Tom Luongo on Trump’s Tariff Triumph, Freeing America from Europe, Why Iran Won’t Be Attacked
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Well, we're going to have a great show today. We have a returning guest who is always making waves with the things that he's looking at and expository, exposing all kinds of strange things that people didn't put together, like maybe we can't get rid of the Fed tomorrow, right? He's the proprietor of Gold, Goats, and Guns, Tom Luongo. How you doing?

I am good, Dave. How are you? I mean, other than the fact that I really do think that the airline industry in this country is dying, because I just got back from New York for the event with my other side gig, so I'm with Newsmax, and I was there for the opening, the ringing of the opening bell on New York Stock Exchange yesterday morning, watching the whole pomp and circumstance, and that was fun. I was there with my editor.

And that was great. And it was fun. But my God was where the flights just awful. Like every flight was 45 minutes to an hour delayed. The ground crews didn't know what they were doing.

I was just, I mean, I'm glad I left like a large amount of, of, you know, for such a simple trip from, from Gainesville to New York, I left, like I knew, I knew this. I just, I left large amounts of like overall, you know, layovers and everything else. And then they turned out, but that I needed every, almost every minute of it to get back and forth on time. It was crazy. Wow. So how was that like being on the, is that the first time you've done something like that at the New York store? Yeah. So what was that like? Did you clap? Did you clap?

Oh, of course. They even gave us little bells to ring and the whole nine yards. It was kind of cool. It was fun. We had breakfast at the New York Stock Exchange. Then we walked out onto the trading floor and there was CEO Chris Ruddy, Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy and the crew up on the balcony. We're standing literally right next to the CNBC studio, which is right there on the New York Stock Exchange. I'm watching Kramer lose his mind over what's going on. It was

it was hilarious and i'm standing there with my my editor and uh mike and we were just you know he was it was a big deal it was i think it was a bigger deal for him than it was for me the older i get i'm just like yeah all these people put their pants on the sink you know one leg at a time they're you know it's just it's weird like i was and

I've now been in the room with very powerful people a number of times now and never before. The first few times it happened to me, I was a little, obviously, like everybody else. You get a little starstruck. The older you get, you're like, yeah, they're just people with money. You know what I mean? Yeah, okay. It was cool. It was fun. Yeah.

you know, so. Yeah. Did you, so you, you had a good experience. Did you, did you have some good conversations and did you get to see anybody that's in the, uh, Wall Street world that, you know, maybe have known, has known your work or you knew their work and could meet for the first time or anything like that? Um, nobody from Wall Street really, but people within Newsmax that, um, that I didn't know. Um, yeah, there were a couple of people who were like, they were like,

dude, you're here? That's awesome. Let's sit down. We've had bread. We had dinner. It was great. And I was like, whatever. That's cool. That's fine. Let's do the thing. But I'm like, the hell am I? So it was interesting. It really was. I feel like there's an entire undercurrent of they're all monitoring the alternative media space pretty heavily.

um they're they're monitoring the pod the podcast space because they're looking like everything else they're all looking for an edge yeah and uh and they go out into our world to find that edge and you know the really good ones are the ones looking for frankly vital and interesting information and um yeah i've had a real good talk with a couple of people actually yeah yeah

You mentioned CNBC. I'm looking at their homepage right now. It says Dow drops 1,300 points, NASDAQ set to close and bear market as Trump tariff sell-off worsens. Powell sees tariffs raising inflation and says Fed will wait before further rate moves. Yeah, he might. Fond market is going to force his hand. Yeah.

But to be honest with you, I don't think Trump cares. Yeah. Because, I mean, this was their plan was it was to lower the long end of the yield curve. And to be honest with you, I really do think that I've been the more I watch this play out, the more I've watched the first hundred days of the Trump administration or we're not even the first hundred days yet. But these first 80 days or whatever they are, there are two targets.

Clearly, at many levels, China is one of those targets. I'm not going to argue that, but it's secondary. I think what's really surprising everybody is that the real target is Europe. China announcing this morning that they're going to put reciprocal tariffs on the United States and Trump coming back and going...

That was a bad move. That's a panic. All capital letters. I'm like, they panicked. This is bad. Okay. Game on. Like, basically, I'm like, yeah, it's interesting. Given some of the things that I, you know, some of the conversations I had this week with people and it made sense that China would act this way. And I think they were expect, I think the Trump administration was expecting that move. But as far as the stock market is concerned, let's kind of break some stuff down.

We've had a lot of funny money pumped into the markets through the U.S. taxpayer or forcing the U.S. taxpayer to pay the interest on the money that they just print out of thin air. And a lot of that's coming out of the Treasury Department, not really coming out of the Fed. I honestly think at a certain level, the more I watch this and the more I watch Elon Musk operate and uncover stuff at Doge, what I come to realize is that the Treasury was just printing money and just sending it out the door.

The Fed then was then being forced to monetize this while there was just profligate spending happening up on Capitol Hill and then, in effect, trying to tie the Fed's hands, which is in many ways is what I was saying all throughout the time that Janet Yellen was at Treasury. And what I originally thought about the whole Build Back Better bill and what the Democrats under the Biden-Hunter were trying to achieve, which was to force the Fed's hand by just codifying in law

trillions of dollars of unnecessary spending that then the Fed would eventually have to go back to the zero bound, monetize, and then keep the whole leveraging of the offshore dollar markets as high as possible and keep that leverage ratio as high as possible and liquefied as long as possible and thereby hollow out what's left of the United States. That was their plan. That plan has clearly failed.

That plan has clearly failed because Jerome Powell cut off a lot of the avenues as Fed chairman for that money to flow out of the Federal Reserve and to force the pricing of those dollars to be made at his rate, not at their preferred rates. And every attempt that they've made in order to try and blackmail us back to lower interest rates or egregiously lower interest rates,

I mean, they just have failed. And now we're watching the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of the ECB. They're all cutting rates far faster than the Fed is. They'll probably have to cut rates again. And Powell's talking a tough game now. I think his hand is going to get forced because he now has a significant inversion in the belly of the yield curve between six months and two years. But there's no stress in the short-term repo markets.

When you look at the one-month, two-month, three-month yield, you don't see any stress there. You don't see traders pushing the one-month, the 30-day T-bill down below 4.25%, down below the Fed's four, right? So there's no stress. There's no like, oh my God, we need dollars. And we're not seeing any of that. So when you're seeing that,

And then you look at what we had been seeing up until Tuesday or Wednesday when Trump announced the tariffs. What you saw was the long end of the yield curve was selling off, right? The 10, the 30, the 7, the 10, the 30 were selling out, especially the 30 selling off really, really hard. But you sell the 30. What do you do with that?

Well, you sell the 30, you're buying dollars. If you don't want the dollar to rise too strongly because you're trying to actually defend your currency if you're Europe, you then immediately turn around and buy tubes. And so what we saw was the yield on the 30 rise significantly.

And the yield on the six-month, the one-year, the two-year, the three-year fall. And so now we have an inverted yield curve. Here's the Fed funds rate, and then it dips, and then it goes up. So we have this kind of cup and handle kind of shaped yield curve. So one of two things can happen here. Either they can stop doing that because they run out of money or they run out of treasuries to sell and manipulate our yield curve with, or the Fed can lower rates and we get a normally upsloping yield curve.

