the money.

After issuing the TRO, the district judge, who frustrated with the pace at which the funds were being dispersed, on February 25th, he issued a second order requiring the government to pay out approximately $2 billion. The judge brushed aside the government's argument that sovereign immunity barred this enforcement order. He took two steps that would prevent any higher court from reviewing or possibly stopping the payments. First, he labeled the order as a non-appealable TRO. And second, he demanded that the money be paid within 36 hours.

Alito says this left the government little time to try to obtain some review of what it regarded as a lawless order. The government moved for a stay pending appeal in the district court. The judge then shrugged off the government's sovereign immunity claim and ignored the government's representation that most of the money in question could probably not be recovered once actually dispersed.

So he writes, to start, it is clear the district court's enforcement order should be construed as an appealable preliminary injunction, not a mere TRO. A temporary restraining order does not apply here because it is not temporary. Once the money is gone, it's gone. Usually a temporary restraining order applies to, for example, you're not allowed for a certain period of time to do this thing. But if the temporary restraining order says you must pay X dollars to this person, that's not a temporary restraining order. The money has now been paid and you can't claw it back. This is Alito's point.

He says the order did not merely restrain the government's challenged action in order to preserve the status quo. It acts as a mandatory injunction requiring affirmative action by the government. So the Court of Appeals had jurisdiction. He said even if the majority is unwilling to vacate the district court's order, it should at least stay the district court's enforcement order until the government is able to petition for a writ of certiorari, meaning like the Supreme Court takes up the full case.

He is right about all of this, of course. He says, So, again, this raises questions as to why Justice Roberts did what he did or why Amy Coney Barrett did what she did.

It's not as extreme an order as it originally seems from the Supreme Court. And that basically says any district court judge anywhere can put a nationwide temporary restraining order on the federal government for any reason whatsoever. But as Justice Alito says, if the effect of the order is to force the federal government to disperse funds it can't get back before the adjudication at the Supreme Court level, then that is a massive problem.

And Justice Alito is right about all of that. But again, you were expecting a lot of this sort of stuff to happen. I mean, the reality is that because President Trump is moving fast and breaking things, there's gonna be a lot of legal action. Most of that legal action is gonna read down to the benefit of the Trump administration. Some will not. So the Trump administration has now been ordered to reinstate thousands of fired U.S. Department of Agriculture workers as well. The chair of a federal civil service board ruled on Wednesday that thousands of fired workers at the Department of Agriculture must get their jobs back for at least the next month and a half.

The ruling said the recent dismissals of more than 5,600 probationary employees may have violated federal law and procedures for carrying out layoffs. But that is not going to resolve all of this because, again, the administration, as Politico reports, may have further options to place the reinstated workers on administrative leave or fire them again as part of a formal reduction in force. So basically, there are all these sort of laws and regulations in place designed to ensure the –

continued peonage of all of these various federal jobs that people be stuck in these jobs basically forever. One of those procedures is an administrative review before anybody gets fired. They're saying that that didn't happen. There was no administrative review. And so you have to replace people in these jobs because there's a merit systems board that has to review the issue. Okay. Now, again, that's not a permanent end to what Trump is trying to do inside the USDA.

All of these road bumps are to be expected at this point. But in the end, one of the things that's going to have to happen is actual congressional movement to re-enshrine what Doge is attempting to do. The executive branch can do many things in terms of firing people. And by the way, there will be negative headlines that attend to many of these firings. So for example, lots of headlines today about the fact that some of these firings are affecting veterans. So there's a whole article from the Associated Press today suggesting that

that it's a great tragedy that veterans are losing their jobs. Number one, nobody, including veterans, has a right to a job from the federal government. That's not actually how it works. You do have veterans benefits that attend to your service time, but nobody has a right to a federal taxpayer job. With that said, it would be a very smart move for the Trump administration to launch an initiative to help people who are veterans get jobs in the private sector if they end up being fired in the public sector, right? That would be just a smart political move. And I think the Trump administration will probably do something like that.

