Ep. 2207 - Can Trump STOP World War III?
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Folks, tons to get to on today's show. The Russians are threatening further action in Ukraine. The Chinese are threatening Taiwan. The Iranians are threatening to go nuclear. And President Trump may be the man who can stop all of it. But first, 40% off new Daily Wire Plus annual memberships. That ends soon. This is where you stream all your favorite daily shows ad-free from the most trusted voices in conservative media. Plus, they'll also unlock our full entertainment library, including Dr. Peterson's brand new series, Parenting. Head on over to dailywireplus.com, use code DW40 to join now and save 40% on

all new annual memberships. Well, of course, this weekend marked Memorial Day, a grave occasion when we actually have the opportunity to honor our fallen warriors. And that means that it's time to take a look at where the United States currently stands in the world geopolitically. Well, the presidents of the United States, Donald Trump, did a couple of things over the weekend. One of them, great. One of them, not so good. We'll start with the not so good. He put out a statement on Memorial Day, and he's fond of doing this, putting out these statements on

on sort of national holidays or national days off in which he rips into his political opposition. He did that on Memorial Day as well, which again, isn't the best look because it's Memorial Day. He put out a statement saying, happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds who allowed 21 million people to illegally enter our country, many of them being criminals and the mentally insane, through an open border that only an incompetent president would approve.

and through judges who are on a mission to keep murderers, drug dealers, rapists, gang members, and released prisoners from all over the world in our country so they can rob, murder, and rape again, all protected by these USA-hating judges who suffer from an ideology that is sick and very dangerous for our country. A Melvillian sentence there from the President of the United States. Again, on Memorial Day, it isn't a happy Memorial Day. It's actually not the proper greeting. But in any case, the actual good thing that he did was, of course, he gave a speech at Arlington in which he discussed our national heroes. Here's what he had to say.

Every Gold Star family fights a battle long after the victory is won. And today, we lift you up and we hold you high. Thank you, thank you, thank you for giving America the brightest light in your lives. It's what you've done. We will never, ever forget our fallen heroes, and we will never forget our debt to you.

So, again, that's the proper tone for Memorial Day. All of this part and parcel of a broader discussion as to what America's foreign policy should look like. And it is kind of unclear what the Trump doctrine is at this point in time. J.D. Vance, just before the weekend, spoke at the Naval Academy.

At the Naval Academy, he spoke at length about what he sees the Trump doctrine as. And there's a lot of wiggle room here as to what exactly he means. I think that Vice President Vance likes to use the Iraq war as sort of the bugaboo to attack

any ideology that he does not find particularly good for American foreign policy, that's fine. But you're going to be hard pressed to find anybody who, knowing all we know now, would go back in time and do the Iraq war again. So I'm not sure who he's arguing against here, aside from a very, very small coterie of people who refuse to acknowledge the reality, which is that we didn't find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that the occupation did not go the way that it should have gone and all the rest. In any case,

Vice President Vance is laying out what he sees as the Trump administration's foreign policy. And so what he suggests is that President Trump's visit to the Middle East, in which he visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE, was designed in sort of recapitulating an American foreign policy that is based on a realistic assessment of what the world looks like. Here was the vice president of the United States. But I actually think the most significant part of that trip is that it signified the end of

of a decades-long approach in foreign policy that I think was a break from the precedent set by our founding fathers. We had a long experiment in our foreign policy that traded national defense and the maintenance of our alliances for nation building and meddling in foreign countries' affairs, even when those foreign countries had very little to do with core American interests.

Now, again, he's arguing here presumably against the war in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan is a bit of a different story since originally the war in Afghanistan was launched on the back of 9-11. So it was, in fact, a core American national interest to defenestrate the regime that had protected Osama bin Laden in the aftermath of the murder of 3,000 Americans. And obviously, there are many different iterations of American foreign policy, many of them bad, very few of them actually wonderful.

Obviously, the United States got involved in a war in Libya and overthrowing the Libyan regime that I opposed and thought was wrong. The United States got involved in the war in Syria in sort of bizarre ways, the civil war in Syria. The United States has been involved in a wide variety of conflicts all over the world. And so this requires more specific definition. So J.D. Vance suggests the vice president of the United States that the American foreign policy has to be focused on our pure adversaries encountering them. Here's what he had to say.

Our government took its eye off the ball of great power competition and preparing to take on a peer adversary. And instead, we devoted ourselves to sprawling, amorphous tasks, like searching for new terrorists to take out while building up far away regimes. Now I want to be clear, the Trump administration has reversed course. No more undefined missions. No more open-ended conflicts. We're turning

returning to a strategy grounded in realism and protecting our core national interests. Now this doesn't mean that we ignore threats, but it means that we approach them with discipline and that when we send you to war, we do it with a very specific set of goals in mind. And consider how this played out in just the last major conflict we engaged in with the Houthis over in the Middle East.

We went in with a clear diplomatic goal, not to enmesh our service members in a prolonged conflict with a non-state actor, but to secure American freedom of navigation by forcing the Houthis to stop attacking American ships. And that's exactly what we did.

OK, we can pause it right there. Now, again, the vice president would go on to suggest that the shift in thinking from ideological crusades to a principled foreign policy restores the credibility of America's deterrence in 2025 and beyond. And the Houthi example is a very interesting one for him to use here, because the reality is that the Houthis have not actually ceased their activities in the Red Sea.

Originally, we did not define our battle against the Houthis as simply restoring deterrence with regard to Houthi attacks on American ships. The goal was to restore freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. The goal was to ensure that people could use the Red Sea and the Suez Canal again in order to ship things, including oil and LNG, from the region.

That has not, in fact, been restored. And let's be clear about this. The Houthis are still shooting a couple of missiles a day over Saudi Arabian airspace at Israel. They're still shooting at a wide variety of ships in the Red Sea and shipping has still not been restored in the Red Sea. So the question becomes when we are articulating a foreign policy, and I agree on a sort of surface level with everything that the vice president is saying right here. I don't disagree with anything that he's saying. But the use of the Houthis is kind of a telling example because.

One of the things that is sort of an open battle in the administration that we all need to keep our eye on is what this sort of language obscures. What is the actual policy of the Trump administration? Is it a policy that makes sure to actually set red lines that are keepable when the vice president suggests, for example, that every mission has to have an exit strategy with an end in sight? Here's what he said, just to quote him.

Past leaders, center service members on mission after mission with no exit strategy, no end in sight, and with little articulation for the American people or for the war fighters about what we were doing. When we extend the deployment of an aircraft carrier, that has real impact on people's lives and we're aware of it. They miss their families, of course they miss their loved ones and their home life.

They accept that sacrifice, and that's the job that you've taken on. But the job that we have taken on is to never misuse that sacrifice or never ask you to do something without a clear mission and a clear path home.

Okay, now again, all that sounds really nice. The reality is that foreign policy is a lot messier than that. So for example, the United States currently has troops stationed in South Korea. Why? That is an open-ended conflict. There's an armistice with North Korea. And the United States is in fact maintaining the peace in the region between South Korea and North Korea by having a trigger force there. The United States still has military bases in Japan. Why? Presumably to deter a Chinese takeover of the South China Sea.

The United States still has overflight and overwatch power over the Middle East. Why? To ensure the free flow of oil, for example, and to prevent, I assume, the nuclearization of Iran. I mean, that's something that President Trump has said himself. This kind of

Easy notion that the United States can simply in pinpoint fashion define our conflicts and get in and get out is not the way actual foreign policy really works. And it very often is the predicate for a bad argument about how the United States needs to spend less on, for example, military development. Right now, the United States spends approximately 3.7 percent of our GDP on military.