It's all about the bonds, folks. It's all about the bonds. The stock market does not matter. The stock market is a reflection of how tight, of how cheap and easy liquidity is. So what we've been seeing when I look at it all, what we've been seeing is that since Trump shut off USAID and since Trump

Musk basically shut down and everybody shut down the dollar flows into all these NGOs and all this raw money being pumped into the global economy. What do we see? We see credit spreads collapsing between European and American debt. We see the stock markets like, you know, petering out and then now they're doing this. And, you know,

But now that Trump has done what he's done, now he's incentivized the market to go, I want to be... And the whole market looked at the 30-year trading at like 6, 7, going, well, that's cheap.

That's an undervalued asset, right? Higher yield, lower price. So they bought the 30 against Europe's wishes and they crashed the 30 down, you know, down 40 basis points. They've got the 10 year down to, you know, 3.95 or 3.9 this morning. So what, knowing all of that and knowing that we're staring at, thanks to Janet Yellen,

running cover for the ECB during her entire term, her entire traitorous, like truly treasonous tenure as treasury secretary. We've got $9 trillion worth of debt that needs to be rolled over this year. And they didn't want to roll it over 5% or 4.5%. They bring it down, push it out onto the yield curve while you're trying to fix the budget at the same time. And that's what's going on. That's what the Trump administration is doing.

They know exactly what they're doing, and they're okay with there being a 25% correction in the stock market because it's probably necessary. I mean, valuations were insanely high. I mean, what was the Schiller PDE index on the PDE ratio on the S&P 500 was the third highest it was ever in history. It was creeping up into the 30s. That's insane. It needs to be brought back down into the 20s.

at a minimum, should be brought down into the teens, mind you, but we don't live in that world anymore. We live in that world. Well, we may live in that world again one day when we have a stock market that properly discounts the future earnings to say eight to 12 times, which is where it should be, where 12 is high, where a PDE is 12 is high, not, oh my God, that's cheap. Everything's so distorted that

You know, that's where we are. So I think that they've gotten exactly the response that they wanted. Europe is now closed for the week. You and I are doing this at 1130 on Friday afternoon. And the minute Europe closed at 11 o'clock, the U.S. equity market started to bounce. And it was a 700 point rip your face off rally in on the Dow. Now, we're not to the close yet.

It's a long way, and the market's this volatile. 4 o'clock is a long way away. When I sit down with Marty Bennett at 4 o'clock this afternoon, we'll talk about the close. But what's interesting is we'll see what happens today. Whether we get a real rally into the close today, durable rally, where maybe the Dow is only down a couple hundred points, that would be a very big tell. Because, by the way, the German DAX was off 4% this morning.

euro stocks 50 is off was off another four percent this morning like the french cac 40 was off like the and if the american equities rebound into the close once all the other sources of of uh of selling are closed meaning first you get past the european close at 11 o'clock then you get past the comex close at 1 30 the futures market closing at 1 30.

You know, I'm back to, I literally, I'm now back into what I used to do on a daily basis when I used to watch the gold market. Like, okay, the European close is going to look like this. What's going to happen? I used to watch this stuff all the time this way. I haven't done this in years. So now I'm like back into the, watching like the 15 minute chart going, okay, so feeling froggy, what leap are you going to take now? Because your markets are closed. Now we can rip your face off. And, and,

It's going to be very interesting to watch American traders and the American banking system, see what they do in this environment. This is a Titanic battle for the future of the world in short, after all that like market positioning talk and all the rest of it, what it comes down to is what I'm describing is a fricking war. And it's,

In the end, it's going to be a bloodier war financially than the war in Ukraine is for Slavs. But human cost, of course, is horrific. But there's going to be a lot of guys jumping out of buildings by the time this is done. And I don't think it's going to be on Wall Street. As a matter of fact, the mood on the stock exchange yesterday was not, I didn't see, it didn't look like a morgue to me.

It looked like a lot of guys bearing down going, oh, there's an opportunity. There's going to be a buying opportunity on IL-12 that I can't wait for. And market psychology is far more important to me. Ignore guys like Kramer. They're paid shills to know, to tell you exactly what the globalists want you to know. I don't fucking trust Kramer as far as I can throw him. And I know this morning, last point, I'll turn the microphone over, is...

What I noted last night while I was on the plane getting ready to come back to Gainesville is that I didn't see any American banks really complaining. I saw Deutsche Bank complaining. I saw European publications complaining. I saw The Economist screaming. I saw Financial Times screaming. I didn't see Americans screaming. I look at CNBC when I look at MSNBC when I look at the rest of them. They all work for the Europeans.

They're all in the tank for the globalists. They're not real. So they have an agenda, and that agenda is very clear as to what the agenda is. And the agenda is, we need more, Dre. We need to take more of your money. And I'm at the point now, dude, where I'm like, I don't care. Burn these people to the ground. And if you want to fight them, you have to be as ruthless as they are.

And they've proven over the last 400 years that they're, 300 years that they're as ruthless as they come. And that they're willing to start global warfare and kill hundreds of millions of people to stay in power. So that's the tail risk coming forward. Because that's the fight that Trump has picked. And I think he and his team are prepared for it. But, you know, it's going to come with a whole lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth in the process. In short, boomers are going to boomer. I want to get into some of the foreign policy issues.

Sure. Factors here in a little bit. But while we're setting the table for this morning's events, right before we started the show, Trump said that this would be a perfect time for Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to cut interest rates. He is always late, but he could now change his image and quickly. Energy prices are down. Interest rates are down. Inflation is down. Even eggs are down 69 percent and jobs are up.

All within two months, a big win for America. Cut interest rates, Jerome, and stop playing politics. So is this the rope-a-dope they're doing with each other here, like you have said? Because you've seemed to indicate that they're kind of working on the same team. But, you know, I mean, is this some theater here? I think there's a little bit of theater here. The markets are definitely positioning that the Fed's going to cut.

I think that the Fed doesn't want to do anything when the market is 95% positioned that there's not going to be a Fed rate cut. I noted since Monday, the odds of a Fed rate cut based on the Fed funds futures curve have gone from 3% to the last time I checked it this morning, it was like 43% in three days. By next week,

You know, it's going to be 75% or 80%. We're going to see the market positioned for it. It's going to give Powell everything he needs. And all he needs between now and May 6th, the next FOMC meeting, is, you know, a couple of data points so that Powell has political cover to do what he needs to do. But again, you know, Powell...

played the game very, very astutely by using interest rates, by using inflation to cover his real agenda, which was to drain the euro dollar system. Now, he has lived by the inflation mechanism or narrative, died by the inflation narrative. Now, Powell cut rates by 50 basis points back in September when the market wasn't expecting him to cut 50 basis points. He didn't anyway. So,

I think Powell has already chosen multiple times that he will, in effect, choose labor over inflation. And Trump is saying, we're inviting the inflation. We're cutting spending. We're getting rid of the graft. We're getting rid of the, we're going to start clawing back, you know, spend it and all the rest of it. You know, give me what I need here. Give me 25 basis points.

And let's get moving. Note, by the way, that the FOMC members who would be normally considered doves are the ones saying, well, I'm not sure we can even cut interest rates this year. Now, that's your tell. They're the first ones to say we need to cut when we need to raise and the first ones to say we need to maintain when we need to cut.

