Ep. 2195 - BACK TO WINNING: Trump Negotiates Tariff Deal With UK
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Okay, so in a moment, I'm going to get to President Trump's economic policy. And the markets are responding, of course, quite positively to a vast shift in the direction of the Trump economic policy, a directional change that I've been calling for since well before Liberation Day. I'm very happy about it as well. The reason that's very important is because right now, the right, Republicans, have a lot of running room. And one of the reasons they have a lot of running room is because the Democrats continue to be insane. I don't just mean they're insane in terms of their policy preferences.

Although many of those policy preferences are quite crazy. I mean, culturally speaking, the Democrats seem determined to do ridiculous things. People on the left in big cities continue to push ridiculous policies, imagery that is going to make them more unpopular, which gives Republicans a lot of running room. The latest sort of bizarre example, but it's symptomatic of a broader imagistic crisis inside the Democratic Party, comes courtesy of Times Square. So there is a brand new statue in

In Times Square, it is 12 feet tall. It is titled Grounded in the Stars by an artist named Thomas J. Price. What is this 12 foot tall statue that is grounded in the stars? Well, it appears to be a slightly to moderately overweight black woman wearing jeans that are too tight for her, a t-shirt that she got at Walmart, and staring angrily at the cashier at CVS. That's what it is. There is nothing about this that is aspirational. There's nothing about this that is inspiring.

This person is completely anonymous. We have no idea what makes her a hero or heroine. Apparently, just being kind of grumpy in front of a TSA agent is enough to make you one of the heroes of American society.

The statue was meant to be a stark contrast to two other statues in Duffy Square of Father Francis Duffy and George M. Cohen. George M. Cohen's statue, of course, is a tribute to the founder of the Great White Way, Broadway, George M. Cohen. And Father Duffy was a Canadian-American soldier, a Catholic priest, and a military chaplain who served in the 69th Infantry Regiment. And he served on the Western Front in France during World War I.

So Duffy Square is named for him. So these are actual, like kind of heroic and world changing figures. And this is meant to be a contrast because this person is just a person who might need a dose of Ozempic and apparently is kind of frumpy and mad and uninspiring. According to Ozempic,

the website for this particular work, the work was created with the idea of disrupting traditional ideas. Always when the left is constantly attempting to disrupt a traditional idea, maybe the traditional idea is good. Like you should have to do something heroic for us to build you a statue. It shouldn't just be a random black lady. Although I do understand that for the left,

The basic idea is that every hero of the past is actually a villain. And the only person who you could put up a statue to is a person who's completely anonymous, has no background, no bad social media posts, and never did anything. Those are the people to whom we should build statues. There's nothing from the statue that makes this person in any way important to anyone else. And yet, I guess this sort of self-centered statue is supposed to represent the future of America and the future of Western civilization.

Again, the work was created with the idea of disrupting traditional ideas of what a triumphant figure and challenges should be defined as. According to the website, Price's work offers viewers a unique opportunity to experience Times Square in a new light and share in a moment of personal reflection and empathy amidst the hyperactivity of the district. That's ridiculous. The whole thing is ridiculous. If you just want to see random people standing around in Times Square, you could do that with random actual humans. You don't need a 12-foot statue in order to accomplish this. It's silly.

But that silliness has an underlying depressing message to it, which is there is no such thing as heroism. There is no such thing as iconic status that can be achieved by accomplishment. Basically, the only thing worth worshiping is a bizarre narcissism of do-nothingism. So if that's the sort of stuff the left wants to embrace, the right has a lot of running room. They really do.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is out there with his own form of narcissism. So Bernie Sanders has been jetting around the country with Alexander Ocasio-Cortez doing these big rallies on behalf of socialism. Bernie appeared on Fox News with Bret Baier

And Brett Baer asked him, you know, we noticed that you spent like over $200,000 on private jet flights. And Bernie is unapologetic in his socialism. He's a good Soviet. He's a good Soviet commissar who has a Dasha out in the woods somewhere while everybody else is crammed into an apartment.

