Shownotes Transcript
Alrighty, folks, lots of news happening in the world. An election in Canada, negotiations over Russia and Iran, plus economic fallout. We'll get to all that in a moment. First, the countdown is on. The Daily Wire is celebrating President Trump's first 100 days back in office with a 100-hour flash sale on annual memberships. 100 hours only. The clock is already ticking. It's up to people like you and me to help build the future of the country. Head on over to dailywire.com. Use code DW100 to join the fight. Alright,
All right, so the big news as of today is the election in Canada. So you'll recall that if you go all the way back to December when Justin Trudeau, i.e. handsome Bernie Sanders, was the prime minister of Canada, the Liberal Party in Canada was in a state of complete electoral collapse. The polls showed that the Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poliev, who was in fact a good candidate, was winning. The Conservative Party was winning by 25 points over Justin Trudeau. The Liberal Party was in a state of
of absolute meltdown. And then Justin Trudeau dropped out and the polls started to come together really, really quickly. So last night, the election result, Mark Carney, who replaced Justin Trudeau, you can call him ugly Justin Trudeau. So basically, if Justin Trudeau is
handsome Bernie Sanders, and Mark Carney is ugly Justin Trudeau. His liberals are now projected to win the Canadian election, according to the Wall Street Journal. They were set to win a fourth term in national elections on Monday, fourth consecutive term. So, I mean, well done on you guys, Canada. Woo!
Oh boy, you make some choices you're going to have to live with up there. It wasn't clear whether the Liberals would actually win a majority of seats or a smaller share that would require them to win support from other parties to govern. That'd make a very large difference, by the way. If they only have enough seats in the Canadian parliament that they have to form a coalition with another party, that still leaves them vulnerable to the possibility of some sort of vote of no confidence in the future. If, however, they have a pretty solid majority in the parliament, then you get four years of Mark Carney up in Canada.
Carney is the former head of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. He is like a World Bank IMF guy. He is very much in line with the sort of Green New Deal, relatively open borders, Justin Trudeau policy. His expected victory, says The Wall Street Journal, is a remarkable one for a party headed for defeat at the start of the year. Again, the Conservatives had a more than 20 point lead in January.
And a lot of that was because of Justin Trudeau's mismanagement, anger over inflation, high housing costs, immigration, insane social leftism. And then something happened. And the thing that happened essentially was that Justin Trudeau dropped out. So there are two conflicting arguments about what exactly happened in this election cycle.
Argument number one is that Trudeau dropping out alone would have propelled the liberals to victory. That basically, the liberal party did what the Democratic Party did in the last election cycle. They took their bad candidate, flipped in a new, fresh candidate, and then ran for victory. And it's a very short election cycle because Carney, upon entering, declared, you could see that there was a boost in the polls, he declared a snap election, which meant that there was only about six weeks between the declaration of the election and the actual election. That's how the system works over there when you...
are in power, you can declare a new election, essentially, dissolve your own government. So the question is whether Justin Trudeau dropping out alone would have been enough to push the liberals to victory, or whether it was a combination of Justin Trudeau dropping out and President Trump's incessant, continuous, and aggressive attacks on America's top hat up in Canada. My theory is pretty much number two, that President Trump obviously had something to do with the results of the Canadian election.
So sure, obviously, it makes a huge difference if you swap out the very unpopular Justin Trudeau for a cipher, a non-entity like Mark Carney. And Carney, to his credit, ran a little bit more as a moderate on issues like immigration or even on the economy. He suggested he wasn't going to raise taxes. He was going to mildly lower the taxes in Canada.
But the big election issue in Canada was not any more inflation or fiscal mismanagement in Canada, which is what Poliev had been running on. The main election question in Canada, beginning in January, simultaneous with the dropout of Justin Trudeau, was America's aggressive attack on Canada, both rhetorically and in terms of policy. President Trump first started attacking the Canadians in December of last year. He started calling them the 51st state and trolling the Canadians.
And then he started talking literally his first day in office about dropping serious tariffs on the Canadians. And what that did is it flipped the entire political fight in Canada. So before it had been about Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party's mismanagement. And then it turned into who is best willing and conditioned to fight President Trump on his tariff agenda.
Who's willing to stand up to Trump? And there's a widespread perception in Canada that Pierre Poliev, because he was a candidate of the right and was widely liked by many conservatives in the United States, that Pierre Poliev was some sort of Trump ally and therefore ill positioned to go up against Donald Trump. He tried to draw a contrast with Trump. He tried to say that he was going to fight Trump on the tariffs and that Trump was wrong on the tariffs. The problem was that imagistically he was of the right. Trump was of the right.
His entire campaign slogan, by the way, was Canada first, which was very reminiscent of President Trump's America first slogan. And so that obviously was sort of roiling underneath the dynamics of Trudeau versus Poliev. And then once Trudeau dropped out, it was almost like a hot air balloon that had dropped its ballast. The Liberal Party started to rise precipitously, specifically because Trudeau, who was wildly unpopular with the public, was gone. And meanwhile, the underlying conditions had changed since the election in the United States.
