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Keys To A Failed Presidency

2025/1/12
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Jason in the House

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我将讨论特朗普即将就任美国总统,以及这将如何影响美国。 我将回顾拜登总统任期的失败之处,并分析导致这些失败的原因。 我将详细解释“和解”一词在政治中的含义,以及它如何影响立法进程。 我将分析加州山火灾害,并讨论灾害管理中存在的问题。 我将讨论美国与格陵兰、巴拿马和墨西哥的关系,以及这些关系中的挑战。 我将讨论美国边境安全问题,以及特朗普政府可能采取的措施。

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An exploration of the five critical points where President Biden's presidency was considered to have faltered, including his alleged dishonesty and absenteeism.
  • Biden claimed a scandal-free administration, yet faced criticism for dishonesty.
  • His presidency was marked by significant absenteeism, spending 40% of his time away.
  • Policies on inflation and spending drew criticism for worsening economic conditions.
  • Biden's leadership was seen as lacking, with accusations of weaponizing bureaucracy.
  • Critics argue his policies failed, leading to increased inflation and economic instability.

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Well, welcome to the Jason in the House podcast. Thanks so much for joining me. I appreciate it. Look, we're off to a new year. Hard to believe. You know, I just wrote a check the other day, 2025. Got to get used to doing that. Some people are laughing at me like, hey, dad, who writes checks anymore? Yeah, I still old school, write some checks every once in a while, pay the mortgage, do those types of things. But yeah, 2025. Hard to believe we've turned the corner.

I remember when it was the year 2000, we were all afraid the lights weren't going to turn on and what would Y2K and all that happen. And here we are in 2025 and it's amazing. Kids are getting older. Life continues on.

And pretty soon, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. That is amazing. To be number 45 and 47, that's just unbelievable to me. So to kick off the new year, there's a lot happening. And, you know, normally I bring in a guest. We talk about their life and all that. We got some really good ones coming up.

But for the moment, there's so much happening and so many detailed things. I just thought I'd take this opportunity to highlight the stupid because, you know, there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. And then get into some details, like some nitty gritty details that maybe you won't hear otherwise. That's the beauty of podcasts, right? You can go a little bit deeper. So we're going to talk everything about the inauguration, the disaster, the California fire and the disaster management there.

We'll talk a little bit about Mayor Karen Bass. I served with her in Congress. I actually know her. The insurance issue and all the things that are going to happen in the aftermath of this fire.

But then I really want to get in in detail reconciliation. You're going to keep hearing that time and time again, reconciliation. What in the world does that mean? And I'm going to go a little bit deeper so you have a deeper understanding of what that means. We'll talk about Greenland. We'll talk about Panama. We'll talk about Mexico. And then we'll circle back, if you will, and talk a little bit more about inauguration. So in order to kick it off, we're going to do things a little bit out of order for this first time.

It's time to highlight the stupid because you know what? There's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. All right. We're going first here. People magazine. You know what a big fan I am of people magazine. And this was a horrific situation.

So we're going to San Diego State University. This happened actually in 2024 back in February, but four fraternity members have been charged after Pledge...

is set on fire and suffers 16% burns during a party skit. This is just horrific. This is just, come on, being stupid. You know, look, I want kids to have a good time, but I want them to be engaged with their community and have some fun and all that while they're getting out and doing their studying. And that's just part of life and growing up. But Phi Kappa Psi members were performing a pre-planned skit, which was set on fire and

And this poor kid ended up with like major burns to their body. Come on, folks. That's not just fun. That's just downright stupid. All right. Let's go to the next one. A YouTuber has been accused of kidnapping woman after announcing his move to Dubai. So what's that all about? Again, I'm going back to people.com because, hey, you know what a big fan I am.

Corey Pritchett Jr. allegedly kidnapped two women from a bowling center in Houston in November before, you know, moving on to Dubai. So they've issued a police warrant for a guy from Houston who evidently fled the country after he kidnapped two women. That's the allegation. Don't know if it's true, but man, that took a turn for the worst. That's pretty stupid.

Evidently, he invited the women to ride ATVs, like an all-terrain vehicle, you know, like, I've got an ATV. It's kind of fun. It's kind of a fun thing to do. He took them bowling, but then all of a sudden said, hey, by the way, now we're going to go ahead and take you to Dubai. Holy cow. Well, police got involved, evidently, and now the YouTuber has been accused of...