You've gotten criticized from other people. Free Beacon says Bernie Sanders spent $221,000 on private jets fighting the oligarchy tour paid for by friends of Bernie Sanders. That you've spent millions of dollars in campaign funds on private jet travel over the years. How do you push back on both of those things? When's the last time you saw Donald Trump during a campaign mode

at National Airport. No, no, no. It doesn't. But he's also not fighting the oligarchy. No. You run a campaign and you do three or four or five rallies in a week. The only way you can get around to talk to 30,000 people. Think I'm going to be sitting on a waiting line at United waiting, you know, while 30,000 people are waiting. That's the only way you can get around. No apologies for that. That's what campaign travel is about. We've done it in the past. We're going to do it in the future.

So that would be yes on the private trial. You think he's going to wait in line with you peons at the United counter? You think he's really going to do that now as somebody who travels a lot?

especially in the past few weeks. I've taken an awful lot of commercial airline travel, like a lot of it. I'm very tired because of it. But you know what Bernie could do? These rallies don't all have to be on the same day. He could actually schedule them out where he doesn't have to take private flights. But again, the rules don't apply to the elite socialists. They only apply to everybody else. Again, this sort of stuff is why the normie American turned toward the Trump administration. Another reason the normie Americans turned toward the Trump administration was because

given, again, pictorial status by what happened at Columbia yesterday. So yesterday over at Columbia University, the students decided they were going to take over the library again. And the administration really didn't do much about it.

According to the New York Times, dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, they're pro-Khamasniks, were taken into police custody on Wednesday evening after occupying part of the main library on Columbia University's campus in an attempt to rekindle the protest movement that swept the campus last spring. The protesters were wearing masks and keffiyehs. They burst through the security gate shortly after 3 p.m. They hung banners in the soaring main room of Butler Library's second floor. They renamed the space the Basel Arraj Popular University.

So who exactly was Basel al-Arash? Well, back in 2017, he was killed by the IDF. The IDF said at the time that he had been organizing terror attacks against Israelis. He was part of a terror cell, allegedly, planning to carry out attacks on Israeli targets. Inside his home, troops uncovered an M16 rifle, an improvised Carlos-style submachine gun. And not only that, the Palestinian Authority had arrested him for planning attacks against Israelis, and they imprisoned him for six months.

So again, they picked not the world's best martyrs for their examples. Here is some of the video from the protesters taking over the library. You can see they took over the entire library. They're occupying the entire central component of the library. They then started tussling with security. Again, all this is a violation of law. It is trespass. And if you decide that you're going to confront officers and try to harm them, it's assault as well. Here's some of the footage. You can see they're trying to push their way through the police.

trying to push their way through security, all masked, wearing the kefiz over their faces like terrorists. Just delightful people. This is at Columbia University, one of the most prestigious universities in America, a university that is under fire from the Trump administration, rightly so, for its violation of the Civil Rights Act. They wrote slogans like, Columbia will burn for the martyrs and free Palestine, all over library walls and shelves. So they committed all sorts of acts of vandalism as well. Here are some of the protesters vandalizing the library shelves.

So just spray painting, nobody in sight, where's security? No one knows. Okay, so eventually some of these people were arrested and then the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, put out a statement saying we're reviewing the visa status of the trespassers and vandals who took over Columbia University's library. Pro-Khmer thugs are no longer welcome in our great nation.

And what he means by that is if you came here on a student visa to support Hamas, you shouldn't be here, which seems pretty intuitively correct. The reason I bring all of this up before we get to trade policy is because the Trump administration, as I've been saying over and over and over since the inauguration,

has enormous amounts of work to do. Everything from DEI to the trans issue, everything from deregulation to building up our military defense. And the biggest thing that they have to do is make sure the economy keeps humming because Democrats have provided them with unique opportunity in my lifetime for Republicans to actually do things. Because guess what Americans don't like? They don't like images of CAFIA-swathed terror supporters vandalizing

Some of the most prestigious American universities, they don't like Bernie Sanders jabbering about how he gets to take a private jet while you're stuck in the third row at Southwest. Americans don't like dumb statues in the middle of Times Square. They're sort of degrading to the human spirit. They don't like this sort of stuff. So Republicans have a unique opportunity. And what that means is you can't blow it based on bad economic policy.

