Ep. 2183 - Pope Francis Dead, What Comes Next?
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Well, folks, tons of news to get to, and we'll explain sort of why we are abroad in the very near future. First, The Daily Wire doesn't just bring you the stories you need to know. We bring you to the center of the story. While legacy media filters the truth through bias and spin, we deliver it unfiltered, ad-free, politics, culture, entertainment. We don't just cover the fight. We are in it. Join us right now at dailywire.com slash subscribe. So we were off yesterday, as I say, for travel. We'll know why in very short order, however.

While we were off, the Pope passed away. That, of course, was long expected. He'd been sick for a while. We talked about it on the show just a few weeks ago with my friend Michael Knowles, who explained how the conclave will work and what the Pope's legacy is. Pope Francis's legacy, according to the left media, is that he was leftist.

That is how left media are playing it. They played it all the way this weekend. The entire left media was basically united in the idea that Pope Francis was important because he isn't President Trump. Here is a compendium of various members of the media basically suggesting that his sole importance lies in the fact that he opposed many of the Trump administration agenda items.

Pope Francis has been vocal, speaking out against ways that the Trump administration has handled migrant issues to also issues across Europe. Even before he was elected in 2016, the Pope talked about this idea of building walls to keep out migrants as something that he said was unchristian. And this sort of continued over the course of his presidency. Many on the hard right inside the church were shocked that this Pope would actually

borrow from Jesus Christ and living that simple life. Again, the reason that the left-leaning media like Pope Francis is because, again, I speak as somebody who really does not have a dog in this particular fight. It's because he was a liberation theologist. He is somebody who believed in a sort of Marxism mix-up with Roman Catholicism. And what that meant is that on economic issues, on issues ranging from migration to immigration,

distribution of resources to the environment, he put heavy focus on a very left-wing perspective. Now, what people in the media like to ignore was the fact that Pope Francis actually was still traditional on issues ranging from same-sex marriage to abortion to transgenderism. He said many of the same things that Pope Benedict had said before Pope Benedict resigned.

resigned back in 2013. That is when Pope Francis took over. But the media, of course, very celebratory of Pope Francis in a way they never were of Pope Benedict, specifically because he said things that sounded different than the papacy had in the past. According to the New York Times, which, of course, was celebrating Pope Francis, Francis steadily steered the church in another direction, restocking its leadership with a diverse array of bishops who shared his pastoral welcoming approach as he sought to open up the church. And this is, of course, the way that the left-leaning media treats Pope Francis.

is that he opened up the church. He made it broader and more appealing to people. Now, what we are seeing in the United States, actually, in terms of the numbers, is that more young Americans are turning toward Catholicism, but it's more traditional forms, not in these sort of left-leaning forms that Catholicism seems to be taking these days, but going back to things like Latin Mass.

And my friends who are Catholic, many of our staffers who are Catholic, Daily Wire is disproportionately Catholic, actually. Many of the people who work for us are people who go to traditional Latin mass and go to more traditional Roman Catholic churches. However, according to the media, the importance of Pope Francis is that he was essentially moving the entire church to the left. According to the New York Times, many rank and file Catholics approved, believing the church had become inward looking and distant from ordinary people. Now, again, do they have any polling data to support the idea that the leftward leaning moves of the church have some

have somehow been a salutary good for the church. They do not. It's just many people believe. Francis reached out to migrants, the poor, the destitute, the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy members and to alienated gay Catholics. He traveled to often forgotten and far-flung countries and sought to improve relations with an antagonistic Chinese government, Muslim clerics and leaders from across the fragmented Christian world. And again, these sort of

extraordinarily positive view that the media hold of any pope is dependent on that pope doing what they believe to be the bidding of the political left. This is why they were puzzled when the day before the pope passed away, Vice President J.D. Vance visited. Now, they're very happy that the pope seemed to give him a bit of a lecture on migration, but the fact that J.D. Vance, who's a fairly recent convert to Catholicism,

was meeting with the Pope was somewhat puzzling to them in the first place. They don't have any trouble understanding why Nancy Pelosi, an extraordinarily pro-abortion, pro-transgenderism, pro-same-sex marriage person,

Now, again,

It's very nice for the Pope to condemn war. Also, it would be good if, you know, maybe he took a moral stance on some of those wars, which actually do have a moral component. It turns out that the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, these are not just conflicts that randomly break out across the planet. They actually have moral underpinnings. And speaking as a critic of Pope Francis, because I believe that the Pope was not morally clear on a wide variety of conflicts and on a wide variety of issues.

ranging from economics to international politics. I wish he had said more about the actual underlying morality of, say, the conflict in Gaza. And by that, I mean, it would have been nice if he had not done a nativity scene at the Vatican that posed baby Jesus as a Palestinian, for example, or if he had suggested that maybe Hamas needed to go. And in Ukraine, it would have been great if the Pope had actually said Russian aggression in Ukraine is evil and wrong. That would have been great. I would have liked more of that sort of thing. The same thing holds true with regard to economics.