And particularly since President Trump took office and started aggressively using American policy to go after the Canadians. President Trump, of course, has been continuously trolling the Canadians. And the question you have to ask yourself here is what exactly was the strategy? Seriously, what is the thing that President Trump was going for? I've been asking this about President Trump's tariffs on Canada all the way along the line. If President Trump was simply trying to get the Canadians to lower specific tariffs,
Again, say American dairy products. Okay, so let's negotiate that. But President Trump in his first term literally negotiated himself the USMCA, which is the governing trade agreement with both Mexico and Canada. And then he overthrew his own USMCA to go after Mexico and Canada on the basis of his specious theories with regard to trade deficits. So he went hard after Canada. He slapped a giant tariff on Canada. And so that became the only issue really in the election.
All the other issues just became secondary.
So could Poliev have done something differently? And a lot of theories on sort of the MAGA right in the United States, I think many of them trying to get President Trump off the hook for some of the blame for Poliev's loss over there. The theory is that Poliev should have run harder to the right. He should have differentiated himself more from Mark Carney on issues like, say, immigration. He should have bear hugged Trump. The problem, of course, is that Canada is basically Vermont. This idea that Canada is somehow down home Alabama, secretly waiting to go deep red,
I have yet to see the evidence of that. Well, on the day of the election, President Trump
put out a truth that said, quote, good luck to the great people of Canada. Elect the man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your taxes in half, increase your military power for free to the highest level in the world. Have your cars, steel, aluminum, lumber, energy, and all other businesses quadruple in size with zero tariffs or taxes. If Canada becomes the cherished 51st state of the United States of America, no more artificially drawn line from many years ago. Look how beautiful this landmass would be. Free access with no border, all positives with no negatives. It was meant to be. America can no longer subsidize Canada
With the hundreds of billions of dollars a year that we've been spending in the past, it makes no sense unless Canada is a state. So literally on the day of the Canadian election, President Trump unleashes a truth declaring that people should vote for him.
He's not eligible to be Canadian prime minister, nor is the United States going to annex Canada. That is not a thing that is going to happen. We're not invading Canada. We're not annexing Canada. All of this started off as a joke. And I think President Trump is so committed to the bit at this point that he couldn't get off the train. Plus, he slammed Canada with a wide variety of significant high tariffs.
Again, the sort of change in electoral mood in Canada was, in fact, due to both those factors. Justin Trudeau dropping out because Justin Trudeau is incompetent. Carney gives a feeling to Canadians that he is more solid because he has more of a financial background and he's done a lot more trade deals and all the rest of this sort of stuff. But according to pollsters, Poliev suffered for rhetoric too similar to President Trump's. Abacus data polling last week indicated 46% of Canadians held a negative perception of Poliev, the highest level since the start of the campaign.
Now, conservatives didn't get blown out in the election. They still had more than 40 percent of the popular vote, which is close to the share in the last federal election they won in 2011. The liberals had just over 44 percent. They benefited from a drop in support for all the smaller parties who seemed to come together around Mark Carney. Carney, for his part, ran a little bit away from Trudeau, but mostly he ran against President Trump. So here is the question. What is the strategy?
Is this a good thing? Now, believe it or not, there are some on the isolationist right in the United States who are celebrating this. So Kurt Mills from American Conservative Magazine, again, a very, very strong isolationist. He put out a statement saying, Trump will and already has weirdly get on with Carney. Trump vibes with the smart hyper Machiavellian central left types. His relationships with Macron and Starmer are strong. He isn't actually friends with Boris Johnson. Poliev could have been Canuck DeSantis.
Okay, so first of all, Canuck DeSantis sounds pretty great. As somebody who is a resident of the state of Florida, Governor DeSantis is an excellent governor. I do not know by any stretch of the imagination how it is better to have a socialist-leaning, Green New Deal nutjob as the sober-faced head of Canada as opposed to the other guy who was just less sober-faced. I don't understand how it's a win for the United States to have a...
Far left-leaning internationalist. I mean, you don't talk globalist. Mark Carney is the definition of a globalist. He's the definition of somebody who wants international institutions to run as much as possible. He would like to make greater overtures toward China, for example. And yet there is this idea on some parts of the right that somehow it's better. Now, I think some of that is cope. I think some people are taking the copium and they are saying, well, it's Poliev's fault. If only there had been another party that was even more right-wing, then that would have worked. Okay, let's be real about this.
The rhetorical attacks on Canada have not actually resulted in a net good for the United States. I care about results. What are the results? Is the United States better off because we keep yelling at the Canadians? I mean, clearly, I think we are now worse off because we don't have a friendly leader in Canada who's capable of making a deal that is going to actually benefit the United States. Is the United States better off for the trade war that we've declared on Canada? I'd love to see the results. If so, I'm waiting to see them.