But in the end, most of the big things that the Trump administration is trying to do

Again, this is the hard part. This is where I say, like, the first 30 days are now over, and now you hit the hard part of the presidency. You need Congress to do a lot of these things. And so yesterday, Elon Musk went to the Hill, and he had a meeting with House Republicans to discuss what Doge was doing. According to the Washington Post, while supportive of Doge's cost-cutting mission, some Republican lawmakers have begun to express concern over Musk's methods of laying off federal employees en masse and then pursuing large budget cuts without congressional input. However, with that said...

House lawmakers have been talking pretty seriously about the possibility of rescission. That is a process whereby the government of the United States, the Congress of the United States can, with 51 votes, vote to rescind some of its funding. Musk and the Republicans were talking about this as proposed by Rand Paul. Rand Paul is a consistent deficit hawk. According to NBC News, they discussed a rescission package that the White House could send to Congress to codify Doge cuts through a measure that can get around the 60-vote hurdle

In order to get around legal challenges to the administration's power to act unilaterally, many of the challenges currently happening are people suing and saying the executive branch can't make these cuts. These spending initiatives were put forward by Congress. Only Congress can undo them. Well, there is a process called rescission. It's been attempted in the past, a little hard to do, but it could theoretically be done with 51 votes where the Congress says we're going to now rescind certain aspects of spending. Senator Rand Paul said, quote, to me, it's ephemeral now.

Meaning all of these cuts. I love the stuff they're doing. We got to vote on it. My message to Elon was, let's get over the impoundment idea, the idea that the federal government in the executive branch can simply stop the spending and let's send it back as a rescission package. Then all we have to do is lobby to get to 51 senators or 50 senators, plus J.D. Vance breaking the tie, to cut the spending. Musk apparently was surprised to learn there was even a pathway to do that.

Lindsey Graham also backed the idea. He said, it's time for the White House to go on offense. We're losing altitude. Now we started off straight good. We need to get back in the game on offense. The way you can regain altitude is to take the work product and away from the personalities and the drama, take the work product and vote on it. And again, this is in fact a smart move by Rand Paul and some of the deficit hawks.

So cutting the debt, rescission is a very good idea. Deregulation is absolutely necessary at this point. There's been a lot of talk about we won't add one regulation without getting rid of 10 others. You run into sort of a definitional problem. What amounts to a regulation?

It's like the entire piece of regulation. Is it a piece of a regulation? What exactly is that? But bottom line is businesses need to be unchained. That is happening, particularly in the energy sector. Drill baby drill is very real. The Department of the Interior, led by Doug Burgum, is doing an excellent job with a lot of this sort of stuff. The permits are going to get a lot easier. This particular administration is very keen on unlocking America's energy resources, and that's very necessary. But congressional action is going to be the next step on a lot of this.

This administration is moving incredibly fast and so is this year. Two entire months of the new year are already behind us. I need to make sure that I'm maintaining my health, hitting the gym, spending time with the family, even with the crazy work schedule. When I was younger, I used to think I could just power through on willpower and caffeine. I learned pretty quickly peak performance requires peak nutrition.

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After more than a year of war, terror, and pain in Israel, all of Israel is brokenhearted after learning of the horrific murders of the Bibas family who were held hostage in Gaza. We're talking about the murder of actual babies by the monsters of Hamas. Many people are still hurting throughout the Holy Land where the need for aid continues to grow. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews has supported and will continue to support the families of hostages and other victims of the October 7th terror attacks.

With your help, IFCJ has provided financial and emotional help to hostages and their families, and to those healing and rebuilding their broken homes and broken bodies. The real work, however, is just beginning. As anti-Semitism continues to rise around the world, the people of Israel, our Jewish brothers and sisters, need us now more than ever. Your gift today helps provide critically needed support to families in Israel

whose lives continue to be destroyed by terror and uncertainty as Israel remains surrounded by enemies. Give a gift to bless Israel and her people. Go to benforthefellowship.org. That's www.benforthefellowship.org. Thank you and God bless. Again, that's benforthefellowship.org. You can help people in need today in a great way. Go to benforthefellowship.org. Now, one area where there could be serious drag in the economy, and again, I'm going to warn about this because economic reality is economic reality, regardless of who is the president of the United States.

