Ep. 2161 - NASA Astronauts Return, Trump Brokers Putin CEASEFIRE?!
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Folks, America is in the middle of a great comeback, but the culture war is not over, which is why tomorrow we're releasing episode two of our five-part series, The Case for Derek Chauvin, The Incident.

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at dailywire.com slash subscribe. So a very cool piece of news. Yesterday, after nine months on the International Space Station, 286 days in space, according to the Washington Post, the NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Butch Wilmore splashed down in their SpaceX Dragon capsule off the coast of Florida just before 6 p.m. on Tuesday. So originally, that flight on the Boeing Starliner was supposed to last eight days, and they ended up up there for 286 days.

which has to suck, to be honest with you. I mean, imagine that you're going to space and you're gonna tell your family that you're gonna see them in a little over a week. And almost a year later, you're still up there. Now, depending on your family situation, maybe that's an unpaid vacation, but whatever it is, it's not great. And the failures of the Biden administration to work with Elon to actually get those people down is pretty astonishing. It really is because we are now,

A couple months into the Trump administration and Musk is sending SpaceX, the much maligned Elon Musk is sending SpaceX to, you know, rescue astronauts where they are stranded in space, which also probably is the beginning of an amazing rom-com that'll come out in a year or two.

The astronauts have said that they were actually prepared to stay longer and they were eager to pitch in by conducting science experiments and maintenance aboard the orbiting laboratory. I'm sure they were. I mean, it probably gets pretty boring up there for a year. I hope that they at least liked each other. NASA officials said the decision about when and how to get them home was made based on safety and keeping the space station occupied, not politics. They were joined on their return trip by the NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russia's Alexander Gorbachev. So that is a very cool thing.

Apparently, the reentry process is pretty rough because if you spend a lot of time in space, then that creates changes in your body. So it's not going to be there's a ticker ticker tape parade tomorrow or anything. So whenever I don't know something about a topic, the first place I go is to my friends over at Perplexity. This search, by the way, is sponsored by Perplexity. I wanted to know what actual physical effects would a year long stint in space have on astronauts. And here is what my friend says.

Wow. That is like a

a lot, actually. Basically, like you get osteoporosis. You have muscle atrophy because the muscles weaken and waste away because you're not using them all the time. It can cause fluids to shift upwards, so you'll have a puffy face and some chicken legs. So you don't get amazingly great looking in space, actually. Apparently, you have significant arterial stiffness, like a 17 to 30% increase in arterial stiffness. You can also have eye structure changes, vision problems. You will get taller, so maybe I should try it.

You know, I've been ripped a lot about my height, so, oh, worthwhile. I don't know, I'll have to talk to my wife. And space anemia, decreased production of red blood cells occurs in space. So it requires extensive rehabilitation. In other words, just for these astronauts to sort of

re-enter the Earth's gravitational pull and then be made healthy once more. But good for Elon Musk, good for SpaceX, and it's good to have these astronauts home. Meanwhile, the other big news of the day is that President Trump had his long-awaited two-hour phone call with Vladimir Putin of Russia. And the account from President Trump and the account from Putin, they don't quite match up. There are some good things that happened on this call. We can be hopeful that this is the first step toward a longer-lasting ceasefire.

Let's just say that Putin is being extremely cagey about these negotiations and the United States really needs to take that under advisement. So President Trump put out the following statement after the two-hour phone call, quote,

with an understanding they'll be working quickly to have a complete ceasefire and ultimately an end to this very horrible war between Russia and Ukraine. This war would never have started if I were president. Many elements of a contract for peace were discussed, including the fact that thousands of soldiers are being killed and both President Putin and President Zelensky would like to see it end. That process is now in full force and effect and we will hopefully, for the sake of humanity, get the job done. Now, you will notice, first of all, that this is not a full ceasefire agreement by the Russians.

So the Ukrainians have already said, President Zelensky has already said that they are willing to engage in a full 30-day complete ceasefire. And not on energy, not on infrastructure, completely. Remember, energy and infrastructure, that's the sort of stuff that is generally civilian-oriented in places like Ukraine.

However, what Putin does not want to do apparently is stop attacking the actual military of Ukraine, and he refuses to do so. Ukraine is saying, listen, we'll go weapons down right now. We will stop this moment. And Putin is saying, no, I don't think so. We're just going to keep pushing. That shows that he believes that he has the military momentum. He wants to keep killing as many Ukrainian soldiers as humanly possible. Meanwhile, there is a story that emerged originally from Russian sources and now has been picked up by the U.S. Sun.