Kidnapping. That's kind of crazy. All right, next one. We're going to this man. This is according to Fox 5 New York. And New Jersey man allegedly killed fiance a day after public proposal on a video. It's always sad when somebody dies. He's charged in the stabbing death of his supposed fiance. Okay.

Just a day, literally a day after posting his video to Facebook about their engagement. Yikes. Come on, folks. We can't be doing that. That's just gruesome. Now we go to Fox29.com. If you go there and have a look at what they're talking about, well, one of the things that popped up on their screen is galaxy gas. If you haven't heard of this, kids are inhaling dangerous levels of nitrous oxide.

Sometimes you think, hey, that might be fun, but Georgia-based Galaxy Gas has paused sales on its nitrous oxide whipped cream chargers amid concerns over kids inhaling the product to get high and potentially causing long-term, long-term neurological damage. Sorry, kids, that's just downright stupid. You know, you want to get this high for a moment, but you don't want to damage your brain for the rest of your life.

Yeah, laughing gas when you go to the dentist in a controlled setting. That feels pretty good. I do that when I get a cavity. But come on. These are called whippets. They've been used as party drugs, evidently. But the videos, they've got millions of views and kids are doing it and they're burning their brains out. Don't do that. This is all in the category of stupid, folks. Grow up just a little bit. Don't have the stupid happen to you.

All right, that's the kicking off week one here, or week two of The Stupid. But now I want to get into the nitty gritty of what's going on in our world and politics and everything else, because you know what? This is going to be historic time. This is going to be an amazing time. We've said for a long time, January 20th cannot happen soon enough. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more right after this.

I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto-friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger. So I can get in more squats anywhere I can. One, two, three. Will that be cash or credit? Credit. Galaxy S25 Ultra, the AI companion that does the heavy lifting so you can do you. Get yours at Samsung.com. Compatible with select apps. Reparts Google Gemini account. Results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy.

So I've got a op-ed. If you go to foxnews.com, Monday morning, it's coming out. Biden's five keys to a failed presidency. Joe Biden will go down in history. He tries to go up to the microphone and say, well, you know, it's been a scandal-free administration. We accomplished so much. Corrine Jean-Pierre, how many times have we heard her say historic this, historic that? Yeah, not really. Not really in a good way.

Here are the five key things I think that happened during his presidency that will put him down in history as one of the worst presidents, not really in the history of the United States. One is breathtaking dishonesty. It's amazing how many times we were gaslit as a public, not only just about his family, his family business and Hunter Biden and the laptop and all those types of things, but

And, you know, saying he wouldn't pardon his child. Okay. But there's all these other things like the border is safe and secure, that they have operational control. No, that was never true. That the inflation is transitory. No, that's not true. All the jobs numbers kind of month after month got revised, of course, almost always, I think, if not always going down.

You know, nobody's look at the allegations or the supposed spin that he put on Afghanistan. That wasn't true. We lost good Americans there. And you just you start to layer this on top and top of each other. And you start to realize that this is just the breathtaking dishonesty that was there. He was very much an absentee president. Think about this. Roughly 40 percent of his time was spent away from the White House.

Now, you want presidents to be out there. You want them to travel. You want them to go visit places. But...

Not always going back to Delaware and hanging out on the beach all the time. I mean, it's just unbelievable. And of course, when disaster happens, it's as if they looked at the map and said, yeah, East Palestine, Ohio, that's a red place. So we won't go there. Even though it took him like more than a year and he finally did go visit, he was largely an absentee president. And I think it speaks volumes when 40% of the time you're not there.

There was no real leadership that I can see. He...

He failed at the basic principle of presidential leadership. The bureaucracy was weaponized against so many Americans. I think when two-thirds of the country says going into the election that we're on the wrong track, we got to get on the right track, that was a pretty good sign. He basically, another thing is he embraced policies that just fundamentally did not work.

The reason we got inflation, you look at Milton Friedman, a famous economist back from the 70s and 80s, and he will tell you definitively there's only one thing that causes inflation, that is government spending. You and I can't print more money. States can't print more money. Your business can't print more money. His premise is that everybody is somewhat greedy. We all want to have money and assets and be able to do things with those assets.