That is actually historically low. So I turn to our friends and sponsors over at Perplexity to ask a quick question. How much has the United States defense spending declined as a percentage of GDP since 1900? And as Perplexity points out, defense spending was actually quite low in the United States other than in World War I for the period 1900 to 1930. And the reason for that is because the empire upon which the sun never set was not the American empire. It was actually the British empire at the time.

We had a spike to about 4% of GDP during World War I. Then spending went up to 40% of GDP during World War II. And then during the Cold War and Vietnam era, 50s through 70s, we saw sustained high spending typically between 7% and 10% of GDP. During the 80s, because of the defense buildup that ended up crushing the Soviet Union, we were spending about 6.8% of GDP.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, we dropped down to about 3.5% of GDP, went up slightly during the War on Terror to 4.5% of GDP. Now we're at 3 to 3.5%. So bottom line is this. If you believe that we are now living in a much more dangerous world than we were in, say, 1996, then obviously that's going to require more of a military spending commitment, a safer world, a world in which free trade actually applies, in which you do have freedom of navigation.

in which economic growth is the norm, in which the United States has trade capacity and commerce, in which global growth is the norm. That is maintained by the American military. That's the reality of the situation. That's always been the reality of the situation. And the sort of notion that I think has been promoted by some on the more isolationist side of the Republican aisle, that if the United States continues

basically defines in pinpoint fashion its own military engagement, that the rest of the world will simply comply. That is not the way the rest of the world works. And by the way, that's been true all along. This idea that straying from the founders is not true. There's a very famous story about George Washington going all the way back to the Constitutional Convention. There was a constitutional delegate who suggested that the standing army of the United States should be limited to 5,000 men.

The reason was that there were a lot of members of the founding generation who didn't like the idea of a standing army on the national level. And George Washington would have to fend off the British with an army of essentially irregular soldiers, militiamen who he had to cobble together throughout the Revolutionary War. The constitutional delegate proposed a 5000 man cap on the on the army in the actual Constitution.

And George Washington agreed and then sarcastically said that there had to be a stipulation added to the Constitution that no invading army could number more than 3000. Of course, the joke he was making is that when it comes to foreign policy, necessity is the mother of policy.

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So you can have all of these principles that we all hope to have about never, no open-ended missions, no long-term commitments. The reality is that in a world in which the United States refrains from any long-term commitments and refrains from flexible policy, what you end up with is more red lines crossed, actually. And so the question becomes for the administration, how strong are the administration's red lines and what happens when those red lines are crossed?

When it came to the Houthis, the United States drew a red line. Originally, it was about freedom of navigation. That was literally in the signal chat that got leaked to Jeffrey Goldberg, which was accidentally included in the signal chat. It was about freedom of navigation. That freedom of navigation has not, in fact, been restored. Now, again, you make the case that shouldn't have been the mission in the first place in the Red Sea. Fine. But that was not actually the mission.

The ends were shifted in order to achieve some sort of titular end to a conflict with the Houthis so that the United States could then go and pick up checks in Qatar. Again, you can make the argument that that's a good policy or that it's not a good policy, but let's be clear about what happened there. And right now, America's enemies are perceiving at the very least, this happens to every president,

It shouldn't really be happening to President Trump is the truth. The reason it shouldn't happen to President Trump is because if President Trump had foreign policy team number one, Trump 1.0 in place, it wouldn't be happening. Trump 1.0 was extremely predictable on foreign policy. If you cross a red line, you will get punched in the face. If you do not cross a red line, we'll negotiate with you. That was the foreign policy of the United States. It was an actual peace through strength, realist foreign policy in Trump 1.0.

But America's enemies and opponents are seeing that there's some play in the joints here, that there's actual a lot of there's a lot of debate inside the administration over whether Trump 1.0 was too hawkish. That is why, for example, there's been a lot of roiling debate over the makeover of the NSC, the National Security Council. The National Security Council, which is now under the tutelage of the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was basically cleansed. And many of the people who are cleansed were some of the more hawkish voices at the NSC.

Leading to the supposition that Vice President Vance actually has a lot to do with staffing up at the NSC. Now, again, maybe you agree with Vice President. That's fine. Everybody's allowed to have their own view on this, and maybe he's right. But America's opponents also see this. And what they widely perceive right now is that now might be a good time to push. That is certainly clear from Russia. It is clear from China and it's clear from Iran. Russia, China and Iran are all pushing very hard right now, sensing weakness in the Trump administration approach.

Now, I think that they're wrong. I think that President Trump has a gut level desire for a peace through strength policy. And there are members of the administration who are much more aligned with the Trump 1.0 peace through strength policy. One of those would be the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. He put out an ad today that is very much peace through strength based. No more distractions. No more electric tanks. No more gender confusion. No more climate change worship. We are laser focused on our mission to

of warfighting. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end. And perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. It's called peace through strength. You look into the eyes of these young Americans who are giving up the best years of their life in a uniform to serve their nation. They are incredible. OK, so again, this ad is much more

This is the peace through strength perspective, right? So that's sort of the Hegseth side. And again, there is a debate inside the administration about all of this right now. The vice president seems to be taking the lead in a lot of these debates. But here's the thing. Reality exists. I've said this a thousand times. I'll say it a thousand more. President Trump does not have thoroughgoing philosophies when it comes to foreign policy or domestic policy. President Trump has impulses. And when those impulses are right, they are great. And when they're wrong, they run up against reality and he shifts his impulses.

That is why President Trump is such a pragmatist. And so right now, America's enemies, our opponents, are showing that they believe that there is play in the joints and weakness at the seams with regard to America's foreign policy. There is no question that's what's happening. Look at Russia's behavior over the course of the last several months since President Trump took office. They've been upping the ante. They're simultaneously negotiating with President Trump. And by negotiating, I mean stringing President Trump along. They've been doing this with the special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who again has yet to negotiate a really good deal anywhere that he has been deployed.

In any case, according to the Wall Street Journal, Russia has now launched its largest ever drone and missile assault on Ukraine on Monday, according to Ukrainian officials, defying President Trump's calls for an end to the bombardment. Ukraine's Air Force said Russia launched more than 350 explosive drones and at least nine cruise missiles. Kiev scrambled aircraft and deployed electronic warfare systems and mobile air defense teams throughout the country in response.

The latest attacks came just hours after President Trump issued a strong rebuke of Russian President Vladimir Putin denouncing airstrikes on the Ukrainian capital and other cities that killed at least 12 people on Sunday. Trump went on social media, on Truth Social, and he posted he has gone absolutely crazy. He is needlessly killing a lot of people. And I'm not just talking about soldiers.

And he put up this post. Missiles and drones are being shot into cities in Ukraine for no reason whatsoever. I've always said that he wants all of Ukraine, not just a piece of it. And maybe that's proving to be right. But if he does, it'll lead to the downfall of Russia. Likewise, President Zelensky is doing his country's no favors by talking the way he does. Everything out of his mouth causes problems. I don't like it. And it better stop. This is a war that would never have started if our president is Zelensky's, Putin's and Biden's war, not Trump's. I'm only helping to put out the big and ugly fires that have been started through gross incompetence and hatred.