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So well before Liberation Day, I suggested that President Trump's giant tariff policies that he was proposing would be bad for the economy, that they would create supply chain problems, that they would not, in fact, achieve the goals that they were seeking to achieve in terms of reindustrialization. But that if tariffs were being used as a way to lower tariffs, if they were being used as a cudgel in order to get other countries to come back to the table and do better trade deals, they were acceptable and good.

Well, it's unclear exactly what the plan of the Trump administration was. I think the most accurate take is that President Trump really did want to do full-scale Liberation Day tariffs, and then the stock market plummeted. And President Trump, as I've said before, is a man who lives in the world of reality. And so if he sees a bad headline, he sticks and he moves. This is what the stock market has been betting on pretty much all along. It's why, as soon as he put out a tweet basically revoking a large swath of the tariffs, the stock market started to jump again. It's the reason why when Secretary Scott Besant

Secretary of the Treasury goes on TV, the stock markets feel a lot better. And when Peter Navarro, Dullard, or Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, go on TV and talk about tariffs, the markets start to get a little bit worried. Well, President Trump has now announced the first big trade deal

And that is a good thing. Because again, if we were to leave the current trade barriers in place, according to Yale's budget lab, consumers would face an overall effective tariff rate of 28%. That is the highest since 1901. 1901. Now, a huge amount of that tariff is coming vis-a-vis China. However, all these other countries where we put a 10% tariff rate on them, many of those countries were like a 2% tariff rate. So that is still a vast increase. So President Trump today,

He announced that he had this earth-shaking deal with the UK. Here's what he had to say. I just want to begin by saying that this is a very special day because it's Victory Day, World War II, May 8th. And just by...

happenstance. We have the Prime Minister on the phone, and we were great allies in that. And it's very unusual that the trade deal comes due, and we signed it up on the same day that we had a great victory, the greatest victory of them all. So we are talking more and more about Victory Day because we were a big part of it, and so was the UK. And it's just, I guess, I don't know what you call it. It's just

Incredible that that day is the same day that we signed a tremendous trade deal for both countries. So I'm going to begin by just adding that we just concluded the rare earth deal with Ukraine. That's been fully ratified and approved by their legislative branches. And so we appreciate that. And I'll be speaking with the president in a little while, a little bit later. And we appreciate that. But the deal is all now signed up and ratified.

And we have access to a massive amount of very, very high quality rare earth. So what exactly is in the deal? Well, it is not a full scale trade agreement because it takes a long time to actually negotiate a full scale trade agreement. It really is sort of a framework. The framework is not as extensive as I would like it to be in terms of actual policy. It doesn't immediately lower all the tariff rates down to zero, which I think would be the best policy. It lowers tariff rates on certain automotive goods, some steel products,

It appears to leave a baseline 10% tariff. Again, I don't think this is the best possible trade policy, but directionally, and the reason the markets are responding is because what they are seeing is that President Trump, if the economy looks to be sinking, is going to adjust and reverse himself.

And you're seeing this across a wide variety of Trumpian policy. So, for example, there are a bunch of articles that came out over the course of the last 72 hours all about how tariffs on Chinese goods were really harming young families because a lot of the products that are coming in and being tariffed are oriented toward kids and babies.

As the Washington Post pointed out, virtually every car seat, stroller, bassinet, and changing table sold in the United States is made in China, making children's products industry among the most vulnerable to fast-rising costs and shortages. Well, again, if you look at the actual statistics, 98% of all car seats are made in China, 97% of all strollers are made in China, beds, bassinets, play yards, changing tables, 94%, high chairs, 92%. So that's a problem for young families. So President Trump saw that headline,

And his first move was to say that he was going to try to make exceptions for that. He was in the Oval Office and he was asked about exemptions. He said, I'll think about it. I don't know. I want to make it nice and simple. He said he doesn't want so many exemptions that it creates confusion. But he said that he would look into it. And Scott Besson, Treasury Secretary, was testifying before the House Financial Services Committee. And he was asked about it. And he said it's under consideration. So, again, the markets are looking for President Holt to punch holes through his own tariff regime.