That President Putin kept Trump waiting for today's phone call and did not leave until one hour after the chat was actually set to begin. And apparently he even laughed off a warning that he was getting late for his phone call with the American president. The host of the event, a guy named Alexander Shokin, was actually looking at his watch like openly on tape.

And Putin laughed it off. So that is, in fact, a sign of disrespect to the United States and should be taken as such. If Zelensky was disrespectful in the Oval Office, which he was, then Vladimir Putin being an hour late to talk to the most powerful person on planet Earth is also a sign of disrespect.

Putin has made this one of his tactics, it's sort of his negotiating tactic, is to keep world leaders waiting. The conference took place right before the high-stakes call was scheduled with Trump between 4 and 6 p.m. Russian time. As the clock ticked past 4, Putin's pal and the host of the event, Shokin, looked at his watch, saying the call was scheduled for before 6 p.m. And Putin said, don't listen to him, that's his job. To which Shokin replied, now we need to see what Trump says about this. And then Putin said that he was referring to the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov.

Eventually, he arrived about 5 p.m. According to a variety of different reports, the Russian takeaway from the call was not the same as the American takeaway from the call. According to the White House readout, quote, the leaders agreed the movement to peace will begin with an energy and infrastructure ceasefire, as well as technical negotiations on implementation of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, full ceasefire and permanent peace. So there will be no full ceasefire until technical negotiations, which means that Putin can keep pushing.

The negotiations will begin immediately in the Middle East, presumably Saudi Arabia. The two leaders agreed that a future with an improved bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia has huge upside. This includes enormous economic deals and geopolitical stability when peace has actually been achieved. Now, again, I think that the takeaway from this

The Russian side is not quite the same as the takeaway from the American side. And the reason that you can tell this is because while President Trump mentioned Russian commitment to an energy and infrastructure ceasefire, Moscow did not quite say the same thing. Instead, Moscow apparently was taking the opinion that the ceasefire would begin with energy and transportation and infrastructure when it began. Because minutes after the announcement of all of this,

There was, in fact, a Russian guided bomb that took out the power in the Ukrainian city of Slovyansk. Fox News has added that Kiev is already under drone attack. It is unclear if Russia violated the energy infrastructure ceasefire or the energy and infrastructure ceasefire, because maybe they're just attacking infrastructure as opposed to energy infrastructure. Whatever the case, it is clear that at this point, the Ukrainians are far more willing to come to the table than Vladimir Putin is.

And the distinction between what the U.S. said and what the Russians said is that the U.S. said that the Russians had committed to an energy and infrastructure ceasefire, but the Kremlin talked of only energy infrastructure. In other words, they won't attack power stations, but they'll still attack roads. They will still attack freeways. They will still attack trains and all the rest of it. So Russia seems to be playing around. The one thing that they said they would not do was, again, agree to a full ceasefire because they feel like they have momentum at this point.

Apparently, Trump was in fact able to secure one element of the ceasefire proposal. The Kremlin announced that Russia and Ukraine would release 175 of each other's prisoners of war. And apparently Moscow would also free 23 seriously wounded Ukrainian servicemen to receive treatment in their home country. The Kremlin specified again that energy infrastructure would not be attacked. But then apparently they hit infrastructure within an hour, basically.

The Ukrainian member of parliament in a sovtsan post attacks, Putin backed Trump's 30 day pause on energy strikes and then broke his word in less than an hour. So the president of the United States should hold Russia to its word. If they want to get to stage two of a ceasefire, then they need to stop attacking energy infrastructure. And we need to know what their conditions are for actually getting to a stage two, whatever the next step is, because the conditions so far that Putin has actually articulated for a full scale ceasefire or an armistice agreement are totally unpalatable.

That's just the reality. Vladimir Putin, for example, is demanding that literally all Western arms supplies to Ukraine be halted for him to conclude a ceasefire agreement. That is not going to happen. That would be nuts. For Ukraine to simply agree that they will receive no more weaponry from the outside in exchange for what a promise that maybe Russia will come to the table and do a ceasefire would be totally insane. According to Bloomberg, Russia wants to stop all arms supplies to Ukraine. Its minimum goal is to cut off American aid. So

Putin is hoping that these sort of baby steps are going to lead the United States to cut off the Ukrainian aid again. Again, that would be a mistake. The United States needs to ratchet up the pressure to get Putin to the table because he clearly is not taking this seriously enough. Unnamed European officials say it's unlikely Europe would agree to Russia's demand that allies block arms supplies to Ukraine during any truce. Because obviously Ukraine would then be left naked and Russia would just rearm with help from the Chinese. So that is the current status.