But you know what? When government decides to print more money, they dilute our ability to purchase. That's called inflation. It's too much money chasing too few goods. And so when you have the big inflation reduction act, so deceptive.

And these other packages, you have nearly $4 trillion in spending. Guess what? You throw that into the market and guess what happens? You have inflation. That's why things at the grocery store, at the gas station and others just became so unwieldy. And if you curb supply, as that was done in the energy sector by Trump,

shutting down the XL pipeline, you know, on day one of his administration, then guess what happens? Energy prices go up, energy prices go up. Guess what? Those costs get passed on to consumers. You do that with all the additional government spending and voila, there you go. There's your inflation. And that's what happened. So he embraced these policies that just fundamentally did not work. Everything from immigration, crime, foreign policy, woke, his woke politics, it all

All ended up being a really negative situation. And then I would argue that he also sabotaged our future.

You know, you had people telling us that some of these undercover videos and other things like this, but he sabotaged our future, that he locked in regulations preventing offshore drilling, started selling the materials, or at least he tried before a judge got involved in selling our border wall materials.

Signing contracts with unions so that the workers didn't physically need to come back into the office, even though we're years past COVID. You know, five-year deal. You don't even need to come to work. Those types of things, they're not for the good of the American people. Those were things that sabotaged our future. Because I think, and I would argue, that Donald Trump has a mandate. He has a mandate to do things and get things done for the American people. And if you want different results, you're going to have to do different things.

And Donald Trump comes ripe with creative ideas and policies and experience now. I think his entering into the White House is fundamentally different than it was when he came in after the 2016 election, because now he actually has the experience and does know what to do and is doing it differently, certainly with the population of his cabinet and senior staff than he's done before.

So January 20th will be a historic moment. And on that day, noon Eastern, they will be going through the ceremonies, which is an amazing feat, right? The peaceful transfer of power, passing the baton so that Joe Biden is no longer the president. Kamala Harris is left as the vice president. The certification of Donald Trump's presidency with J.D. Vance happened on January 6th. And then...

They take the oath of office, and I think before you see late afternoon, early evening come on, you're going to see what is estimated to be hundreds of executive orders that are signed by the president.

You know, if you institute something with an executive order, it can be undone with an executive order. Now, there are exceptions where you're going to have to be engaged in the legal world. But that inauguration day, I think the president's going to sit at that desk and have paper after paper that he's been planning for months and sign these executive orders to fundamentally change the direction and trajectory of our country. And I think...

America will love it. It'll give a mandate to those who will be put in as cabinet secretaries to make things happen.

So as we speak, the confirmation hearings on President Trump's cabinet are underway. That'll provide some drama over the next couple of weeks. But then the Senate needs to get to business, and they are going to have to get through, confirm those nominees that are being put forward, and then they're going to have to get to business.

and get these people put into place. Once they're put into place, then I think you'll see a lot of people dismissed, outright fired, moved on. I don't know. It'll be the whole gambit, but the fundamental change at the executive level within the branches of all the different cabinet areas, I think that we'll start to see that as soon as these people are confirmed.

So I'm going to come back to the inauguration a little bit later in this podcast, but I want to get in and talk about some of the things that are happening right now. Because we're foreshadowing what's going to happen on January 20th. Let's remember what's playing out right now in real time. A couple of days ago, we had one of the worst fires in the history of California, probably the worst fire in the history of California.

You know, I saw Mayor Bass when she came back from her vacation, I guess, or visit into Ghana. I'd be fascinated to know who paid for that trip. Did she pay for that personally? Why was she in Ghana? Who paid for that? I think she was sworn into office...

in 2022, I believe is when she was elected. She got sworn in in December of 2022. So question is, who paid for that trip? Why was she on that trip? Nevertheless, she's out of town. This thing happens. Now, it was foreshadowed by weather forecasters by saying there are going to be 100 mile an hour winds in Southern California. Now, I used to live in Southern California. Now, granted, I was like age seven or eight to like 11 or 12, something like that.

But I remember each year in the winter, usually more like November, December-ish, as I recall, sometimes September, the Santa Ana winds would kick in. And the winds would shift and they would come in from the desert and they'd come in hot, but they would be blowing. And I remember at least

some point during that, we could look all the way across. I lived in Palos Verdes, which if you look on the bay, on one end of the bay is kind of Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and on the other end is Palos Verdes. We'd look all the way across that water without binoculars, and we could see the wildfires in the distance. It was unbelievable. And it happened every year. Now, some years there weren't many fires. Sometimes it was just windy.