And President Trump is doing this repeatedly. So to take another example, there's been a lot of debate over export controls on things like NVIDIA chips. So the idea is NVIDIA chips are the most sophisticated chips that are out there. We have to prevent China from getting them because otherwise China will use them. But NVIDIA is arguing that it doesn't matter, that China is going to find a way to get those chips anyway.

that China is developing other ways of sort of brute forcing the chips. And that actually the best thing you can do is make China dependent on NVIDIA chips because NVIDIA is a unique company. Jensen Huang, who is the head of the company, has oriented NVIDIA so they are redesigning their chips every six months or so. Like they come up with a new chip really, really, really fast. So the minute that a chip hits the market, it gets consumed by the market. But the market,

can't just be gamed by China because NVIDIA is already ahead of the market. So his argument is we'll dominate the Chinese. We'll just keep pumping out new chips and they'll be reliant on American know-how. And that will mean that they can't sort of develop alternative pathways in the same way that the United States has become reliant in some crucial ways and bad ways on supply lines from China. We should make China reliant on crucial supply lines from the United States is the argument that NVIDIA is making.

There's an article by Aaron Ginn in the Wall Street Journal all about this, talking about what he calls the self-defeating AI export controls. He says, in efforts to maintain America's head start, U.S. policymakers are targeting graphics processing unit access and semiconductor tooling with the regime of ever-expanding export controls with an emphasis on restricting Chinese GPU acquisition. That focus misses the point.

Exporting hardware is not the same as exporting capability. Cutting off China's access to American chips might have slowed model development, but it also sharpened Beijing's skill at diffusion in another way. China now leads the world in open source AI. That lead has emerged under the constraints imposed by U.S. policymakers. What America blocks temporarily in outputs like models and enables permanently in inputs like chips.

If AI is eating the world, says Erringen, we must ensure it eats on American hardware and resources. The US should be flooding the world with American GPUs in a concerted way. Untargeted export controls don't stop adversaries. They do punish allies and accelerate technical independence from American frameworks. The American strategy should be simple. Let every aligned country run on NVIDIA, Silicon, and American standards. Biden-era restrictions are targeting an enormous number of countries. Allies like Switzerland, India, Portugal, Israel, and Argentina.

Mexico, which assembles our GPU servers, requires U.S. approval to transfer or re-export those services. So the Trump administration heard the message. And now, apparently, President Trump is openly considering a plan to overhaul regulations that will limit AI chips and their distribution in foreign countries. The Commerce Department plans to replace the rule, which imposed caps on how many chips could go to countries like India, Switzerland, Mexico and Israel.

Because again, the idea is that if you're a third party country, you should be basically using American AI chips. You shouldn't be using Chinese made AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, the decision is at least temporarily a boon for tech titans who have fought the rules and been buffeted by a wave of export restrictions in recent years.

So, again, the Trump administration is constantly sort of experimenting. They try a thing. If it doesn't work, they don't do the thing anymore. This is the benefit of having a non-ideological president. It's also the detriment of having a non-ideological president because sometimes that means that you experiment with some pretty bad ideas. Speaking of which, one of the bad ideas that the Trump administration is now experimenting with. Again, there's a lot of good news now starting to come out from the Trump administration. Deregulation. The tax bill seems to be moving forward in the Congress, which is a must.

And of course, with the UK trade deal, there's a reorientation of the American economy toward free trade. Again, we are moving back in that direction, which is why markets rose again because it's a non-ideological administration. President Trump is also playing with some rather bad ideas. So, for example, according to Politico, President Trump now plans to revive an effort to dramatically slash drug costs by tying the amount the government pays for medicines to lower prices abroad.

So next week, he's expected to sign an executive order directing aides to pursue an initiative called Most Favored Nation for a selection of drugs within the Medicare program. The goal would be to force prices down.

So the basic idea would be that if Canada is buying certain drugs in the American market at a lower price than American insurance companies are paying for it, then American insurance companies or Medicaid should basically be paying the same price as the Canadians. The problem for this, of course, is that we should be doing the opposite. If we were actually going to make a gain from a tariff war with, say, Canada, what we should be doing is saying that you guys are artificially lowering the actual amount that you are paying for these drugs.