I wish that Pope Francis had not been so enthralled to, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board says, ideologies that keep the poor in poverty. The pope was a radical environmentalist and so he was constantly criticizing capitalism when the reality is that poor people across the world need more capitalism and better property rights, not the opposite.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board says his papacy was marked by anti-Americanism and not merely against Donald Trump. He seems to believe Latin America is poor because the United States is rich. That, of course, is a hallmark of liberation theology, which is a left leaning mashup, as I said, of sort of Marxist economics with Catholic social teaching.

As the Wall Street Journal said, some attribute his hostility to free markets to his Latin American background. Born in Buenos Aires, Pope Francis at a young age was made the provincial superior for a Jesuit order in Argentina during the time of the military junta. This is a hard line to walk. Some in his order accused him of unfairly being too friendly with the regime. And Argentina, of course, during Pope Francis's tenure when he was in Argentina, was run by Juan and Evita Perón. And Peronism was a Marxist brand of centralized politics.

And of course, it's also true that the Pope reached out, Pope Francis reached out to the Chinese Communist Party in unique ways. He attempted to make common cause with the Chinese Communist Party. He actually gave the Communist Party in China influence on who exactly would be the bishops in China, which is not a great way to do your religion. And one of the kind of great things about the history of Catholicism is that when Catholics

were sending priests all over the world to minister to people, they weren't actually changing the underlying logic of the Catholic Church. If you're making your pick for bishop subject to the Chinese Communist Party, which hates God and hates Catholicism and hates religion, that is not a great way to do it. Now, again, I'm being very critical of the Pope here because the media decided that the Pope's politics were the thing that made him who he was.

You can also make the case that what made the Pope who he was, was his empathy. And this was sort of the other strain of coverage of the Pope's death, was the fact that Pope Francis was very clearly empathetic to the poor. They spent an awful lot of time with the poor, ministering to the poor. And that, of course, is a wonderful thing. In a world in which, however, the big issues of the day are so much in turmoil, and when moral leadership has never been more wanting,

I'm hoping that the next pope, and again, I'm speaking as an outsider because I'm not a Catholic, but the pope is a large moral voice to a billion people. I'm hoping that the next pope provides more moral clarity with regard to the things that matter. Because if the church is going to stand for anything, if it's going to gain adherence,

then it has to maintain the sort of moral center of eternal values upon which it has been based. I write a lot about the Catholic Church in my book, The Right Side of History, because the Catholic Church for a thousand years was the preserver of Christendom. That's what it was until the rise of Protestantism. And even after the rise of Protestantism, it was the sort of battle between Catholicism and Protestantism that made Europe what it was.

The Peace of Westphalia was based on the idea, religious toleration was based on the idea that no one was going to win the war between Catholics and Protestants. And so religious diversity should bloom within a certain framework. All of this makes a huge difference in the history of the West. And so a robust and useful Catholic church would be a good thing. The Catholic church has been fading in recent decades, not just because of the assault of secularism, but because like pretty much every mainline religion, it has been imbibing from the well of modernity

and casting out its own spiritual values. And that is not going to have long-term good impact on faith, on those eternal values.

themselves. We'll get to more on this in just one moment. First, you know what I hate? Big government, right? You know what else I hate? Being overcharged. There's just a few things that I hate. It's like the reverse of the sound of music. Pure Talk, the cell phone company I use for business every day, is helping you save money on your cell phone bill. That is correct. Pure Talk says, I don't think so, to $100 a month cell phone plans. That's just wasteful. It's irresponsible. Instead, they're offering America's most dependable 5G network and America's most sensible prices.

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Well, the conclave comes next. The conclave, of course, has been made famous in literature and film. Essentially, the...

The College of Cardinals gets together and then they vote on who ought to be the next pope. The idea being, it's kind of a beautiful idea, that God sits in the midst of the quorum. And not an idea that is unique to Catholicism. We have that sort of analog of that in Judaism. The idea is that if you have 10 men who are praying together, then God kind of sits on that quorum. The same thing, I suppose, happens with regard to the College of Cardinals. The idea that God acts through man in history.

According to NPR, with the death of Pope Francis, the elaborate mechanism will now begin to decide who sits in power at the Vatican, the seat of the last absolute monarchy in Europe. It centers around the conclave, a gathering whose name stems from the Latin for with key, which comes from the 13th century. Because back in 1268, the church went nearly three years without a pope. So they actually locked the cardinals in and they put them on water and bread until they could come up with a new pope.

Cardinals in the conclave will be locked away within the Vatican. They are cut off from the outside world. So it's kind of like sequestering the jury. As they deliberate, news outlets point cameras at the papal chimney. And then you find out who was the pope, who's the new pope, when the white smoke emerges from the chimney in the conclave. There are a number of candidates who are up for the papacy. Some are more conservative. Many are not. Pope Francis stacked the top levels of the College of Cardinals and the Vatican with people who are like-minded.

The Washington Post has a rundown on some of the top contenders, including a man from Stockholm named Anders Arborelius, who is 75. My guess is they're going to go with somebody younger because after having two very elderly popes, I think that it would probably behoove them to go with somebody who is younger. Arborelius is 75. He's actually born a Lutheran and then converted to Catholicism when he was 20. He has suggested the creation of a special advisory body of women. He advocates openness to refugees. And again, he is more left-leaning.

