Ep. 2159 - Trump SOARS in Polling, UNLEASHES On Houthis!
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Folks, tons going on in the news. President Trump has some excellent poll numbers. He is also unleashing the American military on the Yemeni Houthis and Iranian front group that's been attacking shipping in the Red Sea. So the American military going to town over the weekend first. America is in the middle of a comeback, but...

Thank you.

on desktop and the Daily Wire Plus app for mobile and TV. Join the fight right now at dailywire.com slash subscribe. All right, so over the weekend, 32 Americans were killed in a massive American storm after fatalities were reported apparently in both Kansas and Mississippi. Violent tornadoes, according to the Associated Press, ripped through parts of the United States, wiping out schools, toppling semi-tractor trailers in several states. It was a huge monster storm that has killed at least 32 more people. More severe weather was expected late

on Saturday. Lots of vehicles involved, truly a terrible accident. You've already seen the attempt by some in the media to try and paint the Trump administration as responsible for all of this. That, of course, is incredibly silly. Natural disasters strike on everybody's watch. The question is what the fallout looks like and what the federal government can do and should do in response that has yet to be seen. So all the sort of preliminary blame on the Trump administration for what happened with these tornadoes across the country, that's silly.

And it is not Joe Biden's fault that a tornado hit North Carolina. It's his fault if the federal government doesn't do what it's supposed to do afterwards. We're going to find out in very short order whether the Trump administration rises to the occasion. I have a feeling that they absolutely will. Meanwhile, the big news of the weekend was that President Trump announced attacks by the United States military on the Houthis. So the Houthis are a group of America-hating, Jew-hating, anti-Israel, anti-American groups

near satanic terrorists in Yemen. And they've been at war with the Saudi government for a very long time. And one of the things that the Biden administration did was basically push the Saudis to give up that war with the Yemeni Houthis on quote unquote humanitarian grounds. And the result was that the Houthis after October 7th decided that they were going to not only target Israel with some missile strikes, but they were also going to target shipping in the Red Sea. The Houthis are almost entirely funded

and staffed by the Iranian military. The Iranian military has propped up the Houthis for literally years. What's been going on in Yemen has been a proxy war. The only reason that that had to involve the United States at all is because the Houthis began to attack shipping in the Red Sea, which is a major artery for international shipping and trade.

So I asked my friends and sponsors at Perplexity to actually explain how Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have affected pricing. So I said, how much have prices risen thanks to Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea? How much has international shipping been affected by Houthi attacks on that shipping? And the answer is the Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have had significant impacts on both prices and international shipping. Global consumer goods inflation increased by approximately 0.6 to 0.7% in 2024 alone due to higher shipping rates caused by Houthi attacks. By the way, that's a lot.

Okay, that is a lot. Understand that right now, the inflation rate in the United States is hovering somewhere around 2.8 to 3%. Imagine taking 0.6 or 0.7 off of that. Now you're closer to normality. And a huge chunk of that could theoretically be attributed to just the attacks that the Houthis are launching on international shipping. The average cost for shipping a 40-foot container has risen to around $3,000.

up from less than $1,500 before the attacks. Why? Well, because instead of going through the Red Sea, shipping, which used to take that shortcut through the Red Sea and then through the Mediterranean, instead, now, they're going all the way around the Horn of Africa, which takes much, much longer, is much more costly. Additional fuel costs for rerouting ships around Africa are roughly a million dollars more per voyage.

About 90% of ships are now avoiding the Red Sea route due to those Houthi attacks. Container shipping through the Red Sea has declined by approximately 90%. The number of merchant ships passing through the Red Sea annually has dropped from 25,000 to 10,000. And again, that adds an average of 10 to 14 days to voyage time. So if you're wondering why it takes you longer to get things than it did a couple of years ago, that would be one reason.

75% of all US and UK affiliated vessels, 60% of EU affiliated vessels are now rerouting around Africa instead of transiting the Red Sea. At least 30 ships have been damaged by the Houthi attacks. And again, normally the Suez Canal handles about 12% of all global trade. That's $1 trillion of goods per year. And that is being shrunk close to zero because of these Houthi attacks. So yeah, it's about time we obliterated them. Well, President Trump announced over the weekend that

that the United States military was now targeting the Houthis. This is on Saturday. Quote, today, I've ordered the United States military to launch decisive and powerful military action against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen. They've waged an unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism against American and other ships, aircraft, and drones. Joe Biden's response was,

pathetically weak. So the unrestrained Houthis just kept going. It's been over a year since a U.S. flag commercial ship safely sailed through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, or the Gulf of Aden. The last American warship to go through the Red Sea four months ago was attacked by the Houthis over a dozen times. Funded by Iran, the Houthi thugs have fired missiles at U.S. aircraft and targeted our troops and allies. These relentless assaults have cost the U.S. and world economy many billions of dollars while at the same time putting innocent lives at risk.

This is President Trump on Truth Social.

Our brave warfighters are right now carrying out aerial attacks on the terrorist bases, leaders, and missile defenses to protect American shipping, air, and naval assets, and to restore navigational freedom. No terrorist force will stop American commercial and naval vessels from freely sailing the waterways of the world. To all Houthi terrorists,

Your time is up. Your attacks must stop starting today. If they don't, hell will rain down upon you like nothing you have ever seen before. To Iran, support for the Houthi terrorists must end immediately. Do not threaten the American people, their president, who has received one of the largest mandates in presidential history, or worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, beware, because America will hold you fully accountable and we won't be nice about it.

