Ep. 2157 - Democrats To SHUT DOWN The Government?
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Well, folks, as always, there's a lot happening in the news. The Democrats are now threatening a government shutdown. No one really knows why. Pete Buttigieg apparently wants to run for president. A lot happening. But you don't just watch The Daily Wire. You are.

Okay, so...

You thought Democrats couldn't possibly get any dumber, and yet somehow they have managed to achieve this signal feat. The reason I say this is because right now, President Trump is having some trouble when it comes to the economy. Obviously, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is off significantly since he took office.

There's a lot of concern about the possibility of recession in the near future in the United States, despite some pretty strong economic fundamentals. And in the polling data, President Trump is actually moving the wrong way on the economy. According to a brand new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, the question is, how have Donald Trump's policies affected U.S. economic conditions? 51% say worsened conditions. 28% say improved conditions. 21% said have no effect.

So that is not a great number for President Trump. 51% again say worsened conditions. 21% say have no effect. Well, if things start to get worse, that 21% is going to cave into the 51%. You're going to end up with three quarters of Americans who are going to blame President Trump if the economy goes south in all likelihood. Only 44% of Americans currently approve of how President Trump is handling the economy, inflation.

In terms of helping the middle class, 43% approve. Only 39% approve of President Trump's tariffs.

And in terms of helping the middle class, only 43% approve. Okay, so these are bad numbers for President Trump in this polling. Now, again, that doesn't mean that if the economy picks up or continues to truck along that President Trump can't heal all of that. It just means that because of all the volatility that's been injected into the economy, because of all the talk about tariffs, which, again, I don't really see the purpose of. I want President Trump to succeed in effectuating his agenda. And if that agenda gets thwarted by Democrats,

an economic downturn, that would be a very large-scale mistake. Well, that's an opening for Democrats, a clear and obvious opening for Democrats. And yet Democrats are not only not going to take advantage of the opening, they're going to shoot themselves directly in the head, which I got to say,

I, as a Republican, approve. I'm just not sure what you are doing. The reason I say this is because Republicans were able to, through the leadership of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and no thanks to Thomas Massey, pass a continuing resolution that will fund the government until about September. That gives the Republicans plenty of time to negotiate a budget deal amongst themselves, come up with the one big, beautiful bill that they need to pass and get that done without the government simply falling apart.

So that's why the government shutdown was averted by the Republicans in the House. So now it gets passed on to the Senate. And in the Senate, obviously, the Republicans also have a majority. In fact, they have a 53-seat majority. Rand Paul has said he's going to vote against the continuing resolution. But there are still 52 votes left. Even if it got down to 50 votes, Shady Vance would then break the tie in favor of the continuing resolution.

So if you're a Democrat at this point, you're looking at the state of the economy, which is somewhat dicey. It appears to be, again, volatile. You can't predict the future there. And that is really the only tool you have to attack President Trump. And what you don't want to do is get into the business of owning the economy if you're the Democrats. Why would you want to own that?

If Republicans had followed down on the job and been unable to pass a continuing resolution, you could have blamed Republicans for the shutdown. This was the Democratic plan in the House. It's the reason why, for example, Hakeem Jeffries instructed Democrats not to vote in favor of the so-called clean CR, the clean continuing resolution, which is just a maintenance of funding at current levels all the way through September. So Democrats, except for one, did not participate in the CR. But now the Democrats seem to want to actively kill the CR and...

push America into a government shutdown that they clearly will own. That's the part that makes no sense politically speaking. According to the Wall Street Journal, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threw a wrench into a Republican plan to avert a government shutdown this weekend, saying there was not enough Democratic support to advance the measure funding federal agencies through September 30th. Now, you're saying to yourself, hold up, don't Republicans actually have a majority in the Senate? Yes, they do. But in order to overcome a filibuster, in order to invoke cloture, you need 60 votes.

Now, Democrats could simply not filibuster. They could just say, fine, listen, you want to vote for the CR, vote for the CR. Instead, Democrats are now actively considering filibustering a clean continuing resolution, which again, makes no sense. Most Americans are just saying, leave us alone. That's effectively what the CR does. It just kind of leaves things alone. If Democrats want to throw a wrench into that for no apparent reason, then they will own any government shutdown. And then if the economy turns south,

Then I guess they own it. They own a big chunk of that because a government shutdown is going to throw all sorts of scares into the market. Schumer said that Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to move the resolution. He indicated that his party was prepared to block it. And then he blamed Republicans saying they chose a partisan path. Well, I mean...

It seems kind of partisan to use your 47 votes in the United States Senate to hold up 53 votes in the United States Senate simply because what? Your base is mad at you for not standing up to President Trump's agenda enough? So Schumer's alternative, believe it or not, is in fact a clean CR but for a month.

So instead of this clean continuing resolution that funds the government through September, instead he's proposing a 30-day clean continuing resolution, and then we can redo all of this in a month. He, of course, is hoping the Republican coalition will fall apart in the meantime, and that the economy will fall apart in the meantime, during that month. If they got what they wanted, there'd be a month of continuing resolution. He's hoping the stock market crashes in that interim month, and then he won't be blamed no matter what happens.