There's Charles Mungbo from Myanmar. He's 76. He has been outspoken against the violence inflicted by the country's military junta, according to the Washington Post. And again, he was made a cardinal by Pope Francis. You have candidates from France, from Congo. You have candidates from Manila. Perhaps the front runner right now, at least in the mind of the media, is a man named Luis Antonio Gokim Tegel, who is from Manila. He is 67. He's considered closely aligned with Francis.

He has criticized the harsh and severe rhetoric Catholic clerics use to describe members of the LGBTQ plus community, divorced people and unwed mothers. He was born in Manila. His mom is of Chinese heritage. His father is Tagalog from Philippines. So again, he was proclaimed a cardinal by Benedict, but the idea here is that he would continue the sort of left-leaning march of the Vatican. And then you have some nominees who are more conservative. So for example, Peter Erdo from Budapest. He is the Metropolitan Archbishop.

of Estergom Budapest in Hungary. He's one of the more conservative members of the College of Cardinals. So when Pope Francis declared in December 2023 that Catholic priests could bless but not marry same-sex couples, Erdo appeared to oppose the decision in his Christmas Eve sermon. He has opposed allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion as well. So he's sort of more traditionalist. So it'll be fascinating to see who emerges as the next pope. And of course, the whole world does have a stake in that because the pope is the spiritual leader for a billion people.

Our condolences go out, obviously, to all Catholics today, because whether you agree with Pope Francis or not, when the Pope passes away, that means an enormous amount to our Catholic friends and neighbors. And may his memory and his work be a blessing to them. Meanwhile, when it comes to the United States, the economy continues to roil and tumble. Yesterday, the stock market had a pretty terrible day. It was down about 1,000 points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Gold was up

Bond yields were up, meaning people are moving away from bonds. They're moving toward gold. They're moving away from stocks. All of this demonstrating lack of faith in the underlying health of the American economy. D-dollarization is happening. People are moving away from the dollar in international trade. A huge amount of this is due to the tariff war, of course, that President Trump declared. Since that tariff war was declared, the stock market is down markedly. Over the course of President Trump's presidency, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is off somewhere between 13 and 15 points.

In something like 11 days in modern history in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dumped 1,000 points, four of those have come since President Trump declared his tariff war. Now, as I've said many times, when it comes to tariffs, there are some things that tariffs are good for. So if you want to actually punish a country, say like China, then a tariff is a useful thing if well calibrated. If you want to protect an industry that is crucial to national security, then tariffs are useful. And you might use it to protect, say, your shipbuilding.

or your steel industry, if you feel that's crucial. And we can have arguments about each of those industries, but that would be the purpose of a tariff. Or you could put a tariff on a country because you're attempting to get that country to lower its own tariffs, to escalate, to deescalate. However, launching a trade war on the entire world all at once turns out not to be something that helps the American economy. It is not a well-thought-out policy, and you are seeing that in the markets nearly every day.

According to the Wall Street Journal, stocks fell with the Dow Industrials dropping almost 1,000 points and on pace for the worst April since 1932. By the way, for no reason. Again, not for good reason. The underlying health of the Trump economy was good.

the attempt to declare a trade war, if you're going to do so and you're going to orient against China, as I've laid out, there are smart ways to do it. You have to first do the preconditional work in order to do a successful tariff war on China. You can't just launch the tariffs up to 245% and hope everything's going to work out okay. Because it turns out you then have to blow holes through the middle of your tariff on things like auto parts or pharmaceuticals or

or for Apple, which is what President Trump has already done. If you actually want to fight a successful tariff war with China, a few things have to be done before you even start the tariff war with China. First, you need to sign terrific free trade deals with everybody else in the world in order to orient them

toward you and away from China. Two, you actually have to gradually raise the tariffs so as to allow people time to reshore their key industries away from China to Vietnam or to Indonesia or to Malaysia or wherever else they're going to reshore. Three, if you have really crucial industries, you have to take the time and cut the regulations such that those crucial industries have already reshored in the United States before the supply gets cut off

from China. Four, you actually have to have rare earth minerals, right? All the things you need from China need to be sourced elsewhere. So when you cut off China, you're not cutting off your nose to spite your face. And five, you actually have to build up your military sufficient that if China feels boxed in and they go for Taiwan, you can deter them. You do all that work before you actually launch a well-calibrated trade war with China. Virtually none of that work was done. It was just sort of dumped out on the table that we're going to do a giant trade war

And then everything else was backfilled. And the markets are reacting to that. If they thought that this was well thought out, the markets, if people in the investment game thought that all of this was well calibrated and well thought out, you wouldn't see the markets moving up and down wildly. The volatility is the indicator. I mean, overall, you're seeing a decline, but you're also seeing volatility. On a day-to-day level, people don't know what's going on. One of the reasons that the market dumped yesterday is because President Trump decided that it would be a wonderful idea to attack Jerome Powell again.