This is what I signed up for, ladies and gentlemen, this right here, because it turns out that freedom of the seas is unbelievably important. And the United States as the global hegemon is the guarantor of those freedom of the seas. The use of the US military, Americans, by the way, have died

In this battle with the Houthis. I mean, there's a thing that has happened where American Marines, I believe there's a couple of American Marines, have drowned in attempting to aid shipping through this area. The Houthis, for a year, they are a ragtag group of people who are radical Islamic fundamentalists. The actual slogan of the Houthis is, I kid you not, it's called the Scream.

And it's God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, curse be upon the Jews, victory to Islam, which I mean is a little long and doesn't rhyme. But you kind of get the idea of what these folks are about. And they've been holding up international shipping for a year at great cost. As we've discussed, the United States launching attacks on pirates is a tradition that goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson fighting the Barbary pirates who are attacking American shipping.

So this right here is what President Trump should be doing. This is an excellent use of the United States military. I see some caterwauling from people, the basis for which seems to be that if the United States fights the Houthis because they're shutting off global shipping supply, that it must be done on behalf of Israel or the Jews. I'm confused because it turns out that pretty much all the shipping that's going through the Red Sea has nothing to do with the Jews. And yet it is the

It is that shipping that is being attacked by the Houthis, actually. This is the peace through strength model that President Trump has always applied. Him guaranteeing freedom of the seas, by the way, is also a very good international signal because one of the things that's been happening in, for example, the South China Sea, which is a massive shipping artery as well, is that the Chinese government

has been exploring further and further away from land masses that it controls into these waterways, holding up boating and shipping from places like the Philippines. And so as a signal to countries like China that the United States is not going to allow the shutdown of international waterways,

That is a very powerful signal as well. As the Wall Street Journal points out, the Houthis had paid little price for more than a year of piracy that forced the U.S. Navy into a combat pace not seen since World War II. The White House tallies 174 Houthi attacks on U.S. warships and 145 on commercial vessels since 2023. One think tank analyst estimated recently the U.S. Navy fired more air defense missiles in those 15 months than it had in the previous 30 years. That means expensive missiles shooting down cheap drones. This is one of the things that terrorist groups have

have discovered, ranging from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis, is that you can fire off cheap drones at very little cost, attach some explosives to them and do tremendous damage. And the only way to defend against those things right now is very, very expensive response anti-missile systems, for example. So it'll cost you $50,000 to shoot down a $50 drone or whatever it is. Well, the other way to do that is you just kill everybody who's firing the drones. And that seems to be the United States military's policy.

President Trump, by the way, including Iranian responsibility in here is really important because the Houthis could not do this without Iran. And once again, I hear people who are caterwauling that this is just President Trump wanting war with Iran. Let's be very clear. There will be no war with Iran. Even if the United States were to facilitate an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, Iran does not go to war with the United States because if they did, we would obliterate them in half a second flat. That is not a thing.

All the people who are telling you that there's a false choice between complete passivity in the face of Iranian aggression and total war boots on the ground in Iran is lying to you. Full stop lying. All caps L.Y.I.N.G. lying to you. The United States is not putting boots on the ground in Iran. That is not a thing. No one wants it. No one. The other plausible notion is that targeted strikes could do an enormous amount of damage to the Iranian regime. So they ought to stop while they are behind.

They should stop funding the Houthis. They should stop their nuclear program. The Trump administration is taking precisely the correct angle on all of this. And again, the liars who are telling you that this is designed to lead to war with Iran, please name me the person who wants full-scale boots on the ground, hundreds of thousands of troops in the Middle East war with Iran. Please name the human. I would love to see you point out the human. Seriously. Well, the White House shared some pictures of President Trump overseeing the strikes on the Houthis. And I guess...

I love it. President Trump came in from golf. He's wearing his MAGA hat and he's got the headphones on so he can hear presumably some of the commands that are happening. And I love the casual, the sort of casual nature of President Trump coming off the golf course so that he can watch the Hooties getting obliterated on live TV. I do love that. I think that's wonderful. And I think it's with that level of casualness that we should treat America's enemies. If you screw with us, we should stomp you into the ground. We should smash you

like a giant boot on a worm. And we should do it while we're playing golf. I love that. I love that so much. It is wonderful. Mike Waltz, who is the National Security Advisor, over the weekend, he points out that we took out a lot of who the leaders here he was on ABC News.

These were not kind of pinprick back and forth, what ultimately proved to be feckless attacks. This was an overwhelming response that actually targeted multiple Houthi leaders and took them out.

Well, the U.S. military is right on top of the Houthis. And guess what? When it comes to your online information, data brokers are on top of your information. In fact, they're watching all the moves you make online. What if I told you there's a way to stop that transaction? What if I told you there's a way to get your privacy and freedom back? You can do it with a product called ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is an app that sends 100% of your online activity through secure encrypted servers. That means data brokers can't see anything you do online. Their customers, government agencies, big tech companies, can't see anything you do online.

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Well, all options are always on the table with the president, but Iran needs to hear him loud and clear. It is completely unacceptable and it will be stopped. The level of support that they've been providing the Houthis. And again, that carries over to the idea that the Iranians should not be developing their nuclear weapons.

This notion that the Iranians are trying to develop peaceful nuclear power, one of the most oil rich nations on Earth is absolutely asinine. Everybody knows it's ridiculous on its face. The skies of Iran are completely open right now. So they either come to the table and they avoid getting hit or they will be hit. I mean, that is the reality of the situation. And again, that does not mean a war. How do I know that? Well, because I remember I'm old enough to remember when President Trump leveled the order to kill Qasem Soleimani, who is the head of the Iranian terror regime.