Obviously, Vladimir Putin believes that he has the upper hand in negotiations. It is up to the allies to demonstrate to Vladimir Putin that he does not, in fact, have the upper hand in the negotiations and he needs to start making concessions. The Ukrainians are willing to come to the table. That's made very clear. Now it's time for Vladimir Putin to do the same if, in fact, he is telling President Trump the truth and would like to see an end to this war.

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Always a good investment. Go check them out right now. Text Ben to 989898. Also, the IRS, they're getting ready to ramp up their enforcement efforts in 2025 with April 15th approaching time is now running out. If you're facing back taxes or unfiled returns, delaying action only compounds the problem. Every day you wait makes your tax situation more difficult to resolve. Do not let another tax deadline pass you by. While taking immediate action is crucial, attempting to deal with the IRS alone can be a costly mistake.

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An enormous amount of what's happening with the judiciary will in fact be solved by the Supreme Court. It will be taken up eventually. Chief Justice Roberts felt the necessity to wrap President Trump on the knuckles on Tuesday. The reason being President Trump demanded the impeachment of a federal judge who's been hearing a challenge to the removal of Tren de Aragua gang members under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

Now, I'm not sure why it's necessary for Chief Justice Roberts to sign into chat here and talk about this. President Trump says a lot of things. But he did put out a statement, quote, for more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose. Well, it was never going to happen. So I'm not sure precisely what the point of that is. Why is Roberts doing that? Obviously, I don't think that President Trump should be calling for the impeachment of judges based on decisions not going his way. That's why the appellate procedure exists.

With that said, why is Roberts signing in here? Presumably to earn some sort of public credibility with a left that has already learned to despise Chief Justice John Roberts.

Tuesday's statement was not the first time that Roberts had scolded politicians for disparaging the judiciary. Roberts did this back in 2018 after Trump attacked an Obama judge for ruling against him in an immigration case. And Roberts said then we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal rights to those appearing before them.

which, of course, is very silly. Of course, you have Obama judges and Bush judges and Trump judges and Clinton judges. It's a fairly decent litmus test for precisely how they're going to view the Constitution of the United States. Trump was right at the time. He said, quote, Sorry, Chief Justice Roberts, you do indeed have Obama judges. They have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.

So again, Roberts is an institutionalist. He believes that somehow he's shoring up the credibility of the institution by sort of wrapping Trump over the knuckles on this sort of stuff. Instead, all he's doing is annoying everybody on the right who understands that Trump says a lot of things and know that he is not going to attempt to impeach these judges. Meanwhile, the DOJ continues to be at war with this particular judge, Judge Boasberg, who is in fact an Obama appointee.

The Trump administration on Tuesday defended its deportation of those Tren de Ragua members, saying that two of the three flights that supposedly had been held up by the judge had already left before the judge ordered them not to. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg initially ordered those flights to return to the United States. The administration argued that the planes were already in international waters and the ruling no longer applied.

Robert Cerna, an acting field office director, according to Axios within ICE, said in a court filing, two of those three planes carrying migrants had departed for El Salvador before 7.25 p.m. Eastern time when the judge issued the order. A third plane departed after that, but its passengers were not removed solely based on Trump's executive order, Cerna said. A separate filing says the government maintains there is no justification to order the provision of additional information and that doing so would be inappropriate because even accepting plaintiffs' accounts of the facts, there's no violation of the court's written order.

So as of Tuesday, there are still 54 alleged Tren de Aragua gang members in detention. About 172 are on the non-detained docket. So that is going to be battled out in the courts. Meanwhile, another district court judge has now decided to basically enjoin the enforcement of the Trump cuts to USAID.

This judge, Judge Theodore Chuang, has now ordered Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to immediately give USAID employees access to their email payment, security notification, and all other electronic systems. The basic notion here, apparently, is that they have a right to their jobs. Now, presumably, that right springs from the USAID enabling legislation. But USAID was originally set up by executive order, as in by the president.

So in his ruling, he goes out of his way to suggest that then it was sort of recodified in the late 1990s by Congress and that now USAID is almost untouchable by the president of the United States. Only Congress could change USAID. I think there's a very flawed interpretation of the history of USAID.

It seems like not a particularly strong argument. This is another Obama judge who is, again, trying to intervene here. He also claims that Musk does not have the ability to fire people. But, of course, it's not Musk technically doing the firing. He's making recommendations via Doge to actual government actors who are approved by Congress who are actually doing the firing. That's particularly true in USAID. It's the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, who's presiding over the dismantling of USAID.