So he starts off right there and then it sort of goes wrong. Again, I'm not sure what he wants from Zelensky that Zelensky hasn't already given him. Zelensky has given him the immediate ceasefire. Zelensky has said he will go anywhere for direct talks. Zelensky gave him the rare earth minerals deal. It's sort of both sides of him from the Trump administration and from President Trump is the reason why Putin is pushing. Putin believes he can get away with it. Now, President Trump, when he says that President Putin has gone crazy,

And he's kind of not sure what happened to him. Nothing happened to Vladimir Putin. He's one of the most consistent leaders in modern world history. He's been absolutely consistent in his territorial ambitions, in his desire to restore, quote unquote, Russian greatness, in his desire for Russia to be perceived as a global hegemon in its own right, as a global power, not a regional power, a global power. Again, Putin has been absolutely consistent. Every single president seems to make this mistake with Putin.

George W. Bush famously suggested he looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and saw through to his soul. Barack Obama tried to set a reset button with Vladimir Putin and then dismissed Russia as a geopolitical enemy in 2012 in his race against Mitt Romney.

Joe Biden tried to make overtures to Putin, originally suggesting that if Putin, you know, sort of lightly, if he sort of lightly invaded Ukraine, well, then there might not might not be a lot of American pushback. Everyone makes this mistake with Putin for some odd reason. But Putin has been absolutely consistent. By the way, Putin responded to President Trump's suggestion that Putin had gone crazy by suggesting that this was emotional overload.

So the Kremlin, their spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said, quote, We are really grateful to the Americans and to President Trump personally for their assistance in organizing and launching this negotiation process. This is a very crucial moment, which is, of course, associated with the emotional overload of everyone absolutely and with emotional reaction. Now, again, what the Russians are pretty openly saying at this point is that they would like to continue their expansion in Ukraine.

They apparently are recruiting another 50,000 troops. That, of course, is no surprise. They're happy to throw men into the into the mall, into the gristmill. The Kremlin continues to maintain that they're not going to end the war short of more territorial expansion. And this, of course, is leading to Western pushback, particularly from the German chancellor. He has now come out, Frederick Murs, and he said that Germany, along with Ukraine's other key Western backers, had lifted range restrictions on weapons they sent to Kiev to fight against Russia.

which, by the way, is the correct response. It is. If Russia gets to fight an endless war against Ukraine, then Ukraine should have the ability to strike at, for example, Russian weapons depots and supply lines inside Russia. Here's Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor.

There are no longer any range restrictions on weapons supplied to Ukraine, neither by the British, nor by the French, nor by us, nor by the Americans. This means that Ukraine can now defend itself, for example, by attacking military positions inside Russia. It couldn't do that until a while ago. With very few exceptions, it didn't do that until a while ago either. Now it can.

Now, again, President Trump taking that position and Murr said that that is going along with the American position as well. That is a good thing. That is President Trump actually trying to apply peace through strength. He's doing the same thing, apparently, in Northern Europe. According to the Wall Street Journal,

The Trump administration wants NATO to get more lethal. A testing ground is Europe's north where NATO faces Russia on two sides. Some European officials worry America's commitment to the transatlantic alliance is waning, given President Trump's criticism of it and his stated desire to reduce military engagement abroad. But U.S. military commanders say that their posture remains firm. Brigadier General Andrew Sasseloff, deputy chief of operations for U.S. Army Europe and Africa, said from a U.S. Army perspective, my orders haven't changed.

The high North and the Baltics have been thrust into the center of U.S. war planning as their access to shipping routes, territory, and energy reserves will be crucial to the West in a new era of geopolitical conflict. The region is hawkish on Russia and is driving European efforts to rearm and boost defense budgets, including support for Ukraine's armed forces. Nordic countries have been ramping up their military spending. That includes, of course, Finland, Norway as well. So again, that is President Trump reacting in the right way. And he's going to have to because he is going to be pushed. Okay.

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slash Daily Wire to get started. The same thing holds true with regard to China. So right now, China has been withholding from some sort of blockade or attack on Taiwan. There are a couple of reasons. One, they're not quite sure what President Trump is going to do if there were some sort of blockade attempted against Taiwan. There are definitely members of the Trump administration who basically would abandon Taiwan to its fate, regardless of the consequences. One of the sort of strange statements about this was made by Elbridge Colby,

who is a deputy secretary of defense for policy. He's been a big proponent of the idea that we ought to shift our focus from the Middle East to China. But then he's also made statements like if Taiwan gets attacked, we do nothing about it. So I'm not sure how that shifts the focus precisely. Now, China is basically banking on the United States not doing a lot about Taiwan.

And or they are hoping that the United States, through its own trade policy, is going to sort of self-defeat, that the United States is going to weaken itself with its allies and thus lead to further inroads for the Chinese in their race toward artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence. So the question for China is, is the window closing? If China believes the window is closing, then they absolutely could go for Taiwan. If they believe that the United States is

is weak and will do little. They could absolutely blockade Taiwan, and that would be global economic disaster. Again, the only reason for China to do that is if they actually believe that their window is closing. They're an aging country. They do have significant debt problems. Their economy has always been a bit of a paper tiger. And I don't mean here they don't have enormous manufacturing capacity. They do. But there is a vast income divide in China. A huge percentage of the population makes like 150 bucks a month.

And those people live out in sort of the rural areas of China. China has done a sort of incredible job of ensuring that cities are not swelled with these people. They force people to stay in their own areas and then they artificially boost buying in tier two and tier three cities.

A lot of what we see sort of publicly from China is not exactly what is going on in China. So it is certainly true that they're sucking in money from the periphery and then they are using it in a sort of fascistic and mercantilistic push for manufacturing supremacy. And that's particularly true when it comes to artificial intelligence. However, they do have some very serious burgeoning financial problems. Obviously, they have a big real estate problem on their hands. They have a demographic problem on their hands. There are folks like Kenneth Rogoff, the American economist,

who teaches at Harvard University, who suggested that actually the Chinese rates of growth are likely to slow sometime in the near future. If that happens, are they more or are they less likely to make a move on Taiwan? The answer probably is more likely to move on Taiwan, which presumably is why, according to the Taiwan News, China has now strengthened its ability to rapidly attack Taiwan. The Chinese Air Force has expanded its combat radius with new fighter jets, such as the J-10, J-16, and J-20, which can reach Taiwan from bases deep inside China without the need to refuel, a Taiwanese defense official told the Financial Times.

Chinese military aircraft now enter Taiwan's air defense identification zone more than 245 times a month, compared to fewer than 10 times per month five years ago, according to Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense. Aircraft also cross the Taiwan Strait median line roughly 120 times a month. In the naval domain, a U.S. official says the Chinese Navy and Coast Guard maintain a near constant presence of about a dozen ships near Taiwan.

With access to nearby ports, Chinese ships could move into a blockade posture in a matter of hours. And forward deployment of vessels allows for faster coordination of airstrikes. Meanwhile, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has reorganized large army units into smaller ones, including six amphibious combined arms brigades along the southeastern coast, according to the Financial Times. U.S. Army War College expert Joshua Arastegui says, quote, this reflects the PLA's renewed emphasis on Taiwan and lays the foundation for actual warfighting capabilities.

And of course, Joe Biden left the United States military in the lurch. The sort of trade posture originally taken by the Trump administration during Liberation Day, which is gradually being corrected, alienated a lot of the allies the United States would need to call on. And there remain open questions about what the United States would do in case of a Chinese move against Taiwan. China's banking on that. There's a lot of push right now. Russia is pushing in Ukraine. They're trying to

prey on these sort of isolationist instincts in the Trump administration. They're trying to string along the Trump administration at the same time, upping the military ante.