But what he's doing right now makes no political sense. He is injecting Democrats into the middle of the most dicey proposition for the Trump administration. It's bizarre. It really is strange. As an analyst of politics, I don't understand any of the logic here. The first rule of politics is do not do not get in the way of your opponent making a mistake. Do not interrupt your enemy when your enemy is making a mistake.

If the idea from the Democrats is the Republicans own every aspect of the economy, you then have to let the Republicans own the economy. If you inject yourself into that process in order to shut down the government, you now own what comes next. By the way, Republicans know this, which is why House Speaker Mike Johnson says the ball is in Schumer's court. On Fox News, he said that the New York Democrat court has a big decision to make. Is he going to cast a vote to keep the government open or is he going to be blamed for shutting it down?

Republicans cast Schumer's remarks, according to The Wall Street Journal, as risky posturing. A Senate GOP aide said there was only one legislative vehicle available to the Senate that will keep the government open beyond Friday night, the House passed bill, and Democrats know that. Schumer's comments came apparently after Senate Democrats huddled for nearly two hours Wednesday behind closed doors. Apparently, many Democrats emerged grim-faced and laconic. Most did not want to talk. Some, including Senators Mark Warner and Mark Kelly, said,

Both senators from somewhat purple states, Warner's from Virginia, Kelly, of course, is from Arizona, said they wanted to vote on a short term continuing resolution to keep the government open for 30 days. Kelly said such a move would enable Congress to work on passing this year's appropriations bills on a bipartisan basis. Right. They're hoping that, again, only funding the CR for a short term would force the Republicans to basically negotiate with Democrats. But that is not what's going to happen here.

The GOP is fully willing to allow Democrats to own a government shutdown because Schumer is going to have to own it. If you invoke a filibuster in order to own a government shutdown, you are a moron. And what Chuck Schumer is doing here is really stupid and really quite bad. Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado said, quote, if we shut the government down in a funny way, you're giving the president even more power. So whether he keeps this part of government open, closes that part, how that money gets spent, he has absolute control, you know, like a king, which is true during a government shutdown.

The executive branch then gets to decide who is an essential worker. So they're playing right into Trump's hands. It's almost best case scenario for President Trump. Let's say that Chuck Schumer does the filibuster and the government shutdown occurs because Chuck Schumer did the filibuster. Well, now President Trump has the unique capacity to determine who exactly is an essential worker under federal law, at which point letting Elon Musk in there with a chainsaw man, Senator John Fetterman, apparently the last non-moron in the Democratic caucus, said he would back the GOP bill

He said, I refuse to burn the village down to claim to save it. He said, imagine what would happen if you shut the government down for how long? Who knows? That is correct. It is amazing that the Democrat who apparently has brain damage from a stroke is the only rational one inside the Democratic Party at this point. They have completely lost their minds. And this is partially due to a complete lack of leadership in the Democratic Party. The Barack Obama-led Democratic Party is dead. Donald Trump killed it off.

And there's no one there to replace it. And so now it's a battle between the Wokies, led by AOC and Jasmine Crockett, some of the progressives, led by Bernie Sanders and maybe Pramila Jayapal, who cross paths with the Wokies all the time, and then the pseudo-moderates. And I say pseudo-moderates because you have Gavin Newsom out wandering the landscape, having on Michael Savage in an attempt to pretend that he is, in fact, some sort of moderate himself. One of the pseudo-moderates is Pete Buttigieg.

So this is kind of a hilarious story. Pete Buttigieg, you'll recall Pete Buttigieg, he was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a place with a population of approximately 150,000. And then he was elevated into a presidential candidate because he likes dudes. That's really his only qualification. He ran for president on the basis of not being able to fill potholes in South Bend, Indiana. And then he lost, he overperformed, but he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. And then he was elevated to secretary of transportation where he presided over

Parts falling off of Boeing planes and trains derailing in East Palestine, Ohio. He was elevated to that position not because he knew anything about transportation, but because in his own words, he liked trains. He had a romance for trains. He liked choo-choo trains. Well, now a man who was so useless that he left on paternity leave. Remember, paternity leave is usually because you are attempting to help your physically recovering wife.

As recognized, Pete Buttigieg is married to a man, which means that his non-physically ailing husband, he stayed home with for two months and no one even noticed because he was so useless. Now he wants to run not for Senate, but for president. Now you say to yourself, wait a second, how did he run for Senate? Isn't he from Indiana? You just said he was the mayor of South Bend. Ah, yes, but you forget. He moved with husband, Jason Buttigieg, to Michigan in 2022. And he has spent approximately 22 seconds in Michigan.

Therefore, he was considering a Michigan Senate run. Well, he announced today that he's not going to be running for Senate in Michigan, which I mean, hell, I'm not running for Senate from from New York. I mean, I have the same connections to New York that Pete Buttigieg has to Michigan. So he's not going to run for Michigan's open Senate seat. Instead, he is going to run a campaign for president in 2028. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Of course. Of course he is. Why the hell not?

Why not? Well, Pete Buttigieg is a bad bet and so is debt, folks. Are you struggling with credit card bills, personal loans, or medical debt? It can feel like your money is working harder for your lenders than it is for you. It doesn't have to stay that way with PDS Debt. PDS Debt doesn't just manage your debt. They help you take back control. Their platform looks beyond the numbers to understand your specific financial situation and creates a personalized plan tailored just for you. No generic solutions.