Which, by the way, under the original executive order that established UISID, it was placed under the auspices of the State Department.

Judge Chuang, again, tried to bash Musk, saying that he, quote, usurped the authority of the public's elected representatives in Congress to make decisions on whether, when, or how to eliminate a federal government agency and of officers of the United States duly appointed under the Constitution to exercise the authority entrusted to them. And this is a very flawed reading of the balance of powers. Basically, the case seems to be that if Congress sets up an executive branch agency and then

creates sort of general rules and allocations to that agency, that is now untouchable by the executive branch. And even the people inside the executive branch can't be fired by members of the executive branch, in which case you have now set up an unanswerable fourth branch of government. That branch of government firings and hirings can't be done by Congress. Cuts can be done by Congress. And meanwhile, the president apparently can't either cut or fire. This, of course, is to maintain the size and scope of the federal government. The entire Trump administration is oriented against it, of course.

Meanwhile, President Trump is challenging the legal order by firing two Democratic commissioners at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday. A White House official confirmed that Democratic commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter had been fired. The firings drew criticism from Democratic senators. The FTC has a bipartisan structure. No more than three of the five commissioners can come from the same party. Both of these fired FTC members plan to sue to reverse the filings.

The Supreme Court did rule in 1935 upholding a law allowing FTC commissioners to be fired only for good cause, like neglecting their duties. So presumably there will be some sort of case made by the Trump administration that these particular FTC commissioners did in fact neglect their duties. And then he will find some titular Democrats to fill the seats. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Republican Commissioner Melissa Holyoak have said that they support the administration's legal position that the White House actually has the power to fire those agency officials.

They say that, legally speaking, the White House does, in fact, control government agencies. And so it'll be interesting to see whether the Supreme Court takes that up and then overturns that 1935 decision, pointing out that the unitary executive is, in fact, a feature of the American government.

Meanwhile, to economic news. So the greatest threat to the presidency is not, in fact, the judiciary. The Supreme Court, as I say, is going to hash out a lot of these questions. And I have faith that the Trump administration is not simply going to ignore the Supreme Court. It's one thing to say a district court judge does not have the power to enjoin action at the USAID.

or that a district court judge can't magically turn airplanes around that are in international waters. It is another thing to ignore the Supreme Court of the United States wholesale. I do not think there's intent inside the Trump administration to do just that. The real threat to the Trump administration is not that. The real threat to the Trump administration, in the end, is the economy. If the economy should go south, the Trump administration will go south with it. This is true for literally every president. It is not unique to President Trump. The stock market has been bouncing around a lot lately.

On Monday, the stock market jumped significantly. On Tuesday, the stock market dumped significantly. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped about 260 points. Right now, investors are not quite sure what to do. And apparently, neither is the Federal Reserve. There's been a lot of talk about the Federal Reserve lowering those interest rates. The problem is that the inflationary curve has not yet stopped. Stock prices still seem to be too high. The P.E. ratio at the Dow Jones Industrial Average remains significantly above historical averages.

It remains at about 25. Normally, you want the P.E. ratios, the price to earnings ratio, to be down in the 16 to 18 range. Now it's unclear what the Federal Reserve is going to do. According to the Wall Street Journal, not long ago, it looked like Jerome Powell's final test as Federal Reserve chair would be to stick the soft landing. Now, with about a year left in his term, he faces a serious complication, navigating a trade war that threatens to push prices up while simultaneously weakening the economy.

During a seven-year tenure that included President Trump's first trade war, pandemic historic inflation, and high-profile bank failures, says the Wall Street Journal, Powell's final act also unfolds with an imperative to preserve the institution's apolitical DNA that protects its autonomy in setting interest rates. So President Trump is pushing him to lower those interest rates. But again, inflation continues to hover in the 2.8% to 3% range. Everybody is sort of holding their breath to see what the Fed does. I think it's very unlikely that the Federal Reserve is going to drop the interest rates.

And if inflation were to accelerate, then officials would have to think about the idea of actually increasing those interest rates. Again, a lot of the sanguinity about the economy, sort of satisfaction with the economy, would return if there weren't such high levels of

of dyspepsia over President Trump's tariff plans because nobody actually knows what's going to happen on April 2nd. President Trump has said that April 2nd, everything's going to change. His Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, has said the same, that a giant set of reciprocal tariffs are going to be put in place. Now some of the details are sort of being spelled out. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump administration officials are roiled in debate over how to implement the president's pledge to equalize U.S. tariffs with those charged by other nations.