That was back January 3rd, 2020. Did a war with Iran ensue? I noticed not. So here was, again, Mike Waltz saying, listen, the Ayatollahs are not going to have their fingers on the button. That is not something this administration is going to allow. They can either hand it over and give it up in a way that is verifiable, or they can face...

a whole series of other consequences. But either way, we cannot have a world with the ayatollahs with their finger on the nuclear button. We cannot have a situation that would result in an arms race across the Middle East in terms of nuclear proliferation. And President Trump is determined one way or another. Iran has been offered a way out of this. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been tremendously strong throughout the Trump administration.

He said the airstrikes will continue until morale improves. So we basically have a band of pirates, you know, with guided precision anti-ship weaponry and exacting a toll system in one of the most important shipping lanes in the world. That's just not sustainable. We are not going to have these people controlling which ships can go through and which ones cannot. And so your question is, how long will this go on? It will go on until they no longer have the capability to do that.

Now, notice what Rubio also says. He says, we're not talking about putting boots on the ground. This is not something we want. Again, this is what I'm saying. The Trump administration is not interested in hundreds of thousands. People who are telling you differently are lying to you and they're lying to you for a reason. Here is Secretary of State Rubio.

Well, those are military decisions to be made, but I've heard no talk of ground raids. I don't think there's a necessity for it right now. I can tell you that as of last night, some of the key people involved in those missile launches are no longer with us. And I can tell you that some of the facilities that they use are no longer existing. Secretary of State Rubio pointed out that this is also a warning to Iran. Like we will hit your proxies. And if you continue with this, we will hit you.

What we can't ignore, and the reason why the president mentioned Iran, is because the Iranians have supported the Houthis. They've provided them intelligence, they've provided them guidance, they've provided them weaponry. I mean, there's no way the Houthis, okay, the Houthis would have the ability to do this kind of thing unless they had support from Iran. And so this was a message to Iran, don't keep supporting them because then you will also be responsible for what they are doing in attacking Navy ships, in attacking global shipping.

It turns out a little prevention goes a long way. If the Houthis had never been delisted as a terrorist group, which is a thing that the Biden administration did, if the Biden administration had never put pressure on the Saudis to leave the Houthis alone, if the Biden administration not created daylight between Israel and the United States with regard to Iranian terror proxies, none of this would have happened in the first place. And President Trump's team is working hard to shore all of that up so that Iran is not, in fact, a threat to global shipping lanes or global oil supplies or a terror threat to the region and beyond.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth put out a statement. Godspeed to our warriors who the attacks on American ships and aircraft and our troops will not be tolerated. Iran, their benefactor is on notice. Freedom of navigation will be restored. America under President Donald Trump will never back down. This is good. It is unabashedly good. It is excellent. This is strong Trump.

And it's it's great. Speaking of strong Trump, President Trump and the White House took some moves over the weekend with regard to deportations that are sending Democrats into an absolute tizzy. So obviously they are still freaking out over the fact that Mahmoud Khalil, a terrorist supporter who somehow got a student visa and then apparently a green card is now going to be deported. So Marco Rubio was appearing on the Sunday shows.

He's on CBS News' Face the Nation. And he was asked about visa revocation. He says, listen, we revoke visas every single day and we'll continue to do that. If you support terrorist groups, you don't belong in the country.

Well, not just the student. We're going to do more. In fact, every day now we're approving visa revocations. And if that visa led to a green card, the green card process as well. And here's why. It's very simple. When you apply to enter the United States and you get a visa, you are a guest. And you're coming as a student, you're coming as a tourist or what have you. And in it, you have to make certain assertions. And if you tell us when you apply for a visa, I'm coming to the U.S. to participate in pro-Hamas events, that runs counter to the foreign policy interest of the United States of America. It's that simple.

That seems pretty simple, right? And that's right. Democrats keep taking the 20% side of every single 80-20 issue. It's unbelievable to watch. Truly, they are awful at this. Rubio was asked also about Mahmoud Khalil specifically. Khalil, of course, basically came to the United States in order to pursue pro-terror rabble-rousing. He worked for the UNRWA. He was brought in a student visa and apparently did nothing except for lead student protests that took over buildings illegally. I hear a Secretary of State Rubio being asked about this.

Is there any evidence of a link to terrorism or is it just his point of view? Yeah, they take over. I mean, do you not? I mean, you should watch the news. These guys take over entire buildings. We vandalize colleges. They shut down. I'm asking about the specific. OK, so she watches the news intensely, intensely. OK, so the reality is that Mahmoud Khalil is being deported because Mahmoud Khalil expressed via the group that he led support for actual honest to God anti-Western violent terrorism.

That is the link. You do not require him to be a funder of Hamas. That is not a thing you require. The question is not the same as if you were an American citizen. The question is, if you have a green card, do we owe you a duty as a country to allow you to stay in the country when you express support for terrorist groups like full on terrorism? And the answer is no, we do not. Under the law, under the INA, we do not.

Well, speaking of Democrats taking the wrong side of every single issue, over the weekend, the Trump administration got into hot water with a local district judge. Why? Well, because the Trump administration deported alleged Venezuelan gang members

Under a centuries-old wartime law, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg early on Saturday evening blocked President Trump from using a law known as the Alien Enemies Act to deport non-citizens held in U.S. custody. Government lawyers said Trump was using the law to target members of Tren de Aragua, which is a deeply violent and evil Venezuelan gang whose members have reached the United States in recent years. So these are people who are drug dealers. These are violent criminals.