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consistently all the time. My company is using AI, which is why we rely on Oracle. Go check them out right now, oracle.com slash Shapiro. That's oracle.com slash Shapiro. David Axelrod said, quote, Pete was an A-list recruit who would have been a formidable candidate for the Senate had he chosen to run, but had he won in 26, would almost certainly have taken him out of the conversation for 28. This certainly keeps that option open. Uh-huh.

Sure. Yeah. OK, fine. This is people to judge that. That's that's the one you choose for the or maybe or maybe Politico is pushing Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago, who did such a spectacular job that Chicago is now one of the most sought after places to live in America.

That'd also be the guy who was chief of staff to Barack Obama, famous for leaving dead fish. I'm not kidding. It's when he was in Congress. He'd leave dead fish, apparently, and near his congressional colleagues to threaten them to vote in particular ways, like the Godfather. So now Rahm Emanuel is traipsing across the political landscape, seeking to gain support for a presidential run, according to Politico.

Named the political podcast, Emanuel has likely been on it or will be shortly. He immediately snagged a CNN contract in a regular Washington Post column. No small accomplishment for a formal official at a moment of retrenchment for news organizations. He's also hitting the lecture circuit. Just as striking is to talk to anybody in high-level Democratic politics who knows Emanuel and hear how matter-of-fact they are about the inevitability of his candidacy. Apparently, he's already road-testing the first outlines of a stump speech, or at least an issue, that he can make his own.

He said, I'm done with the discussion of locker rooms. I'm done with the discussion of bathrooms. We better start having a conversation about the classroom. He said, we can lead a discussion and force the topic onto the agenda of this country that's worthy of having a debate about. So, okay, good luck. Good luck to Rahm Emanuel. So you're traipsing out, again, a guy who was last relevant in like 2010, maybe, Rahm Emanuel.

and a guy who's mostly famous for being an absolutely horrible secretary of transportation, but is also gay. You guys, you're doing great. You're absolutely doing great. Well, meanwhile, President Trump is having fun. Yesterday, he had in the awful president of Ireland,

And he proceeded to have some fun with this. Here he was ripping Rosie O'Donnell for moving to Ireland. Rosie O'Donnell announced that she was moving to Ireland, which, you know, good luck to Ireland. It was hard for me to think that Ireland could get any worse in its politics, but Rosie O'Donnell will certainly help.

Ireland is known for very happy, fun-loving people. Great attitude. Many in this room right now that I've met. Why in the world would you let Rosie O'Donnell move to Ireland? It's just going to lower your happiness level. That's true. Thank you. I like that question. Do you know you have Rosie O'Donnell? Do you know who she is? Do you know who she is? You're better off not knowing. Okay, so first of all, I think President Trump...

This is like one of his longest standing feuds is Rosie O'Donnell. You remember Rosie O'Donnell from like the 2015 debates in which Megyn Kelly asked him about women bleeding from there wherever. And he said, I was only talking about Rosie O'Donnell. So, yeah, this is a very long standing feud that he has with Rosie O'Donnell. And I think it's fair to say that Trump won this feud. He's the president twice and Rosie O'Donnell is moving to Ireland. Meanwhile, Trump was also raving about the tattoos of Conor McGregor. So, listen, President Trump is living his best life.

Well, I do happen to like your fighter. He's got the best tattoos I've ever seen. I don't know if I'm a big fan. Boy, you have. Well, Conor's great, right? You know, talking about Conor. But you have a lot of you have a lot of great Irish fighters, actually. So, again, he was having a good time over at the White House. However, he then got into commentary on tariffs.

I was at the gym yesterday watching President Trump talk about tariffs. And I watched in real time as the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped as he talked. When he talks about tariffs and he discusses trade barriers, the markets start to freak out because at the very least, it means more volatility. We don't know what's happening next. I'm not saying this because I wish to criticize President Trump.

I'm saying this because I wish President Trump to succeed. If you look at the chart of President Trump's first term, what you see is the Dow Jones Industrial Average on a straight arithmetic increase line up, up and to the right. And so far in his term, the line has been down. And that is not exactly what you're looking for. Well, President Trump is upping the ante by now saying that he wants to increase tariffs on the EU. Now, again, if the goal of all of this is to get the EU to lower its own tariffs against the United States, I'm for it.

If the goal is to leverage some other deliverable from other countries, if the goal is to protect national security, I'm for it. If this is just because tariffs are fun and games or because President Trump has been talked into the idea that trade wars are both good and easy to win, that is not good economic policy. It just isn't. Right now, inflation is cooling, actually. That is good news. It should be good news for the Trump administration. According to the Wall Street Journal, inflation actually cooled last month

Consumer prices were up 2.8% in February from a year earlier. Now, again, remember, that is still an increase in inflation. You're looking generally for a 2% year-on-year increase. It is a decrease in the rate of inflation, but it is actually an increase in the actual inflation of the cost. There was a January gain of 3%, so it's moving in sort of the right direction.

Prices excluding food and energy rose 3.1%. That was the lowest year-over-year reading since 2021, and it was lower than 3.2% expected by economists. But all of the sort of uncertainty that is being injected into the process by President Trump is not helping matters. And tax cuts, deregulation, consistent policy, these are the things that make for a strong, healthy, and growing economy. And yet this morning, President Trump threatened a 200% tariff on alcohol from the EU.