Officials have recently weighed whether to simplify the complex task of devising new tariff rates for hundreds of U.S. trading partners by instead sorting nations into one of three tariff tiers. That proposal apparently was later ruled out, adding that the Trump team is still trying to figure out how to implement an individualized rate for every separate nation. And Trump has repeatedly said that reciprocal tariffs would mean what they charge us, we charge them. But the problem is that it's not just like the country has one giant tariff rate on the United States. There are different tariff rates on different goods from every single country.

So it's not as easy as, oh, Canada just charges a blank at 5% rate. We'll charge them a 5% rate. Let's say that they tariff, for example, American lumber, which they do. Well, how do we respond in kind? If we tariff their lumber, that makes no difference to them since, again, they are importing our lumber and we're not importing their lumber, presumably. You have to find some sort of equivalent in the market and then tariff that. It's a very, very complicated procedure.

Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said on Fox Business on April 2nd, each country will receive a number that we believe represents their tariffs. So for some countries, it'll be quite low. For some countries, it will be quite high. And again, there's been talk about these sort of three-tier tariff proposal, which is really a blunt instrument. I mean, like there's a big difference between...

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Point your toes west. Also, tax season is now upon us, and while we may be weary of numbers, some deserve our immediate attention, like the $16.5 billion in IRS refunds flagged for potential identity fraud last year. Identity theft tax fraud surged by an alarming 20% in 2024 alone, affecting thousands of unsuspecting Americans.

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He's been helming policy discussions, according to people familiar with the matter. There were several lengthy meetings in recent weeks among top Trump aides, including an hours-long meeting at the Naval Observatory, which is, of course, where the vice president lives. The meetings have centered on how to create a comprehensive tariff policy that achieves Trump's goals, but also has some more flexibility. The reciprocal tariff plan is expected to be introduced April 2nd, along with additional 25% duties on a handful of industries like autos, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals.

And again, one of the big questions here is what does the U.S. Trade Representative's office do? They have like 200 people. How do they handle all of this? All of this is a very complicating factor. The markets aren't quite sure whether this is going to be a rough Trump proposal where the edges get sanded down or whether it's going to be a blunderbuss that hits everybody. Vice President Vance,

did an event yesterday in which he spoke about tariff policy and economic policy more generally. The vice president has sort of a foot in both camps. He obviously is a representative of the sort of MAGA protectionist position on some economic proposals. At the same exact time, Vice President Vance has a long history of warmth towards Silicon Valley. And tech bros do in fact rely on a wide variety of free trade and technological advancements. He's trying to square a circle that I'm not sure can be totally squared right here.

Again, the vice president's a super smart guy, and this attempt is probably as good as an attempt can be. However, you're talking in some cases about mutually exclusive policies. If you're talking about radical increase in tariffs at the same time as you talk about the technological advancements to be made by the United States amid economic advancement, that is a tough road to hoe. So here is Vice President Vance standing up for tariffs as a quote-unquote necessary tool.

President Trump is starting with and is dead serious about rearranging our trade and tariff regime internationally.

We believe that tariffs are a necessary tool to protect our jobs and our industries from other countries, as well as the labor value of our workers in a globalized market. In fact, combined with the right technology, they allow us to bring jobs back to the United States of America and create the jobs of the future. Okay, well, I mean, let's be real about this. When he says, combined with the right policy, you end up with the jobs of the future and we bring everything back,

Okay, here's what a tariff does. A tariff protects the industry that it is designed to protect and it taxes everybody else. That's what a tariff does. It raises prices for all the other people who are using inputs that are covered by this area. It subsidizes some businesses at the expense of others. Now, if there are national security oriented businesses and we got to protect them because God forbid there's a war, you need to have all of that living in American shores. Totally agree. I've said this a thousand times. If the goal of a tariff war is to get everybody else to lower their tariffs,

so that you end up with a freer trade regime than when he started, that's great too. And again, I'm not sure exactly where the president stands on all this because he obviously is dedicated to a large portion of the sort of free trade agenda when it comes to, for example, freedom of the seas. This would be one of the reasons why we are currently bombing the Houthis in Yemen who've been holding up free trade via the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. However, when you say that tariffs combined with the right technology create the jobs of the future,

I do not see how that is in any way, shape or form correct. He says, when you erect a tariff wall around a critical industry like auto manufacturing and you combine that with advanced robotics and lower energy costs and other tools that increase the productivity of you as labor, you give American workers a multiplying effect. Well, or you could not erect a tariff wall and you could combine the non-tariff wall with advanced robotics and lower energy costs and lower taxes and better tools to draw America, draw businesses to America.