Sometimes there were bigger fires, like whatever year it was back then that I saw them. But nevertheless, the wins always happen. So you got to mitigate the challenges of these fires. But evidently that didn't happen. You know, it's interesting. Leadership is often defined by preparing, not just reacting. And if you go back and watch the tape, you're going to see

Donald Trump repeatedly talking about the need for water resources, the need to have mitigation efforts in place to suppress wildfires. We had a great moment years ago where Governor Gavin Newsom and President Trump were together looking at fires in California and Donald Trump talking about this. But the leaders in there in California evidently didn't heed any of those warnings.

Certainly not Mayor Bass, certainly not the legislature, and certainly not the governor of California. Now, the devastation is, I mean, the numbers keep rolling in, they keep going up.

But we're talking about by the thousands and thousands and thousands. You can't just roll a mobile home in there and say, hey, continue on your life. Where are families, where are the kids going to go to school? Where are they going to go to a pharmacy? Now, LA's got a big population. You can drive to go to certain places to find your local bank or grocery store or that sort of thing. But still...

It's still not your life and your community. And this devastation, it will really, really have to play itself out.

I think people are there in California. Certainly Adam Carolla has been one of the most outspoken. You know, he's a comedian. He's got a big voice. You see him a lot on Fox and whatnot. He lives there. He loves it there. He has this fascinating story talking about how he tried to become a firefighter when he was a young man, and they told him basically based on their woke policies, he wasn't able even to apply, or he did apply, but it would take years before he got considered.

But you know what's going to happen here is that, yeah, they're going to take a lot of criticism about the $17 million taken from the fire budget dealing with illegal immigration and dealing with homelessness, sometimes one and the same. You have a mayor who's off in Ghana. You have a fire chief who is saying we won't be able to deal with a catastrophic event. And then imagine being a firefighter, training your whole life, putting your life on the line,

Only to go out to fight a fire, save a home, squelch whatever's flaring up, hooking up that hose, and then turn in the knob, and there's no water. No water in the fire hydrant. I can't even imagine. What did these people do? Yes, they went out and they saved lives. They did what they could, but imagine no water for firefighters. That's just untenable. And a lot of this comes back to this smelt fish issue.

So many activists there in California wanted to save the fish rather than make sure they had the adequate water supply for, you know, life and happiness and security there in California. It's absolutely stunning. Now, let's foreshadow some of the things that are going to happen here.

One of the things that happened last year in droves were insurance companies. Insurance companies started going to these homes by the tens of thousands and saying, we can no longer cover our exposure here. And there were a whole host of reasons of why they couldn't adequately charge the amount of money that they thought they should be able to charge. And there were some, my understanding, some...

efforts or some legal ramifications that they couldn't charge what they needed to charge. And so they started dropping people last year from their insurance policies. They were given notice. It wasn't just overnight, but literally by the thousands, tens of thousands, people lost their insurance. Now, if you lost your insurance, there was a backstop. It was very expensive is my understanding that was offered by the state of California. And

Few people, again, preliminary analysis, were able to take advantage of that. So how many of these homes had no insurance? Who should pay for that? Should the good people of Montana have to pay for that? What about the people of, I don't know, Alabama? Should you have to pay for that, Alabama? This is going to be a big question because undoubtedly there are billions upon billions of dollars to be paid, but how many times do we have to go to

the taxpayers and say, you need to pay for this because somebody else didn't properly prepare. They use these woke policies to protect smelt fish, but didn't properly prepare for catastrophe, winds that happen on a regular basis. Fuel, when I talk about fuel, I'm talking about trees and shrubbery and undergrowth.

Gavin Newsom will say, well, I put, you know, I put a billion dollars towards fire suppression, but for the state of California, it's a massive state. And evidently there were only like 11,000 acres or something that was protected. Those numbers will be fleshed out. I want to be fair to the governor, but, you know, you aren't able to tackle everything everywhere. But if you don't

to mitigate and take out the underbrush or do controlled burns every once in a while or do those things that you need to do to protect on the fire suppression, don't be surprised when all of a sudden stuff starts burning. So again, I feel for the, our hearts drop, you know, for the people that are caught in this. I mean, what would you do if your insurance company said, we're not going to insure you, you got a $2 million home and in Southern California, that's not uncommon. Right.