A giant regime of increased tariffs will harm the American economy. It will. There are areas of the American economy where businesses will be reshored. Protectionism does reshore businesses in the affected area. However, the broader costs of gigantic tariff wars across the planet are to shrink the market for American goods, increase the price for American consumers, undermine the value of the U.S. dollar as foreign reserve currency, and lead our allies to make trade deals with each other but not us or with our enemies.

That is what tariff wars tend to do. They are not, in fact, good or easy to win. Now, again, if President Trump is throwing out his willingness to do tariffs as a way of leveraging down tariffs, meaning that he is basically saying, listen,

I'm willing to do whatever it takes. You want to do tariff war? Man, let's do tariff war. Let's do this thing. Or there's an off ramp and the off ramp is you lower your tariffs and we lower our tariffs. As I said yesterday, if President Trump's emphasis in the term retaliatory tariff is on retaliatory rather than tariff, then I'm fine with it. A retaliatory tariff would be designed to say that if you guys go down, we will also go down. And that's fine and dandy.

However, comparative advantage is still an element of economics and pretending that it is not is a fool's errand. Just because we can produce something in the United States does not mean that it is the best thing economically for it to be produced in the United States. Autarky is a giant fail. As an economic strategy, autarky is a fail. And again, that doesn't mean we can't out-compete people. We can out-compete a lot of people. It does mean products are going to get more expensive. Businesses are going to be underfunded. Our bonds are going to be less purchased on the open markets.

There are going to be real, real problems here. So one of the big questions right now with regard to the tariffs is what they will be. There's been a lot of sort of up and down, in and out. I mean, it's a roller coaster with regard to this tariff regime. And that in and of itself, by the way, not good for the economy. What you want from the economy is

is George Gilder described the economy, the economist George Gilder. He described the economy as essentially a phone line, right? A series of regulations, regulatory background, the tax regime as essentially a phone line. What do you want on a phone line? You want clarity. You just want clarity and predictability. If you have extraneous information in your phone line, meaning static, it's very difficult to hear the actual information you want to hear, which is the person at the other end of the phone. Unpredictability is static in the phone line. And so when you are

saying one day we're doing tariffs and the next day we're not doing tariffs or we're going to do a tariff. Then we're going to blow a hole in the tariff with an exception for automakers. Or maybe it's a retaliatory tariff. Maybe we just love tariffs. When you do that sort of stuff, business people get a little skittish because how do you invest in building abroad if you think the tariffs are going to increase? And why would you invest building in the United States if you believe tomorrow President Trump is going to revoke those tariffs or the next administration will revoke those tariffs?

Business is very much about investing for the future because it takes a while for things to materialize. This is why when Apple, for example, says they're going to spend $500 billion in the United States, they don't mean they're just going to take a bag of cash and drop it in the Federal Reserve today. That is not how that works. They mean that over the course of years, they are going to spend on a variety of projects in the United States, the net cost of which will be $500 billion. That's what they mean. But that could change at any moment. A commitment to spend money is not actually spending money.

So uncertainty in the economy is the enemy of productive growth. It is a massive problem. It's the reason why when you have sort of tyrannical countries where the rules change at any moment, you can't get economic growth. You would not invest in a country where the government could at any moment seize your assets. And investing in a country where the regulations change every five seconds, a tariff goes up, a tariff goes down. It's literally day by day. Very difficult. People instead tend to withdraw their money from the economy and they tend to keep their powder dry.