You could do that without, you know, taxing the American consumer, actually. I mean, one of the great sort of fibs that's been told about free trade is that free trade is the largest reason for the decline in manufacturing jobs in the United States. That is not real. It is not true. In fact, the reality is that increases in productivity via technology have been the largest contributor to job loss in the manufacturing industries in the United States.

So when Vice President Vance yesterday suggested that globalization and its hunger for cheap labor, that's somehow preventing innovation. Well, I mean, to be fair, globalization is also the process whereby people trade good services and information so as to create significantly more sophisticated products, which is why the stuff that you have now is way, way, way better in quality and price than the stuff you had in, say, 1990.

I'd ask my friends, both on the tech optimist side and on the populist side, not to see the failure of the logic of globalization as a failure of innovation. Indeed, I'd say that globalization's hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it's been bad for innovation. Both our working people, our populists, and our innovators gathered here today have the same enemy. And the solution, I believe, is American innovation.

Because in the long run, it's technology that increases the value of labor. Innovations like the American system and the interchangeable parts revolution it sparked or Ford's moving assembly line that skyrocketed the productivity of our workers. That's how American industry became the envy of the world. Okay, but the American car industry became the envy of the world before, before the imposition of, for example, the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. In fact, large-scale tariffs

protectionism and subsidization of the american auto industry in the 1950s and 1960s meant that toyota ended up out competing the hell out of the american auto industries by the 1970s yeah there's this kind of i understand what he's trying to do he's trying to square a couple of different policies one is a very robust tariff regime that president trump seems entranced with and the other is technological innovation but if that were true that that tariff policy made for better innovation at home by artificially boosting the price of labor

And that's driving innovation to actually, what, make labor more productive and then lead to the ability to fire some of the laborers? That is a bit of a different argument, and I'm not sure it's an argument that really holds a lot of water, economically speaking. If that were the case, then we should put our tariffs at 100% everywhere. And boy, howdy, would we be innovating like nobody's business.

Innovation is not merely a process of create pressure and wait for innovation. Innovation is a process of the free flow of information, the free flow of goods and services. That is how innovation happens. Innovation isn't some guy in a shower thinking up the flux capacitor. That's not how it works. And if the Trump administration continues down the sort of subsidization and tariff line as opposed to the deregulatory and tax cut line, then I think that they are in for some hurt on the economic front.

That's not really a theory. That is proved out pretty strongly by past market indicators. And again, this is coming from a place of, I want President Trump to succeed wildly on the economy because if he does not, then the agenda that I hold dear and that he holds dear are gonna be an awful lot of trouble. Meanwhile, the president of the United States had for a long time promised that there would be additional documents coming in the JFK assassination. I know, it happened in 1963. Here's the president a couple of days ago announcing that the documents were coming.

We are tomorrow announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files. So people have been waiting for decades for this. And I've instructed my people that are responsible. Lots of different people put together by Tulsi Gabbard. And that's going to be released tomorrow. We have a tremendous amount of

So, 80,000 or so pages of the JFK files were in fact released.

It was all put together in something like 1,123 PDF documents. So people are combing through these in search of the detail, the smoking gun that shows that it was the Cubans or the Russians or the CIA or the Israelis or something. I'm just going to break it to you right now. It was Lee Harvey Oswald.

spoiler alert, it was Lee Harvey Oswald. It was always Lee Harvey Oswald. The most credible theory about Lee Harvey Oswald is that he was some sort of Soviet agent, considering that he literally went to the Soviet Union and then he came back from the Soviet Union and he was at the Cuban embassy. Other than that, you know, not much is my expectation. There are going to be some pages here of people who showed up to law enforcement and then made statements about things that they thought had happened, people that they knew, which does not constitute any real sort of evidence.

There's tons of documentation on this. Again, 99% of all JFK files had already been released. You're talking about literally millions of pages of documents that have been released before. These documents are not categorized or presented in any real organized way. It's possible some of them are not really new.

David Garrow, who's a historian who's written a lot about intelligence agencies, he said this dump is profoundly more impenetrable than all the previous more annotated ones. Tim Naftali is a historian. He said he hadn't had much luck so far. He told the New York Times, I'm trying to find stuff that's been re-reviewed and re-released with new information because some of it's unredacted. Some documents have, some have not.