And you have a $2 million home and you have no insurance. And so what are you going to do? That will all, again, need to be fleshed out. But here are the issues. You got to deal with housing. You have to deal with education. Where are these kids going to go to school? What are they going to do?

I think you're going to have the fraudsters come in in droves. You've already seen people arrested for looting, trying to go into these homes and steal things. It's such a wide swatch, and you have law enforcement, little to none. They're exhausted. They need a little time off. They need things like sleep. And then what happens when it actually does rain?

I mean, there's going to be all kinds of flooding when you get rid of the, when you get rid of the trees and you've had a fire, guess what happens? That becomes mud. It just starts flowing. And it is, I wouldn't call it mountainous, but it's kind of mountainous. It's certainly hilly. Um, and, um, you know, I'm from Utah, so when we talk mountains, we're talking serious mountains. So mountains, I guess for California level, um,

The point is the elevation changes dramatically and you're going to have water and it's going to flow and it's going to bring with it all kinds of debris and ash and flat out mud. It's a disaster and our hearts can go out to these people. They do need help. They do need assistance. And of course, we're going to come help them.

But at the same time, there's got to be a balance here because the good people who do the right things that don't live in these disaster areas, they don't build homes right on top of homes. I just don't feel like we should have to pay for that. And yet we got to find the right balance. And we will. Stay with us. We'll be right back. You're listening to Jason in the House.

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All right, let's go back to politics here because Donald Trump's coming into office and we've got a lot of things happening and you're going to hear a lot of discussion about reconciliation. So I want to bring you back to your school rock days. Remember how a bill becomes a bill? Well, there's a process before bills become bills and that's setting up a budget. So here's how this works. And I'm doing this in very rough cuts here. Okay.

All spending originates in the House of Representatives per the United States Constitution. They pass a bill. The Senate passes a bill. And previous to either one of those things, the president submits his budget plan, what he would like to see. It's a suggestive document, but it's supposed to be done early in the process, almost always late. In the years of Obama, it was months late every single year. So you have a suggested budget from the president.

which give directions to, in that case, the Democrats. House passes a budget resolution. Then you've got a budget coming out of the Senate. Inevitably, they're different. And so in order to reconcile the two, they go to a conference. The conference comes together. These are appointees from the various committees, and they get together, and they try to come up with an overall budget framework. Once they have that budget framework in place...

and they can get it passed, that is what is supposed to be the reconciliation. This is the top-line budget, and it gives direction to each of the 18 authorizing committees in the House, and I'm not sure, I can't remember how many are in the Senate.

That's the idea of reconciliation. So in order to do that, they recognized that they needed to speed it up. So I believe it was the 1974 Budget Act put into place that you didn't need to reach the number, the higher threshold of 60 votes in the Senate, which is the normal threshold in order to pass a legislation. It got expedited review done.

And it requires only 50 plus one in the Senate in order to pass. So in this case, the Republicans, you have Trump in the White House, you have Republicans with like a very small majority in the House, a bigger majority in the Senate, and which creates this golden opportunity for Republicans, if they can get their act together, to get the

the two bodies, the House and the Senate, to pass a bill that can go to the president's desk for signing. Now, here's the thing with reconciliation. You can't just put everything you ever wanted in there. There are rules and parameters, and one of them is called the Byrd rule. B-Y-R-D. This is named after Senator Byrd. And there are certain things that a

that you can't do with under the Byrd rule. So you can only put things into reconciliation that have changes in outlays or revenues. So it's primarily a tax bill, but not always. And you can do things, but again, there's what's called the Byrd bath. There's the Byrd rule. There's the Byrd. It gets really complicated.

You also have to understand that the Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, looks at things in a 10-year window. So if something comes along that says it will produce a massive deficit over a 10-year period, then guess what? It won't allow it to pass if your debt ceiling isn't high enough to handle it.