He said the EU, this is on Truth Social, one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the world, which was formed for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the United States, has just put a nasty 50% tariff on whiskey. That, of course, was a retaliatory tariff put in place by the Europeans after the United States put tariffs on other European products. If this tariff is not removed immediately, the US will shortly place a 200% tariff on all wines, champagnes, and alcoholic products coming out of France and other EU-represented countries. This will be great for the wine and champagne businesses in the United States.

I mean, it's not great for the wine and champagne consumers in the United States, but he is correct that when you institute taxes on American competitors, it tends to be good for the businesses in those particular areas. Here's President Trump ripping on the EU yesterday. - The EU was set up in order to take advantage of the United States. - Including Ireland? Is Ireland taking advantage of the US?

Of course they are. I can't, you know, I have great respect for Ireland and what they did. And they should have done just what they did. But the United States shouldn't have let it happen. We had stupid leaders. We had leaders that didn't have a clue. Or let's say they weren't business people, but they didn't have a clue what was happening. And all of a sudden, Ireland has, you know, our pharmaceutical companies and other, this beautiful island of, it's Ireland, of 5 million people.

It's got the entire U.S. pharmaceutical industry. Okay, well, I mean, one of the reasons that Ireland has been drawing American businesses is because they lowered the corporate tax rate, which is something we should do in the United States.

Ireland never signed on to the idiotic Joe Biden worldwide global corporate tax rate that he was proposing a 15%. Ireland just went right under it at like 10% and drove a bunch of businesses to reshore. That's something the United States could do. If we are the best place in the world to do business, businesses will come here. It is that simple. That is why the United States historically has been such an unbelievable powerhouse in terms of foreign investment, in terms of economic growth. That's why the dollar is the world's reserve currency and all the rest.

President Trump, when he said that the EU was set up to take advantage of the United States, that's not true. The European economic community was actually mostly set up in opposition to the communist bloc in Eastern Europe. It was meant to create a robust trading and free trade infrastructure inside Western Europe to combat the influence of communists from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. And the real question in all of this is what is President Trump intending to do?

If President Trump wants to explain what the goal is and how long it's going to take and how we get there, that would be a welcome development for everyone who invests. And again, I'm a person who invests, right? I have a lot of money in the stock market, in real estate, in various different investment vehicles. And as an investor, I'm looking for certainty. I'm looking for reliability. I am not unique in this respect. The markets are speaking as a sort of aggregated knowledge of pretty much everybody who has money in the markets.

President Trump is relying on some advisors like Peter Navarro. Peter Navarro has always been a sort of trade hawk who has sought higher tariffs as a form of actual positive policy.

So this is where we're going. We're going to a world just like Reagan went from his inauguration to the middle of his term, where it was the Reagan mural. This is going to be the Trump golden age of prosperity miracle. And it's much bigger than Ronald Reagan ever dreamed of or imagined. And it's going to be that much better. Salute to Ronald Reagan, but really salute to the commander in chief right now.

Again, his mouth to God's ears. That's what we're all rooting for. But the tariff policy is, in fact, a wrench in the plans of the Trump administration. Caroline Lovett, whose job it is to defend the president's policies, obviously, from the White House podium, she says that President Trump is going to continue to use tariffs.

The president is effectively utilizing tariffs, not just as a negotiation negotiating tactic, but actually implementing them, as we saw with the 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum to bolster those industries here in the United States to advance our national security interests, to create good paying jobs here at home. And you've actually seen the steel and aluminum industries applaud.

those tariffs as being good for their manufacturing for their revenue and for their workers most importantly and so the president will continue to effectively utilize tariffs while again driving down the cost of living in this country okay so again the the kind of notion that we actually need to protect as a sort of matter of national security the domestic american steel industry

their problems with that basic idea. So I thought this would be an excellent time to ask our sponsors over at Perplexity, quote, what percentage of total U.S. steel production goes to U.S. military consumption? In other words,

The U.S. military consumes steel. Of the total U.S. steel production, how much of that steel is consumed by the U.S. military? Because if we're kind of even, you would imagine, okay, fine, we need to subsidize U.S. steel production. We need to protect U.S. steel production. If, let's say, that 70% of all U.S. steel was consumed by the military, you'd be like, yeah, we really need to protect that. As it turns out, that is not the number. Quote,

of total U.S. steel production that goes to U.S. military consumption is relatively small. The American Iron and Steel Institute reported that in 2020, military applications represented approximately 3% of annual domestic steel production. However, some sources suggest that the actual figure may be even lower, with the Pentagon historically purchasing significantly less than 1% of the U.S. steel industry's output.

So, yeah, in other words, the idea that you need like massive steel tariffs to protect the American steel industry so that our military has access to the materials it needs,

That doesn't line up with the factual reality here. The predictable effect of all of this is that the EU is going to unleash new tariffs. Canada is unleashing new tariffs as well. According to the Washington Post, both the EU and Canada hit back Wednesday at President Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs with levies of their own on billions of dollars worth of U.S. products, including bourbon and motorcycles, warning of further retaliation as well.