It turns out that the United States, as the sort of sensor of gravity on planet Earth, many of the things that we do have a rather outsized effect. Canada just happens to be one of those effects, and so far those effects are not good. We'll get some more on this in just a moment. First, you know what I hate? Big government. You know
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Meanwhile, in actual good news, the Trump administration, there are many areas of the Trump administration that I think during the first 100 days have not gone particularly well. That would range from the economy to some areas of foreign policy. However, when it comes to immigration, President Trump has been absolutely stalwart. That was his number one issue. He's actually handled immigration so well that it dropped out of the top four or five issues for Americans. It was the number one or number two issue in every poll for Americans during the 2024 election cycle. Trump comes in and literally on the first day,
Everything gets fixed because he says we're going to enforce the border. Don't come here and people stop coming here. Well, yesterday, Caroline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, announced that President Trump is going to be signing an EO cracking down on illegal immigration. Later this afternoon, President Trump will sign an executive order on law and order and another executive order on sanctuary cities. The first EO will strengthen and unleash America's law enforcement to pursue criminals and protect innocent citizens.
The second EO is centered around protecting American communities from criminal aliens, and it will direct the attorney general and secretary of Homeland Security to publish a list of state and local jurisdictions that obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration laws. So all of that is quite good. He signed three executive orders, including one that instructed Pam Bondi and the secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, to pursue all necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures against so-called sanctuary cities.
Again, that is correct. If you have said so, here's the deal. Local law enforcement cannot be militarized by the federal government under the Posse Comitatus Act to actually enforce federal law. That is not a thing. However, obstruction of justice, which is a thing that has been happening in these sanctuary cities where ICE goes in and you have local law enforcement actively obstructing, getting in the way, declaring their sanctuary cities and going out of their way to sort of thwart federal law. That is something that the federal government should be cracking down on.
Another one of these executive orders aims to bolster legal resources to police officers accused of wrongdoing. The third seeks to enforce existing laws requiring professional truck drivers to be proficient in English, according to the New York Times. Now, President Trump, of course, has also been unleashing ICE to actually go after illegal immigration wherever they find it in significant numbers.
One of the big sort of splashy stories that happened over the weekend is U.S. federal agents, according to CNN, early Sunday raided what authorities described as an underground nightclub in Colorado Springs and took into custody more than 100 migrants accused of being in the country illegally, according to the DEA. Jonathan Pullen, the special agent in charge, said what was happening inside was a significant drug trafficking, prostitution, crimes of violence. We seized a number of guns in there. So again, the raid had been
planned for months, according to the DEA. During surveillance, investigators documented drug trafficking, prostitution, and presence of people suspected to be members of the Venezuelan gang Tren Daragua, the international gang MS-13, as well as the Hells Angels. This is a very large raid. Attorney General Bondi, in explaining the nature of the raid, explained there'd been a bunch of 911 phone calls during the Biden administration, basically ignored.
So to back up, during the Biden administration, they received 170 911 calls to that club alone. That club we were just watching, 170 calls. Wouldn't you think that would have been a red flag? Nothing happened. Guns, shootings, ag batteries, nothing happened. Okay, so again, this is the upside of the Trump administration. Immigration, they've been doing an excellent job, even though courts have been attempting to hamstring them pretty much every step
of the way in sort of a funny corollary to the immigration situation. Over the weekend, Kristi Noem, the secretary of Homeland Security, her handbag was stolen. She had put it underneath a chair in a restaurant and purse snatchers grabbed it. Well, the suspects were then nabbed by the authorities. And one of them, it turns out, was apparently in the country, not legally. So that was a bad idea. Tom Homan, the bulldog border czar, had a bit of a funny quip about all of this.
I don't have the criminal history, but I know the one who stole the purse is supposedly in the country illegally. But, you know, pick the wrong person to steal a purse from. I mean, Secretary Nome is a strong, strong secretary. So, again, the Trump administration on this matter has actually been completely thorough.
They are doing a good job on all of this. And they're being very aggressive in their public facing about all of it as well. According to Axios, Trump administration officials late Sunday began placing dozens of posters of arrested unauthorized immigrants along the White House driveway. The posters were treated arrested, specified various crimes linked to the pictured immigrants and have the White House's official logo at the bottom, according to Axios. So all of these posters were designed to point out that, again, the goal here is to deport criminal illegal immigrants.
Hundreds of these posters were put up, and this is still President Trump's most popular issue, the immigration issue, as well it should be. Meanwhile, the DOJ is reorienting in a positive direction as well. Our friend Hermie Dillon, who, full disclosure, we've worked with on a bunch of legal cases. Her law firm is excellent. She moved over from her law firm to head the Civil Rights Division over at the Department of Justice, and she is now reorienting the DOJ toward immigration.
pushing against institutional discrimination under the Civil Rights Act, including universities. And now that's been apparently a great way of getting people at DOJ, who are in fact many of them sort of deep state members embedded with the left, to quit. According to the New York Times, hundreds of lawyers and other staff members are leaving the DOJ Civil Rights Division as veterans of the office say they've been driven out by Trump administration officials who want to drop its traditional work in order to aggressively pursue cases against the Ivy League, other schools and liberal cities. Well, good.