And that's what you're seeing, by the way, from, for example, Warren Buffett. The reason he is keeping his powder dry right now is because he doesn't know where this is going. And he's figuring, hell, if the stocks go down in a month, then I'm gonna be able to buy them up on the cheap. Well, meanwhile, the trade war that is currently being initiated with Canada, President Trump has said that he wants a crackdown on the northern border in Canada. Fine, let's get that. Let's do that. And then let's get rid of these tariffs. Seriously, let's get them to ratchet down their tariffs. Let's ratchet down our own tariffs.

Canada is the number one trade partner of the United States. They are not a financial or economic or physical threat to the United States. Treating them as such is not a wise move. It just isn't. And by the way, it's going to keep Justin Trudeau in power. So President Trump had a conversation yesterday with the terrible leader of Canada. And then he put out a statement, quote, Justin Trudeau of Canada called me to ask what could be done about tariffs. I told him many people have died from fentanyl that came through the borders of Canada and Mexico, and nothing has convinced me that it has stopped.

He said it's gotten better, but I said that's not good enough. The call ended in a somewhat friendly manner. He was unable to tell me when the Canadian election is taking place, which made me curious, like what's going on here? I then realized he was trying to use this issue to stay in power. Good luck, Justin. Except for the fact that actually it is good luck, Justin, because the reality is that Pierre Poliev, who is the leader of the Conservative Party and is excellent, a terrific leader, would be amazing prime minister of Canada.

Pierre Poliev has been sinking in the polls since the initiation of the trade war because people in Canada are associating Poliev with Trump, even though he says he doesn't like the tariffs and doesn't like what Trump is doing.

So you know what I would like? I would like lower tariffs with Canada. Sure, I'd like more border security. I will point out at this point that the grand total of fentanyl that was caught at the northern border in the last year was 43 pounds. By way of contrast, the amount of fentanyl that was caught at America's southern border was 22,000 pounds. So there may or may not be a major problem with fentanyl coming across our northern border.

The United States should articulate to Canada what are the concrete steps that they want Canada to actually take to crack down on fentanyl trafficking across the border. We should actually make a significant ask and then get the ask, you get the win, and then ratchet this thing down because it is not good for Canada and it is not good for the United States. And hell, I don't care much about Canada, but I do care about the United States. When you ratchet up prices...

on everything from oil to cars because of this. That is not going to be particularly good. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, he seemed to be linking the Canadian and Mexican policy to our open borders. This again, totally on board with us. If you're using tariffs as leverage, that is worthwhile. If you're using them as a way of quote-unquote winning economically, not as worthwhile.

You are our greatest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, right? If we are so important to you, why is the border wide open? Why do we have to build a wall? Why are you building a wall? Why are you respecting America? Why do you think it's okay to disrespect America? So what they did is they disrespected America. They

They had caravans coming in from Mexico. They had visas just flying off the shelf from Canada and every criminal in the world and terrorists coming in through Canada. And the president said, I've had enough. OK, well, that's fine. But we need the deliverables. What are the deliverables that the tariffs can go back down? And in fact, President Trump has already blown a hole in his own tariff regime because you can see that it's having a massive impact on trade with the United States.

Yesterday, the White House announced a one-month reprieve from tariffs on Mexico and Canada for cars that comply with the USMCA. Again, the USMCA was negotiated by President Trump in his first term. It is a pretty good piece of agreement. The markets immediately rose because it turns out, you know what the markets don't like? The breakup of trade. It turns out that after you announce that, what you get is an increase in markets. And when you announce tariffs, then you get a decrease in markets.

It does not require like a genius level understanding of economics to understand that this is in fact the case. There are a bunch of reasons why a tariff war would not redound to America's overall benefit. Again, maybe it harms others more than it harms us, but it certainly harms us. And I'm not sure what exactly is the achievable goal. If you're doing it for national security reasons, on board. You're doing it to leverage our enemies, on board. You want to get something out of someone? Fine.