We're not even talking about mass deportations here. We're not talking about President Trump is rounding up illegal immigrants in broken down suburbs and he's taking them to the border and letting them go or forcing them. That's not what he's talking about. Trenveragua is a deeply evil, violent gang. And President Trump is taking people who are alleged to be members of these gangs, violent criminals, and he is deporting them to El Salvador. And a U.S. district judge is saying he can't do that. During Saturday's hearing, the ACLU,

told Boasberg that two aircraft believed to be carrying Venezuelan deportees took off from U.S. territory on Saturday. The ACLU had sued the administration earlier that day on behalf of migrants at risk of deportation. Boasberg said Justice Department lawyers hadn't disputed the claim. They told them that, quote, any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in air needs to be returned to the United States.

The judge subsequently issued a written order that didn't explicitly mention planes that were already in the air. So the White House said, OK, well, you didn't say already in the air, except verbally. You wrote down just planes that get to take off. It was in the air. It was in international airspace. No, Levitt said, quote, the administration did not refuse to comply with a court order, adding it was issued after terrorist Trenada Agua aliens had already been removed from United States territory. The written order and the administration's actions do not conflict.

Now, one of the reasons this is important is because the left is now claiming that President Trump is defying the judges, defying. First of all, what you have here is a judicial activist who does not have the authority to issue injunctions on behalf of the entire United States against activities taken by the administration to deport illegal immigrants who are members of violent gangs to El Salvador.

That's ridiculous. If you can just find a U.S. District Court judge somewhere in San Francisco to strike down everything Trump is doing, well, then that guy becomes the president, effectively speaking, and that is not how our system of government was meant to work. This stuff will get elevated to the Supreme Court. It will be ruled upon. Senior White House officials huddled on Saturday evening to make a decision about what to do with the judge's order. They decided to go ahead with the plans.

During the emergency court hearing, Boasberg said he had not reached any final conclusions on even whether the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act was lawful. Okay, so he didn't even come to the claim that Trump had invoked the act illegally. He said, I'm not sure, so you have to turn around the plane that has the gang members on it. And the White House is like, well, it's in international waters and you're just saying so. We didn't write it down, so no. He said his temporary restraining order will preserve the status quo until he can hear arguments more fully.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Exxon Sunday the administration had sent two leaders of the MS-13 gang and 21 of its most wanted, as well as over 250 members of Tren Daragua to El Salvador. He also reposted a comment from El Salvador's president, Ayib Bukele, that said, oopsie, too late. Bukele then shared a video with three planes on a dark tarmac that showed gang members being escorted off the planes by security services and sent to jail in El Salvador, where the United States is paying for their room and board. Here's some of that video.

And as you can see, they're taking these gang members who are in handcuffs off the plane and to jail in El Salvador. And supposedly a district court judge was going to hold all of this up on the basis that he wasn't sure about whether the Alien Enemies Act could be invoked at this point. So the Trump administration paid attention. They've not actually deported people who are sitting in American jails right now. The plane was already in the air on the way to El Salvador, and they said, we're not turning it around.

Trump's proclamation that he was invoking the Alien Enemies Act, released by the White House on Saturday, stated that Trenada Agua is, quote, undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States, both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.

So this, of course, has driven enormous, enormous heartburn among Democrats. Oh, he's violating the law. Oh, it's like tyranny now. OK, if tyranny amounts to the president of the United States invoke the law to deport enemy illegal aliens who are members of violent criminal gangs. Got to tell you, that is not a winning issue for Democrats. It is not a winner. It is not a winner. And again, the Trump administration, if they receive a binding order from a Supreme Court, is not going to ignore it.

The whole idea that local courts have the ability, like single district court judges have the ability to issue nationwide temporary restraining orders on anything the president of the United States is doing at any time is insane, ridiculous, insufferable. It wasn't even tried until the 1960s in American law.

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Well, there's a reason that more Americans now believe that America is on the right track than at any time since 2004, according to a brand new poll. That's the NBC News poll released on Sunday. President Trump's approval ratings are not where he would wish them to be at this point. 54% say they disapprove of his handling of the economy, and that is largely because of the tariff war. But the survey found that voters generally feel Trump is bringing the right kind of change on the key issues.

On a lot of other issues, the border particularly, Trump is incredibly strong. 56% say positive change on the border. In fact, the best way you can tell that Trump is doing an amazing job on the border is that on the list of issues that Americans take seriously, immigration has now dropped from number one to number four. Why? Because it's no longer a problem. President Trump has done such an amazing job on the border that no one is crossing, and so people don't even think about it anymore. On government cuts, 47% say his changes are good compared to just 29% who oppose.

On his handling of the Ukraine war and NATO, some of the most controversial stuff he's done, more respondents say his actions were good, 41% than opposed it. So pretty evenly split on all of that. As far as inflation, 40% say his policies are having a positive effect. 30% say negative. 28% say not changing things at all. As far as the sort of partisan gap, his approval rating among Republicans, unsurprisingly, 90%. His approval rating among Democrats, 4%. Okay, but among independents,

The answer is that his approval rating is much closer to sort of the Republican approval rating than it is to the Democrat approval rating. Democrats right now are tearing themselves apart over all of this. They legitimately don't know what precisely to do next. Here is CNN announcing the terrible Democrat. I mean, the Democratic polling numbers, they have favorability numbers worse than cancer at this point. Really bad numbers, according to CNN.

Americans' favorable views of the Democratic Party's brand are at a record low, just 29%. That's compared to 36% for Republicans. It is the lowest ever recorded for Democrats in CNN polling, going back more than 30 years. As you can see, the party's numbers dropping a staggering 20 points in just four years.