Why? Because now high interest rates are not certain are not going to serve us here. Right. Europe wants us to cut. Actually, Europe wants us to hold rates high now so that they can they can cut and look proactive and we need to cut.

I agree with Trump. He needs to cut by 25. I don't think he needs to cut 50. I certainly think he needs to cut by probably 75 basis points, maybe 100 by the end of the year. But that's going to be a hard sell given the situation. But we'll see.

He's got oil prices down into the mid-60s. Watch gasoline futures carefully. I haven't looked at them this morning. As a matter of fact, while I'm sitting here, while you ask your next question, Dave, I'm going to look at gasoline futures because that to me is your biggest tell as to what is going to happen next. Because right now, the inflation rate is tied almost directly to... No, gasoline futures is down to 205. They were 225 earlier in the week. Forget it. Powell will be able to cut because the CPI is going to come in

is going to come in better than expected. Watch. Yeah, I've just followed up with the reaction so far. You know, Trump's talking about how he just had a productive call with Tho Lam, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. Right. He says that Vietnam wants to cut their tariffs down to zero if they are able to make an agreement with the U.S.,

So do you think that that is enough of a thing that you'll start to see more and more follow suit? Or do you think that's just going to be, it won't create the kind of chain reaction? For certain players, especially Vietnam, yes. Vietnam's very important because realize that China is dumping a lot of its, well, Trump's first round of tariffs.

Moved a lot of Chinese textile business to Vietnam. And Vietnam was always going to become... I mean, for 15 years, Vietnam has been a very important textile business. Exporter or importer. They would export their textiles back into the United States. Yeah. No. Vietnam was always the weak link here. They don't have an option. They can't afford a tariff.

So that's a move aimed directly at the Chinese. And, you know, the Vietnamese, Vietnam is a country I used to study a lot because I used to work with a broker over in Vietnam. So it's kind of, I mean, my information on Vietnam is out of date. But what I'll tell you is the Vietnamese are very, very worried about the Chinese. They always have been.

That's why they were, you know, back in 2009, 2010 through 2013, 2014, that whole period right after the first five years, say after the global financial crisis, when Vietnam was like, you know, the dong was destroyed. The State Bank of Vietnam had to go to 16, 18%. They were inviting a lot of Japanese capital. The Japanese were actually outsourcing a lot of their demographic problems to Vietnam.

which is part of the reason, which was a real problem, by the way, when we had the CIA pick a fight, Shinzo Abe pick a fight between Japan and China because the Japanese and the Chinese were beginning to normalize relations economically. That had to be severed. And Abe...

took ended the strong end policy, where at that point was trading about 75, 77, and immediately pushed the end up to 125. And that was to stop Japanese investment into Vietnam. And which tells you that at that point, our the Obama administration and our intelligence services were working in concert with the Chinese to stop the Japanese from helping to colonize

you know, to not colonize, but to compete with the Chinese in Southeast Asia. That's what Abenomics did, by the way. It was terrible. It was a terrible thing for the Japanese. And in the end, it's actually what cost, it's cost that wing of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan all of its power. That's why we have, what's his name? Um, um,

Ibero, what's his other name? The current prime minister of China. That's why he's in charge now, because he represents a different... There's only one party. It's a one-party system in Japan. The liberal Democrats are in charge, but there are two wings in the liberal Democrats. There's a classic kind of British neoconservatives or American Anglo-Neoconservatives, and then there's the Japanese nationalists. The Japanese nationalists are now in charge.

So, and they're starting to pursue a much stronger yen policy and normalization of interest rates and everything else. They're trying to get back to the system that made Japan rich in the first place, which was torn down by, well, by us and the Brits and George Soros and the rest of them. So it's a very interesting thing. I'm not surprised at all to see Vietnam

try to settle with Trump almost immediately. Which is part of the reason why Trump put the stiffest tariffs on Vietnam. Yeah, that's the way he wanted them to come quickly. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I want to kind of touch a little bit about the foreign policy stuff. But before I do, how important is it that the midterm goes favorably to keeping the House with the Republicans?

It's absolutely critical, which is why Trump needs to act quickly now. He needs to get all, it's like Reagan. If you remember what happened, they did the same thing to Reagan in his first 18 months. He had to act very quickly, get the Federal Reserve, get Volcker on his side and act very, very quickly.

To fix the problem so that when we got to the midterms, his he was strengthened and then we got to the second term. Trump is running the exact same playbook. And so they have to get all this done. So this is today. Everybody's freaking out. OK, fine. But those is going out there and finding all sorts of cuts to the budget. We have a Congress that is not sure.

individually whether or not they're going to, you know, Trump is going to be able to pull any of this off. So they're, you know, do I do this? You know, they're all being squishy because they don't want the fuck to do because they're, you know, a bunch of feckless jackoffs, right? They're only interested in themselves.

they'll go with whatever way the wind is blowing. It's the same thing with the Arabs, by the way, over in the Middle East. Whoever looks dominant between the Russians, the Europeans, and the Americans, that's who the Arabs are going to back. They don't have the ability to buck the strongman.

right? Well, a lot of our politicians are exactly the same way. So Trump has to rack up wins with the populace here. What he's done very successfully to this point is explain by showing them just how much the Canadians hate us, the Canadian leadership hates us, and the European leadership hates us, and who the real enemies of the United States are. And the real enemies of the United States are the Liberal government in Canada, Emmanuel Macron,

Ursula von der Leyen, Friedrich Mers, soon to be Chancellor of Germany, and the others. Those are not friends of the United States, and they're the ones that run the European Union. And they run that whole Davos, what I like to call the Davos crowd. Keir Starmer, clearly one of them trying to destroy what's left of the United Kingdom. Now, with that said, Trump has to, this is just,

Only one part of what he has to do to convince the American people he's got the right plan. I agree with a lot of people. So I've given you like all the things that Trump wants to do and some of the things he's done right. What has he done wrong so far? No arrests. That's the big one. There's been no scalps gotten at this point. That's one bad move. He's got to go arrest somebody soon for whatever's going on here.

Two, he has to start really communicating directly with the people as to what his whole plan is, because right now no one has any fucking idea. Now, that being said, he's in the middle of some intense trade negotiations. So he's like Donald Trump likes to do. He likes to negotiate by not doing anything. Right. He likes to negotiate by blustering and then waiting for them to come to him. So we're in that period right now. Where are we going to be at the end of the month is the big question.

If we're still doing this at the end of the month, he's in trouble. If he's shifted the entire narrative and started to explain what the next part of this is, what the next part of the plan is by the end of April, he's going to be in a very good position. So let's – because the pace is what matters here. Because, you know, he shocked and awed everybody, and he's got them all stunned, and now they've like –

Now they're starting to try and retaliate. But in some ways, you have to let them retaliate so you know what they're going to, how they're going to retaliate so that you can go, okay, so you've done this? You feckless jackoffs? Fine. This is how we beat you. At some point during this back and forth of a large-scale negotiation, you have to find out what they think they have. And they have to reveal their weaknesses by how they respond. The Chinese, as far as Trump is concerned, just revealed that they're terribly weak.