But tariffs are a blunt instrument, and they're a blunt instrument that affects the American consumer and many American producers who import inputs into their product. Why do I care about this? Because the only thing, the biggest obstacle to President Trump's success is an economic downturn. It is the single biggest obstacle. And there's a theory out there that what President Trump is actually doing is, quote unquote, engineering or I don't believe that's true. I don't think that's true. The theory goes that basically President Trump is attempting to undermine the

Trade regimes with the United States in order to essentially force the Federal Reserve to lower the interest rates, undermining the strength of the American dollar because President Trump likes a weaker dollar in comparison with other countries to rectify the trade imbalance. I don't think it's anything like that. I think President Trump has a very simple view of trade and that very simple view is we don't like getting screwed. And again, I'm on board with that.

Tariffs is leverage, that's fine. But if the idea here is that tariffs are going to make America wise, free and beautiful on their own, that is a massive mistake that is gonna come back to bite. And again, I don't think President Trump believes that. I hope he doesn't believe that. I know the markets hope he doesn't believe that, which is why they rose yesterday on news that he is suspending the tariffs with regard to automakers for at least one month.

Meanwhile, there is some movement on Ukraine. Mike Walz, the national security advisor yesterday, he suggested that there will be some good movement on Ukraine after Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, came to the United States. There, of course, is a giant blow up at the White House between Vladimir Zelensky and the president and the vice president. And then a couple of days ago, Vladimir Zelensky essentially gave up the goes. He put out a statement saying that he wanted to do the rare earths mineral agreement with the United States, that he was looking forward to moving toward peace. Here was the NSA Mike Walz explaining.

I

Just got off the phone before I walked out here with my counterpart, the Ukrainian National Security Advisor. We are having good talks on location for the next round of negotiations, on delegations, on substance. So just in the last 24 hours since the public statement from Zelensky and then these subsequent conversations, which I'm going to walk inside and continue, I think we're going to see –

movement in very short order.

Now, it is worthwhile to note here that the movement is all on the Ukrainian side. I've seen no movement whatsoever from the Russians, and it takes two to tango. The Russians keep saying that we want to do an agreement, but then when it comes down to sort of the hard-nosed negotiation of what an agreement looks like, they are currently turning down pretty much all of the prerequisites and necessities for any sort of peace agreement. And remember, Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia would like to take Kyiv. If they believe that the West is going to cave in Ukraine, they will continue to push. This is how negotiations work.

So pushing the Ukrainians does not come without risk to the Ukrainians. Clearly, the reason I say this is because literally yesterday, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who's essentially a cutout for Vladimir Putin in Belarus. Belarus is effectively a sort of satellite member of Russia. He warned the Kremlin, quote, will never accept a European troop deployment to Ukraine. In a wide-ranging interview with blogger Mario Nafal, who, of course, is very big on X, he

Lukashenko praised President Trump's forthright approach to Russia's war on Ukraine and suggested Putin was ready to make peace. However, he said any proposal would be unlikely to win Russian support if it included deployment of European forces into Ukraine. Quote, Russia will never agree to this. At least this is Russia's position today, especially since the leadership of the EU, primarily in the person of Germany and France, is taking a very aggressive position at the moment.

The Belarusian leader also counterattacks by both Trump and Putin on the legitimacy of Vladimir Zelensky while offering Belarus as a location for peace negotiations. So again, here is the question. This is a very real question. If Russia is unwilling to make an agreement that allows European boots on the ground, how in the world do you get to a national peace agreement? I've said many times, I've been saying since 2022, again, that agreement looks like Russia keeps Donbass and Crimea unprotected.

There are security arrangements with Ukraine that guarantee that this never happens again. That's the only thing that Ukraine will sign on to. If Russia refuses that, then why would Ukraine sign on to anything? And any peace that would be forced by the West would be a sort of temporary respite before Russia rearms and then goes back in. That's what Ukraine is worried about. I don't think unreasonably.