Just a full scale disaster area for the Democrats. And they continue to drop. The NBC News polling has them at a similarly low level. Here's what's happening. Republicans already know the Democrats suck. Independents think the Democrats are completely off the rails and Democrats are disappointed with their own party for not being crazier. That is a absolute box canyon for Democrats. How do they escape that? Seriously, how do you escape from Republicans think that you're crazy? Independents kind of think you're crazy and your own party thinks you're not crazy enough.

That is the biggest problem for Democrats. How do we know they think that they're not crazy enough? Because a recent CNN poll shows that the most popular Democrat as quote-unquote the leader of the Democratic Party right now, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, she is considered by 10% to be the leader of the Democratic Party. That's not so good. The Democratic leader they feel best reflects the core values of the party,

10% said AOC. 9% said Kamala Harris. 8% said Bernie. 6% said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Brutal, brutal numbers right there. Why is that so brutal? Because guess what? She is totally out of touch with most Americans. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were to run for president, she would lose 60-40 because she is insane. Her policies are crazy. But look at the top of that list. Basically, if you are a Democrat,

The people that you like are the nut jobs and the people you don't like are the ones who are more sane. So John Fetterman doesn't even clock in. John Fetterman is on the list. He didn't clock in. The top names again, AOC, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Hakeem Jeffries, Barack Obama, who ain't coming back. Jasmine Crockett is at 2%. Then Gavin Newsom at 2%. Nancy Pelosi at 2%.

Tim Walz at one, by the way, that shows you how much Democrats hate Tim Walz, right? Tim Walz was the VP candidate half a second ago, and now he's at 1% in the polling. He has the same percentage as Al Green. By the way, Pete Buttigieg at 1%.

What does this mean? It means the Democrats are addicted. They are absolutely addicted to the crazy and they can't let go of the crazy. And it's a major, major problem for them. So last week, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, made the correct political decision not to engage in a government shutdown. Why? Well, as I said last week, it was a giant unforced error. I wish he had, you know, sort of a political matter. I wish that Chuck Schumer had engaged in a continuing resolution shutdown. Why? Because then he would have had to own it. Whatever happened next would be on him.

First of all, President Trump would have had the ability to designate which employees in the federal government were mandatory employees. And because the spending in the federal government, there's some spending in the federal government that's considered essential spending that goes forward even during government shutdown and stuff that's considered non-essential. The non-essential shutdown essential goes forward. That's true for employees as well.

Trump would have had more power if the government shutdown had happened along those lines. But number two, anything negative that happened economically over the following few weeks was going to be in Chuck Schumer's lap. So Chuck Schumer, flirting with the left, which wanted him to resist, resist, resist, thought very seriously about shutting down the government. And then at the last minute, he pulled back. And he pulled back because he didn't want to be a complete nut job who destroyed his party. And the Democrats are fighting mad at him, enraged at him. Here are MSNBC hosts over the weekend bashing Chuck Schumer over it.

The Democratic Tea Party was born the same day that Chuck Schumer took to that podium to read that very well-crafted statement that told us he folded like a paper napkin. Well, and that's why you have members of the Democratic caucus privately encouraging Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to primary Schumer. Anyone can primary him.

Okay, so there's a lot of talk in the Democratic Party about AOC primarying him. And all I can say is good luck and Godspeed. Seriously, please keep steering in the direction of AOC if you wish to keep losing. And this has been the way that the Democratic Party continues to approach the issue. They are not taking the advice of James Carville, which is sit back and wait for your opponent to make a mistake. They're not doing it. Instead, they're jumping both feet on every rake in sight. Congresswoman Debbie Dingell from Michigan says, listen, we need to fight back. I can't believe we did the CR. We should have fought back.

My town halls look like a Republican town hall. I'm not taking it personally. People are scared. They want to see us do something. You mean people are shouting, people are angry, people are upset. They want to see Democrats fighting back and they're really scared about what's going to happen to them. So then you have Senator Adam Schiff, who was the greatest promulgator of the Russia, Russia, Russia lie. And he's saying that passing the CR was a terrible policy.

Please, guys, keep following Adam Schiff. It's doing you wonders. We in the Congress gave up our authority, gave up our power to allow him to continue to do this because we feared something worse if we refused. Now, I made it clear I think that was the wrong judgment. I strongly oppose this CR, but nevertheless, it passed.

He strongly opposes the CR. It was the wrong judgment. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse doing the same thing. He says, listen, we need to stop fighting internally. We need to unify against Trump. The problem is you can't. You can't because half of you are crazy. So they were both extremely, extremely dangerous options. And my view is that as Democrats, we need to stop the intramural quarreling about who voted what way and get back to work saving our democracy.

Well, let's see you get it back to it. Here's the thing. The other problem for the Democrats is that because the leadership is up for grabs, there's a battle among the nuts for the leadership. If AOC is at 10%, Jasmine Crockett is looking at this and she's going, hey, hey, we've talked about Jasmine Crockett, the very valuable congresswoman from Texas who's trying to become the new AOC and trying to steal some of her thunder. Here she was trying to go after AOC.

You're close with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Some of your fellow House Democrats say, and not just progressives, by the way, we've heard that moderates have said this too, that they're ready to support her to challenge Chuck Schumer in a Democratic primary. Would you get behind that?

That's four years from now. If you were asking me at least in two years, then I would have an absolute answer. But I can tell you that there are a lot of people that are watching his leadership in this moment. This is the moment. We don't even know what elections will look like in four years if we will have elections. And so I definitely think

that younger, fresher leadership may be something that many of us, not just depending on what part of the spectrum you're on, but many Americans may be looking for, especially in the state of New York.

You notice how she kind of slides in right there that there might not be elections in four years later. There are going to be elections in four years. The real reason that she's not endorsing AOC at this point is because she's afraid that she's going to get banged on by the moderate wing of her party. And she is currently riding in that same SSRS poll, which shows AOC at 10%.