Okay. And I hate the, I mean, but that's because the Chinese didn't sit down at the table with Trump and say, okay, let's not do this. And that's what his tweet was about this morning. So again,

We're writing them thick of it right now. Everybody's having their endocrine, their big endocrine reaction, their big ab reaction. And oh, my God, what's going to happen in the world? But that's part of the gaslighting. You have to think through that and go, OK, so where are we? You know, this is they're playing one hand right now. Poker. What's the next hand of poker? Senator Rand Paul says when McKinley most famously put tariffs on in 1890, the Republican Party lost 50 percent of their seats in the next election.

When Smoot and Hawley put on their tariff in the early 1930s, we lost the House and the Senate for 60 years. And so is that, you know, does that, you know, if you don't see the shift dramatically at the end of this month, do you think that could be where we could see this play out? I mean, not just on a month, but, you know. There's a couple of things here. One, this is when Rand, this is when being a doctrinaire libertarian works against you. I've said this before and I'll say it again. Everybody's read of history is wrong.

including the libertarians. They refuse to admit this because they want to focus on nothing but monetary policy and how bad the Fed is. Martin Armstrong has taken them to task on this a thousand ways from Sunday, and they won't listen to him, even though he's been right. The Holly Smoot Tariff Act did not cause the Great Depression. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's arguments about how the Great Depression started are wrong, period. They're wrong.

They have always been wrong. Hell, I've heard that from the Mises Institute. They're wrong. So this is about capital flow and about a sovereign debt crisis. There was a sovereign debt crisis in Europe because of German hyperinflation and coming out of World War II and everything else. And all the money ran over here and they invested over here. And then the money flowed back out again. But you know why? Because Europe was a smoking ruin. And no matter what tariff we put on, no matter what we did, it wouldn't matter at that point.

Like that money was going to flow out again because Europe was trading at 23 cents on the dollar or something. I mean, when that shit's that cheap, it doesn't matter. When Argentina has a currency crisis, money flows into Argentina, how it flows in, what, what political system you wind up with afterwards. Well, that's a different story, but this is what happened. And you know,

It was a different world where we were still mostly on a gold standard, but then we had the, then we're producing federal reserve notes. We had a bipolar monetary system and all this stuff. Now we're trying to go back to getting rid of the federal reserve note and moving towards a hard money system. And we had, and the way you have a hard money system and have it actually work is you get rid of the income tax and you get, and you bring the central bank

back out of the complete control over the monetary system. Like, I would argue that the Banking Act of 1935, which gave us the modern version of the Federal Reserve, was probably more important to destroying the country than the tariff was. Like, context matters.

Just saying, well, McKinley put tariffs on and it was bad. This guy put tariffs on and it was bad. Well, when the rest of the world didn't want you to put tariffs on and you didn't have the ability to defend yourself or you had already given up your ability to defend yourself by going to a central bank and an income tax policy and having traders in the White House, like FDR did no thing about money.

Let's not forget that FDR didn't know a thing about money. Let's also not forget that all of his major, all FDR's advisors were openly communists. And it's all come out that they were all working for Stalin. Like, do you think that Trump's team is working for Xi? Or did you think Obama's team was working with Xi? Like, this is, David Boaz wrote ages ago, don't be a knee-jerk libertarian.

Today, we have nothing but half-trained, knee-jerk libertarians. And I'm over it. I just don't care anymore. This is what we have to do. You want to get rid of the Federal Reserve? You want to repeal the Banking Act of 1935? You want to depower the Fed? What is Scott Besant talking about? He's talking about taking the banking regulation, the banking supervisory role of the Federal Reserve away from them, which was given to them by the Banking Act of 1935.

Like he's openly saying that's not the Fed's job. The Fed's bad at it. We know the Fed's bad at it. I'm not, you know, I'm not here to be a Fed show. I think the modern Federal Reserve is an abomination. But if you have the right guy running it and you have a terrible freaking system like we currently have, well, your first step is drain the offshore dollar markets. Get control of the pricing of dollars. Do what Powell's done to this point.

create a create funnels where offshore dollar interests can only go to us to get dollars okay like synthetic live water is gone like there's no now they have to post real now these european banks have to post real collateral they have to post real bank reserves to go get dollars in the repo markets they can't just like they can't just pass fake dollars amongst themselves in the form of

in the form of LIBOR-denominated contracts, which require no capital to float through the city of London. It doesn't work like that anymore. They have to go out and get real capital. They have to put real bank reserves on the table. They have to hollow out their balance sheets to go get the dollars they need to service their debt. It's a different world than it was on March 30th. And then Trump puts these tariffs on on April 2nd? Like they didn't know what was going on? Are you kidding me? Of course they knew exactly what was going on. And they did it on purpose. And they chose these dates on purpose.

So again, I love Rand, but he's wrong here. It's like I can't abide Thomas Massey's virtue signaling about all this stuff either. It's all wrong. At this moment in time, they don't understand modern finance. And if you want to go back to 19th century money,

which the Austrians have all been arguing for for 50 freaking years. Well, how are you going to get there?

You got a plan for that? Or are you just going to write some principles on the board and make it? I understand what Rand is saying. Tariffs are a tax. Only Congress has the ability to tax. That's nice, Rand. We know that that's bullshit. And we also know that that's bullshit. How is this realistically going to work when you're going to have this term with Trump?

you might switch back to the Democrats. They're going to go back to... Well, this is why Trump absolutely needs to sell the whole plant. I agree with you, Gabe. He is... So wouldn't that make Rand and Massey's warnings a little bit more...

It would make them right if they had the fucking spine to actually understand what was going on and do the second-order analysis, which they're not doing. That's what I'm getting at. What I'm saying is if we bake into the cake the probability that the Dems are going to go back and add their chaos to what's going on with some of the...

attempts that Trump's trying to make to transition us to this, this older, this older view of how America used to be. And then it gets undone. Does that not kind of add to the argument though, that this is not, wouldn't Massey and Paul be really good spokesperson, good spokespeople for, no, this actually makes sense of an order of, uh, order of operations perspective. No, this is exactly the, what I ran into when I went to the Mises Institute and spoken in October. Yeah.

This is exactly why my speech was not was shit-canned and thrown into the dustbin of history. I'm over this. Probably because you didn't say enough negative things about Lincoln.

I didn't say, well, yeah, if I had said more negative things about Lincoln, maybe Tom DiLorenzo wouldn't have called me a clown. That's nice. You know, fourth-rate historian from a third-rate book club, I don't give a fuck. Like, I'm at that point, guys. I don't care. Because this is real. This is sincere. You're trying to break the control of

of the people who have destroyed the lives of hundreds of millions of people over the course of the last 300 years and who are utterly ruthless and without any shred of decency. You have to understand who you're fighting. You are fighting orcs. You are not fighting rational people.

Okay. Look, I just had a conversation with my partner, Dexter White, about this, about Europe. And he's like, up until about six weeks ago, Tom, I thought you were crazy that they, clearly that at some point they would just come to their senses about what's going on here. And no, their arrogance is off the charts, dudes. They don't care. But does the electorate have the wisdom to wait out the time, to have the time scale to make what,

You've got a year and a half. Remember, Trump keeps talking about the 250th anniversary of the United States, which is July 4th, 2026. He's going to go between now and then. He has a plan. Whether it's going to work or not is a different story. And I'm sorry, but, you know, got news for you. It's a war. Are you going to dare nothing? I mean, seriously, I mean, that's the way that this way this works. Yeah.