You heard Donald Trump expressing extreme frustration with the idea that, guess what? We have not dealt with the debt ceiling. Because within that 10-year window, if you produce things that go outside the 10-year window, then guess what? You can't do it. And so you have to increase the debt ceiling. We have a lot of people out there saying, I'm not increasing the debt ceiling unless we're cutting spending. One thing the Congressional Budget Office doesn't do is to deal with

dynamic scoring. So it works like this. If I were to institute a tax cut, let's say you make $100 and we take taxes from 25% to 20%. You now have five extra dollars in your wallet. Dynamic scoring says you will probably spend that $5 and inject it back into the economy.

So what happened, and there's a difference. People disagree with this. Democrats will say, oh, the tax cuts from Donald Trump put a huge hole. It was massive deficit spending. I would argue no. Tax cuts from Trump came into place. Guess what? Revenue to the treasury went up. It didn't go down. It went up.

Because the economy was zooming. People were feeling confident. They were making investments. They were buying homes. They were buying cars. They were doing it. Life was good in America. And the revenue to the Treasury consequently went up. But the Congressional Budget Office does not recognize this quote-unquote dynamic scoring, that by cutting revenue, they just assume that's lost revenue. And they count that as deficit spending, even though the revenue to the Treasury actually went up.

So the problem is, how do you deal with that? That's why the Trump, the original Trump tax cuts were only instituted for, I think, seven or eight years, because they needed to have them expired so they can be re-upped again down the road and thus extending the 10-year window, because the 10-year window moves in perpetuity. Hope this all makes sense.

The problem is the question before the president, the House, and the Senate is what bill do you put out there first? You can't do a lot of legislating, but you have to make a justification that it has to do with revenues and expenditures. So on one hand, you have Senator Thune who originally said let's do –

Energy, security, border. That should be easy because Republicans will largely get in line behind that. And if they can just get all the Republicans, it'll pass. No problem. You have another camp that says, no, we got to deal with the tax cuts first. If we don't deal with the tax cuts first, then, you know, then we got real problems, even though they expire the, you know, months down the road.

And then you have the third line of thinking, which is the prevailing one at the moment that you hear Donald Trump and others talking about is, let's do it all in one. Sounds more appealing to do it once. Because remember, the budget for the United States government goes on a fiscal calendar through the end of September. So you only really get two bites at this apple or one bite at the apple, depending on how you look at it, in 2025.

So the question is, do you do one big bill? But the risk here is that you don't have enough people supporting that bill. Do you have people that say, ah, wait, I can't do that. I'm opposed. Because literally you have two people in the House, Republicans, that say no, then you're in trouble. So how do you get everybody? And this is going to take some real leadership by Donald Trump. Or do you separate into two and just tackle it one at a time?

Don't know, but that's the big strategy that's coming up before the House of Representatives and what they're doing there in reconciliation. I hope that qualifies for, I hope that clarifies some of this for you. The other thing we got to talk about is Greenland. I think this is a great move. You know, right now it was interesting. One of the allegations against the Dutch, it's one of, it's a Dutch colony, is

against Denmark was, hey, why don't you do more to protect it? And they said they put two more dog sled teams up there. Are you kidding me?

Greenland is huge. If you look at what Russia is primarily, but somewhat China is doing, they believe there are shipping routes. They believe there are military installations that they should be putting. Some of these ice caps are getting smaller. Some aren't. There's a dispute. Is it getting bigger? Is it getting smaller? Is there global warming? Is there not global warming?

But if you look at our military and our ability and our Coast Guard with ice cutters, the Russians have invested heavily in these major ice cutters. There's a lot going on up there. And Donald Trump, the brilliance of what he did is put together the Space Force. There, in my estimation, is a war going on already in space. You just don't see it. There aren't cameras. That's why we never talk about it. But there's a lot going on up there.

The other thing is, and Greenland's part of that. We have a military base up there that's specific to the Space Force and our ability to communicate with our satellites and everything else. So you have to kind of understand that. There's a lot of strategic military reasons, energy reasons, and transportation communications reasons that Greenland is very strategic. And Donald Trump, again, thinking out in front of everybody,

It's really important. Panama and the Panama Canal is the same way. You know, the Panama Canal is supposed to be neutral, but it's not. The Chinese were aggressive on either end of the ports and buying those ports. And consequently, they're charging, and I read, anywhere between $25, 25 cents, something like that, per ship or per vessel that moves through the canal, to $300,000. The United States...