At 4%, out of nowhere, the same as Barack Obama. So why precisely would she hand over leadership of the party to a person while she herself might make that climb? The Democrats are in such trouble. They're in such trouble and they don't even understand they're in trouble. They're boxed in. Gavin Newsom, by the way, he's been attempting through his Gavin Newsom podcast to move to the center by interviewing people who are on the right.

This, of course, is a play for the 2028 nomination among Democrats. He's going to run as a quasi-moderate. The problem for him is in that same SSRS poll, it's like 2% of Democrats think that he's the leader of the party. And his approval rating has absolutely plummeted throughout all of this. So they have no leadership. They're completely broken.

They got a massive problem on their hands and they're not doing the thing they should be doing, which is waiting for Republicans to make a mistake. So as I say, all Democrats have to do at this point is wait for President Trump to make a mistake, not because President Trump is going to be terrible at being president, but just because every president is faced with crises. Bad things happen in every presidency and they should wait until he makes a mistake to jump on him. But they just can't do it. They just can't do it. Over the weekend, Scott Besson, the secretary of the Treasury, who is excellent at his job,

He was he was talking about President Trump's economy. Look, the economy is going to be fine again. Besant is doing heavy work on behalf of the administration to quiet the markets, given all the sort of tariff chaos that has been taking place over the course of the last several weeks.

I've been in the investment business for 35 years, and I can tell you that corrections are healthy. They're normal. What's not healthy is straight up that you get these euphoric markets. That's how you get a financial crisis. It would have been much healthier if someone had put the brakes on in 06, 07. We wouldn't have had

The problem's in '08. So I'm not worried about the markets. Over the long term, if we put good tax policy in place, deregulation, and energy security, the markets will do great.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So one of the things that's happening right now is something that happened during the first Trump administration. Trump would throw out an economic policy. Everybody would freak out. And then the economic policy would get sanded down by all the people around him into something that was more palatable to markets. That is one of the things that Scott Besant is doing here. By the way, J.D. Vance was doing the same thing over the weekend with regard to Doge. There have been tons of questions about Doge.

And about the fact that Doge is moving fast and breaking things. And that means that some people are getting fired who probably need to be rehired, for example. Over the weekend, Vance said in an interview with NBC News, the vice president, quote, Elon himself has said, sometimes you do something and you make a mistake and then you undo the mistake. I'm accepting of mistakes. I also think you have to act quickly to correct those mistakes. But I'm also very aware of the fact there are a lot of good people who work in the government, a lot of people who are doing a very good job. We want to try to preserve as much of what works in government as possible while eliminating what doesn't work.

Again, that is a smart way to approach all this. If you explain to the American people that when you are performing a surgery on a catastrophic cancer inside the federal government, you might have to cut out some stuff that you don't want to cut out, but then you have to allow it to grow back. That's what Vance is essentially saying right now. He said many people are clearly collecting a check and not doing a job. He said, I don't know how many people that is in a three million strong federal workforce. Maybe it's a few thousand. Maybe it's much larger than that.

But he said we have a lot of great civil servants who are doing great work. So again, the administration is moving into a more comfortable arena where it's not just moving fast and breaking things. It is moving fast, breaking things, and then rebuilding the things that shouldn't have been broken or broken in the process of getting to the root of the issue.

They're going to get better at things as things go on. This is actually the roughest point in the Trump administration in terms of actually being able to make major change. Meanwhile, the situation in Ukraine is in some ways getting worse. Vladimir Putin is obviously using

the sort of moment in order to consolidate land grabs as much as humanly possible over the weekend. Ukraine's audacious military gambit inside Russia drew toward a close this week as much as it started last summer quickly, according to the Wall Street Journal. A rapid Russian advance in recent days left remaining Ukrainian forces increasingly isolated under withering assault. They'd all but pulled out from a sliver of Kursk province by the weekend. How is this happening? Well, Putin went out and he got a bunch of North Korean soldiers who were basically conscripted into service and then forced into fighting in Kursk.

The Russians used familiar tactics, relentless assaults with overwhelming numbers of troops, including elite units and North Korean soldiers that ground Ukrainian forces down over months. Glide bombs smashed buildings and bunkers where Ukrainian troops sheltered. Then in the past month, Russia deployed large numbers of drones controlled via fiber optic cables to strike armored vehicles on the main roads routes for supplying Ukrainian soldiers on a shrinking patch of land.

The Ukrainian military's seven-month foray had surprised allies with its vigor and embarrassed Putin. But now Putin has turned the tables and he has become the first Kremlin leader since Stalin. He was faced trying to oust a foreign army from his own territory, but it appears that now he has actually done that. Ukraine was hoping to cling on to that territory as sort of a bargaining chip. That bargaining chip is gone. So the question now is whether Putin is going to come to the table at all. On Tuesday, President Trump is supposed to speak with Vladimir Putin, according to Axios.

Ukraine, of course, has already agreed to Trump's ceasefire proposal. Putin has refused to accept it unconditionally. Trump said, I'll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday. A lot of work's been done over the weekend. We want to see if we can bring that war to an end. Maybe we can, maybe we can't. I think we have a very good chance. When asked what sort of concessions he'd be looking for, Trump replied, we'll be talking about land. We'll be talking about power plants. He said they were already discussing dividing up certain assets.

Steve Witkoff, the president's negotiator in Russia, described his four-hour meeting with Putin as positive and said the discussions was solutions-based. Witkoff said that Putin accepts Trump's philosophy of ending the war with Ukraine. He says the two sides are a lot closer today than they were a few weeks ago.