China is obviously banking on the fact that the United States is looking for an off ramp with China. I do not think that China took, for example, the Trump administration's refusal to actually impose the TikTok ban as a sign of friendship. They took that instead as a sign of weakness and they are building up their capacity to invade Taiwan, which of course would be disastrous for the global economy because Taiwan produces all the sophisticated semiconductors basically on planet Earth.

And then meanwhile, the Iranians seem to be openly strengthening their position in negotiations. They seem to believe that President Trump actually wants some sort of off ramp with Iran more than Iran wants an off ramp with the United States, which, if true, would be an insane proposition. Totally insane. Iran skies are open. Iran is an extraordinarily weakened country. Its proxy forces have been devastated by Israel. Its economy is on a razor's edge.

The Ayatollahs are unpopular in their own country. Why in the world would the United States be seeking an off-ramp faster than the Iranians? By what stretch of the imagination?

It is a bizarre negotiation strategy to continue to maintain that you're having great negotiations while Iran is continually publicly strengthening its own position, rejecting your core demand. The United States' core demand by President Trump, again, is the same president. President Trump was right in Trump 1.0. He said the Iran deal, the JCPOA, cut by Barack Obama, was the worst deal in American history. He was not wrong about that. He said it over and over and over. Why? The JCPOA essentially granted...

Iran, a clear pathway to a nuclear bomb while allowing them to use funding for their ballistic missile development, for the funding of their proxies, of their proxy terrorist groups all over the region, ranging from the Houthis to Hamas to Hezbollah. It was an awful, awful deal, which is why President Trump pulled out of it. Why would he seek to reenter such a deal simply to what? Placate the isolationists who mistakenly believe that if Israel.

bomb the Iranian nuclear facility, somehow this would pose a grave global danger to the United States. On what planet? Please explain to me the chain of events. Please explain the chain of causation right there. Again, the sort of language coming from the Trump administration here is bizarre and mixed, shall we say, because what's being conveyed by the Americans is optimism about a deal. What's being conveyed by the Iranians is that they are not making any sort of real concessions with regard to their nuclear program.

So here is President Trump over the weekend saying that the United States talks with Iran have been good. Very importantly, we had some very good talks with Iran yesterday and today, and let's see what happens. But I think we could have some good news on the Iran front. Likewise, with Hamas on the on Gaza front.

We want to see if we can stop that. And Israel, we've been talking to them and we want to see if we can stop that whole situation as quickly as possible. But having to do with nuclear, we've had some very, very good talks with Iran. OK, very bizarre to say that we've had very, very good talks with Iran, considering the fact that according to the Iran International publication.

Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani, a member of Iran's Parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, told Didban Iran that the offer right now from Oman includes a temporary pause in enrichment with the possibility of resuming activities afterward. He says Tehran has not accepted the proposal due to concerns rooted in past experiences. He said the Omanis told us stop enrichment now for six months and then resume it again.

But Iran has not yet accepted this offer because based on past experience, there's the likelihood of further excessive demands from the other side. So in other words, the Omanis are trying to push the Iranians into a six month pause. Why? What would a six month pause do? Number one, it would open up the Iranian economy. Number two, it would allow them to rebuild all of their air defense systems that Israel couldn't actually strike their nuclear facilities. And number three, it would push toward a JCPOA 2.0.

Apparently, according to Artestani, if negotiations break down, Iran possesses 300 kilograms of enriched uranium, an amount he said is sufficient to produce 10 atomic bombs. He said, quote, there will be a deal and Iran will enrich at a level one step above the JCPOA. I mean, that's unbelievable. That's basically Iran spitting in the eye of the Trump administration.

While President Trump is saying the negotiations are going well, something is not being conveyed to President Trump. I don't know who's talking to President Trump. I don't know what the Witkoff team is doing in these negotiations. I don't know what the flow of information is. But the Iranians are openly spitting in the eye of the United States, taking these positions publicly. You know, if President Trump is pissed at Zelensky, who gave him everything he wants on the rare earth minerals deal and the ceasefire and the direct talks,

Why is he so sanguine about the Iranians who are openly rejecting the key negotiating point in his demands? I mean, over the weekend, Christine Ohm, the head of the DHS, was on Fox saying that Trump will never accept a nuclear capable of Iran. Iran. Meanwhile, the Iranians are saying we won't do a deal unless we're nuclear capable. And the president will never accept a nuclear capable Iran. He will never accept them having nuclear weapons and building the capacity to that.

The intelligence information that they have and that Israel has and they share with the United States and that we also have and are using for those conversations is critically important. So I think the message to the American people is we have a president that wants peace, but also a president that will not tolerate nuclear Iran capability in the future.

OK, so is that the position of the Trump administration or is there going to be a giant cave? We don't know yet. And the Iranians don't know yet either, which is why they're pushing. By the way, the idea that the Iranian regime is somehow friendlier toward the West or they've moderated in any way weird because the newspaper for Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, according to Fox News, praised the terrorist who murdered an American and Israeli Wednesday night in Washington, D.C., calling him, quote, our dear brother. Those are the people who are being negotiated with and who want a nuclear weapon.

And who believe that if they just stall enough, President Trump will cut a deal. Well, President Trump, I don't believe he will cut a deal. I don't believe that President Trump is going to cut JCPOA 2.0, no matter who in the administration is urging him to do so. I don't think President Trump is going to cave on Taiwan. I don't think that's President Trump's way. I think that in reality, President Trump is a peace through strength president. But that needs to be conveyed, not just in words, but an actual forward posture in military spending.

in public statements because, again, the United States has spent the last 20 years being non-credible in its threats. The Trump administration was credible during Trump won. Joe Biden was not credible in his threats. Barack Obama set red lines and then immediately obliterated them as soon as they met with the light of day.

President Trump 2.0 does not need to be like Barack Obama or like Joe Biden. He came into office promising precisely the opposite. There's more on this in a moment. First, you might already own a firearm, but some prefer starting with a less lethal option to avoid the financial and mental repercussions of pulling the trigger. Enter Byrna. That's B-Y-R-N-A.

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Available exclusively on Daily Wire Plus. We're dealing with misbehaviors with our son. Our 13-year-old throws tantrums. Our son turned to some substance abuse. Go to dailywireplus.com today. Meanwhile, on trade policy, the Trump administration continues to sort of try things out and then see how they work. So over the weekend, the president of the United States threatened Tim Cook, suggesting that Apple needed to manufacture the iPhone in the United States.

It was sort of a bizarre statement, considering the fact that the United States is not going to be a salutary place to actually produce the iPhone. If you want the iPhone to cost you $5,000, that's a really good way to do it. Cook had tried to shift production away from China and toward India, which would be really, really good. The United States needs to foster better economic connections with India, a rising power that is a bulwark against both Pakistan and China.

And so it would be good if Apple made more connections with Modi's India. That'd be an excellent, excellent proposition. President Trump, of course, has suggested instead that there needs to be a reshoring of manufacturer of iPhones in the United States. Apparently on Friday morning, according to the New York Times, President Trump caught much of his own administration and Apple's leadership off guard with a social media post threatening tariffs of 25% on iPhones made anywhere except the United States.