Harmeet said in an interview over the weekend, now over 100 attorneys decided they'd rather not do what their job requires them to do. I think that's fine. She said, we don't want people in the federal government who feel like it's their pet project to go persecute police departments. The job here is to enforce federal civil rights law, not woke ideology. Now, again, that is great.
Harmeet is terrific. She's doing a great job over there. And it's specifically because, again, that the administration is doing so many really important things that I am concerned about the administration's generalized foreign policy approach because administrations rise and fall as a unit. If the American people like President Trump's immigration policy but do not like his economic plans and the economic plans are pulling in the 30s right now, that is going to sink how they feel about his immigration agenda.
If the American people like what President Trump is doing on DEI, I love what President Trump is doing on DEI, but they don't like his foreign policy or believe that his foreign policy is going to lead to a more fractious and conflict-ridden world, that drags him down. Again, presidencies rise or fall as a unit. Now, one of these sort of truisms of American politics is that foreign policy doesn't tend to matter all that much. Well, here's the thing. It doesn't matter all that much until it absolutely does. Excellent example of this would be Joe Biden. So if you look at Joe Biden's approval rating,
During his presidency, his approval ratings from the time he was elected were fairly high. After his election, his original approval ratings were up in the 50s. And then they started to slowly decline where they really started to cross streams, where the disapprove versus the approve started to cross streams was specifically around the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
So his numbers had been declining, albeit slowly. And then the withdrawal from Afghanistan absolutely cratered him. He was underwater the rest of his administration. Because it turns out there's one thing Americans do not like, and that is our enemies winning. We don't like it. And the world is filled with American enemies. And those enemies, yes, include Russia. Yes, include China. Yes, include Iran.
Not because we don't like them, but because they very clearly do not like us and have their own actual interests. They say those interests out loud. I'm always bemused and puzzled by people who seem to believe that Iran, China, Russia, and our foreign enemies are only reacting to us, as opposed to they have independent interests that conflict with ours, that their agenda for the world is not the same as ours, and they see us as an enemy. That is very clearly true, for example, about the Russians. They're not shy about this.
I discussed this on the show at length on Friday. We went through the thought of Alexander Dugin that happens to match up with the thought of Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov and everybody else who is in power in Russia. They believe that the great obstacle to Russian imperial ambition is the Atlantic alliance, meaning NATO, but effectively the United States. If Russia is able to take over Ukraine, this is one of their chief goals. It has been since the 90s. If they're able to completely ingest Ukraine, regardless of how many Americans,
don't care about Ukraine. They will care if Vladimir Putin starts strolling through the center of Kiev. And the same thing was true about Afghanistan. Look at the polls. Americans did not like that we were there in Afghanistan. You know what they liked even worse? When we withdrew in shame in September of 2021. When that happened, it absolutely cratered the Biden presidency.
If Ukraine were to be full scale taken over by the Russians, that'd be quite bad for the United States, for our allies, for NATO, for all the other countries that are along the borders of Russia and for international politics more generally. Because by the way, if Russia were able to completely ingest Ukraine.
The next step would very obviously be a blockade of Taiwan by the Chinese government. They would start to occupy the outlying islands. And so far, President Trump, when it comes to Taiwan, has said that if that were to happen, we'd hit them with tariffs. Okay, well, we're already hitting them with tariffs and it doesn't seem to be deterring them at all, as we'll get to in a moment. First, not everyone who handles your personal information is going to be as careful as you are. It only takes one mistake to expose it to hackers and identity theft. That's why
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Left-wing politicians in Washington have been trying to raise taxes on carried interest for years. They love America's tax rate to be higher than China, France, Germany, even Canada. Well, you don't
We don't want that to happen. American investment should stay in America, fueling the growth of businesses that create jobs and build communities. America's private equity investors directly support 13 million hardworking American jobs. It's time to take a stand for small business and speak up against tax increases on American investment. Tax hikes on carried interest are bad for the country. So what is carried interest? Basically, carried interest is the share of a profit of an investment that's paid to an investment manager
that is basically sort of an alternative investment bonus. So if you invest really well, then you get carried interest. And that carried interest then is taxed at a capital gains tax rate as opposed to a basic income tax rate. Why is that important? Because again, the way to incentivize better investment is in fact to keep the taxes low. Tax hikes on carried interest are bad for America, just like tax hikes generally are not good for the country. That is one of the reasons why you should care about all of this. This has been paid for by the American Investment Council.
So what exactly is the Trump administration approach with regard to Ukraine? It remains unclear. Russia continues to be intransigent. So Russia lies about their policies all the time. They are now ordering, quote unquote, a three day unilateral ceasefire in Ukraine, supposedly for next week, according to The New York Times. Of course, our last ceasefire, which was for Easter, really wasn't a ceasefire. They're flying drones the entire ceasefire. I know because I was over there.