Yes.

Historians said that they really didn't expect anything earth shattering.

So, you know, it'll take some time to go through it. Every legit historian who has gone through the JFK files has come to the same conclusion, which is Lee Harvey Oswald did it. That is what the physics demonstrates. That is what the wounds show. That is what the tape shows. All the conspiracy theorizing around JFK, while entertaining, is, in my opinion, specious and not just specious, in some case, maliciously oriented conspiracy.

If you want to see a fuller breakdown of that, we have a series behind the paywall over at Daily Wire Plus called Debunked, in which I did a full episode about the JFK assassination, going through some of the most common accusations about the JFK assassination.

In any case, I'm for more transparency. So I'm very happy that Trump did this. I think he should do exactly the same thing on the RFK assassination. I think he should do exactly the same thing on the MLK assassination. Let all of it come to light. I think the more that the public sees, the better. Now, is it going to shut up the conspiracy theorists? Of course not. Because then the answer will be, well, of course the government didn't take account of any of these files. I mean, it was the government that did it.

Or there's probably a secret box of documents somewhere. A sort of conspiracy theorizing that's become incredibly popular on the right these days. It was popular on the left, and now it's become increasingly popular on the right. The kind of, let's just ask questions. Who really killed JFK? Wink, wink, nod, nod.

And then you're like, well, do you have any evidence of the thing that you are presupposing? Well, no, I'm not. I'm not making any accusations. I just know I don't believe the story that I'm being told. I know not to trust the authorities. Well, that's fine. But do you have like any evidence, like evidence, not just supposition as well? You're part of it, aren't you? You, you, you. Yes, you. You're part of it. The reason that you're that you're so defensive about all this is I care to kill JFK. I mean, I do because it's really interesting.

But I noticed that the calendar says 2025 and he was killed in 1963. And so my opinion about who killed JFK has about as much relevance as who killed William McKinley, which is or James Garfield, which is to say not an enormous amount. It's not going to change the world in any real way, barring the revelation that many of those same people are still in the government today. But I don't expect that any of that is going to be in there. I would be.

shall we say, rather shocked if that were the case. But it's not going to put conspiracies to bed because conspiracies have a life of their own. Okay, meanwhile, the Democrats continue to just flail around. They have no idea what to do with President Trump. It is amazing to watch them flail. It truly is. Chuck Schumer, this is an amazing term of offense. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, who is quite awful, he wrote a book about anti-Semitism. Okay, as a Jew, and I don't do an as a Jew all that much actually, but as a Jew,

No. The answer is no, Chuck Schumer. You do not get to speak as a Jew about how you're fighting anti-Semitism while you greenlit the Iran nuclear deal, made room for every anti-Israel, anti-Semitic person in your party, refused to condemn the worst excesses of your own party. The answer is no. Absolutely not. Okay, so he actually had to cancel his book tour. Hilariously enough, he did not cancel his book tour because...

He really shouldn't be speaking about anti-Semitism. Ridiculously, the reason he had to cancel his book tour is because so many Democrats are ticked off at him over greenlighting the continuing resolution, which shows you where the violence is on the American spectrum these days when even the Senate minority leader can't face his own constituents in New York, afraid that they'll yell at him. According to Politico, he's postponing that book tour for security reasons as he faces intense backlash from the party base in the wake of last week's government funding vote. Again, that's pretty incredible.

Right-wingers who are canceling events these days, Republican Congress people, they are doing so because of the violent left. And when Chuck Schumer cancels an event, it's because of, wait for it, the violent left. I wonder who's violent. I was told only the right was violent. The right has a violence problem. Schumer was expected to make several stops in coming days to promote his new book, Anti-Semitism in America, How I Did It. No, sorry, it's called Anti-Semitism in America, A Warning. Due to security concerns, Senator Schumer's book events are now being rescheduled, according to a spokesperson for Schumer.

That didn't stop Schumer from appearing on The View. Now, again, I have to admit, I am jealous of Chuck Schumer for appearing on The View. It has been a lifelong, I don't have, I have a wonderful life. I've gotten so many things I want out of life and I hope to get many more. And it's a great life. One of my unfulfilled aspirations as a human is to be on The View. I just, it would make some of the best TV ever. It would just be wonderful TV. I mean, kind of intellectually clubbing a baby seal, but amazing TV.

Chuck Schumer was invited, not because he's a woman. I mean, I don't know the answer to that. Only he can identify. But he was invited to talk about all of this, where he then explained why he had not signed on to the why he had not signed on to the filibuster of the continuing resolution. There's no exit strategy. How do you get out of a shutdown? Guess who determines it? Trump, Musk, Trump.