The Post thrust Apple back into the administration's crosshairs a little over a month after Cook had lobbied and won an exemption from 145% tariff on iPhones assembled in China and sold in the United States. Now, we should point out at this point,

That's not going to cause Apple to reshore its production in the United States because the differential in cost between producing an iPhone in India and producing an iPhone in the United States is way bigger than 25%. So all you will do is ramp up the amount of money it costs the American consumer to buy an iPhone. He's not going to reshore because of that. The costs are just too great. Again, if the costs of reshoring are higher than 25%, you'll just leave the production in India and pay the 25% to get the iPhones into the United States and consumers will effectively pay it.

So is that a good move? Probably not. I'm not sure exactly why we are attempting to cudgel Apple into doing such things. Again, getting them out of China, good. Suggesting that we're going to have unionized factories in the United States screwing in the screens to iPhones. No, that is not going to happen. Also, the sort of tariff war is in fact leading to selective inflation in product prices in certain areas.

According to Axios, from Ralph Lauren to Barbie Maker Mattel, several household names have recently announced they are looking at higher prices in an effort to offset the tariff regime. Last month, CEOs from some of the nation's biggest retailers warned President Trump his trade policies could disrupt supply chains. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested that the foreign countries and producers would bear the cost of the tariffs. And then Walmart warned that it would raise prices. And at that point, President Trump suggested that Walmart should eat the tariffs, which, of course, is not a thing that is going to happen in reality.

So apparently Ralph Lauren, Walmart, Mattel, Volvo, Subaru, Ford, Nike, Adidas, all of them are talking about now increasing prices. And those increases in prices can make it hard for the Federal Reserve to, for example, lower interest rates. The mortgage rates are currently still riding up around 7%. So it's going to be very difficult to unlock the real estate market with the interest rates that high at this point in time. However, President Trump did announce that he would be delaying another deal.

So President Trump over the weekend threatened the Europeans with a 50% tariff. He said they're not negotiating fast enough. And so we're just going to dump a 50% tariff on them. The stock futures immediately dumped. And so then he walked it back. He said, we'll wait until July 9th to try and negotiate something. Okay, well, you know, better. She just called me, as you know, and she asked for an extension on the June 1st date. And she said she wants to get down to serious negotiation because she's

I told you specifically, but I told anybody that would listen. They have to do that. And we had a very nice call and I agreed to move it. I believe June 9th would be July 9th would be the day. That was the date she requested. Could we move it from June 1st to July 9th? And I agreed to do that. And that she said we will rapidly get together and see if we can work something out.

Okay, so that is a good thing. Better that he should delay it so that we can actually get a good deal. That was the promise. The promise was tariff war would lead to better deals. We're still waiting for many of those better deals to materialize. And we've gotten to kind of where we needed to get to with China, sort of. We're down at a 30% tariff rate on Chinese goods. China has dropped its tariff rate on American goods to 10%. We need to radically lower our other tariffs on all the countries surrounding China so as to help box them in using our trade measures.

Stephen Moore, who's a financial advisor to the president, an economic advisor. He celebrated the olive branch by the Europeans. Look, I do think this is a olive branch by the Europeans and Ursula to come to the negotiating table, which is what Trump wanted. And the significant thing, I think the stock market, when it opens on Tuesday morning, remember, tomorrow is a big holiday.

I think investors will be happy to hear this news because it means that these tariffs that were supposed to be imposed as early as next week. Now, if I heard the president correctly, it's going to be another month delay on those. That gives some time for negotiation. Again, he's right about that. That is a good thing. And getting the Europeans to the table would definitely be a good thing. We also need the Europeans to actually shift their trade away from China. If the goal is to isolate China, if the goal is to prevent China from cheating on IP and cheating on its economy,

artificial exchange rates on its currency. If that's the goal, then we actually need to pursue policies that achieve that particular goal. Speaking of a win for the Trump administration, this is in fact a good thing. I understand there are people who don't understand how this deal works, but the reality is that it is good for Nipon Steel to actually be able to bid for U.S. Steel. U.S. Steel is not an American-owned company. It is not an American government-owned company. It is just a steel company in the United States called U.S. Steel that has sort of a long and storied history.

But it doesn't belong to the American government. U.S. Steel is simply an American firm that produces overpriced steel and has thus been subjected to a shrinking share of the markets, both internationally and domestically. Nipon wants to come in, change over the management structure, make it significantly more cost effective. That is, in fact, a good thing. That is not a bad thing. Capital from Nipon coming in and fixing U.S. Steel so it doesn't lose employees and market share is actually a good thing. Here's President Trump saying so.

You announced on Friday about U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel. What will the ownership structure look like? What made you think? It'll be controlled by the United States. Otherwise, I wouldn't make the deal. I went to the unions, to all of the local unions. They all wanted it. And I'm doing it because all of the congressmen came in, about five of them. And the others, I understand, are in concurrent. And they asked that I do it. Everybody seems to want it.

And we'll see. I mean, you know, we'll see what the final is. But they're going to invest billions of dollars in steel. And it's a good company. Nissan's a very good company. We'll see. But it's an investment and it's a partial ownership. OK, so again, that is a good thing. We have to see what the details of the deal look like. But honestly, it's really not up to the United States government or it shouldn't be.

If a foreign investor decides to buy a share of an American company, unless there is some sort of national security issue involved, which there simply is not with regard to U.S. steel. And I think so much of the confusion is based just on the name U.S. steel and the fact that we all have sort of seventh grade memories of what U.S. steel represented in the early 20th century. Meanwhile, on the economic front,

The situation continues to be a little bit fraught with regard to the so-called big, beautiful bill. It has now passed the House. It is in the Senate. Unclear exactly what's going to happen in the Senate. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has pointed out that there are serious problems with the bill from the Senate perspective. It doesn't cut the deficit enough, doesn't cut the debt enough. And again, he's not wrong about this. America does have a giant ticking time bomb that is the national debt. The bill does cut some deficit.

The idea that we're increasing the deficit with the bill assumes sort of it's sort of an accounting conversation is the amount of money the United States is set to take in based on the tax rates currently or based on the reversion to the pre-Trump tax rates.

If you suggest that the amount the United States was set to take in was based on the pre-Trump tax rates because this was set to sunset officially, that's when you get a quote unquote deficit increase. If the suggestion is that the tax rates were basically always going to be extended, then what you're talking about is a deficit decrease from what it otherwise would have been because the bill actually attempts to cut the cost curve on things like Medicaid for people who are not working.

That's the real question. Now, if you're a real fiscal hawk, you still are going to say that this bill is not cut enough. That includes an enormous amount of pork. And that's true. There's an enormous amount of pork in this bill. That is the position of Senator Johnson. Here he was.

My campaign promise in 2010 and every campaign after that was to stop mortgaging our children's future. It's immoral, it's wrong, it has to stop. And so he may not be worried about that. I am extremely worried about that. That is my primary goal running for Congress. This is our moment. We have witnessed an unprecedented level of increased spending, 58% since 2019, other than World War II.

This is our only chance to reset that to a reasonable pre-pandemic level of spending. And again, I think you can do it and the spending that we would eliminate, people wouldn't even notice. But you have to do the work, which takes time. That's part of the problem here is we've rushed this process. We haven't taken the time. We've done the same old way, exempt most programs, take a look at a couple, tweak them a little bit, try and rely on a CBO score, and then have that score completely out of context for the rest of the year.

with anything that, you know, really we ought to be talking about, like the $22 trillion of additional deficit over the next 10 years. Okay, but that $22 trillion in additional deficit, as Senator Johnson correctly points out, that is attached to Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare in the main. Those are the chief drivers of America's national debt. And no one, as I've said a thousand times, is actually at this point willing to seriously consider cutting entitlements. Rand Paul, of course, has been very consistent on this throughout his career. Here's the Senator from Kentucky making much the same point.