He put out a series of truths in which he slammed Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, slammed him again. And then he went on a sort of truth spree talking about how people don't understand tariffs. Quote, the businessmen who criticize tariffs are bad at business, but really bad at politics. They don't understand or realize that I am the greatest friend that American capitalism has ever had.

Well, listen, I think that he's a friend to American capitalism, but you know what the markets react to? The policy. They don't react to just the perception of who they believe the president is. They react to the policy. And right now, again, it is unclear whether President Trump is ratcheting up tariffs to ratchet them down, whether he's just attempting to protect key industries, or whether he thinks trade is bad, like his advisor, Peter Navarro, who is, in fact, not good at this.

And if you want the markets to rise again, what you actually need to do, Mr. President, is fire Peter Navarro, who is quite bad at this, and let your Treasury Secretary, Scott Besson, negotiate a bunch of great trade deals. That is the best way out of this situation.

President Trump openly went after Jerome Powell again, suggesting that Jerome Powell needed to lower the interest rates. Jerome Powell is not going to preemptively lower the interest rates in the middle of a tariff war that is likely to increase prices. President Trump calling on Powell to do this is like his get out of jail free card. I'm not going to change my policy. Maybe Jerome Powell will do it. Jerome Powell isn't going to do that because Jerome Powell is not going to lower the interest rates in the middle of an inflationary cycle.

So President Trump put out a big statement on truth, quote, preemptive cuts in interest rates are being called for by many with energy costs way down, food prices, including Biden's egg disaster, substantially lower than most other things trending down. There is virtually no inflation. Now, again, that's true, but those are back looking numbers. The question is, looking forward, will there be inflation if you break the supply chains?

He says, with these costs trending down so nicely, just what I predicted they would do, there can be almost no inflation, but there can be a slowing of the economy unless Mr. Too Late Powell, a major loser, lowers interest rates now. Europe has already lowered seven times. Powell has always been too late, except when it came to the election period when he lowered in order to help sleepy Joe Biden later commonly get elected. How did that work out? Now, I agree with him on that last part. I criticized Jerome Powell for lowering the interest rates just before the election, which I saw as at least partially political.

The reason, by the way, that Europe is lowering its interest rates right now is because it wants to dump a bunch of spending money into its own flailing economy. The European economy is falling into stagnation, and so they want to try to inflate their own economy. Plus, they're about to spend a lot more money, you would think, on the war in Ukraine because the United States is withdrawing its support gradually and not so gradually from Ukraine. We'll get to more on this in just one second. First,

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Every day you wait only makes things worse. With over 5,000 new tax liens filed daily and tools like property seizures, bank levies, wage garnishments, the IRS is applying pressure at levels we have not seen in years. Increased administrative scrutiny means collections are moving fast. The good news? There's time for Tax Network USA to help you. Still self-employed or a business owner? Even if your books are a total mess,

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This is the thing. If you're going to try and box in China, you actually have to work on the box. You have to work on everybody who's around China and cut excellent trade deals with all of those people so that if you say to them, choose between us and choose between China, they don't just say, hey, how about both? How about both?

Okay, well, according to the New York Times, the Chinese government on Monday warned other countries against curbing trade with China in order to win a reprieve from American tariffs, promising to retaliate against countries that do so. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce said it was responding to foreign media reports that President Trump's administration was trying to pressure other countries on their trade with China as a negotiating tactic.

The ministry said in a statement, quote, appeasement will not bring peace. Compromise will not earn respect. Seeking so-called exemptions by harming the interests of others from one's selfish gain is like negotiating with a tiger for its skin. In the end, it will only lead to a lose-lose situation. China said that it would resolutely take countermeasures. Now, the United States is significantly more powerful economically than China. It is. Just as a global power, we are significantly more powerful. Investment dollars flow into the United States and from the United States.

There's a reason why the GDP per capita of the United States is a high multiple larger than that of China. China, in aggregate, is a strong country. But of course, 1.4 billion people live in China, whereas only 330 million people live in the United States.

However, where China does have an advantage when it comes to fighting a trade war, for example, which is a centralized government policy, is that China is a centralized government. When I say they're a centralized government, I mean they are not subject to elections. So China can fight a trade war, impoverish its own citizens. Hell, if its own citizens die, China's done that before, the Great Leap Forward killed 40 million people.

China is no stranger to human rights violations against its own people. So if the question is who's going to break first in a game of chicken between the Chinese Communist Party and the Trump administration, which, again, is subject to the outside will of the American people, we're going to have midterm elections in a year and a half here. I mean, this is why you better have your ducks in a row before you do something like that, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The idea that you can break trade and not break the capital flow side is a fantasy, said Stephen Blitz, chief U.S. economist at Global Data TS Lombard. Markets settled down in recent days as Trump pulled back from a maximalist stance on tariffs. Volatility soared after the president unspooled his fluid and unpredictable trade policy on April 2nd. A brutal bond market sell-off unfolded with 30-year yields, notching their largest weekly increase since 1987, despite decent bond auctions. The sell-off occurred against the backdrop of a weakening dollar.

which normally strengthens during bouts of stress. People invest in what they think is going to bring at least a solid return in bonds. That's not happening. People are moving away from bonds, they're moving away from the dollar, and they're moving away from stocks, which demonstrates lack of faith in the current economic policy or in the economy of the United States. The president can still course correct here. Make deals. We were promised deals. Make the deals. Seriously, we need like deals now. Okay, well, that's what we need in the market. What we need are those excellent trade deals President Trump was talking about.