The United States is footing the bill for all of the R&D on these drugs. American consumers are footing the bill for that with higher prices, and they're subsidizing places like Canada and the UK and every place else that is actually buying American drugs. They are getting a below market price, and we in the United States are paying an above market price. We should force those countries to actually pay the market price. We should not allow them to collectively bargain using their state status against the drug companies in the United States if they wish to have

lower trade barriers with the United States. Instead, the Trump administration is messing around with what is effectively a Bernie Sanders proposal. This again is not a particularly good proposal with regards to drug pricing policy. And so I would hope that that one also is met with market disquiet so that President Trump moves off of it

As the Wall Street Journal points out, Medicaid already receives hefty discounts for drugs under statutory formulas that require manufacturers to kick back a share of a medicine's price to states in a rebate. Medicaid rebates in 2023 amounted to 52% of the program's drug spending. Drugs accounted for less than 4% of Medicaid spending in 2023. The Fed spent 10 times more on hospital payments. Even if Republicans required drug makers to give away medicines to Medicaid, savings would not come close to the kind of savings that Republicans are looking for in the tax bill.

And what this would actually lead to if Medicaid crams down these prices is fewer companies actually just selling to Medicaid. They just move into the private markets. And so it undermines the efficacy of Medicaid, whatever efficacy there is. So again, I think President Trump sticks and moves based on the success of a policy. That sometimes means he proposed some not particularly useful policies. Meanwhile, IR is rising again inside the Trump administration because the Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, announced yesterday that he would not, in fact, be lowering the interest rates.

I agree with him. We should be in wait and see mode at this point. We don't know the impact of the tariffs. Policies have long tails. Frameworks for negotiations are not, in fact, long form trade deals. And so one of the things you do have to worry about if you're President Trump is an inflationary economy. Inflation killed the Biden presidency. It could easily kill the Trump presidency if we were to, for example, lower the interest rates in the middle of a supply chain crisis brought on by much higher tariffs. Here was Jerome Powell explaining his decision yesterday.

In support of our goals, today the Federal Open Market Committee decided to leave our policy interest rate unchanged. The risks of higher unemployment and higher inflation appear to have risen, and we believe that the current stance of monetary policy leaves us well positioned to respond in a timely way to potential economic developments.

Well, again, what he's doing here is he's saying, listen, we want to keep that bullet in the chamber. If the economy takes a serious downturn, we want to be able to lower the interest rates. We don't want to preemptively lower the interest rates into an inflationary economy before we have to do any of that. He said, we don't feel like we need to be in a hurry. We feel like it's appropriate to be patient.

When things develop, we have a record. We can move quickly when that is appropriate. He points out that uncertainty about the economy is elevated. That, of course, is true. Again, I think that the markets are correctly assessing that President Trump is moving away from his gigantic trade war against the rest of the world. However, that doesn't mean uncertainty has gone away by any stretch of the imagination. Here was Jerome Powell yesterday.

My gut tells me that uncertainty about the path of the economy is extremely elevated and that the downside risks have increased. The risk is, as we pointed out in our statement, the risks of higher unemployment and higher inflation have risen, but they haven't materialized yet. They're really not in the data yet.

Okay, so again, he's right that they're not in the data yet, but the sort of danger is that the data is always a trailing indicator. So for example, we know that many, many, many ports are empty right now. Like the Port of Seattle is basically receiving no ships. And we know that there are a bunch of blank ships, blank sails as they're called, that are arriving at ports with nothing on them. That has not yet kind of sunk into the economy or passed through the economy. And so to preemptively lower the interest rates

While supply chains are strained would be exactly the same thing that Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve did during the Biden administration. That'd be a mistake. COVID created supply line problems, supply chain problems, and then Jerome Powell and company continued to lower those interest rates. And that helped create the super bubble in terms of pricing in the United States. So that's the thing that they are attempting to avoid right now.

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Well, meanwhile, Doge continues to uncover serious waste, fraud, and abuse. The Daily Wire has a fascinating piece. Lou Groziak, our intrepid investigative reporter, has a pretty amazing piece, Where Our Money Was Going Via USAID.