Doge. They're the only ones. And one of the Republican senators told one of the Democratic senators, you get in this, we're staying in for six months, nine months, a year till we decimate the entire federal government. Okay, so that's actually not a horrible explanation of why he voted in favor of the continuing resolution. If the government had shut down, Trump would have the ability to decide who the essential workers were and then fire a bunch of people. So that's actually a pretty good explanation.

However, Sonny Hostin was having none of it. She ripped into Schumer. She's really mad because if Trump says black, you have to say white. If Trump says day, you say night. That's how it works.

Governor Pritzker's chief of staff, Anna and Caprera has said the following. The fight going on in the Democratic Party right now is not between hard left, right and moderate. It's between those who want to fight and those who want to cave. And it gives me no pleasure to say this to you because we are friends. But I think you caved. I think you and nine other Democrats caved. I don't think you showed the fight.

that this party needs right now because you're playing with by a rule book where the other party has thrown that rule book away. And so in my view, what you did really was in supporting that GOP partisan bill that Democrats had no input in, you cleared the way for Donald Trump and Elon Musk to gut Social Security, to gut Medicare, to gut Medicaid. Why did you lead Democratic senators to play by that book that the Republicans are not playing by?

All right, so that's the battle inside the Democratic Party and it's going great. If you thought that Chuck Schumer, however, was the reasonable side of the Democratic Party, I beg to differ. Here he was explaining that Americans are stupid. He was mocking Americans who want to keep their money.

You know what their attitude is? I made my money all by myself. How dare your government take my money from me? I don't want to pay taxes. Or I built my company with my bare hands. How dare your government tell me how I should treat my customers, the land and water that I own, or my employees? They hate government. Government's a barrier to people, a barrier to stop them from doing things. They want to destroy it. We are not letting them do it, and we're united. Okay.

Oh, man. I mean, the fists of uniting. Wow. Go, go, Power Rangers. But let me just put out there that that's actually my viewpoint. We, not I, we, our team, built this entire company. The government did not help us. The government provided the basic law and order necessary to the preservation of private property in the United States and the protection of free speech. Those were the things. That's all the things. We built it, not Chuck Schumer. He is not entitled to our money.

Chuck Schumer is not entitled to the money that I've earned on behalf of my family. He is not. And I don't think many Americans believe that Chuck Schumer is entitled to that money or that he's likely to use it in good ways. So, again, the Democrats, they cannot help themselves. Even the divide inside Chuck Schumer is pretty amusing. Meanwhile, the 2028 race is getting significantly more amusing on the Democratic side of the aisle, I do have to say. So Gavin Newsom is trying a sort of late turn in time to become a moderate. It's really funny.

So he got his new podcast and he had on my friend Charlie Kirk and Charlie really kind of ripped him up. And then he had on Steve Bannon and he played footsie with Bannon. And this caused him to be ripped up and down by the inflatable off the side of the freeway to use car lot, Tim Walls. You remember him? He ran for vice president that one time. He was real weird. Here was Tim Walls with Gavin Newsom Newsom.

praising Steve Bannon as a person who he can talk with and who really reflects a lot of democratic principles.

How do we get some of those guys back under a rock? I think we have to first understand what their motivations are. I think we have to understand what they're actually doing. You don't think it's racism and misogyny? I think there's a lot of that, but I don't think it's exclusively that. When you talk to a guy like Steve Bannon, you know, he reminded me a little bit of my grandfather when he talks about working folks and he talks about how we hollowed out the industrial core of this country. I understand that. But so we can dismiss the notion of

of election denialism, we could completely dismiss what he did on January 6th, but I don't think you can dismiss what he's saying. Reminds me a lot of what Bernie Sanders was saying. Reminds me a lot of what Democrats said 20, 30 years ago. - Oh man, I'm up for these fights between Gavin Newsom and Tim Walz. Walz, by the way, is now walking around saying that he can kick Trump supporters' asses, which, which ones? Can we name them? Like, really? Like, you, sir? Okay.

How do you fight it? Well, this notion of tax. I think I could kick most of their ass. I do think that. I know I can run them. But I don't know if we're going to fall into that place where we want to, okay, we challenge you to a, you know, a WWE fight here type of thing. These are the 2028 candidates, guys. They're doing great. They're just doing amazing. Alrighty, coming up, we'll jump into President Trump now investigating the Joe Biden auto pen.

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