And by the way, we need the headlines on the trade deals because the reality is that our trade relationships, let's say Mexico or Canada, they weren't so bad. You know why they weren't so bad already? They weren't so bad already because President Trump already negotiated the USMCA with Mexico and Canada.

There's a lot of danger here for the Trump administration, not just in a sinking economy, but in the impact that could have on the Republican brand in the midterms and in the future. After the last election cycle, most analysts basically declared the Democratic Party in cardiac arrest situation. The EKG looked pretty terrible for the Democratic Party.

If you want to inject electricity into the Democratic Party, you want to paddle the Democratic Party back to life, a bad economy will do it. Harry Enten at CNN talked about the possible collapse of the Republican brand if the economy continues to go the way it's going. You look forward now. Of course, it's completely on the table that the Republican brand could collapse. It has not yet, but...

It absolutely could. 100% if the economy goes south, it will take Republican House members with them. And some senators too. Okay, now this right here is the question. If you want President Trump to succeed, then you want his policy to be geared at reality. And that means a trade policy that makes sense to the markets that they can intuit because the markets do have real world impact. If the markets drop, there's less liquidity available for businesses. Credit dries up. Small businesses which operate on margin are going to go under.

There is a lag effect between the stock market going down and the economy cratering. But to pretend that you are utterly disconnected is ignorant of economic history. Let's put it this way. There's never been a time when the economy was booming, where the stock market was radically declining. There have been times where the stock market declined and then went back up, declined, went back up. But when the stock market continues to go down and to the right, name me a time in American history where the economy was doing amazing work while the stock market continued to go down and to the right for a prolonged period of time.

And meanwhile, the president of the United States, his signal policy, the one that actually is working the best for him is immigration. On the polling, President Trump's immigration policy is highly popular. It's not just because Americans are sick and tired of the open borders policy of the Biden administration. It's also because Democrats continue to take the worst possible tack when it comes to this sort of stuff. The tack they should be taking on immigration right now is that President Trump is right to close the border, that President Trump is correct to unlawfully

unleash ICE to go find criminal illegal immigrants and deport them. But we need to obey the law. That would be the actual smart approach to this particular issue. But Democrats have decided that the smart approach is to shove their heads directly up their own, you know. And so what that means is that they are instead basically going out of their way to praise MS-13 members and suggest that President Trump is wrong to try and deport all of those people. And this leads to the awkward situation of absolute dolt Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland has the IQ of a turnip.

going down to El Salvador to meet with a man named Kilmer Abrego Garcia, who is a likely MS-13 member and an alleged wife beater by his wife. OK, like not a good guy. And he was deported to El Salvador. Again, that was done mistakenly, according to the Trump DOJ.

And that was a process issue. So the way that the Democrats should have protested that is they should have said, listen, everybody deserves due process. If you are here on a green card, you deserve whatever the due process is for a green card holder. If you are here as an illegal immigrant, you deserve whatever due process is due to you under the law.

And due process shouldn't be violated at Sacrosanct in the United States. That's the argument they should have made instead because they have an, I don't know, it's an internal emotional necessity to valorize people who are quote unquote victims of the Trump administration. They've decided to treat people who are actually quite bad with sympathy, which leads to the awkward spectacle of Chris Van Hollen being asked if the person he visited down in El Salvador and had drinks with was MS-13 and he can't answer the question.

Well, Dan, what Donald Trump is trying to do here is change the subject. The subject at hand

is that he and his administration are defying a court order to give Abrego Garcia his due process rights. They are trying to litigate on social media what they should be doing in the courts. They need to put up or shut up in the courts. But since you were the one person to have met with him, and since this is a thing, you say, on social media, it's what we hear from Donald Trump and Republicans every day, all day long, you didn't ask him?

I didn't ask him that because I know what his answer is. What he told me was he was sad and traumatized that he was being in prison because he has committed no crimes. Okay. Sad and traumatized, the likely MS-13 member. Great job there, Chris Van Hollen. You can see he's trying to backtrack now. Now he's trying to turn it into a due process argument. Again, the due process argument is a better argument for Democrats. It just is. The Supreme Court, over the course of the last 72 hours, handed out...

In orders early Saturday morning, 7 to 2, they handed down just an order. There was no actual text to the order. It didn't explain its reasoning, but it ordered the Trump administration to respond to an emergency appeal and said the government is directed not to remove any members of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court. That would be the people who are being detained under the so-called Alien Enemies Act, which is an 18th century act.

Act designed at allowing the expeditious removal of people who are declared wartime enemies by the executive branch of the government.