Part and parcel of this is right now, again, the United States continues to ratchet up pressure on Ukraine as though it's Ukrainian intransigence that's responsible for all this. What I would love to hear is some move by Russia to explain exactly what they want. I've yet to hear that. I want to hear from Vladimir Putin and from the Russians. What is it that would look like an off ramp to you? Because so far it's been everybody else projecting an off ramp onto what Russia wants, including me. I'm telling Russia what it should get.

If we want to come to some sort of end to this thing, but if Russia refuses to take that, what does the off-ramp look like? Would Vladimir Putin actually accept Donbass and Crimea and real security arrangements, meaning European troops there that would trigger a larger regional war if Russia were to walk across the border? And if the answer to that is no, there's no agreement, it seems to me, to be made.

So the United States keeps ratcheting up the pressure on Ukraine. John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA, said that they're cutting intelligence support to Ukraine. This, to me, I don't understand this part of the strategy. I'll just be totally frank with you. I don't understand the part of the strategy where we are denying Ukraine weaponry to at least maintain the current status in the war, to maintain the current lines. Again, if Russia feels like they have momentum and they can push further, why would they come to the table?

If it takes two to tango, you have to simultaneously convince the Ukrainians to come to the table by threatening things like we might withdraw if you don't get a deal. But you also have to say to the Russians, if you don't come to the table, what happens? Where's that other half of the conversation? Withdrawing intelligence support to Ukraine, which is effectively designed to prevent Ukraine from making attacks inside Russia, which is a way of them, by the way, clawing back territory, which then they will presumably trade for some territory inside Ukraine.

I want to see movement from the other side of the table. Has there been any movement from the other side of the table? I'm waiting to see it. Now, again, I'll let the administration cook, but I would love to see some movement from Vladimir Putin to justify the kind of movement that is being pushed on the Ukrainians right now. Here is John Ratcliffe over at the CIA.

President Trump had a real question about whether President Zelensky was committed to the peace process. And he said, let's pause. I want to give you a chance to think about that. And you saw the response that President Zelensky put out a statement saying, I'm ready for peace. And I want Donald Trump's leadership to bring about that peace. And so I think on the military front and the intelligence front, the pause that

that allowed that to happen, I think will go away and I think we'll work shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine as we have to push back on the aggression that's there, but to put the world in a better place for these peace negotiations to move forward.

Now, again, what Ratcliffe is saying there is actually correct. So the pause has to be temporary. And again, Zelensky, I think one of the reasons that now he's showing more flexibility is because of the pressure. That means that the pause should actually stop at this point. And the United States should continue to ratchet up pressure on both sides. It requires pressure on both sides. If you're going to be an arbiter who is neutral, a mediator who's neutral, there has to be pressure on both sides to come to the table.

Meanwhile, the Europeans are apparently stepping up military spending. The Germans in particular are radically revamping their military spending. The EU is in crisis talks on Thursday focused on defense. French President Emmanuel Macron says, I want to believe the US will stand by our side. We have to be ready for that not to be the case. The future of Europe must not be decided in Washington or Moscow, which, OK, fine. That's that's great. I mean, again, I think that President Trump is very much on board with the Europeans taking the lead on this sort of stuff.

Apparently, Germany is about to blow out its debt ceiling in an attempt to radically increase their defense spending, which, of course, is necessary in the face of Russian predation. None of that is particularly bad. And I think all the pyrotechnics aside, we could end up with a salutary end to this war because of what President Trump is doing. He's putting pressure on the Ukrainians to come to the table. They're ready. Now the pressure needs to be on Vladimir Putin to come to the table.