According to the New York Times, the Kremlin said Russian forces would stop fighting on May 8th for 72 hours to mark the May 9th celebration of the Soviet Union's victory in World War II, which is a major holiday in Russia. In Russia, they do not celebrate the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which probably led to World War II in the first place. But put that aside, the Kremlin said during this period, all hostilities will cease. Russia believes the Ukrainian side should follow this example. And then Putin's spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said the declaration underlines our willingness to get on the path toward a peaceful resolution.
Well, no, it doesn't. If they wanted a 30-day ceasefire, they could do that literally right now, like today. They don't need these three-day fake ceasefires, which are obviously an attempt to slow play the Trump administration. By the way, the demands of the Russians still today include full demilitarization of Ukraine. According to the New York Post, Russia shamelessly demanded the U.S. lift its sanctions and that Kiev be demilitarized and recognize that 20% of Ukraine belongs to Russia.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov insisted on Monday that Russia will accept nothing less than total victory over Ukraine after Steve, after Steve Witkoff, the Trump special envoy. Again, the idea that Steve Witkoff has any sort of special negotiating expertise. I want to see one iota of evidence that this is the case because he seems to just travel around the world being taken in by various dictators, the Emir of Qatar or being taken in by Vladimir Putin, with whom he said he was striking up a friendship.
When asked by the Brazilian newspaper O Globo, what terms would Russia agree to come to the negotiation table with Ukraine? Lavrov then rattled off a list of items, quote, the international recognition of Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions as part of Russia as sovereign Russian territory. And then demilitarization. He insisted that basically Ukraine give up its military and also that at the same time, the West lift all the sanctions.
And they changed their constitution. OK, so in the Ukrainian constitution is a commitment to try to pursue entry into NATO. So they'd have to change their own constitution. So all of that says that the Russians are not interested whatsoever. I mean, there's no evidence of their desire for any serious peace negotiation here, because what Lavrov is saying here is obviously complete nonstarter. OK, but what is the U.S.'s perspective going to be here? Well, J.D. Vance, vice president of the United States,
He was on with our friend Charlie Kirk, and he says, if this doesn't stop, if the war doesn't stop, the Ukrainians won't win. Okay, well, that's true if you cut off support for them. And by the way, there are actually three possible outcomes. One would be heavy support to the Ukrainians, sufficient that they actually push Russia out of these areas. That's
That is a very unlikely outcome because it would require heavy levels of support the West is not willing to provide and risks the possibility of more Russian escalation. Then there is possible outcome number two, the most plausible outcome and the one that the West should be pursuing. And that is effectively a 1953 style Korean armistice, meaning the lines are drawn where they are drawn. The war ends. Ukraine remilitarizes, strengthens, and everybody moves forward.
OK, and then there's possibility number three, which is that Ukraine just completely collapses because the West withdraws. Here's the vice president.
If this doesn't stop, the Ukrainians aren't winning the war. I think there's this weird idea among the mainstream media that if this thing goes on for just another few years, the Russians will collapse, the Ukrainians will take their territory back, and everything will go back to the way that it was before the war. That is not the reality that we live in. If this thing goes on for another few years, we could have, you know, societies collapsing,
The demographics of both of these countries are a nightmare. You could have millions of more people killed if this thing goes on for another few years, and it can risk escalating into a nuclear war. Okay, so I have a question. What is the solution then? Because you need to get the Russians to the table. It takes two to tango. I mean, so I'm hearing Vance correctly assess that Ukraine is not going to be taking back Crimea or the Luhansk-Donetsk-Kyrgyzstan region anytime soon. That's true.
But what like in order for there to be a deal, the Russians need to come to the table. What is the thing that would drive the Russians to the table? So far, I'm not seeing it. And Steve Witkoff doesn't seem to be doing anything to actually to get the Russians to the table at all. Meanwhile, President Trump, over the course of the last 24 hours, has been saying that he believes there will be a deal with Iran.
Now, let me ask a very simple question. President Trump called the Obama deal with Iran, the JCPOA. He called it literally the worst deal in history. In history, he said it over and over and over. Here's President Trump saying it. I think the whole Iran deal is the dumbest deal that you can imagine. I think it's going to go down as one of the worst deals in the history of this country, maybe of the world.
Never, ever, ever in my life have I seen any transaction so incompetently negotiated as our deal with Iran. It's just unbelievable. I think it's the worst document I've ever seen as far as a negotiation is concerned. The Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.
Frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the United States, and I don't think you've heard the last of it. That horrible, disgusting, absolutely incompetent deal with Iran. I tell you what, I guarantee you that if I were president, this deal wouldn't be made. A deal would be made that's 100 times better. So what was that terrible deal that Obama cut with Iran? Well, it included the so-called P5 plus one.