Apparently, the European Commission, which is the executive branch of the EU, according to the Washington Post, said it will reimpose tariffs dating to Trump's first term on April 1st. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, we deeply regret this measure. Jobs are at stake. Price is up. Nobody needs that. And by the way, if you're trying to face down Chinese predation and Chinese growth, actually pushing away countries that are then going to turn to China for more of their product and to Chinese markets, that's not the way to do this on sort of a national security basis. Of

Folks, none of this is a great way to face down Chinese growth. The fact is that China is a geopolitical enemy of the United States. They do everything from cheating on trade to stealing our IP to maybe threatening your identity. Tax season is upon us. While we may be weary of numbers, some deserve our immediate attention. $16.5 billion in IRS refunds flagged for potential identity fraud last year. Identity theft tax fraud surged by an alarming 20% in 2024 alone, affecting thousands of unsuspecting Americans.

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And if you want parties who are more right-wing elected in allied countries, then perhaps what you ought to do is not provide fodder to the opponents of those allies in those countries. If Pierre Pelliev becomes not the prime minister of Canada because of President Trump's tariffs, that is not going to be a good thing

Meanwhile, the Canadians are injecting their own brand of uncertainty into the markets because they're saying to everybody else, listen, if President Trump is coming after us, who the hell won't he come after? We have like a free trade agreement that we signed with President Trump that he negotiated in his first term and he's still coming after us. According to Politico, Foreign Minister Melanie Jolie plans to welcome her G7 counterparts to Quebec with a warning, quote, if the U.S. can do this to us, their closest friend, then nobody is safe.

Julie told reporters in Ottawa on Wednesday she plans to raise the issue with European and British members, advising them Canada is the canary in the coal mine. Speaking with two reporters from Ireland on Wednesday, Secretary of State Rubio said that there will be a lot to talk about at the G7 meeting. Quote, it is not a meeting about how we're going to take over Canada.

But again, the more that the Trump administration makes that joke, because we're not taking over Canada, the more the Trump administration makes that joke, the more the Canadians, particularly on the left, respond as though he is serious. Here is the Canadian Minister of Finance, Dominique LeBlanc, who says precisely that.

These partnerships go back decades, but Canada is an independent, sovereign, proud country. And frankly, Canadians find it insulting that somebody as important in global affairs as the president of the United States of America sort of belittles Canada by saying, oh, you know, you should you're not an independent, sovereign country. You should join the United States. Right.

Again, this sort of thing. What's the what's the impact? Why is it? Why is it smart? Why is it smart? Stop this. Just what is what is the goal? What is the goal? At least articulate the goal. I don't want President Trump's numbers going down. He's doing too many important things right now. Here's CNN reporting on President Trump's numbers on the economy.

It is by far issue number one for voters. Nothing really comes close overall for Americans. And on that score, he's actually performing a tick below his overall approval rating. 44% approve of his handling of the economy. You see that there...

below his job overall there, the economy, 44 percent, 56 percent, Sarah, disapprove. He is minus 12 percentage points on the issue that Americans say is the most important. Now, as I say, there are too many important things that President Trump has to do in the next two years to get caught up in this particular battle to no great upswing in the economy or really in long term manufacturing in the United States.

And the reality is that unless you have a robust tariff regime for a very long period of time that is specifically designed to increase prices on American consumers, you are not going to get a vast number of manufacturing jobs back into the United States. And even if you do, companies are going to start trying to drive down prices through automation. So...

What is the goal? Again, that's the question we should all be asking ourselves. I hope the Trump administration is asking itself that. What is the goal? What are we trying to accomplish here? Because there are too many other important things and there's too many good things happening. So President Trump yesterday cut half the staff at the Department of Education. That's great. And here he was explaining that the goal is to move all of that power back to the states, which is precisely what he should be doing.

We have a dream. And you know what the dream is? We're going to move the Department of Education. We're going to move education into the states so that the states, instead of bureaucrats working in Washington, so that the states can run education. Yes, that is correct. That is good. If every president's agenda is tied to kind of the low point of the agenda, this is true for every president. Whatever is the worst thing in the agenda tends to define the entire agenda. Then what you want to do is avoid the boo-boo.

This is a good thing. It's a necessary thing. Cuts to the DOE are undoubtedly an excellent thing. Not only that, other good things are happening too. Yesterday, according to Breitbart, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced he would move to clear the hundreds of backlogged cases to clean air, saying the Biden administration focused on ideological pursuits rather than the agency's core mission.

The agency said it would commit to working with states and tribes to resolve hundreds of backlogged state implementation plans and tribal implementation plans the Biden-Harris administration could not or would not resolve. The EPA administrator wrote, quote, with more than 140 million Americans living in non-attainment areas around the country, cooperative federalism and clearing out the state implementation plan backlog will make significant strides to improving the air we breathe. Now, again, one of the goals here is to also free up industry.

The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to review and approve all of these so-called SIPs that meet the requirements of the law. But many states have raised concerns about being punished for emissions outside the control of their state and air quality monitors not being placed in the most logistical areas. The EPA says that it's going to make sure that air quality is protected, but also they're going to generate more economic growth by getting rid of stupid regulations and stupid regulatory overreach.