Yeah, he's trying to deactivate the bomb and try to, you know, he's going into the wires and he's trying to set up a whole new scenario. Look, at the end of the day, this has to be thought of like a war.

you're gonna dare some some of your operations are not going to work no plan survives contact with the enemy blah blah blah but if you fight on ground not prepared by your enemy you have a better chance of winning basic sun tzu stuff yeah so that's what trump is doing he's resetting the game board everybody's saying it and he's i find their messaging awful too like i am so you know like i know

I know a lot of the media stuff is lying and manipulating this stuff, but I'm kind of disappointed in how they've messaged the Doge stuff. They totally let that... I mean, they should have been out there saying, look, this USAID money is what... The trickles of this and the NGO complex behind it is what's behind these terrorists at the Tesla dealerships.

They just put it all together for the public every night. You know what I mean? Just say it. But they won't say it. I agree. They always say that stupid messaging of the radical left. It's like, no, man, that doesn't really play as well. Say what's really happening. This is the government behind this. Those are elements that we're cutting, and they're trying to do terrorist attacks like they always do. Well, here's the thing. But let's stop. Have you noticed? I've looked at the polls.

The American public is now radicalized against Europe in a way that they have not ever, they have not been. What is the indicator for that? I'm not familiar. What's the indication? No, I saw, I've seen polls on this. Like, what do you think about, you know, our relationship with Europe? And our Republicans are like 75% now thinking that Europe is our big enemy. The messaging has been actually quite clear. The problem is, is that we all sit kind of,

Look, we're libertarians. By definition, we're skeptics. And I'm going to be honest with you. We're a bunch of fucking cowards. I'm going to be frank and honest. Most libertarians that I've met, and I used to be one of these people. I'm not going to be a coward about it. It's easier to be a critic than it is to be a general. It's much easier. I'm not trying to be too much of a dick here, but I am reading people the riot act a little bit. Like, look.

The messaging has worked. Go look at it. Like there are people truly radicalized and they're doing it on their own, Dave. Like I thought I was going to have to spend a month explaining to people that

about how we need to stop paying our income taxes because these people are evil and what they've done. I thought it was going to take me a month to explain this to the normies. Are you kidding? Within the first 24 hours of some of the stuff that Elon and company were uncovering, I saw people all through my Twitter feed. I'm not talking about typical libertarians who don't want to pay taxes. I'm talking about normie Republicans coming through like

Out of the woodwork on TikTok, just going, why are we paying taxes to these people? I mean, we're talking about, you know, guys who were truck drivers and whatnot. Like, I don't want to do this anymore. The amount of anger at how badly the American people have been screwed is so visceral, so real. When you stop to think about the reality of, I saw a great little video this morning, which Trump retweeted, by the way, about his plan.

About the effects of the plan, which was that, look, there's 94% of stocks are owned by 8% of the population, right? Meaning the people who are losing money in the stock market today are not you and me. They're all the people that the old system, the wealth extraction system has made obscenely filthy rich. They're the ones losing a lot of money today.

Those people are the ones losing money. What's happening today? Trump has moved interest rates down. If Powell cuts rates by another 25 basis points, we're going to see 5% mortgages in the United States. We're going to take a lot of... I can't remember the numbers off the top of my head. We're going to drop a mortgage payment on a $400,000 home from...

$4,000 a month to $3,000 a month, $3,200 a month, whatever the hell it is. It's a lot of money. He's setting up the sovereign wealth fund. He's going to put assets on the balance sheet. He's going to turn our finances from a reissue debt and the American people pay the interest on the debt in order to fund government services model, which sends all the money overseas. Okay.

Because what we've seen so far is a durable, let's back up for a second, because I think I got a little ahead of myself. Let's really nail this down. Saw a thing this morning. Trump's tariffs could bring in somewhere close to $700 billion this year. Now, I don't know that we'll get that number. Let's say we only get $500 billion.

But we cut the budget by a trillion dollars. Now, all of a sudden, we have a close to a balanced budget. We only spent 1.7 more than 1.8 more than we took in last year. And that was the worst budget of all time, right? Or the last worst spending year of all time. So that's almost close to a balanced scenario. That's one.

You refinance debt that's currently being paid at 5.5%. You can throw it on the yield curve at 4%. You've now cut hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments off the cashflow statement of the country, of the government. That's another one. But here's the big one. What everybody's focusing on is the theoretical textbook discussion about what happens with tariffs. But the reality is,

When you look at the trade surpluses that people are, that we're running with all of these countries, right? And I'm not talking about the small commodity producers like, you know, in Central Africa that have nothing else to do but export cobalt or whatever. I'm talking about China, the European Union, all of them. When you look at their trade surpluses, these are large and durable. Now I'm going to bring a basic concept to you. In the gold market, when you see a big,

arbitrage between the Chicago price and the Shanghai price, or you see a big arbitrage, meaning gold is trading $40 higher in Shanghai than it is in London or Chicago, what happens? Traders in London and Chicago buy it cheap and then ship it over to Shanghai and sell it and then pledge that same gold and sell it in Shanghai. Once the futures contracts settle, then they ship the gold over, right? And they pocket the difference. And what happens to that arbitrage?

That $40, it goes away. That's what the free market does. Free market, now I'm back to basic, everyday, libertarian, free market, economic first principles. The free market does one thing better than anything else. It grinds out arbitrage. When you see an arbitrage that refuses to close, that should close, something's getting in the way to keep it from closing.

And you can't close it. What's that thing? We got to get rid of that thing. And then the arbitrage will close, right? Well, trade surpluses and trade amongst large scale first world economies like we have, that's an arbitrage that refuses to close. And what's gotten in the way of that? Terror policy, regulations, cost of labor, cost of inputs, blah, blah, blah, all these things. So,

So what do you do? You have to assault all of those things at the same time. The first move you can do is you can normalize things through tariffs by just saying, look, I don't give a shit why it is this way, but right now we're stopping this. We're going to close this arbitrage. This is how we're going to do it. Yeah, it's a blunt force hammer, without a doubt. Is it the right way of going about it? I don't know, but we're going to negotiate it out. In the United States, what do we have to do? We have to cut...

Federal regulations, we have to open up. We got to get rid of the red tape. We got to streamline the permitting process. We got to get rid of the EPA stopping everything from happening. We got to get rid of this and get rid of all those things. And that we can do at the executive level. And that's what he's been doing. That's why the Chevron deference going away was so very fucking important.

So while all that's percolating in the background, Trump grabs all the headlines with the tariffs and then forces starts to force either the negotiations or money comes in. What is that saying? But go back to what that arbitrage actually looks like. Ready? If you can't grind it out, we're still the biggest consumer market in the world, meaning they still need access to our market. So guess what happens? They're going to eat that tariff.

Why? Because I was chatting with one of my patrons yesterday or, yeah, I think it was yesterday. He said, look, I have a small business, you know, I import candy. And I, for the most part, I have two suppliers for my packaging.

I have a domestic supplier to regulate the margin, 10% of the margin. Meaning if I have a 10% surge in demand, I can go to my expensive domestic supplier of packaging. It'll cost me 100 times more money for those because it'll cost me, let's say, a tenth of a cent where I can get my packaging out of, say, China or Indonesia for one one-hundredth of that.