According to Luke, when Department of Government Efficiency aides showed up at a small USAID-linked federal agency called the African Development Foundation in March, its management locked the doors and refused to let them in. A fired board member sued to stop Doge. The group was lauded for resisting Doge's demands for access to U.S. ADF systems, including financial records, payments, and human resources systems. But according to several former employees, it may have been that the actual objection was something else entirely.

that the actual objection was that there was a bit of impropriety going on, shall we say. According to Luke,

The African Development Foundation has an annual annual budget of just 45 million bucks. But operating out of sight and out of mind, it might have been the most corrupt agency in Washington, D.C., as employees have been sounding the alarm for years about a culture of self-dealing abuse, anti-white discrimination. By law, the agency is only allowed to give grants to Africa based groups, but to move money through African entities and then back into the United States to pad the salaries of D.C. bureaucrats and pay friends and former employers, according to employees.

Until the Doge takeover, which culminated in U.S. Marshals ordering building security to let Trump administration officials in, the agency was led by CEO Travis Adkins, who arrived in 2021 after working at USAID. An assistant to Adkins said after she asked why her paycheck was lower than agreed upon, Adkins informed her the remainder would be coming from an overseas account. According to this woman, Adkins sent me an email connecting me with a guy in Africa who asked for my banking information, and then that guy wired me $17,000.

All of this is really, really sketchy and has led to accusations of international money laundering.

And there is indeed an enormous amount of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. Doge has been uncovering it. Are those the kind of numbers that are going to be sufficient to cure the national deficit or the national debt? No, but it's a step in the right direction. Meanwhile, information continues to emerge about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the hero of the left, who was visited by a national sitting United States senator, supposed victim of the Trump administration. Now, according to Breitbart News,

Kilmer Abrego Garcia is being investigated by the DOJ after a convicted human smuggler told the FBI that he hired Abrego Garcia to smuggle illegal immigrants into the United States, according to a new report. So you guys picked the wrong victim. Again, the Democrats are apparently utterly incapable of saying two things at once. Kilmer Abrego Garcia should not be in the country and seems to be a quite bad person.

And also, everybody is entitled to some level of due process. Now, to be fair, Republicans are also having a difficult time holding those two thoughts in place at the same time. So the Democrats are like, no, he's probably wonderful. He has a Maryland father. And then it turns out that he has been for years accused of being an MS-13 gang member. And his wife made repeated police reports about him beating her and sought orders of protection against him. And the DHS released a piece of body cam footage from 2022,

where troopers pull over Abrego Garcia, and there were nine people inside the car, none of whom had luggage, which looks a lot like a smuggling operation. But again, because everything is stupid, we can't hold two ideas at once. So Senator Lankford from Oklahoma said,

He has come under fire, James Lankford, for saying the obvious here, which is that Kilmer Abednego Garcia should not be in the country. And also, even illegal immigrants have certain rights to due process. That does not amount to like a full jury trial. Typically, before you're deported, you have a hearing before a judge and then we and then we throw you out. That's what due process amounts to. Here was Lankford.

What's been confusing on this is some people see due process like as an American citizen. That's a right to a jury trial. That's all those different things. That's not true for due process for someone who's not a citizen of the United States. It's a different process. It's often just literally what people call an immigration judge.

is not a typical federal judge or a state judge. This is someone that's in the bureaucracy, that their task for DHS is that task on it. So they're a government employee career that's an immigration judge. So it's a very different process for it. But yes, there is a need to be able to give an opportunity for someone to be able to make an argument before they're removed in the country.

Okay, so apparently this is too much. This very, very moderate statement that Lankford is making here, which is saying that there are actual procedures for deporting people and you're supposed to follow those procedures and a court will hold that.

This was apparently too much for some people on the right who were angry and fuming. Katzherd, who, again, amazing to me that a person who calls himself Katzherd has wide, apparently, appeal and also impact inside the MAGA movement. But, you know, we live in a brand new world where all voices are considered equally wise. He said, I'm so sick of these fake ass weak cowards in the Republican Party running to fake news CNN to undermine the voters and the president.

How is that undermining the voters and the president? Seriously. Lankford is in favor of the deportations. He's just saying that if you actually want to accomplish this, you have to follow the process because otherwise courts will stop you, which is true.

Like, I'm sorry, but the idea that Lankford is some sort of traitor for saying the obvious, which is that pursue a good policy in the most precise possible way in order to achieve success. If you want President Trump to succeed, then you can totally agree with his ends and also believe that the means that he is applying to achieve those ends need to be well calibrated.