There was a dissent by Justices Alito and Justice Thomas in this particular case. Saying, quote, shortly after midnight yesterday, the court hastily and prematurely granted unprecedented emergency relief. Although the order is not to find the putative class, it appears the court means all members of the class the habeas petitioner sought to have certified, namely all non-citizens in custody of the Northern District of Texas who were, are, or will be subject to the March 2025 presidential proclamation entitled Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua.

And then they criticized the court for doing all this, even though it's not clear the court had jurisdiction. It's questionable whether the applicants complied with their obligation to seek emergency injunctive relief in the district court. The Court of Appeals was already considering the issue of emergency relief. The papers alleged that the applicants were in imminent danger of removal, but there was no concrete support for that suggestion. So...

Alito and Thomas both complained in some literally in the middle of the night, the court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule without hearing from the opposing party within eight hours of receiving the application with dubious factual support for its order and without providing any explanation for its order. I refuse to join the court's order because we had no good reason to think that under the circumstances issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate. Now, again, I think what the rest of the court would say is we wouldn't think that was necessary or appropriate either, except for the fact that we've now had situations in which the Trump administration has,

allegedly ignored the orders of lower courts not to do a deportation and then just did the deportation. That's the argument that is being made on the other side of the aisle. One of the things that should become clear to Republicans at this point is that doing things in meticulous fashion is likely to lead to longer lasting victories than doing them as sort of one offs and in quick fashion.

Because on the morality, the Trump administration is not only correct, they are unbelievably correct. Tom Homan, who's our bulldog borders are, criticized, for example, Chris Van Hollen for his sympathy for MS-13 members, saying how many angel moms and dads has he met with?

What shocks me is he's remained silent on the travesty that happened on our southern border. Many people died. Thousands of people died. I've met with hundreds of angel moms and dads who buried their children that were murdered by an illegal alien. How many angel moms and dads has he met in the state of Maryland? That's what concerns me. And on the politics, Republicans are right.

But do the law right also, and you'll have longer lasting victories because otherwise, many of the things the Trump administration is trying to do are going to get reversed on appeal. And that would be really bad for the Trump administration as well. And I'm rooting for the Trump administration to do all of this right so its policies actually work. The same thing holds true with regard to Harvard. So the Trump administration is admirably going after the endowment of Harvard University, which is great. They should. Harvard University is a travesty. Again, that is my alma mater. I went there for law school.

They're very rich. And there's no reason why Harvard University should be treated with kid gloves. Their endowment is $53 billion. Massive endowment. And these major universities have the GDPs of small countries. It's unbelievable.

The Trump administration, according to the Wall Street Journal, has now grown so furious with Harvard University after a week of an escalating dispute between the two sides. It is planning to pull in additional billion dollars of the school's funding for health research, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump administration officials thought the long list of demands they sent Harvard last Friday was a confidential starting point for negotiations. Instead, Harvard released the letter to the public.

Before Monday, the administration was planning to treat Harvard more leniently than it had Columbia University. Now officials want to apply even more pressure to the nation's most prominent university, according to those people. There's a lot of talk about the attempt to remove nonprofit status from Harvard University. The task force thought Harvard would concede. Instead, Harvard decided to make itself the centerpiece of this issue. Now, the Trump administration could have won a very easy victory here, and they still may win a victory here. It'll be harder fought.

They could easily have simply said to Harvard University,

that unless it complied with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the necessary consequences would follow. Its aid would go away, for example. And then been very meticulous about the list they put forward. And so they put forward a very broad list of things they wanted Harvard University to do, including reconstitute its board, reconstitute its professoriate. And listen, those are all things that are good and should happen to Harvard University. Absolutely. Will they be upheld in a court of law? That is a little unclear. Again, Harvard University

For all the problems with Harvard, there's some good lawyers who work there and very expensive lawyers who work there. I want to see the Trump administration's measures against Harvard University maintained, which is, again, why meticulousness should be the order of the day. We'll get to more of that in a moment. First, if you're not able to watch those old family videos anymore because, you know, they're on a VHS tape in your garage moldering away, well...

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My dad was so happy with it, he actually made copies of all the material and made sure the kids could get it. Protect your memories. Take advantage of Legacy Box's all-American sale. Visit LegacyBox.com slash Shapiro shop. Their $9 tape offer, digitized by hand in the United States. Get 90 days of free access to Legacy Box Cloud. That's LegacyBox.com slash Shapiro. American-made, trusted by families. Okay, meanwhile, the Defense Department continues to roil with its own level of chaos.

Now, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth appears to be under assault from people who are very much opposed to Pete Hegseth's view on the universe. And here I'm talking about isolationists within the Defense Department. There's a sort of bizarre narrative that's now being retailed that Hegseth is under assault from people who are, quote unquote, more interventionist in sort of their directionality. It's precisely the opposite. You can tell this from social media. The people who are currently assaulting Pete Hegseth

are people opposed to Pete Hegseth because Pete Hegseth is too much in favor of peace through strength. So some of the people who are fired over the course of the last couple of weeks, allegedly for leaking to the press, are people who are very much allied with the isolationist wing of the Republican Party. And then many of them have been going around and mouthing off about it in public. That includes Dan Caldwell. Dan Caldwell,

was a member of the Defense Department, a top member of the Defense Department. He was appointed by people inside the Office of Personnel Management. The Office of Personnel Management is staffed by people who are very sympathetic to this point of view, apparently. Caldwell was fired after allegations that he was leaking to the press, presumably falsely

people with whom he has friends like Tucker Carlson on whose podcast he appeared recently. And that is the kind of generalized suspicion. I don't know if that's true or not. Dan Caldwell went on Tucker's podcast on Monday and said he was not responsible for leaks that were used as, quote, justification for a purge that has caused turmoil at the Pentagon and prompted calls for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to resign.