That's where 90% of that goes. Guess what? If he puts a 50% tariff on Indonesia, that goes up. I'm still going to buy from them. It doesn't matter. I'm still going to buy from them. And the grocery store is still going to pay me the exact same amount of money at the wholesale level for my candy bar. And that little bit of difference is going to get eaten. And it's going to wind up in the coffers of the country, which is then eventually going to wind up

which is going to take pressure off of the government to have to collect taxes to keep the budget balanced. When you have an arbitrage this big, my point being is that we are dealing with not profit, but rent in the economic sense of the word rent. This is unearned profits, unearned wealth. We can chop that and we can take that off the top. That's what Trump is targeting with this. That's what this is about.

Now, if everybody still wants to, so at some point, if you still want to make money and you still want access to our market, great. If not, what's going to happen? Even if the supplier, even if that guy, my patron doesn't want to buy from Indonesia anymore or as much, what if he shifts it to 12% buying from the domestic supplier?

Okay, well, all of a sudden, now they're putting a second shift on. Now they're doing this. Now they're doing that. Now they hired a few more people. Their cost goes down by a little bit and then over time, and the arbitrage goes away. That's what this is setting in motion. It's grinding out this egregious rent-seeking behavior that we all should hate.

And we hate it when we see the banksters doing it. We hate it when we see the Black Rocks of the world doing it. We hate it when we see this because it's easy. I got news for you. It's everywhere. And it's everywhere because our government is literally got 14 computers printing fucking money and sending it overseas to lower the cost of running the world on our dollars. And, you know, then telling us that we can't have a job because we're white. And that's the end state of that. And that's where we are.

And I'm sorry if you don't have the stomach to like fight that fight yourself. It's like, I feel like the narrator from fight club. I was angry at every Panda that wouldn't fuck to save its own species.

Why he was beating the shit out of Jared Leto at the midpoint turn of the movie. He's got Jared Leto on the ground. He's just, he's like just beating the shit out of him. And the, the narration, everybody remembers the end of that, which is what the hell got into you. I just wanted to destroy something beautiful, which was his response. No, what he was really angry about was that was that, and I'm, that's where, that's where I am at this point. I'm like, I am over listening to this nonsense. Yeah.

Like, stop talking about what's going on in your head. Those models don't work. The map is not the world. The model is not the universe. The globe is not the world. It's a globe. It's a model in your head. The world is far more complicated than that. Why don't we allow it to actually function reasonably fairly?

And then let's see where we are and stop histrionically overreacting. Why don't we do, if we're such great systemic thinkers, like we libertarians like to say that we are, why don't we actually engage in some systematic fucking analysis as opposed to sitting here like this talking about first order effects like everybody else does? Because the memes are funny.

I'm over it. I don't care. This is the work that I do all the time, Dave. I don't ever look at first order. I was trained not to look at first order systems. And then I do it, and then everybody's like, no, you're wrong. I'm like, then why am I right about everything? What is your response to folks who feel like Israel is being put ahead of the line in terms of checking off the promises made to their people?

ahead of some of the things that, you know, they want more deportations and more of the MAGA critique that, you know, you've been hitting on the libertarian critique. What about the MAGA critique of Trump that

It seems like you're making sure you're doing these things where people are arresting people for speech and stuff. Yeah, well, this is an issue, right? And look, I hate our Israeli policy. I really do. But again, those connections, that spider's web was built on a system of money.

and blackmail that we all paid for, right? Did we not all pay for it? Right? And it's still there. It's still there. And the way you eventually grind it out like everything else is you take away the money. Take away the money and eventually...

those systems start to become less important. It becomes easier for people to get out from underneath the thumb of whatever blackmail it is. Why do you think Trump says nice things about Lindsey Graham the other day? Why do you think he's backing Lindsey Graham for re-election? There's two reasons. One, because Trump owns him now. Because whatever's come out, Trump has the goods on Lindsey Graham. And notice how Lindsey has done everything that Trump has asked him to do. That's one.

And two, in South Carolina politics, there ain't nobody to replace him. Better the devil you know that you can control than to go get somebody else who you don't. Because South Carolina politics are a mess. You want another Tim Scott? Like, really? You want another Nikki Haley? Really? Because that's what you're looking at. Because that's what will come out of the South Carolina GOP.

I think people are just really... That's how we got Mitt Romney in the fucking Senate in Utah. I just think, you know how you talk about people being angry? I think people are really sick and tired of always watching, okay, here we go again with Yemen, here we go again with Iran, here we go again with the insults, here we go again with this Mickey Mouse tariff deal with Israel. Oh, wow! Why are they tariffing? People have a right to say, why do they have the audacity to tariff us when we've been giving them

Hundreds of billions of dollars. Israel was the first one to... Why did they even have them in the first place? It's a disrespect. Because. Everybody was able to get away with it. And then the minute Trump put any pressure on them, Trump said, they said, well, we're going to cut the tariffs. Great. Trump still put a tariff on them. Did you not notice? Everybody got a 10% minimum. I thought Trump's already gone ahead and said they're going to not put tariffs on them, right? No.

on did he did he negotiate that i haven't heard that yeah i gotta check on it let me see if you but again that's fine like okay but everybody's gonna wind up with a 10 percent tariff by the time this is over that's what i think is gonna happen now as far as like the foreign policy stuff in the middle east i really i don't

I see most of this, like that's a really long and engaged conversation. And it breaks down like this. I invoked Italy earlier when I talked about George Maloney. Trump is moving a lot of military assets to the Greece. No one's talking about it. It's all happening behind the scenes. Greece has become a priority. A lot of missile systems, STADs, this, that, everything else. It's all being moved to Greece. Nobody's talking about it. Why? Why?

We have 100 military bases in Italy. Georgia Maloney is standing up for herself and standing up for the Italians against Brussels. I think the last, I don't know if I did this the last time I was on your show, but I've done it on other shows that have been on. I've said, look, in the long run, what you really want is a demilitarized zone between, you know, that stretches from like St. Petersburg all the way down to the Gulf of Aden.

And by demilitarized, I mean that the Russians and the Americans are not really involved anymore. Now, that's a very complicated process. It's not going to occur overnight. We have to deal with the Iranians. We have to deal with the crazies in Israel. But note that Erdogan is in control in Syria, which the Israelis are big mad about.

And I don't see Trump getting angry with Erdogan for, he didn't like say night, he didn't say bad things about Erdogan when Erdogan jailed his, his political opposition. You know why? Because this political opposition was in the pay of Europe. The mayor of Imolu, the mayor of, of, of, of Istanbul, that was a color revolution attempt against Erdogan because the EU, you cannot have the United States and Russia together.

Leave the region only to have a goddamn French come back in and the Brit, you know, and the whatever's left of the British remnant that they've that they've co-opted, have them come back in with their the trillions of dollars that they want to mobilize through their new savings and investment union and their new digital euro.

And they're, you know, and the rest of it. These guys are all like Macron is itching for war. He wants to use American assets, NATO assets to go start World War III with Russia, which is a nice thought, by the way. But he has to get Trump to sign off on allowing them to have satellite access because none of our weapons systems work very well without satellite access. And last I checked, the French don't have

access to our NATO satellites. And you want to watch that carefully to watch Macron lose his mind when he sends French troops in with American systems and Trump turns off all the satellites and they all get wiped out.