This year in September, when our fiscal year ends, the deficit will be about 2.2 trillion. Now people used to always say, the Republicans would say, what's Bidenomics, that's Biden's spending levels. When March, every Republican, virtually every Republican other than me, voted to continue the Biden spending levels, which are gonna give us a $2.2 trillion deficit. And people are gonna wake up in about two months and say, how come the deficit's still $2.2 trillion?

Where did the savings go? People are going to be very disappointed, conservatives, and I'm the one ringing the alarm saying they're not doing anything. They're not sending us a rescission package. They're not cutting spending. Somebody has to stand up and yell, the emperor has no clothes, and everybody's falling in lockstep on this. Pass the big, beautiful bill. Don't question anything. Well, conservatives do need to stand up and have their voice heard.

Okay, now, the real question here is not really about the principle. On principle, obviously, Senator Paul and Senator Johnson are right. The question is about pragmatism, and here are the choices. The American people are not ready to restructure entitlements. They're almost never ready to restructure entitlements. That's just the reality of the situation. So what are they? So the two choices are you let the taxes increase, like 70%, or you don't let the taxes increase. Those are really the two choices on the table. That's the point being made by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

Well, I agree wholeheartedly with what my dear friend Rand Paul said. I love his conviction and I share it. The national debt is the greatest threat to our national security and deficits are a serious problem. What I think Rand is missing on this one is the fact that we are quite serious about this. This is the biggest spending cut, Shannon, in more than 30 years. We're going to cut over $1.5 trillion in spending. And it's a

big leap forward. The last time we had a spending cut was three decades ago, and it was only $800 billion, even adjusted for inflation. This is the biggest spending cut, I think, in the history of government on planet Earth.

Okay, so again, he is not wrong there either, except that whenever people in government talk about cuts, they don't actually mean that they are cutting. What they mean is they are cutting the trajectory of future increase. That's like saying that, yeah, I know I'm going to go into debt 200 bucks next month, but I've cut back a little bit. So I'm only going to go into debt 150 bucks next month. You're still going into debt.

So let's just be clear about what we're talking about right here. But here is the reality. Neither party is willing to face up to what it will actually require in order for us to bend the cost curve in a very serious way. Neither party is willing to do this. And it's always funny to hear people out of power talk about this, because suddenly the minute they're out of power, they start talking about debts and deficits and entitlement restructuring. So Jack Lew, who, of course, is the former Treasury secretary under Joe Biden, is

Here he was suggesting that what we actually have to do is raise the taxes and then carefully restructure entitlements. Weird, because you guys never talk about carefully restructuring entitlements when you have the capacity to do so.

I think this is the opposite of what you do if you really want to reduce the deficit. If you really want to reduce the deficit, you have a bipartisan conversation about the difficult choices. It doesn't mean cutting taxes. It means raising taxes. It does mean taking careful steps to reduce entitlement spending. But these are not careful steps on entitlement spending, and they're big tax cuts.

So in reality, again, all my sympathies are with Senator Johnson and with and with Senator Paul. The American people are not ready for this. They just aren't. Donald Trump ran on the proposition that the American people are not ready for this. He's the first Republican of my lifetime to run for president as the candidate to openly say he was not going to touch any of the entitlement programs.

That's one of the reasons why he has been so successful in a sort of populist vein. Because it turns out that one of the best ways to win office is to promise everybody the moon. Lower taxes and high entitlement spending is, in fact, a quite popular position in the United States. Democratic position, which is higher taxes and much, much higher social spending. That is also a relatively popular position, so long as you can lie and pretend that raising taxes on the wealthy is actually going to pay for everything, which, of course, it will not.

So both parties that are totally dishonest about what it would actually take in order to get out of our debt crisis, which means let's be real about this. We're going Thelma and Louise over that cliff. That's what's going to happen. 10 years from now, 15 years from now, major austerity measures are in the offing. That's just the reality. Joining us online is Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who's been a leader in trying to push this big, beautiful bill toward a better answer with regard to debt and deficits. Senator Johnson, thanks so much for the time. Really appreciate it. Morning, Ben. Thanks for having me on.

So let's talk about the problems with the big, beautiful bill. Obviously, House Speaker Mike Johnson is very high on this. Obviously, there are others in Congress who are as well. And the argument that they are making is essentially that in order to come up with this big deficit number from this bill, you have to assume that the Trump tax cuts were going to expire. And you basically have to look at the decrease in revenue from the tax cuts being renewed as a form of deficit increase. Well, what do you say to that argument?

It's convoluted. Let's try and simplify this. Over the next 10 years, again, I'm not saying CBO is perfect, but I would say this is a rosy scenario out of CBO. They're projecting $89 trillion of spending over the next 10 years and a deficit of $22 trillion. So Biden left us averaging $1.9 trillion in deficit spending per year. CBO is projecting $2.2 trillion of deficit per year. And there

they're projecting about a $4 trillion tax increase in that projection. So if we don't, if we don't, if we, and I, by the way, I would absolutely do this, extend current tax law, that's going to nip off about $4 trillion off of that CBO rosy scenario. So now you have to, you know, $2.6 trillion per year

We are seeing the bond markets already react. If the interest rates go up to just midway between a 50-year average versus where we're at right now, that add another $4 trillion. If we go up to 5.3%, which is pretty close to 50-year average, add about $8 or $9 trillion to that 10-year deficit figure. So now you're up over $3 trillion per year deficit. And the big, beautiful bill does nothing to alleviate that. They're talking about $1.5 trillion in interest.

spending cuts. You know, again, some of those are fake, some are pushed off, they'll never occur. Going to add about $300 billion in spending. So that's at most 1.2. Again, it just doesn't meet the moment. It doesn't even come close to addressing what should be our primary goal is reduce the deficit over time, not increase it.

So Senator Johnson talking about reducing the deficit over time and reducing the national debt over time. As the big drivers of the national debt and the deficit continue to be our massive entitlement program, Social Security and Medicare, those are the third rail of American politics. Nobody wants to touch them. Anybody who does touch them is immediately electrocuted.

President Trump did run in 2016 on the idea that he really was not going to fundamentally change Social Security and Medicare. Is there a way for us to actually reduce the deficit and bring down the national debt without taking on these major entitlement programs that are only going to expand as our population ages?

First of all, let me correct you. What's really driving the increase, the massive increase in deficit spending is pandemic spending. So if you exclude Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid, there's literally hundreds of billions of dollars, probably $400 to $500 billion of spending that exceeds 2019 spending increased by population inflation. Again, that's excluding Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That's just all the other total outlays

Again, we wanted a spending spree from $4.4 trillion in 2019 to $6.5. We never looked back. We kept borrowing. We kept spending at that level. Next year, we're looking to spend about $7.3 trillion. So if you would go line by line, that's what I've been arguing. We need a budget review panel. We need to do what Doge has done looking at these contracts. We need to go through more than 2,000 lines of the federal budget line by line. Again, you can exclude Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid. Exactly.