And it is not quite a wonder as to who actually is calling for his resignation on the right. It's people who don't like the sort of Trumpian peace through strength argument and are much more friendly to the sort of paleo conservative isolationist wing of the Republican Party.

Caldwell said, quote, I was out there advancing things a lot of people in the foreign policy establishment didn't want. It doesn't justify what's happening to me, but let's just be honest. That's the nature of the games played in D.C. So he's claiming to Tucker Carlson that he's basically ousted by, quote, unquote, the neocons, which is weird because he isn't naming who did the ousting precisely. He thinks his views contributed to his ouster. What's weird about that is, of course, there were a couple of other people who were fired from the Pentagon who actually don't hold those exact same views.

Now, Caldwell himself is making very strong isolationist arguments, and he accuses there of being people who are just desperate for another war in the Middle East, which, again, is simplistic thinking. The idea that, for example, if you wish for Israel to take out Iran's nuclear facilities, this means you want another war in the Middle East. That's just wrong on its face. The idea that you want another war in the Middle East if you want to stop the Houthis from, you know, stopping all traffic in the Red Sea, which is something that Pete Hegseth has expressed support for, that that means that you're a warmonger.

That is an Obama-level foreign policy. The press attacks on Pete Hegseth, though, because, again, they agree with the Obama-level foreign policy is a horseshoe theory here. The New York Times and Dan Kald will largely agree on foreign policy in a wide variety of ways. According to the New York Times, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared details about information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15th in a private signal group chat that included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.

And so now this is being used as another excuse to go after Pete Hegseth. Rumors started flying around yesterday that the Trump administration is going to look to alternatives for Hegseth for the White House's part. They're denying that. Caroline Leavitt at the White House yesterday said this is not true. The Pentagon is working against Pete Hegseth specifically because, by the way, recruitment numbers are up because Pete Hegseth is cutting the waste and the fraud and the abuse over at the Pentagon because Pete Hegseth is a different kind of sect. Yes.

The president stands strongly behind Secretary Hegseth, who is doing a phenomenal job leading the Pentagon. And this is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and working against the monumental change that you are trying to implement. Secretary Hegseth was nominated for this position because he is standing up for the war fighter, the men and women in uniform who are putting their lives on the line to protect our country and our homeland. And unfortunately,

There have been people at that building who don't like the change the secretary is trying to bring. So they are leaking and they are lying to the mainstream media. The fact the White House is standing by Hegseth, that is, of course, the right move. Pete Hegseth yesterday was talking about his relationship with the White House. He says, listen, we're trying to fire leakers. That's what we are doing here.

You know, what a big surprise that a bunch of, a few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax. Won't give back their Pulitzers. They got Pulitzers for a bunch of lies. Pulitzers for a bunch of lies. And on hoaxes time and time and time again. And as they peddle those lies, no one ever calls them on it.

See, this is what the media does. They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees and then they try to slash and burn people.

and ruin their reputations. Not going to work with me. So the White House should stand by Hegseth. He was their pick. He was an out-of-the-box pick, and he remains the right pick for Secretary of Defense. Meanwhile, speaking of wrong picks, Steve Witkoff, again, he's been trotted out there as some sort of negotiating genius. I would love to see the actual negotiating genius at some point of Steve Witkoff. So right now, he's leading negotiations over Ukraine, and he continues to make proposals that are geared, presumably at granting carrots to the Russians.

That is the only way to sort of read how Steve Witkoff is approaching these particular negotiations. The Ukrainian, I mean, Zelensky already came to the table. If the idea was get Zelensky to the table, the Trump administration has already accomplished this. And I took the Henry Kissinger position back in 2022, which is the Ukrainians needed to be brought to the table. But then so did the Russians. I mean, you're going to have a deal. You need the Russians at the table, too.

And right now, all the focus of the Witkoff wing of the administration is get the Ukraine. The Ukrainians already came. Zelensky already said he wants a 30 day ceasefire. Zelensky already is granting this rare earth minerals deal, which is extremely, extremely favorable to the United States. He's already doing all of those things. The question is, what exactly is going to get Russia to the table? Witkoff's view seems to be that if he makes more overtures to the Russians, then magically Vladimir Putin is going to come to the table.