That's what's going to happen. But you can't have us leave and then have the Europeans just come right back in and stoke the conflicts up over again. Remember, there is an Israeli, there is a European contingent inside Israeli politics, just like there is inside British politics. What you see mirroring, what you see happening in Britain is mirrored in Israeli politics. Everybody's tired of Netanyahu, but everybody's just as tired of frigging Naftali Bennett and Ehud Barak. Like,

So, again. Was the Epstein network with Ehud Barak or both or something else? What I'm saying is that you've got to get rid of both of them. It's like you've got to get rid of Keir Starmer and you've got to get rid of Nigel Farage because Nigel Farage works for the City of London. Okay? No. Nigel is on the outs. He's nowhere near Mar-a-Lago. He used to hang out in Mar-a-Lago all the time. He's not there anymore. There's a reason for that.

If you want to free Britain, little Britain, what the English press and the London press disparages is little Britain. The people in the Coswells that Jeremy Clarkson farms next to all the time. That whole thing with Clarkson's farm is telling you everything that's wrong with Britain. Why they're invading Ireland. Why Conor McGregor is running for... This is real.

OK, these people are communists and they're evil and they don't care and they have and they have to all be destroyed. And the way you way you get Israel to stand on its own and the way you get rid of an Iran that stands on its own effectively, because, look, the Iranians has made a defense treaty with our defense pact with with the Iranians. But it's about protect. But if you read it really carefully, it's about protecting the international north south transport corridor.

It's about that, which is anathema to the British. It's anathema to the French because they don't want the Russians to have a multimodal trade corridor that goes from St. Petersburg to the port of Shabahar in the Indian Ocean, which is in the south of Iran. They don't want that. They don't want the Iranians having the ability to export oil outside of Bandar Abbas, south of Bandar Abbas, south of the Persian Gulf,

The narrow point is they want to keep the Iranians bottled up because that way then the Iranians are belligerent. This is always about creating chaos. You have to allow all of that chaos and all those single points of failure to go away. So how do you do that? Well, the Russians and the Chinese have been helping the Iranians build port infrastructure outside of the Persian Gulf so that they can

do trade with the rest of the world and therefore they don't have to worry about this anymore. So, so much of the conflict between Israel and Iran is really about the Persian Gulf, the access there and everything else. Yes, there's, you know, there are historical issues and bubble, sure. But that is, that's the stuff at the margin. That's the stuff, the cream on the top. This is the real stuff is, is about, is about the trade routes. Okay. And so, so,

And so much of what we've got in our relationship with Israel is so freaking complicated and so freaking toxic in so many ways for both sides, for everyone, for the Arabs, for the Jews, for the Americans, for everyone. It's always about us.

People who think they run the world and have a right and are entitled to run the world and will sacrifice no matter any number of the help to get that done. And we're saying we're no longer the help and we're not going to be your, we're not going to be your genre. I just hope they don't bait him into some conflict with Iran by, by he's, you know, cause he has a hard time with,

He doesn't want to look weak when he barks a loud bark. And I don't have to be a libertarian or anything to be absolutely repulsed by people in my generation, millennial generation, grew up watching

every war known to man, you know, it's always a new boogeyman. It's always a new thing. And it's always, it was always for Netanyahu and Israel. That's what we were doing. And I don't know. Iraq. No, that wasn't city of London. Who was that? No, I mean, I know. I agree with you. I know it's all terrible. It's all awful. And, and, and I, and I know the trust is low. I get it. I get why everybody's like, like,

I get it. I just, you know, I'm not looking for, but look, that analysis is a dime a dozen. The analysis of nothing's changed is a dime a dozen. The analysis of, oh my God, we're doing it again, dime a dozen. Do you have me, do you really want me to come on your show and tell you what everybody else is telling you? Or do you want me to tell you how you can see other things happening that,

lead you potentially into different conclusions. And I'm not trying to whitewash history. What I'm trying to tell you is that one, you got one thing, Donald Trump will never apologize for his mistakes. Never. And the worry with him, of course, is that he'll double down as opposed to, you know, when, when doing challenged, but rhetorically, I mean,

The Houthi bombing, to me, looks no different than what he did when he dropped the Moab on the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was a signal. Hey, everybody, get your shit together. And he did it while he was having chocolate cake with Xi. Xi's at a state dinner and Trump dropped a big freaking bomb on Chinese assets in Afghanistan. Your move.

I remember being freaked out about it back then. I was freaked out about it. But in hindsight, I was probably wrong. It was the right thing to do because someone had to, because in this game, you either have the stomach for this. In order to dare peace, you have to threaten. In many ways, you have to threaten more. And from a purely strategic perspective,

I'm taking off. I'm taking my heart and I'm putting it in a box. Okay. For the analysis. Do I want to see dead Palestinian children? Do I want to see dead Iranian children? Do I want to see dead Ukrainians or dead Russians?

Do I want to see dispirited and miserable Britons who can't afford to heat their homes? Do I want to see... When I walked around New York City, downtown, it was shabby. I was at Lexington on 44th, okay, for this event. And I'm looking around and I'm like, this is not the downtown I remember. I haven't been that part of New York in 30 years, okay? Like...

Did we want to see that? When I went through the airport yesterday, multiple airports, Atlanta, Charlotte, and LaGuardia, I saw the same thing. Every fifth person was running to a connection they were about to miss, and everybody else was just miserable. They were miserable. No one was enjoying their trip. No one was having a good time. Everybody was miserable. That's the world we live in today.

It's this horrible administrative state where no one is, you know, where no one is served except the evil people at the top. And then everybody gets scapegoated. And then they conveniently turn whoever they need to at that moment in time into a scapegoat. And I've said this before and I'll say it again. The Palestinians have been scapegoats in the past. The Israelis are currently their scapegoat. The Russians are always their scapegoat. The Chinese at other times, like it's all bullshit.

What matters to them is protecting their power. And so what really matters is always looking at how can you take their power away from them, and their power comes from the purse strings. It comes from their ability to use currency arbitrage to their advantage. So your argument is that if he can succeed in this term, that even we'll have the same, it won't be the same Democrat party that has to battle Trump.

What is what is instantiated here? What is developed here? Right. The Democrats have a 24 percent or 25 percent approval rating. Trump would have to literally start World War Three for him to lose the midterms. Right. Clean up the voter rolls and we find out what the United States really is. And they're doing that. Yeah. Clean up the election process.

Now he gets that done. This map is not plus three or plus four. This map is plus 40 or plus 50. Tariff or no tariff. And the thing about it is that Rand Paul knows this. Okay? He knows this. Thomas Massey fucking knows it.

So why aren't you out there helping us with that? Why are you complaining about your 15? If we don't clean up the voter rolls, if we don't drain the purse, then we're back to the same. Then they're going to steal another round of elections like they've done. No, Trump is right. You get to vote on election day.

That's it. You don't get the stuff ballot boxes. If we don't get that through, then we're back to the same nightmare back and forth, and we're not going to get our golden age of manufacturing like you're- Or anything. We're not going to get anything. What we're going to have is a dark age. This is a real nail-biter in your view. Even though we have the cusp of being able to really open up a golden age of manufacturing and wealth creation, it's very precarious.