I can totally agree with what he's attempting to do with China while believing that the way he's approaching it is the wrong way and probably destined to backfire. When it comes to illegal immigration, I can praise the means and the ends when it comes to the southern border. He's been unbelievable on that. The administration has been incredible on that. I can praise Tom Holman to the skies. I think he's great. Our borders are.

I can praise what Kristi Noem is doing, generally speaking. I can also say, I think we should say, that actually due process rights under the Constitution, as the courts have already ruled, requires some form of process before people are removed. And the Trump administration is best served by expediting all those processes to remove people faster. Because otherwise you're going to end up in court interminably fighting these battles for no apparent reason. There's plenty of stuff the administration can do to facilitate deportation.

including, by the way, cracking down on sanctuary cities. The acting ICE director yesterday mentioned that the Trump administration is going to start going after sanctuary cities. Here's the acting ICE director, a man named Todd Lyons. So we're going to support men and women in law enforcement. We're going to go out and take these public safety threats out of the communities. Well, when people like the governor of Illinois bar law enforcement from working with another law enforcement agency, it just absolutely makes no sense. Sanctuary laws just make it so hard for us.

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Again, applying the law equally and consistently is a very, very good idea. Applying it inconsistently

You know, policies being applied in wild fashion does not actually achieve the goal. And I'm all about results. I just want to see the results. Listen, when President Trump was running, a lot of people were talking about the character of President Trump or what is he like as a person or any of that. To me, when you look at your politicians, that stuff should be basically irrelevant at this point in time. We are well beyond the point in American history since the Clinton era where character was the deciding factor in presidential elections. Just as not, it isn't. That's why Mitt Romney wasn't president in 2012.

The thing that matters most right now is does the plumber fix the toilet? That's it. So it matters very little to me whether the plumber intends to fix the toilet and then proceeds to botch the job. All I care about is whether the toilet is fixed. So President Trump wants to fix the toilet. In many areas, he is fixing the toilet that is Washington, D.C. But in places where I think he's going about it the wrong way, I'd prefer that he do it better so the toilet gets fixed. And I don't think that pointing that out is a critique of Trump as a president or as a human.

I think it is an attempt to call for the right direction to be taken to achieve the actual goals. If you want Trump to succeed, the only thing that succeeds is actual success. And meanwhile, on the foreign front, India versus Pakistan continues to heat up.

According to Sadhanand Dume, writing for The Wall Street Journal, the drumbeat to impending war in the Indian subcontinent just got a lot louder. India said early on Wednesday it has conducted military strikes on nine terrorist infrastructure sites in Pakistan and Pakistan administered Kashmir in retaliation for a terrorist attack that killed more than two dozen civilians, mostly Indian tourists in Kashmir on April 22nd.

Pakistan then called the Indian moves act of war and vowed to retaliate. Again, they've been effectively at war, India and Pakistan, since their partition, which took place in 1947, by the way. It's always amazing that you hear people say, well, Israel is a fake state. India and Pakistan literally were created out of the British mandate the same exact time. And nobody ever says that. Anyway, side point.

Dealing with Pakistan, as this columnist says, an unstable nation brimming with armed jihadists is a serious challenge for India. New Delhi has to find a way to deter Pakistan army-backed jihadist groups that shelter under Pakistan's nuclear umbrella while factoring in Islamabad support from China, which Pakistan calls its iron brother. The West also has a Pakistan problem because it's unclear whether Pakistan is a sort of anti-terror ally. Not really, but sometimes they help out. Or whether they're an actual enemy of the United States.

It's a very complicated situation, obviously. President Trump, he says the obvious here. He would like for this to stop before it escalates into nuclear war. I get along with both. I know both very well. And I want to see them work it out. I want to see them stop. And hopefully they can stop now. They've gone tit for tat. So hopefully they can stop now. But I know both. We get along with both countries very well. Good relationships with both. And I want to see it stop. And if I can do anything to help, I will be there.

Okay, that is the right approach, obviously. Now, again, I think that that approach is being taken by China as well, neither China nor the United States.