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council, China, France, Russia, the UK, the US and Germany, P5 plus one and the EU are all signed in for the JCPOA, which is Obama's awful Iran deal. Again, not me saying it's an awful deal. President Trump saying it was an awful deal. What exactly did it do? Well, basically, it set a 10 year limit on the use of particular centrifuges.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations synopsis of the deal, Iran agreed not to produce either highly enriched uranium or plutonium that could be used in a nuclear weapon. And they said they were going to ensure that four downed Natanz and the Iraq facilities, which are their
their various nuclear facilities pursued only civilian nuclear energy. Now, let's be real about this. Iran doesn't need nuclear energy like at all. They're one of the most oil rich, natural gas rich regions on planet Earth. They are not technologically sophisticated. They are not interested in a green new revolution over there. The reason they are pursuing nuclear facilities is because they are pursuing nuclear weapons. Quite obviously, the JCPOA was supposed to limit the numbers and types of centrifuges that Iran could operate.
And the IAEA was supposed to somehow enforce that. They were going to be allowed to use their centrifuges to spin up to a certain level of purity in their uranium, enrichment in their uranium.
If you enrich uranium to 5%, that's good for like a nuclear power plant. At 20%, you can do it for a research reactor or medical purposes. You need 90% uranium enrichment in order to get to nuclear. So the idea was keep them to 5%. But the problem, of course, is that the spin up from 5% to 90% is actually quite fast. It doesn't take years to spin up uranium from 5% enrichment to 90% enrichment. The deal also got rid of sanctions on Iran, freed up them to use money for ballistic and terrorist activity, ballistic missiles and terrorist activity.
The IAEA was supposed to monitor them, but they weren't giving them full authority to see anything in Fordow or Natanz or any of the rest of their nuclear reactors. That's the deal that President Trump said was the worst deal ever. That's the deal. It also had a 10-year sunset that basically said after 10 years, all the sanctions are gone and Iran can develop nuclear weapons.
So it was clearly an awful deal. So the question right now is what deal is the Trump administration seeking to cut? And you hear a bunch of conflicting messages from the Trump administration. One of them, the only one that would be sufficient is complete denuclearization of Iran. No nuclear facilities, none. Why? Well, because why would you possibly trust the the militocracy in Iran not to lie about what they are doing with their nuclear facilities?
I mean, first of all, they don't even need to lie. We all know what they're doing with their nuclear facilities. You think they are really trying to power up their country on nuclear energy? That's their big priority in a country that can't even export oil right now? They have such an oil glut that their entire economy has basically cratered.
Because of the maximum pressure campaign of President Trump.
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So if you were to get rid of the sanctions and then to sign off on, well, they can have nuclear, but they can't actually have like nuclear nuclear. That is just the Obama deal. That's just Obama 2.0. Well, President Trump, after saying all that about the Obama nuclear deal, said yesterday that Iran deal is going to happen on the Iran situation. I think we're doing very well. I think the deal is going to be made there. That's going to that's going to happen. Pretty sure it's going to happen. Well,
We'll have something without having to start dropping bombs all over the place. OK, well, the problem with that, obviously, is that when the president says a deal will happen, we'll have something without dropping bombs all over the place. Well, I mean, first of all, it's not necessary for the United States to drop bombs all over the place.
I mean, I'm sure it'd be helpful to Israel, for example, if the United States were to lend some B2s for one sortie over Iran. And that could destroy the nuclear facilities and no, it wouldn't start a giant world war. Iran is so weak right now that after Israel destroyed their entire air defense system, they uselessly fired a bunch of missiles at Israel, which caused zero casualties. So this idea that Iran is like a sleeping giant waiting to awake if their nuclear reactors
are finished off is not true. That's not true whatsoever. And we also know that the United States actually has struck significant Iranian targets before with no actual serious blowback, including the killing of Qasem Soleimani during Trump administration number one. But if the Trump administration were to sign a crappy deal with Iran that would allow them a pathway to a nuclear weapon that allow them to open up their markets again, to reconstitute their terror network, that would not be good for the world either and would be bad for the Trump administration. And then there is China.
China continues to grow more and more aggressive. And this is where our trade policy comes in. So if the idea was that tariffs on China were somehow going to curb their aggressive intent, that is not yet in evidence at the very, very least. And again, there have been some mixed signals from the Trump administration on this. Remember, TikTok is still operating despite the fact that there is a congressional mandate for TikTok to come to power.
to an end, or at least be divested of its Chinese ownership. Right now, China is making aggressive moves in the South China Sea, according to the Washington Post. The Philippines and China have each unfurled their flags on a disputed reef claimed by both nations in the South China Sea, escalating tensions, reigniting hostilities over Beijing's expansive territorial claims in regional waters. Now, why does that matter? Well, because the South China Sea is the source of pretty much all shipping coming from the Far East to the rest of the world and vice versa.