I think we need to fix Obamacare because that's really the Medicaid portion that we're concerned about for single age childless adults that are really leading to all this fraud by state governments. But leave that aside. There's literally hundreds of billions of dollars in both other mandatory as well as discretionary spending that exceeds what we spent in 2019 fully inflated by population growth and inflation. You go back, by the way, to Bill Clinton's

total outlays. I don't think we were spending too little in 1998 or Barack Obama in 2019. You can save even more hundreds of billions of dollars, but you have to do the work. It's going to take the time. That was always the flaw of the one big, beautiful bill is going to be rushed, is going to use the same old technique, exempt most things, focus on a couple of programs, come up with a bunch of fake savings, put them out to the out years, crack me and say, oh, look at what a great job we did. No, you completely missed the moment, completely inadequate.

So when we look at those 2019 spending levels, just to get a little bit more specific, what kinds of things would have to, quote unquote, be cut in order for us to restore the 2019 spending levels? Because obviously to I think everybody else, we remember 2019. It wasn't a year when we weren't spending lots of money. We were still spending lots of money. And you're right, obviously, that if we continued with our current level of tax revenue stacked up against what the spending levels were in 2019, we actually would have a budget surplus. So what would that actually look like in practice?

Well, it would look like the more than inch thick budget that I've already produced. It does just that. It goes line by line. It pluses up what we spent 2019 based on population inflation, then compares it to current spending. Now, again, if you're in business, this would literally be a five minute conversation with my manager. Say, listen, you guys, I told you you could increase your budget based on inflation, the number of customers you serve. You're 10% over that. Cut it.

Literally, a five-minute conversation I'd walk away if they didn't do it, I'd fire them. We ought to be able to do the same thing now. There are some sensitivities there. There are some programs that you can't touch that one. We need to examine all of these things. And again, line by line, I think you literally could cut hundreds of billions of dollars, a couple hundred million dollars at a time, line by line. But you got to do the work. You got to go through that detail. Nobody's willing to do that work. Nobody's willing to take the time.

So Senator Johnson, when we look at the constituency of the Senate, obviously the Republicans have a majority, but it's a fairly narrow majority. You have a somewhat fractious caucus. Obviously, you have fiscal conservatives like you or Senator Paul from Kentucky, but you also have Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, who's written full op-eds suggesting that any sort of cuts would be political disaster for him and for the Republican Party. How do you cobble together a majority just on a pragmatic level for a better version of the big, beautiful bill that you're talking about?

First of all, it takes leadership. It takes a president to lay out the fact that this is completely unjustified going from $4,400 billion of spending to over $7,000 billion of spending. You'll lay out exactly what caused it. You'll lay out the facts. This is a budget process. We ought to be talking about numbers. The only number we ever heard of in the House was $1.5 trillion, and then $4 or $5 trillion increase to debt ceiling, completely divorced from the context and the reality of the situation.

It's very possible to do. Again, I actually look at numbers. You go back to President Obama, came into office. We had been spending about $3 trillion. He bumped up to $3.5. We had a $1.4 trillion deficit, 1.3 the next year, 1.3. But then the Tea Party movement, that came in and constrained him. For five years, we held spending flat at $3.5 trillion. It didn't increase.

And he left office, quite honestly, with an average budget deficit of about $550 billion over his last four years. Trump increased that to over $800 billion in his first three years. Then, of course, he had the pandemic, $3.1 trillion. It should have ended there.

Biden should have said, okay, we spent enough on COVID. Let's return to a pre-pandemic level spending. And we wouldn't be in this fix. But no, Biden kept throwing fuel on the flames. That's what caused spark 40-year high inflation. And that's why we're in this enormous mess right now. Got to lay out the facts. You have to lay out the figures. You have to look at how completely unreasonable this level spending is rather than start at an unjustified level spending and then suffer death by 1,000 cuts. And that's what's happening. That's what happened in the House.

Senator Johnson, on another topic, you've also reported a new report that shows a cover up of adverse events in the COVID-19 injections by the Biden administration. They knew that there were, in fact, adverse events related specifically to things like myocarditis. And the Biden administration in 2021 basically downplayed a lot of those results specifically in order to continue propagating untrue statements about the COVID-19 vaccine. Why don't you talk about what exactly that study found?

Well, first of all, understand this is just the tip of the iceberg. Now, it's been difficult to get the documents out of HHS, even though Bobby completely wants to

provide radical transparency, instill the bureaucracy in place. I think we've had records destroyed, but we're starting to get some documentation. So what we were able to prove is that they were well aware of the myocarditis signal. Israel contacted them at the end of February. We already knew that, but now we got the FOIA documents unredacted, and we know that they were having conversations internally asking the question,

Is there a signal on myocarditis for, you know, boys ages 15 through 18? The answer is yes. And they still didn't issue a warning on the health alert network. They did clinical considerations. And even in those, they removed a sentence that cautioned doctors to encourage people not with myocarditis not to engage in drugs.

physical activity. So again, they completely downplayed, I would say they hid the myocarditis signal. But again, this is the tip of the iceberg. I've been trying to get their analysis, their empirical Bayesian analysis for years. We're finally starting to get some of that trickling in. We're starting to see that there were signals. We've got to put these studies together to prove that. But

You're going to see, I think, more bombshells in terms of what they knew, what they hid. And let's face it, these injections caused all kinds of death, permanent disability, millions of adverse events, which to this day, they're not owning up to. They're not admitting to. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin doing yeoman's work with regard to budgetary issues and the like. Senator Johnson, really appreciate the time and the insight. Have a great day. Meanwhile.

President Trump is making strong moves against Harvard. President Trump is now set to cancel the federal government's remaining federal contracts with Harvard University worth an estimated $100 million, according to a letter being sent to federal agencies on Tuesday. The planned additional cuts represented what the administration's official called a complete severance of the government's longstanding business relationship with Harvard. And that, again, is based on their unwillingness to change their order of business, their operations,

His suggestion is that they have violated the Civil Rights Act by essentially allowing a discriminatory atmosphere against Jews. Now, again, I've said it before. If you want to make the argument that the Civil Rights Act is wildly overbroad,

and that it wraps up violations of the Constitution within it. I think that argument is not only plausible. I've made that argument before. I've made that argument for 20 years. There are certain aspects of the Civil Rights Act, such as banning discrimination by governments, that are correct and good. And then there's a bunch of stuff in there that really is a wild constitutional overage.

And there's a great book called The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell talking specifically about the constitutional shift over the Civil Rights Act, how the entire structure of the federal government got completely changed over by it. However, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. And you do not get to play the game where local police departments all over the United States are sued into oblivion by the federal government for not violating civil rights on the basis of race.

But Harvard University gets to violate the so-called civil rights of its students so long as those civil rights are the civil rights of Jews. That is the point being made by President Trump. On Monday, President Trump said he was considering taking billions in grant money from Harvard University and instead redistributing it to trade schools across the United States. He posted on Truth Social, quote, I'm considering taking $3 billion of grant money away from a very anti-Semitic Harvard and giving it to trade schools all across our land. What a great investment that would be for the United States and so badly needed.

The announcement didn't provide any further specifics, but again, it is true that the executive branch does have the unique capacity to redirect funding away from these universities. That is not, in fact, like an earned entitlement mandated by law. So he can simply say, listen, no further funding, no future funding. And there can be an argument over whether the university's violation of the Civil Rights Act justifies funding.

types of action by the administration. But the notion the federal government is bound and committed to continue funding Harvard University, that is not true. And this is one of the real problems for Harvard University. They can complain all they want. But if the federal government under President Trump decides that no further money will flow to Harvard, no further money will flow to Harvard. Harvard has been locked in a battle with the Trump administration since March when the government said it was reviewing nearly $9 billion in federal funding over anti-Semitism concerns.