And we'll have to see whether that materializes or not, because Putin has sort of a history of holding out the football and then removing the football at the at the very moment at which a consummation becomes possible. Holman Jenkins writing for The Wall Street Journal is doubtful. He says there won't be a deal anytime soon. Vladimir Putin has received no reason to stop pushing for more concessions to see where the limit, if any, exists. Neither has he received any message from the administration that now is the time to cut a deal.

because President Trump will open the floodgates and make the situation more painful and costly than Putin would find it useful to bear. So it's possible that there is another possibility, he says. He says, strike a deep state peace deal between the incoming Trump administration and the U.S. intelligence agencies, bring the best of the U.S. to bear on the problem of managing our Ukraine involvement to an acceptable outcome.

Steve Witkoff is flying around on his personal plane, perhaps using his personal phone while shuttling to Moscow to sample the latest peace musings of Mr. Putin. How many intelligence agencies are listening in, including those who usually agree not to spy on us when we agree not to spy on them? These are all open questions, obviously.

We'll see what ends up materializing. I am doubtful that Vladimir Putin is going to come to the table with anything that looks like a real peace deal here, because again, he has to feel the pressure in order for him to have an impetus to actually sign on to something. Meanwhile, there was some talk that Keith Kellogg had sort of been sidelined in the negotiations. Keith Kellogg is sort of more hawkish member of the foreign policy team.

President Trump put out a statement, quote, I am pleased to inform you that General Keith Kellogg has been appointed special envoy to Ukraine. General Kellogg, a highly respected military expert, will deal directly with President Zelensky and Ukrainian leadership. He knows them well. They have a very good working relationship together. Congratulations to General Kellogg. And this is the right move by President Trump. So I'm hoping that this is the precursor to the Trump administration understanding that if Putin says no, the pressure has to be reversed. And now instead of being on Ukraine, the pressure really, really, really has to be on the Russians.

Well, as you all know, I'm not big into the culture stories, and so I have to have experts on to help walk me through them today. It's Emily Austin stopping by. All right, folks, we are here with Emily Austin. She is a news personality. She's also on Instagram at Emily Austin. She has almost 3 million followers. So first of all, I want to ask you, Emily, how you went from sports personality to kind of news personality? How'd that happen? So I went to Hofstra University in Long Island, and you could hear the accent slip out here and there.

And they initially say when you want to do journalism, you have to choose politics or sports. And at the time, I was like, well, of course I'm going to choose sports because I hate politics. And it's funny because all of my professors ended up being so politically involved on the woke left and always proselytizing the students with their ideologies and especially the gender ideologies. And it became so nauseating that the focus was never about sports. Prime example was...

Sports journalism, which I did not do well in because my professor failed me for going to the Super Bowl and missing four classes. Being 19 and covering the Super Bowl was pretty impressive in my book. I mentioned I'd be voting for Trump, and the entire class transitioned into a why if you vote for Trump, you support Hitler, even though he's not a Jew and he's lecturing me about supporting Hitler, and just completely had this bias towards me the rest of the semester.

So backtrack a little bit. In the same sports journalism class, it was Women's History Month, and I grew up a star tennis player in New York, all over the country. I played in Chris Everett Academy, and I just found out Chris Everett was battling cancer. So I wanted to write a piece about how she inspired me to become the tennis player I was. And he was like, "I prefer you write about Leah Thomas." And I was like, "Who's Leah Thomas?" And then I found out that he was the swimmer that took the medal at Kentucky.

Then I found out who Riley Gaines was. And I was like, I'd rather write about Riley. So I did and I failed. And I was like, this is like abhorrent. I actually have no words. So I tried to leave his class. It was too deep in the semester and it really affected my GPA.

My next professor was they them, which was really new to me at the time because you look like a man. You have chest hair that you love to flaunt. You have naked pictures on Instagram with your genitals out. And I was like, don't tell me you're a woman because that's insulting to me. But he wasn't a woman. It was he was nothing. He was just this was new at the time. This was like COVID kind of.

And he said, I would really prefer if you call me they, them. And I said, but that's plural. This is a journalism class. That doesn't make sense. And they proceeded to tell me how transphobic I was for not referring to they as them.

I said, professor, he said, that has like a male connotation. I'd prefer not to be professor. I said, sir, by accident, he said, I'll penalize you if you do it again. And I was like, I need to leave this school completely. So I left the school. I went to Turo University, but I found out it's not just the school. It's the new world we're living in under Biden. And it was a bigger problem than just my university. So I just became very

attracted to common sense. And once my sports platform was growing through like working for the Nets G League, and then growing to the game day and starting like my own podcast, the hoop chat with, you know, star NBA players, I was definitely more politically active in my own opinions. And a lot of people resonated with common sense, but there was a loud opposition of just like this lunacy that took over the media during Biden's presidency.

So I want to go through some of the stories of the day with you. There is a sports story that is on the radar. Apparently, West Virginia's Rich Rodriguez has now put out a rule that his players are not allowed to dance on TikTok. I mean, I generally agree. I don't know why TikTok exists. I mean, I do. It's Chinese op. But what's the story here?