Zeldin said the EPA is going to aggressively pursue an agenda powering the great American comeback. That is our agenda we wanted to announce with you. EPA wants to help power the great American comeback. This is the kind of stuff that needs to be focused on. Like, let's focus on those things. Meanwhile, it's funny. If you go back to that CNN poll, what you will see is that when it comes to handling the federal budget, President Trump's

highest approval ratings are in that particular area. He's got immigration at 51%, handling the federal budget at something like 48%. And that's due to Elon Musk. Elon Musk is out there doing Doge

And the media are still fulminating over all of this, complaining about Elon Musk. The reality is that President Trump has handled this whole situation with aplomb. He's handled it quite brilliantly, actually. Allowing Elon Musk to be the face of Doge means that Elon takes all the incoming. Elon is not an elected official. Elon is the richest person in the world. Elon owns X. So Elon can take it. It's not just an Elon condition. Elon can take it.

Meanwhile, President Trump can sit over here and just reap the benefits of having a very, very famous person be the focus of the ire of his opposition while the good effects are actually accruing to his administration. Meanwhile, the media don't know how to handle it. Dana Bash on CNN had maybe the funniest line yesterday. She was talking about big balls again. This would be one of the young Elon Musk staffers who's going through the federal government. And she started talking about apparently how Elon Musk likes when she says balls on TV. I don't even know what's happening now.

I think at the risk of Elon Musk tweeting about me, because apparently he likes when I say the word balls on TV, I will say that balls and strikes, when you're talking about Steve Bannon, when he calls balls and strikes, he calls strikes balls and ball strikes.

Yeah, boy. Okay. Great, great things happening over at CNN. And the complaints by people like Rashida Tlaib about how Elon Musk is being funded by the government, they just don't ring true. So Rashida Tlaib was out there screaming yesterday about how billionaires are being funded and Medicaid is being cut. Medicaid is not being cut. Here we go. Stop lying to the American people. Some of you have over 50, even some is over 60% of...

folks that depend on Medicaid. So when we say fund care, not billionaires, we mean it. Oh, man. These are the best the Democrats have to offer. Again, credit to John Fetterman for being the only sane person in the building. He was on MSNBC. And MSNBC was suggesting once again that the Republicans were in league with the oligarchs. And Fetterman's like, come on, man, really?

And I would just, I was asked Democrats, like start talking like a regular person. Most people are not sure what an oligarch is. You know, it's like, okay, is an oligarch, is it like a rich, is it a rich, a rich dude or woman? Okay, well, but there's also another, a little secret to Democrats. You know, we like billionaires if they're giving to our causes or to our party as well too. But there's a difference. Hold on. There's a difference.

between a very wealthy donor. It's unlimited money. It's unlimited money. That's the poison of American democracy. I'm not sure if they necessarily are motivated just, you know, based on money. When, you know, most of those folks, whether it's Bezos or Musk, they have far more than you can spend in a hundred lifetimes.

So for that, I think scarcity defines the luxury. So that's why a lot of them want to be engaged on that because they have unlimited money. So I think they want to be just be part of the conversation. Again, leave it to the man with brain damage to be the only intelligent person inside the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, other important things being done by the Trump administration. Yes, we should be deporting Hamasniks. I don't even know why this is controversial. If you are a supporter of Hamas here on a visa,

Here on a green card. You should go. We don't need more of you. I'm confused as to why this is even an issue. Again, we're not talking about American citizens who are participating in speech we don't like. We are talking about people who are here as guests of the United States or trying to earn their way into citizenship.

This notion that they magically ought to be treated exactly the same as natural born American citizens or people who have already earned their citizenship is like if that's the case, then why do we even have immigration standards at all? Maybe we just shouldn't. Maybe being a terrorist supporter should just not be on your immigration application. It's all absurd.

Marco Rubio had the best response to this yesterday. Secretary of State Rubio has invoked his power as the Secretary of State to say that this guy is a foreign policy threat, which is a member of a group that actively called for armed uprising against Western civilization. Here is Secretary of State Rubio yesterday. When you come to the United States as a visitor, which is what a visa is, which is how this individual entered this country on a visitor's visa. OK, you are here as a visitor. We can deny you that visa.

We can deny you that if you tell us when you apply, "Hi, I'm trying to get into the United States on a student visa. I am a big supporter of Hamas, a murderous, barbaric group that kidnaps children, that rapes teenage girls, that takes hostages, that allows them to die in captivity, that returns more bodies than live hostages." If you tell us that you are in favor of a group like this,

And if you tell us when you apply for your visa, and by the way, I intend to come to your country as a student and rile up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, anti-Semitic activities. I intend to shut down your universities. If you told us all these things when you applied for a visa, we would deny your visa. I hope we would. If you actually end up doing that once you're in this country on such a visa, we will revoke it. And if you end up having a green card, not citizenship, but a green card as a result of that visa while you're here in those activities, we're going to kick you out.

This seems inarguable. And yet Democrats are somehow finding a way to argue with all of this. The lawyer for Mahmoud Khalil read a letter, Mahmoud Khalil's wife yesterday, suggesting he had been kidnapped. Oh, the irony. Oh, the irony of a man who cheers for actual kidnappings by a terrorist group claiming he has been kidnapped because the legal process is now kicking him out of the country for being a supporter of that terror group.

My husband was kidnapped from our home and it's shameful that the United States government continues to hold him because he stood for the rights and lives of his people. I demand his immediate release and return to our family. His disappearance has devastated our lives. Every day without him is filled with uncertainty, not just for me, but for our entire family and community.