So he wants the Ukrainians to basically declare that all the areas that Putin has occupied, even some areas that Putin is not occupied actually yet in the east of the country, that all those areas ought to be taken off the table and declared Russian annexed territory. He wants the Ukrainians to also agree that they will effectively never join NATO.

and give up their sovereignty, because that's what that means. If you're not allowed to join, it's not that NATO has to accept Ukraine, but if Ukraine can never try to orient itself toward the West in order to appease Vladimir Putin, that's one of the things that Putin is looking for. Now, the question is, does Putin even want an off ramp? Because right now, the other side of the table is, let's say you're Vladimir Putin, just switch the sides on the chess table for a second and play the other side of the chess table. You're not the United States anymore trying to get to an arrangement. You're Vladimir Putin. And what you've seen so far is that the United States is putting extraordinarily heavy pressure on the Ukrainians

And so far, no actual pressure on the Russians. In fact, the United States has cut off intelligence sharing with the Ukrainians. The United States is threatening to cut off aid to the Ukrainians, threatening to leave the negotiating table entirely. If you're Vladimir Putin, why don't you just wait out the United States? Why don't you just wait them out? Seriously, just wait them out. The Europeans probably can't fill the gap. Wait for the United States to get frustrated and leave, and then redouble your efforts and go harder. Now, I don't think that's in the interest of the United States. I don't think that's in the interest of President Trump.

President Trump correctly believes one of the most humiliating moments in American foreign policy history was the Taliban strolling through Kabul, that the Taliban taking over a country that the United States had abandoned, where we abandoned our allies under Joe Biden, was shameful and ugly and wrong. Well, the United States allowing Vladimir Putin to stroll through Kiev would have a significantly worse impact on America's foreign policy. I don't think President Trump wants that.

And so what that means is that Steve Witkoff should start conveying messages to the other side of the negotiation as well, that they need to come to the table and spell out some actual consequences. Now, President Trump himself has said that. President Trump himself has said that there will be consequences to Russia if they don't come to the table. But those consequences need to be spelled out. In the meantime, other countries around the region are feeling very uneasy about this. This ranges from the Baltic states all the way up to Finland and Sweden, according to The Wall Street Journal.

For a long time, the Nordic countries were better known for their peace efforts and cozy living than militarism. Now they're shedding that persona. The Norics have emerged as a model for Europe's defense. They're leading efforts to reverse decades of military drawdowns to counter both Russian aggression and uncertain security guarantees from the Trump White House. The four main Nordic countries are among Europe's top donors of military aid to Ukraine by population. They're taking steps to usher in a new regional security architecture that's less reliant on the United States. Listen, that's great for the United States. If the Europeans can shoulder more of the burden, that's wonderful.

That'd be good. The question is, how much of the burden are the Europeans actually willing to shoulder? Because the United States, in fact, has security interests in Ukraine that are not just European security interests. The question is, what are Russia's actual ambitions? A little bit later this week, I'm going to go into extreme detail about what I believe Russia's ambitions are, because I've been spending...

the last week or so, delving into the writings of the man known as Putin's brain, Alexander Dugin. And so I think I have a pretty good insight into what exactly Russia is looking for here. And it is not an off ramp. Meanwhile, with regard to Ukraine and Russia, Vladimir Putin made the cynical move of declaring a 24-hour ceasefire around Easter, which apparently he then violated by

not sending missiles, but sending tons and tons of drones into Ukraine and sending off air raid sirens every five minutes over the course of Easter. According to the Washington Post, Kiev is expected to respond to a new U.S. proposal and talks in London starting Wednesday and including representatives from the United States, Britain and France. The talks will take place in the shadow of the apparently futile 30-hour truce.

Now, again, Zelensky said, let's turn that into, you know, like a 30 day truce. And maybe that turns into an armistice, which, by the way, is the most likely outcome here. There will be no peace agreement. There will be no peace agreement because Ukraine is not going to simply cede the territory in the east of the country and the Crimea to Russia. And Russia is not going to settle for that. So the most likely outcome here, if you were to get to any outcome at all, looks sort of like the Korean War, which, by the way, is still technically ongoing.

There was an armistice agreement signed in 1953, but there's no actual technical agreement by South Korea that North Korea is not its territory. And there's no agreement by North Korea that South Korea is not its territory. It's just there's a hardened battle line right there. And then it's basically been set up as a demilitarized zone. That is the most likely scenario and outcome in what's going on in Ukraine. But in order to even get there, you have to have a perception by the Russians they're not going to get much more. That everyone needs to go weapons down because the costs of not going weapons down are too high.

There's been a lot of focus placed on, for example, the rare earth minerals deal that the United States is now going to sign with the Ukrainians, that this is going to essentially provide for an informal security arrangement with the Ukrainians. You can see why the Ukrainians are a little bit skeptical of that, considering that in 2017, the United States actually did sign a rare earth minerals deal with Afghanistan. And within a few years, Afghanistan was totally overtaken by the Taliban.

So again, I'm waiting to see the negotiating genius of Steve Witkoff. Like, bring it, dude. Let's see it. All right, coming up, we'll get to Coachella, which unleashed a rather shocking message over the weekend. Plus, Klaus Schwab has now resigned as head of the WEF. So something good at least happened over the course of the last 72 hours. But in order to watch, you actually have to be a member. If you are not a member, become a member. Use code Shapiro. Check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.