China backing Pakistan, the United States largely backing India, although we do have security arrangements with Pakistan. Nobody wants this escalating further. But as I said yesterday, this is just a great object lesson in why nuclear proliferation among really sketch countries is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea, which brings us to the latest with regard to Iran. So the administration continues to send wildly mixed signals about what a good Iran deal would look like. President Trump has been pretty consistent.

that the Iranian government cannot have nuclear capacity. But it's unclear whether they mean to allow some sort of civilian nuclear capacity.

Just to be clear, if you're building nuclear capacity under a mountain, I don't believe that you are doing so because you need nuclear energy in oil-rich Iran. The only reason you're attempting to build nuclear facilities in Iran is because you want to nuke. That is the only reason. Because it turns out one of the great guarantors of the longevity of your regime is a nuclear weapon. North Korea only exists as the hellhole that it is because it has a nuclear weapon. That is the only reason.

Because under the crazy man theory, the idea is that if ever there was an attempt at regime change, both internal or external in North Korea, which is the worst place on planet Earth, that if that happened, then a nuclear weapon might get fired. There's a reason why the worst people are pursuing nuclear weapons right now. So if the Trump administration is moving toward some sort of Obama 2.0 deal with Iran, that is a full scale disaster area. And obviously that's what Iran wants. Iran is very good at this game. The phrase in the Middle East that's often used about Iran is that they never win a war or lose a peace.

which is a pretty good description. The attempt the other day by Iran to tell the Houthis to stop hitting American shipping in the Red Sea so as to get the United States to stop hitting the Houthis and also to create some sort of warm feeling between the Iranians and the United States before upcoming nuclear negotiations. The region sought for what it really was, which was an attempt to separate off the United States from its allies in Israel.

With the hope that that would extend, that logic would then extend to an Iranian nuclear deal where basically the United States said, well, you know, if you develop ballistic missile technology or if you develop terror connections or even if you develop nuclear weapons, but you're aiming it mostly at like Israel, then whatever, we don't really care.

The problem with that philosophy is that a nuclear-armed Iran means a nuclear-armed Saudi. It means a bristling nuclear-armed Israel. Israel, of course, already has nuclear weapons, which is one of the reasons it has survived so long in a region surrounded by hundreds of millions of people who wish to exterminate it. But proliferation among non-allied countries with the United States is generally a very bad thing. It's the only reason you care about the border between India and Pakistan today. So the sort of mixed signals that are being sent by the administration with regard to an Iran deal

Here's what a good Iran deal would look like. Seriously, what a good Iran deal would look like. The kind of deal that would allow for an off ramp from any sort of strike on Iran. This is the only form of a good Iran deal. Iran completely dismantles all nuclear capacity inside its country. They do not need nuclear energy. And America has inspectors on the ground watching it.

Those two things, that's what a good deal looks like. Anything short of that is a bad deal, period, end of story. Any sort of Obama deal where they still have civilian nuclear enrichment, they can just ramp into high gear the minute that the United States is not looking. Foreign inspectors from Russia, for example, or the IAEA, that is not going to be sufficient. And whether the United States takes part in a strike or not, it's certainly not going to be sufficient for Israel, which sees correctly an Iranian nuclear weapon as an existential threat.

Well, we should always remember in all of this that when it comes to Middle Eastern policy, whatever the questions are about the Trump administration's approach, they will never be as bad as the Biden administration was. A brand new investigation has found that the, you remember that floating Gaza pier? Remember this? The Biden administration decided that they were going to try to create a humanitarian aid pier in the Mediterranean, the dumbest idea of all time. It turns out it left 62 US personnel injured, one service member dead and caused $31 million in damage to military equipment

and basically ended up distributing very, very low amounts of aid because it was really stupid. And that aid ended up being hijacked by Hamas anyway. So slow clap once again for the Biden administration, the worst foreign policy administration of my lifetime. All right, folks, the show continues now, but only behind the paywall. We're going to get to Disneyland and Disney. Are they the biggest hypocrites in human history? I mean, they have to be pretty close at this point.

When you become a member, by the way, you get all sorts of goodies, not just the extras of the show. You're also going to get all access live where you hang out with me and Matt Walsh's movies and all access live with him and stuff with Jordan and stuff with all of our hosts, all of our other movies like Run, Hide, Fight. Tons of good stuff. If you're not a member, become a member. Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.

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