So a lot of shipping moves through the South China Sea, I asked my friend and sponsor, perplexity. Approximately how much? And the answer is, according to estimates, one third of all global maritime trade, somewhere between 30 and 33 percent, passes through the South China Sea every year. That's
That's like $3.4 to $3.6 trillion worth of goods annually. It's particularly important for energy shipments, about 40% of all global petroleum products and 45% of crude oil transported by sea passed through the South China Sea. It's a crucial artery for China, Japan, South Korea, and many other Southeast Asian nations. The Chinese takeover of the South China Sea could effectively cut off the East from the West in a lot of very important ways, which is why I also asked for
perplexity about China targeting islands and land masses in the South China Sea. There are a couple of areas where China has been particularly heavy on this. One is called the Spratly Islands. They've apparently reclaimed land and built artificial islands on seven reefs in the Spratly Archipelago, equipping them with military installations, airstrips, ports, and surveillance equipment. There have also been recent standoffs, as we mentioned, at Sandy Cay, which is a small sandbar near Thitu Island, which is controlled by the Philippines. There's also the Paracel Islands,
China's controlled those since 1974, but they've been increasing their militarization. They've actually been attempting to build entire islands in the Spratlys in an attempt to maximize military presence there. Who controls the South China Sea has a bottleneck on global trade, which is one of the reasons why the Chinese are attempting to turn the South China Sea into essentially a Chinese lake.
Manila deployed Navy and Coast Guard ships Sunday to San D.K. and two neighboring islands where its national flag was planted, according to a statement and photos from its National Task Force for the West Philippine Sea. And that, of course, is a response to China's Coast Guard seizing the sandbank earlier this month and then planting their own flag on it. Now, again, China is moving aggressively to consolidate space in this entire area.
Figuring that if it can push the U.S. Navy further and further away from Taiwan, that will also solidify its opportunity to take Taiwan or blockade Taiwan, which would completely melt down the world economy, probably comparatively to China's benefit.
Now, again, the way that President Trump was attempting to deal with this was through a massive tariff on China. As I've said before, I'm totally on board with this. President Trump should be doing that. But you actually have to fulfill the preconditions before you do that. You have to make sure that you are economically ready for that, militarily ready for that. Your supply chains are in order and all the rest. The question is whether President Trump is actually doing that
this whole tariff process because he's trying to shut down China or because he has a sort of bizarre view of trade. So President Trump did an interview with the Atlantic. Now, again, I don't think the president should be doing interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg. I think Jeffrey Goldberg is the lowest of the low. He was an Obama stenographer. And reaching out to the Atlantic, I just don't see why. President Trump gave an interview to Jeffrey Goldberg in which he talked about his tariff plan. And here's how he discussed it. Quote,
Look, we lost trillions of dollars last year on trade with Biden, trillions of dollars. Every year we lose trillions, trillions, right? Hundreds of billions, but basically trillions. We went over the ledge into the T word. And I can't imagine it's sustainable to have a country that can lose that much money for years into the future. Okay. So first of all, it's not how trade deficits work. You're not losing money when you run a trade deficit any more than I lose money when I buy a product from the grocery store. That money comes back in the form of people buying treasuries, in the form of people investing in American companies, in the
in the form of them buying real estate. The money comes back just in a different way on capital services. There's all sorts of ways the money comes back. It just may not be on manufactured goods. He says, we're going to be very rich. We're going to make a lot of money. I don't think the answer is that it will affect me. It always affects you a little bit. I don't think there's certainly no theory like you say that if it hits a certain number, I don't know where it is today. How's the stock market?
And then he said, this is a transition period. It's a big transition. I'm resetting the table. I'm resetting a lot of years. Not from the beginning, you know. Our country was most successful from 1850 or so to think of this from 1870, really, from 1870 to 1913. And it was all tariffs. And then some great genius said, let's go and tax the people instead of taxing other countries.
So, again, that is a vision of tariffs that is very much in line with the idea that he just likes tariffs. And so what he's doing with China is actually more of a cover for his love of tariffs than it is about boxing in China. Either way, the markets are not responding particularly well to this. And again, the effect of the tariffs has not really hit yet. The empty ships are going to start arriving any moment now, according to Investors Business Daily.
The port of Los Angeles is now warning that there will be difficult decisions ahead as all the shipments from China cease. Again, it is one thing to cut off China at the knees. It's another thing to set up a trading system that actually in some ways benefits China comparatively, meaning that if the EU doesn't cut off China, but the United States does, if countries in Southeast Asia start reorienting toward China as opposed to the United States, that is not a win for the United States, particularly when the president is slamming those countries with their own tariffs.
According to Investors Business Daily, President Trump's trade war policies are expected to bring about a 35% decline in cargo arriving at the Port of L.A. by next week. That is according to the executive director, Gene Sirocco. His warning came during the port's Board of Harbor commissioners meeting April 24th.
With the executive director saying retailers and manufacturers typically put in orders to factories in Asia around three to four months in advance of shipments, Trump's 90-day pause on the broad reciprocal tariffs resulted in no real difference for businesses because everybody is sort of not sure what's going to happen, whether Trump puts those back in place or not. He added that U.S. exporters are getting hit hard by retaliatory tariffs amid Trump's trade war, and that includes agriculture, heavy-duty manufacturing, and information technology services.