So it'll be, by the way, you want to talk about genius populist moves, shifting money from Harvard University with its endowment of something like $150 billion, shifting that money over instead to trade schools is a wonderful populist move. Truly, truly a smart populist move by the president of the United States. And Harvard deserves every little bit of this. All they had to do is negotiate with President Trump. That's all they had to do. And they wouldn't do it. They decided they wanted to stand up on their hind legs and defend

their discriminatory atmosphere, an atmosphere they never would have allowed for any other minority group at Harvard University. Never, not in a million years. And so President Trump is using this as a club to clock them as well they should be. Speaking of which, President Trump is also now looking to actually make people pay their student loans. So Joe Biden's proposition is essentially the American taxpayer should foot the bill for subsidizing all of these universities all over the United States.

Well, now President Trump is saying, no, no, no, you got to pay off your student loans. According to the Wall Street Journal, borrowers have been required to repay their student loans for some months now. But just this month, the Trump administration began putting millions of defaulted student loan borrowers into collections and threatened to confiscate their wages, tax refunds, and federal benefits. The collections process was standard before the pandemic. So they're claiming this is something new. It isn't. This is how it used to work.

Now, if President Trump wants to do something truly populist, what he should do is open investigations into the various colleges and universities that sold people scam degrees with the tacit or explicit promise that they would be able to get a high-earning job afterward. Because it turns out that student loan balances are not equivalent across various career choices. Student loan balances from the Federal Student Aid Division

Those loan balances typically go to majors that do not earn out. That's why you can't get a private loan on those things. So there'll be a jump in delinquency. There'll be some people who get hit. It seems like a good opportunity to go back to many of these universities and ask them whether they defrauded their own student body.

in trying to promote the idea that a $200,000 degree in lesbian dance theory was going to somehow pay off in a six-figure salary. Meanwhile, the New York Times has an amazing rundown on the Democratic inability to communicate with the normies. It's an entire piece titled, Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward. Shane Goldmacher writes, One longtime Democratic researcher has a technique she leans on when nudging voters to share their deepest, darkest feelings about politics. She asks them to compare America's two major parties to animals.

After around 250 focus groups of swing voters, a few patterns have emerged, said the researcher, Anatchenko Osorio. Republicans are seen as apex predators like lions, tigers, and sharks. Democrats are typically tagged as tortoises, slugs, or sloths.

So it's pretty amazing. Six months after President Trump swept the battleground states, according to The New York Times, the Democratic Party is still sifting through the wreckage. Its standing has plunged to startling new lows. Twenty seven percent approval in a recent NBC News poll that is the weakest in surveys dating all the way back to 1990.

The stark reality is the downward trend for Democrats stretches back further than a single election. Republicans have been gaining ground in voter registration for years. Working class voters of every race have been steadily drifting toward the GOP. And Democrats are increasingly perceived as the party of college educated elites that have

The defenders of a political and economic system that most Americans feel is failing them. Well, actually, they are seen as the defenders of a moral system that is failing them. It is not just a political and economic system. It is a moral system whereby elitists at the top of American society decide boys can be girls, decide that a person who graduated from Harvard is of more moral worth than a blue collar worker. And then people go to church are, in fact, bitter clingers. This started under Barack Obama and it never stopped.

The first challenge for Democrats, says the New York Times, is that it is not just Republicans and independents who've soured on the Democratic Party, it's Democrats themselves. The Democratic base is aghast at the speed with which Mr. Trump is undermining institutions and reversing progressive accomplishments and the lack of resistance from congressional leaders. Well, yes.

So hilariously, they're trying to figure out exactly how to deal with this. Quote, fierce ideological debates over policies, whether to push for a stricter stand on immigration, defend transgender rights less forcefully, or embrace anti-corporate economic populism are already playing out on Capitol Hill and the nation's 2028 campaign trail. And they point out again that they have lost men like across the board, across the board, they're losing men. And they actually have no way of regaining those men. This is hilarious.

Democratic donors and strategists are gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places. The prospectus for one new $20 million effort obtained by the Times aims to reverse the erosion of democratic support among young men, especially online. It is codenamed SAM, short for Speaking with American Men, a strategic plan, and promises investment to, quote, study the syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.

It recommends buying advertisements in video games. Above all, it says we must shift from a moralizing tone. Well, I mean, they're not wrong that the moralizing is the problem, but they're not going to be able to abandon that sort of stuff because that is the essence of the Democratic Party at this point. It is not a sort of progressive redistributionism.

It is argument over whether you are an oligarch or whether you're experiencing food insecurity or whether transgender intersectionality is the way to perceive the world. Democrats have been too fond of using sociological left-wing idiocies for too long to simply break out of it now. It's gonna be very difficult for them to break that particular addiction, for sure. And by the way, the Democrats continue to move to the left. According to a brand new primary poll, AOC-

would trounce Senator Chuck Schumer in a New York primary. She leads Schumer 54-33 among likely Democratic voters in New York City. That's unbelievable because, of course, she is wildly to the left. The numbers are troubling for Schumer, obviously, according to the New York Post. It is amazing to watch as Schumer simply falls apart. But this is the next wave of the Democratic Party. This is why they're trying to try out Rahm Emanuel.

like the former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff under Barack Obama to try and be the guy. Yeah, good luck, guys. What an uninspiring crew the Democrats are rolling out right now. This, by the way, is the reason why Democrats tried to run a dead person in that last election cycle. And Alex Thompson, who's the author alongside Jake Tapper of this new book about the Biden health cover-up, he points out that Biden aides, the way that they justified lying to the American public about exactly...

How bad things were for Biden is because they said it was the only way to save democracy from Trump. Yeah, well done, guys. He just had to win and then he could disappear for four years. He'd only have to show proof of life every once in a while. His aides could pick up the slack. Who would have been running the White House in a second Biden term? This person went on to say that when you're voting for a president, you're voting for the aides themselves.

around him. But these aides were not even Senate-confirmed aides. These are White House aides. These were unelected people. And one of the things that really, I think, comes out in our reporting here is that if you believe, and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe, that Donald Trump was and is an essential threat to democracy, you can rationalize anything, including sometimes doing undemocratic things, which I think is what this person is talking about.

Unbelievable. By the way, Sam Harris, again, I'm friendly with Sam, but we should remember that Sam Harris is still out there saying that he would rather have Joe Biden in a coma than evil Trump. Well, it didn't work. It didn't work because the American people weren't up for it. But to close the loop on this whole scandal, even that is preferable to me.

and to, I think, many Democrats than having someone who we consider to be genuinely evil, genuinely 100% purposed to serving himself in the office of the presidency. I would rather have a president in a coma where the duties of the presidency are executed by a committee of just normal people.

OK, I'm just going to point out that that reason that doesn't work is specifically because if you lie to the American people, they will pick the other person. It is because of that belief that the American people could not be leveled to that they that they couldn't be told the truth. It is precisely that reason why you have seen the rise of Donald Trump. All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now. We get into Rajiv Macron pushing Emmanuel Macron in the face on camera.

Which is about the most French thing I can think of. Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member. If you're not a member, become a member. Use code Shapiro. Check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.