And the pressure that he's put on the Ukrainians has been accompanied by a radical revision upward of European security spending, which is good. And the end of this could be quite salutary from President Trump. And if so, he deserves an enormous amount of credit. It's a little early to say that. Let's get there first. If it does end the way that it could, that would be a very, very good thing. And meanwhile, speaking of foreign policy and the President of the United States' peace through strength. So the President of the United States yesterday said,

without an ultimatum to Hamas, because Hamas is still holding American hostages and indeed holding probably 35 live hostages somewhere in that neighborhood. The president of the United States

put out an ultimatum to Hamas in some of the strongest language he has yet issued. Quote, Shalom, Hamas, means hello and goodbye. You can choose. Release all of the hostages now, not later, and immediately return all of the dead bodies of the people you murdered or it is over for you. Only sick and twisted people keep bodies and you are sick and twisted. I am sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job. Not a single Hamas member will be safe if you don't do as I say. I've just met with your former hostages whose lives you have destroyed. This is your last warning for the leadership. Now is the time to leave Gaza while you still have a chance.

Also to the people of Gaza, a beautiful future awaits, but not if you hold hostages. If you do, you are dead. Make a smart decision. Release the hostages now or there will be hell to pay later. Donald J. Trump, president of the United States. Love it. Love it. Couldn't possibly love that more. Imagine if this had been the angle of the United States on October 8th, as opposed to Joe Biden being a cowardly fraud. Amazing stuff from President Trump. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, explained in more detail President Trump's

language here, although it didn't really require a lot of explication. This is the beautiful thing about President Trump. If you're ever wondering what he's thinking, you shouldn't. He just says it. Here was Marco Rubio yesterday.

You know how long we've been waiting for a long time in this country to have the kind of leadership with that kind of clarity. People don't realize the president meets with these people, he hears their stories, he's outraged and rightfully so. He's tired of watching these videos every weekend where hostages that are emaciated are released and bodies are turned over and sometimes it's the wrong bodies and this five here and three there and these games that are being played and he's lost his patience with it. He's been very clear about this from the beginning. He's created space and time for this to be solved

And now it's time for seeing it come to an end. It's enough of this already. These people have been in captivity now for over a year and a half. These are monsters. It needs to stop. And I wish there were more international pressure along the same lines here. But I'm glad he's putting those statements out. I think he doesn't say these things and not mean it, as folks are finding out around the world. If he says he's going to do something, he'll do it. He'll do it. And so they better take that seriously.

Again, that is that is excellent stuff there from the secretary of state and obviously from the president of the United States. And meanwhile, a breaking story courtesy of our reportorial team over at Daily Wire is pretty amazing story. Apparently, it turns out that a former top aide to Kamala Harris is now under criminal investigation by the Trump administration. Apparently, this person tried to forge paperwork to take advantage of Elon Musk's fork in the road buyout offer, according to Luke Rosiak and the team at Daily Wire.

The probe is apparently going to explore whether high-level officials, potentially including Kamala Harris herself or Lena Kahn, Joe Biden's chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who's awful, conspired to embed a person named Nathaniel Siegel into a job at the FTC just before President Trump's inauguration. Apparently, that placement involved a series of maneuvers that appeared to have been designed to evade personnel and ethics regulations, hide that Siegel was a political appointee, and prevent the Trump administration from firing him.

So basically, in short, this person was placed on the payroll at the FTC on the direct orders of Lena Kahn, even though he was missing essential paperwork. And when the scheme began to unravel, Siegel tried to pull the ripcord by doctoring a document to try to secure the deferred resignation program buyout, despite the deadline having passed and Siegel not having received the offer in the first place, which would have insured him something like $200,000 in exchange for leaving the government. The official confirmed, according to the DOJ, that the department was taking a broad look at this story.

Apparently, again, it was a bunch of sleight of hands that resulted in Siegel being hired just before the Biden administration left and then classified improperly as a tenured nonpolitical civil servant, making it harder to fire him.

I mean, it's this sort of waste, fraud and abuse that Doge exists to ferret out. And obviously, Attorney General Pam Bondi, if there's criminal activity, is going to be all over this. All right, guys, coming up, we're going to get into some culture. Viola Davis has some thoughts on Black History Month that are sort of bizarre. Plus, Hamilton and Lin-Manuel Miranda, he says that they will no longer be performing at the Kennedy Center because of the evils of Donald Trump.

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