I'm not sure if it's the majority, but certainly the plurality of goods and services that moves through the canal, including military ships, is in the interest of the United States. And so the Chinese have thought, hmm, that's pretty smart. We'll go and kind of wrap this up. The Panamanians are claiming, oh, no, that's not the true. Everybody gets charged the same price. Well...

Really? I mean, we're doing the majority of the business there. So again, I think you're going to see more on that Panama Canal. And again, President Trump is way out in advance and doing it right. And he did the same thing with Mexico and Canada as it relates to immigration.

Hey, we're going to issue a 25% tariff unless you help lock down the border. Hey, guess what? Things have gotten smarter. Justin Trudeau has resigned up in Canada, unable, unwilling to work with the Donald Trump. And you know what? Donald Trump, at the end of the day, he just wants to be treated fairly, not taken advantage of.

And guess what? The Mexicans, to their credit, they started to say, hey, we're going to put up these camps to help take care of people that are going to be deported. And that deportations, guess what? Those are going to start happening on January 20th. Tom Homan and that group is going to start getting after it. It is amazing to me how much has been done by Donald Trump literally today.

Before he's even taken office. And he's tackling some of the most difficult things and letting the world know. Here's the other thing. We have hostages. There are still Americans who are being held hostage by Hamas. Those hostages need to be released. The president was definitive. I mean, not equivocating in any way, shape or form.

All hell is going to break loose on Hamas if they don't release those sausages. And if anybody out there doubts the tenacity and the commitment of President Trump to get that done, they're in for another thing. Because I'm telling you, he will get after it. He will make things happen. And it all starts as I'm circling back. Isn't that Jen Psaki? Gosh, drove me nuts when she said that.

But now the circles back to this inauguration. Here we are literally a couple days away. And I think the country is very much looking forward to this. But strap on your seatbelt because I think Donald Trump understands he has a limited amount of time to make some good things happen. And they're in the best interest of the United States. And of course, we're going to debate the different policies. Fair game. But.

There is a surge of patriotism in this country I haven't felt before. There is this surge of optimism in this country that's been waning and has disappeared for a long time. And we shouldn't expect the status quo. The United States of America is the greatest country on the face of the planet. We need to act like it. If you're going to be the world's superpower economically, militarily, politically,

and morally and everything else, you need to act like it. And I think that's the direction we're going. And this surge of patriotism is good. We got people that need help. They're in Hawaii. They're in where that hurricane happened and the Carolinas and Georgia and others that are still hurting. And now you're going to have people in Southern California displaced from their homes and

All the cameras will kind of pull back here once the disaster subsides, and they have to figure out how to get on with life. And it'll never be the same. And it's going to be more difficult, particularly for some financially, just to have this devastation rain down on top of them. So...

We can do a better job, I think, as Americans reaching out and helping those in need. But let's also create some fairness. Let's reinstitute that rule of law. Let's reinstitute the commitment that we need to make sure that this is a place where the rule of law is paramount. You can't just come into this country illegally without a consequence. You can't steal or do things without consequence. And the restitution part of that is really important.

And you know what? That's what we need in this country. And that's why it's exciting that Donald Trump will take office on January 20th. So there's a lot happening. I hope this helps understanding a little bit more about reconciliation. Greenland, Panama, Mexico, Gaza, everything that's going on in California, disaster management, the inauguration, and then certainly the enforcement of what's going to have to happen with our border.

So thanks so much for joining us. It's been, we're off to a great, great start. I would really appreciate it if you could rate the podcast. Appreciate it. That would be good. Subscribe to it because, you know, you can get it every week. And I want to remind people, you can listen ad-free with a Fox News Podcast Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to the show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.

Thanks so much for staying with us. And you can go over to foxnewspodcast.com, foxnewspodcast.com, and check out some of the other podcasts that are out there. Otherwise, make sure you join us next week. We'll have a really good discussion. I appreciate your time. Thanks for hearing us out. Hope you enjoyed it. And we'll be back with you soon. I'm Jason Chaffetz. This has been Jason in the House.

I'm Dana Perino. This week on Perino on Politics, I'm joined by former GOP strategist and host of The Rich Zioli Show, Rich Zioli. Available now on FoxNewsPodcast.com or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Must listen to podcasts from Fox News Audio.