I'm sorry, the family of Yudan Alexander, the American citizen being held in Gaza by Hamas, would like to have a word.

I've yet to see the Democrats tweeting out free Idan Alexander, an actual American citizen being held by an actual honest to God terror group kidnapped into Gaza. And yet here we have this lawyer for the wife reading a letter in which she claims that he was kidnapped. Nope. That's called the legal process taking place. Going online without express VPN is like putting your passwords on a billboard for the world to see on public wifi. Hackers can steal your passwords and credit card details with minimal effort. Then sell your data for up to a thousand dollars on the dark web.

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Right now, Khalil is being held in Louisiana pending deportation. The U.S. District Court judge, a guy named Jesse Furman, who is heavily associated, shall we say, with family members of the left, his family members worked for the Obama administration, set a schedule on Wednesday for the lawyers to present written arguments later this week. He said his order to keep Khalil in an immigration detention facility in Louisiana was

Those do not to the merits of any arguments, but to provide time to address the important issues his case raises. It's unclear where the case is going to be held. We have heard he has a green card. It is not totally clear whether that is true or not. We'll assume that he does for the sake of argument. Again, the real question in all this is how this guy got in the country in the first place. Who is actually analyzing the student visas? Who decided that America desperately needs someone who worked for the UNRWA?

In the United States to study at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, where apparently his only job was to agitate on behalf of Hamas. Amazing stuff. Meanwhile, Democrats embracing him full scale. A person who may in fact become the next mayor of New York. This person apparently is running second in polls to Andrew Cuomo right now. A person named Zoran Kwame Mamdani went to a...

An event yesterday at which borders are Tom Homan was, and he started trying to yell at Tom Homan. So first of all, I do like the hold me back element of this. Hold me back. If he got within an arm's length of Tom Homan, Tom Homan would eviscerate him. Tom Homan is one of the scariest people I've ever been in a room with. We were in a room with him last week, and he is simultaneously one of the nicest people and one of the scariest people you will ever meet.

Here is Zoran confronting the Trump border czar over his immigration policy, including the policy surrounding Mahmoud Khalil. How many more New Yorkers do you believe in the First Amendment? Do you believe in the First Amendment, Tom Holman? Yeah, hold them back. Hold them back. OK, if Democrats want to do this, I guess they can do this all day long. Meanwhile, negotiations continue over the possibility of Ukraine-Russia ceasefire.

As noted yesterday, the Ukrainians have embraced the idea of a 30-day ceasefire without preconditions at this point. They're hoping to negotiate for the return of their children, their actual kidnapped children, kids have been kidnapped from Donbass and Crimea and sent back into Russia in place with families who are not their own. Actually, I mean, it's horrific. Caroline Leavitt at the White House said, we hope that the Russians will accept this.

The president's team continues to be in correspondence with the Russians. In fact, our national security advisor, Mike Waltz, had a call with his Russian counterpart today in pursuit of ending this war and striking a peace deal with Russia and with Ukraine. We had great progress on that front yesterday with the secretary of state and our national security advisor having those peace talks in Saudi Arabia. The Ukrainians have finally agreed to a ceasefire.

and have agreed to this long-term peace plan. And we expect, we hope, and we urge the Russians to do the same. And our team is currently working on getting this done. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is saying the same intelligence sharing has continued with the Ukrainians. It should, because one of the things that's happening right now is that the Russians are pushing very aggressively back against Ukrainian gains in Kursk, which is a Russian area. The reason the Ukrainians are trying to hold that is for purposes of negotiation. They want to say, you withdraw from here and we'll withdraw from there.

The Russians are taking this time to really up the ante. Here's Secretary of State Rubio saying, listen, the Ukrainians are at the table. We await Russia's response. The United States has done a good thing for the world in bringing this process forward. And now we all eagerly await the Russian response and urge them strongly to consider ending all hostilities so people will stop dying, so bullets will stop flying, and so a process can begin to find a permanent peace.

Okay, so the question now is whether Russia is going to take the United States up on this offer. It appears the answer for now is not even remotely. According to the Financial Times, quote,

according to a senior aide to Vladimir Putin. Yuri Ushakov, the president's foreign policy advisor in Russia, told state television on Thursday the 30-day ceasefire proposed after talks between the U.S. and Ukraine this week, quote, was nothing other than a temporary breather for Ukrainian troops. Nobody needs steps that imitate peaceful actions in this situation, said Ushakov, adding Moscow hopes the U.S. knows our position and wants to believe they will take it into account as we work together going forward.

That is Putin taking an extremely hard line prior to the arrival of Steve Witkoff, the president's envoy, who's arriving today in Moscow. The demands that are being made right now are crazy from the Russians. I mean, they're just not doable.

According to a document written in February by an influential Moscow-based think tank close to the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, which is sort of the modern KGB, lays out Russia's maximalist demands for any end to the conflict in Ukraine. It dismisses any preliminary plans for a peace deal within 100 days as impossible to realize and says a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine crisis cannot happen before 2026. That's them attempting to get Trump to pressure Ukraine. That's what they're doing. They're saying they know the midterms are coming up. They know Trump has pledged an end to the war. And so they feel that they have the negotiating leverage.