I guess, what would you say? It's low odds, or do you think we have a high chance of... I think we have a very good chance of pulling this off. Knowing some of the little things that I know behind the scenes, like I've heard so far that I think they're going to implement, and what I can conjecture, I'm like, I look at the moves that are on the game board for a lot of the people, for the people that we're fighting, and it's pretty obvious that most of their shit's pretty weak, Dave. Mm-hmm.

I mean, I look at guys like, I look at Schumer and Pelosi and AOC and I'm like, no one's going to vote for these fucking people. I mean, like it hit yesterday. It was all over Twitter, like Schumer and Pelosi decrying the trade deficit. We have to fix this trade deficit. Back in the 90s. Yeah. You know, I'm like, really? Really? Okay. So what changed? Yeah. Hmm. Yeah.

What changed? What Trump and what we've done in the alternative media, what Trump has done is he's exposed their method of how they gaslight you. Now, the fact that they can turn a bunch of Democrats in certain congressional districts into Nazi-scrawling, or sorry, swastika-scrawling vandals

And Molotov cocktail throwing terrorists. Notice that they're using Molotov cocktails. Like, tell me you're a commie without telling me you're a commie. Like, the Molotov cocktail is like literally the thing. Like, we're at the point now where like,

they're going to strike back. They're going to fight us every and every step of the way. And if you either have the, the stones for the fight or you don't. Yeah. And if you don't have the stones for the fight, then please shut the fuck up and get out of the way so that you're not making life hard that we have to fight you and everybody else. I got, I'm sorry. Rand Paul understands this and he should be not stay like, like,

He didn't get involved with Massey last year when Massey was screaming to put the Ron Paul and the Fed bill forward again. Like, Ron Paul stayed on the sidelines. Very smart. This time, now about tariffs, all of a sudden, like, that's not going to work? Like, are you kidding me? Like, clearly what Trump is setting up is that he wants to move the United States to a sovereign wealth fund, royalty-based economy, government financing with tariffs.

And move us away from what we currently have. And, you know, what does that all look like? I don't know. But there are a lot of moves yet to be made. And we've seen the opening gambit so far. Now let's watch the rest of it. And, I don't know. We'll see. I was very disappointed with Rand that he did that the other day. I was very disappointed. But whatever. On that thing, I guess he's with his dad. And he was okay with

He was okay with some of the freaking wars that we fought previously. Because Rand's views on foreign policy are not particularly libertarian. He hasn't been as tough on the Iran policy. He's gone along with the sanctions and everything, but I don't know if that's your reference. But again, this is a big problem. And invariably, what I've noted with Trump

And is every time I underestimate Donald Trump's understanding of how things actually work, I get disappointed. I come up, I come a cropper. I come a cropper every time. Like he actually gets a lot of the stuff at a level that we never really thought that he did. And I've been very skeptical of Trump's ability to see the game board. Yeah. Okay. I have, I've ripped him a new asshole multiple times. His getting rid of the JCPOA and sanctioning Iran is,

back in 2018, was about Europe. He understood the European Union was the problem. We didn't. I wasn't sophisticated enough to see the game board at that point. I understood the EU was evil, but I didn't understand it the way I understand it now. And in hindsight, this was a way to keep France and Iran hooking up with Russia and China to destroy the U.S.,

That's what Obama was doing. And eventually I figured it out. I'm like, oh, that's why he did it. But it took me a little while. And, you know, I'm not here. I'm not, you know, I'm not going to. You really have to have a bifocal. You have to have a bifocal approach to accept what, you know, the framework you're saying, because it's people, people, you know, like, you know, when you when you look with your heart, you know, you think about the.

the evil, you know, and you have to be kind of utilitarian about to see what you're saying, you know, and see it through. And then there's these infinite, there's these, I don't want to go there now, but there's these infinite ways in which

you know, the ends justifies the means becomes this perpetual, you know, digression where you're, you're always going off into justifying. Well, we, we had to wipe out Iran because it was for Europe. We bombed. I know. I don't think that's what's going to happen. I'll be honest. You're saying, I know, I know that. I know. I don't think there's going to be an attack on the world. Yeah.

at all okay i just don't i just don't i i see him moving assets out of the ukrainian theater towards the middle east towards certainly towards the mediterranean i think erdogan's blocking moves in syria and trump said and company saying nothing bad about erdogan jailing his opposition it's a big tell folks it's a big tell

Yeah. And they're not saying anything about Erdogan putting S-400s up. And then, but they also didn't say anything about the Israelis bombing the bases where they were going to put those S-400s as a show of force. But again, the Israelis made that move after the announcement happened. They didn't actually take out the S-400s.

Right? Like, so who's weak? Who's not? Like, this is the game. And if we have the stomach for the game, we have the stomach for the game. If we don't have the stomach for the game, well, then, you know, that's fine. Stay on your Twitter feed. Call me, you know, call me a bad person. I don't care. But I, this is the way you have to read geopolitics. It's not about your, it's not about, it's about getting to the final solution or the final solution. Terrible choice of words. It's about getting to a final state

that is far more equitable than what we currently have. And it's a multifaceted game. It's not just one theater. And if you only approach things from one perspective, in war, you become very predictable. Now, the big one here is that the Europeans are incredibly predictable. They have one mode of operation. One. And that's why...

I think Trump can win this because he has enough other people on his side who want the same things. And so for a brief moment in history, maybe longer, he and Putin know who the real enemy is. And so Trump on one side, well, previously it was Powell. Now Trump plus Powell plus Besant and those guys, along with Putin. And the clamps are being put down on the European Union. And the way you do that is you take away their ability to get cheap dollars to lever up

destroy their capital markets, force them into a catastrophic move, force them to threaten economic nuclear Armageddon. And if that threat fails to materialize or even better, fails to actually be a weapon, then the European Union breaks up and 90% of everything we talk about in this podcast is part of history. And then we get to all sit back and write history books because we've watched history unfold.

As the end of a 400 year. Is King Charles on board with that? Breaking that up? King Charles isn't going to last three months. Yeah. Trump is already making moves to, okay, three months ago when I watched Keir Starmer, this is the last point that we should probably wrap it up. When I watched Elon Musk go after Keir Starmer and I thought about what was happening, I'm like, oh, so yeah, they really are going after Davos through Starmer. That means they're going after King Charles as well.

I literally off the cuff went, Charles will be dead in six months or he'll be removed from office in six months. And Trump is going to place William on the throne. I said exactly that. Trump is going to place William on the throne in order to save England from itself. I don't know if that's going to happen or not. But Trump has already opened up dialogue with William and Kate. Twice happened last week.

Two different reports of what was going on with Trump and William. Very important. Nobody's talking about it. It's very important. It's happening. We'll see. Tom, I always appreciate having you on. Go to Tom Luongo dot me. Anything else you'd like to share with us?

um you can follow me on my riotous twitter account at tfl 1728 and of course you can sign up at patreon at patreon slash gold goats and guns and even if you don't want to like pay for this i do post most if not all of my media appearances they're free to the public as a repository for everything when this goes live this will be up there as well so you can you can check it out that way and then if you decide you want to sign up with us you know you're more than welcome to it would be great to have you bring you into the community it

which is tremendous. They're so good, my people. They really are. Always great to have you on, Tom. It's good to hear your positive message. A lot of people need to think of those things in that way. That's good. It's interesting. Appreciate it, Dave. Thank you. Have a great weekend. Thanks.

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