Unions are starting to sound off, right? This is supposed to benefit manufacturing unions. But the Longshore and Warehouse Union came out with a very strong statement yesterday, quote-unquote, unequivocally condemning the recent tariffs the Trump administration has imposed. Tariffs are taxes. These and other reckless, short-sighted policies have begun to devastate American workers, harm critical sectors of the economy, and line the pockets of the ultra-wealthy at the expense of hardworking families. Prices for food, gas, household goods are rising due to tariffs. Again, this is a very strong statement from
a union, right? Those are the people that President Trump is supposedly attempting to protect with a lot of this tariff policy. Now, President Trump has also suggested that revenue from tariffs is going to somehow replace the income tax. Well, if that were to happen, basically, you'd have to increase tariffs on all incoming goods to the United States by 67% or something. You'd have to increase them to 67%. And then you'd have to assume no drop off in actual purchases in order to replace anything remotely like the income tax.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, Trump's statements point to a central riddle of his trade agenda, whether the point of higher tariffs is raising money or gaining leverage to strike better deals with trading partners, as some administration officials and congressional Republicans insist. But the idea that that we are going to be replaced. Listen, if we were able to replace the income tax and tariffs I had before it, it's just the math doesn't work. And so the biggest thing right now that matters for Republicans is getting this gigantic tax
big, beautiful bill done. It has to get done. It just has to, because if that falls through, if there is no preservation of the Trump tax cuts, the economy is going to free fall. So right now, Speaker Johnson is pushing for passage of the big, beautiful bill by Memorial Day, which is four weeks away. According to Politico, House Republicans will launch a legislative sprint when they return to Washington on Monday with key committees set to finally put GOP pledges on taxes, energy defense and border security into legislative text.
The problem is unclear if you can get everybody on board, including many of the conservatives in the caucus. Representative Darren LaHood of Illinois suggested his colleagues on the House Ways and Means Committee will not be ready to advance the tax portion of the bill until early June, which, of course, is way past the Memorial Day deadline. There's been a lot of infighting inside the House Republican caucus.
Meanwhile, Johnson is pushing to move quickly, but there are a lot of pitfalls ahead on spending. Republicans still haven't seen a plan to meet the shared goal of slashing $1.5 trillion in spending over the next 10 years. And some Republicans want that number to be even higher. But then you have some populist Republicans, say Josh Hawley in the Senate, who doesn't want to cut Medicaid at all, doesn't want to touch any of the entitlement programs. So it will take...
an act of political leisure domain. It will have to be basically political magic for Johnson and Thune to get something through. I think it will happen, but it's going to be a complex and difficult process, absolutely for sure. Okay, meanwhile, in other news, the media continue to melt down over the failures of 60 Minutes to basically allow the inmates to run the asylum. So 60 Minutes has had serious credibility and reporting problems for quite a while. It's a very biased program.
Sherry Redstone, who's the head of CBS's parent company, Paramount, has basically asked to screen or at least know what exactly 60 Minutes is talking about. And this caused Bill Owens, who was the show's executive producer, to resign because he basically said, if I don't get to run the show the way that I want, well, then I'm not going to run the show at all. Well, Scott Pelley, who is one of the faces of 60 Minutes, he did a monologue at the end of 60 Minutes on Sunday in which he ripped into management.
Stories we pursued for 57 years are often controversial. Lately, the Israel-Gaza war and the Trump administration. Bill made sure they were accurate and fair. He was tough that way. But our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways.
None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires. No one here is happy about it. But in resigning, Bill proved one thing. He was the right person to lead 60 Minutes all along. Well, was he, though? Was he? Because here is the thing.
You have Scott Pelley there saying they do a wonderful job with all these stories. Well, here was Leslie Stahl like two weeks ago asking a person who was literally in a Hamas tunnel, like kidnapped by Hamas in a Hamas tunnel, whether Hamas was nice to him or not. Just genius level journal. I can't imagine why Sherry Redstone was concerned about 60 Minutes. They were beating me and starving me. Do you think they starved you or they just didn't have food? No, I think they starved me and they would often eat in front of me and not offer me food.
I mean, what a crazy question from Leslie Stahl. Do you think that actually they were starving? Or maybe it was the Israelis starving them, which is why you were starving. Hamas has been stealing all the food aid coming in. It's the reason why Israel has now cut off the food aid. It's because Hamas was stealing all of it. And the only way to get the hostages free, presumably, is to actually cut off the supply. That's what 60 Minutes is. So what they're really mad about is the same thing that the Washington Post editors were mad about when Jeff Bezos was like, guys, by the way, you don't get to basically run whatever you want using an outlet that I own. So...
Again, 60 Minutes has been a wildly biased program for decades. They're getting what they deserve right now. And no, Bill Owens isn't a hero for standing up to management in any way, shape, or form. Already coming up, we'll get to a brand new study on the abortion pill that says the reverse of what many people on the left have been saying. Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member. If you're not a member, become a member. Use code ShapiroCheckout for two months free. On all annual plans, click that link in the description and join us.