The document rejects any plan for any peacekeepers to Ukraine. It insists on recognition of Russia's sovereignty over the Ukrainian territories. It has already seized. It calls for a further carve-up through the creation of a buffer zone in Ukraine's northeast on the border with Russian regions such as Bryansk and Belgorod, as well as a demilitarized zone in southern Ukraine near Crimea. That latter would affect the Odessa region. So in other words, they actually want more territory than they have actually won on the battlefield.

In addition, the document discusses the need for the complete dismantling of the current Ukrainian government. So this is a non-starter, obviously. This is a non-starter from the Russians. So if it's a non-starter from the Russians, the administration is going to have to bring the hammer. President Trump suggested that that is very much on the table yesterday. Here he was.

But yeah, there are things you could do that wouldn't be pleasant in a financial sense. I can do things financially that would be very bad for Russia. I don't want to do that because I want to get peace. I want to see peace and we'll see. But in a financial sense, yeah, we could do things very bad for Russia. It would be devastating for Russia. But I don't want to do that because I want to see peace.

Okay, well, whether we want to see peace or not, Russia may not want to see peace. And if that's not the case, then it's going to be very difficult to reach anything like a deal. Well, folks, as always, it's been a busy week at the White House. And our Daily Wire White House correspondent, Mary Margaret Olihan, is on point to cover all of it. Mary Margaret, welcome back to the show. Hey, Ben, it's great to be here. So a lot going on this week at the White House. You were able to ask a question this week about the situation in Ukraine. What did you ask? What was the answer?

Yes, so at the briefing a couple days ago, Caroline Levitt called on me. I was able to ask about Zelensky's letter to President Trump, which we learned about last week in President Trump's joint address to the nation. And he shared that Zelensky had sent him a letter. He didn't really share what else Zelensky had said. And Special Envoy Witkoff revealed earlier this week that Zelensky actually apologized in that letter. And so we thought we should know more about what was said in that letter and what the president and Zelensky are talking about. So that's what I asked

And Caroline didn't really expand on the contents of the letter, but she did share with us that that very day Secretary Rubio was in Saudi Arabia meeting with Ukrainian officials. She told us that the talks were going really well. They were very positive. And shortly after that press briefing ended, we learned that Ukraine and the United States were in a great position and had agreed to a ceasefire and more. So that's ongoing. We're hoping for more developments there. And we know President Trump will be meeting with members of

of the European Union and NATO here at the White House today. So that's very exciting. We're looking forward to what comes next in that area. You know, President Trump has been very emphatic about his desire for peace between Russia and Ukraine. And that's what this whole White House has been gearing up towards for the last several weeks.

So, Mary Margaret, obviously a lot of eyes on Russia and Ukraine. Russia today apparently suggested that they were not going to sign on to any temporary ceasefire, that instead they were going to seek some sort of permanent settlement. Of course, the terms of that permanent settlement are extraordinarily onerous on Ukraine. Very unlikely Ukraine accepts that, so we'll have to see how all of that plays out. Meanwhile, the presidents of the United States hosted the president of Ireland in the Oval yesterday, and they got into a number of topics ranging from trade to his love for Conor McGregor. What was the mood in the room like?

Well, that was a really interesting visit. Actually, to backtrack a little bit, I was able to start the whole day at the Vice President's residence up in Northwest D.C. because that's where the Irish Premier Michael Martin started his day as well, at a breakfast at the Vice President's residence. And Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his wife were in attendance, RFK Jr., a number of other high-profile Irish Catholic, Irish public figures in the Trump administration and in Washington, D.C.,

And I was able to post some pictures from outside. I think it's really interesting to see what the Vance's life looks like up there in the house where Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff used to live. Really interesting turn of events there. They've got a little playhouse outside the house, outside the residence, as well as a swing for the Vance kids.

who had gone off to school in their very highly secured vehicles before we got there. So all of that was really interesting. And then, of course, Vance hosted Michael Martin at his residence. They talked about the importance of the Irish-American relationship, which is also what President Trump and Michael Martin talked about in the Oval Office yesterday.

One kind of cute moment, I guess you would say, was at the breakfast, Vance joked that he was wearing St. Patrick's Day socks with shamrocks on them. And he said to Martin, you're going to have to defend me if President Trump doesn't like them because he's a very conservative dresser. Well, sure enough, later in the day in the Oval Office, President Trump kind of teased Vice President Vance about his socks, which had these massive green shamrocks on them, and said he loved them. So that was a funny moment. Also, another one that was notable

Brian Glenn, another White House reporter, asked Michael Martin about Rosie O'Donnell saying that she wants to move to Ireland.

and asked why anyone would want Rosie O'Donnell in their country, which is a little bit of a surprise question. I think a lot of us wouldn't have expected that one. You can see in the video Vice President Vance kind of doubling over, covering his face and laughing. And Trump had some funny quips in there as well. But overall, you know, Michael Martin talked about how important the relationship between Ireland and the United States is. He also talked about the role that President Trump is playing in peace between Russia and Ukraine and really emphasized his interest

in furthering that piece as well. Well, Mary Margaret, really appreciate your time. And she, again, is the person on the ground at the White House keeping an eye on things every single day. Mary Margaret, good to see you.

Good to see you too.