I can tell you from a sports reporter perspective that when we had a Hofstra had a division one basketball team and a lot of the star athletes on the team would just be dancing in the locker room on TikTok. So I would go on my algorithm and I see them like hitting the whoa and like doing really zesty kind of dances. And I was like, if I'm your opponent and I see you in the locker room dancing and I don't see you on the court doing like drills, I'm going to come into this game with more of

less of an opinion on you, but more confidence in myself. And I feel like it actually took a toll on the players because we were looked so down upon for dancing in the locker room. So that's a good coach right there. I fully support that. Okay. So meanwhile, in other news, Dylan Mulvaney apparently has a book coming out, which is really exciting, was honored on International Women's Day by the ladies of The View, which makes perfect sense since he is in fact a dude. And I just wanted to read you, we apparently have excerpts from his new book, quote,

My healthy long brunette locks constantly reminded me of the images I would see of myself in conservative media, the Audrey Hepburn persona I had leaned into for most of my transition. I was the good girl, Jackie O, but I wanted to be the other woman for once. I wanted to be Marilyn. Thoughts? Dylan Mulvaney seems to have almost like a fetish of cosplaying women. Because when I saw her as a man...

or he has, I can't even keep up anymore. When he was a man, his personality was almost the same. Not that I think he's a woman. I think he likes the attention. And because it became so normalized, he just was like, let me hop on the wave while I can.

But he doesn't understand, he does understand, he's just mocking women. So his TikTok transition, he vlogged every day. And day one, he said, "It's day one of me taking estrogen and I cried three times and I didn't send an email because I was overly hormonal." He talks about how he carries tampons in his purse when we know very well you're not getting your period ever, no matter how much you wish and pray.

And he's insulting real women that go through womenly problems that he will never relate to. He doesn't know what a hormonal mood swing is like. He doesn't know what going through puberty is like as a kid. He'll never understand these things. Same issue I had with Miss Universe. As a judge, I said, I really hope there's no trans people in my years contest because I don't care how bright they are. They're not moving forward under my jurisdiction.

And they asked me why and I said, 'cause I don't care if you physically identify as a woman, I don't care if you try, first of all, biologically you never will be, mentally you never will be and no amount of hormones will change that. But what you are doing is you're hurting the real women who deal with these, who have a chance to take this platform and you're robbing them of their platform. In sports,

I'm not even going to go there. It's an abomination that ever was allowed to happen, but it's in every industry. They're making a mockery out of hard working women that fight for their place to be there. And then for them, for Dylan to be featured on Women's Day, for Leah Thomas to be ESPN's Athlete of the Month, they should be so ashamed of themselves.

Meanwhile, the Democrats seem to be unable to actually separate off from this issue. It's pretty amazing. Gavin Newsom tried to try it. And the rest of the Democratic Party came down on him like a like a ton of bricks. But it seems to me that Democrats are not really going to have a choice. This issue is a giant loser for them. They do have an opportunity to win back the presidency in 2028. People say that. So.

Listen, the 2024 election is a lot closer than I think people want to admit that it was. Yeah. And you shipped a couple of hundred thousand votes in particular jurisdictions. And suddenly this looks like a much more competitive election. If the economy tanks, obviously Democrats could come back. You never want to rule it out. I think Republicans have a lot of systemic advantages. I think that the population movement to the South is obviously helping Republicans an awful lot right now. But things change really rapidly in American politics.

If Democrats actually jettison some of the insane culture war issues that they've been running on, and if the economy turns south, then yeah, they have a decent shot, but they can't jettison those issues. What do you make of the Democratic field right now? You know, they need to get off of TikTok, for example, and start focusing on their policy issues. And that's obviously amongst the many things that hurt Kamala Harris. That was her biggest flaw.

is that they played too much into the identity politics and the race and the gender ideology. You know, such a big distraction as to the real issues that we're facing, which is the economy, it is the border, it's safety, it's immigration. These are the problems that even people my age want to hear about. Like, we have a future ahead of us. We don't want to worry about being murdered on the streets of Manhattan or if we could afford a mortgage and a house one day. So...

The Democrats would rather play into the identity politics and not focus on any policies that actually influence real people. So they play out to this small percentage of people, and you don't win an election that way.

But in fact, them switching over, I think hurts them more. Like Gavin Newsom's podcast, I think backfired because he said, well, I never went by pronouns. I never said Latinx. I never did this. I never said men should be in women's sports. But the facts show otherwise. You did in fact say you believe men should dominate women's sports. You did say Latinx. You did use pronouns. So now you're showing the people I never cared about you. This was about politics. And because I want to win, I'm going to turn my back on all you wokies, even though this is what I've been claiming I care about.

just to win whatever it is, let's say presidency that he's running for. However, and I don't think Republicans should head into 28 with a hothead. I don't know if the Democrats could manage the disarray that they're in because they're so conflicted within that I feel like they need to focus on their own issues before competing with Republicans. And like the men and women's sports, like John Fetterman voted against it. You have a daughter.

You have a daughter. Imagine a man. First of all, imagine a naked man in the locker room with your daughter. Would you not feel violated by that? Secondly, imagine your daughter spends her whole life, let's say someone like me, for example, five days a week tennis, sacrificing my weekends, not being able to keep Shabbat over something like that, full ride to school, and then a man takes her spot. How could you possibly sleep at night knowing that you voted for something like that? I'll never understand it. So as long as they have these crazy,

Manic beliefs, I don't think they'll get far. So I hope they keep them. Well, Emily Austin, thank you so much for stopping by. Folks, check out her stuff over at her Instagram page at emily.austin. She's terrific. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you.

All righty, coming up, we'll jump into the latest episode of Bill Maher. Don Lemon stopped by and had some things to say about black Americans voting for President Trump. First, you need to become a subscriber in order to see this kind of magic. We have so much great stuff coming. I've seen some of the cuts of Pendragon. Amazing, truly incredible stuff. Backstage Live, Morning Wire, Am I Racist, All Access Live, so much good stuff for you right now and so much coming. If you're not a member, become a member, use code Shapiro, check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.