Ep. 2184 - Is The Trade War ENDING?!
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Folks, tons of news to get to today. Obviously, the stock market has been jumping. It's been jumping because President Trump seems to be backing off of some of his actual trade war. We'll get to that in a moment. First, your reminder that the reason you are here at Daily Wire is because you want the facts.

That's what we bring you. This is why The Daily Wire exists. We don't wait for permission to bring you those facts. We're here to challenge the legacy media narrative every single day. We're making the kinds of movies others won't. We're investigating stories that they bury. We tell the truth, even when it costs us. This only works because our members have our back because we have your help. Join us now at dailywire.com slash subscribe. So the big international news of the day is that the talks that were supposed to be held in London beginning today between Ukraine, the EU, and the United States,

have basically been downgraded. The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, was supposed to attend. So was Steve Witkoff. They were all going to talk together about a proposal they were then going to go to the Russians with to finally bring a ceasefire to the Russia-Ukraine war that's been ongoing since February of 2022. At the last minute, Secretary of State Rubio canceled his trip. That prompted...

other leaders, secretaries of state from Britain, France, Germany to then pull out as well. Those would be the foreign ministers of those particular states. All of this is coming amidst heavy pressure from the Trump administration to come to some sort of deal. President Trump

had warned last week that Washington, D.C. could walk away from the talks completely if there was no progress on a deal that was also reiterated by Vice President Vance yesterday. He said, quote, it's time for them to either say yes or for the United States to walk away from this process.

Well, for the Russians, that's actually fairly good news because obviously if the United States were to walk away from the process entirely, a crucial base of support for Ukrainian materiel would go away. So Vladimir Putin does not have tons of incentive to come to the table at this point. The offer that President Trump's team is putting forth right now is an offer that is very rich for Vladimir Putin. It's an offer that does not put a lot of restrictions on the Russians. It frees them of legitimately all economic sanctions. And in return,

They basically stopped the war where it currently stands, which means that they are able to de facto claim the entire eastern flank of Ukraine. They're able to, in law, like de jure, recognize Crimea as part of Russia. And not just that, there'd be a ban on Ukraine from seeking membership of NATO.

Which is very difficult for Ukraine to accept because it's actually literally a part of their constitution. They're supposed to seek membership in NATO. It's also part of their constitution that they're not supposed to just give away land, even if that land is currently being occupied by the Russians. Part four of the plan would see America offer recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea. There are no serious security guarantees in the plan that's been put forth at this point. The security guarantees are vague.

It's not a U.S. security guarantee. It's a possible European security guarantee. But the Europeans have not made clear what exactly that looks like at this point in time.

Nonetheless, the Ukrainians, in anticipation of the possibility of a deal, have for a couple of weeks now already accepted in principle a 30 day zero condition ceasefire like to start right now. And Vladimir Putin has not taken them up on that. He's continued to fire drones into Ukraine. Yesterday, about 134 drones were fired over the border from Russia into Ukraine yesterday.

Obviously, we're at a very, very fraught point in the negotiations. After two long years of a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, at least 50,000 dead on the Ukrainian side, possibly up to 200,000 dead on the Russian side. Tremendous human cost, significant violations of basic rules of war, particularly by the Russians.

This is a crucial week in the negotiations to try to find an end to this war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. That's why my team and I actually went to Ukraine, to Kyiv. We flew in, took the 10-hour ride into Kyiv to get a look for ourselves and then sit down with the president of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, and get the answers the American people deserve. All working? Yes. Yes, all good.

I want to start by asking you about the meeting that you had in the Oval Office. How do you feel that you could have handled things better with the president and vice president? The meeting in the Oval Office, it did not help Ukraine. You spent nearly $200 billion to the defense of Ukraine. There are lots of questions about where the money is going. There's nothing to hide. We are absolutely open. Wouldn't it be possible by the United States of where those dollars are going?

We are kind of the living shield against Russia's invasion to the civilized world. I want to get to Russia's intentions and the possibilities of a ceasefire. Americans have questions about things that are happening here.

Our hour-long interview with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky will be released on this show tomorrow and Friday in two parts with extra material to come only at Daily Wire+. So make sure you stay tuned. Okay, meanwhile, the markets have been going up. They went up yesterday. They are up today as well. The reason for that is because it seems that the Trump administration is finally swiveling away from the large-scale trade war they declared on the world. At least that's the signal that the markets are taking away.

And it was necessitated by the fact that the markets really were tanking. They were in serious, serious trouble. The International Monetary Fund, for example, had suggested that a global economic slowdown was in the cards, according to the Wall Street Journal. The sharp rise in tariffs since the start of the year marks the onset of a new era that will see the most economies grow more slowly than previously expected, with the United States suffering one of the largest hits to its own prospects, according to the IMF. That's what they said on Tuesday.

Pierre-Olivier Gorinchas, who's the fund's economic counselor, said, quote, we're entering a new era as the global economic system that has operated for the last 80 years is being reset. And the IMF said that the immediate impact would be a slow economies around the world that lowered its forecast for global economic growth this year a full half percent from 3.3 percent to 2.8 percent. That is actually a larger downgrade than the downgrade in the forecast that happened after Russia invaded Ukraine, which shook up global markets tremendously.

For 2026, it has also revised down global growth by about a third of a point.

The United States economy, according to the IMF, was expected to suffer damage with growth in 2025 down from a forecasted 2.7% to 1.8% and another 1.7% in 2026. So to mention the IMF forecast, the obvious question which I asked our sponsors over at Perplexity is how accurate have prior IMF predictions of annual economic growth been? And Perplexity tells us that the IMF

is a prominent source of global and country-level economic growth forecasts. With this World Economic Outlook published twice a year, the accuracy of these forecasts has been subject to extensive evaluation. It's considered fairly accurate. Forecast errors are typically larger during periods of economic crisis or recession because, you know, the unpredictable is in fact unpredictable. It's just about as accurate as other private sector or World Bank forecasts, but they tend to be a little bit optimistic of anything. According to Perplexity, IMF forecasts are on average

0.2 to 0.3 percentage points less accurate and more optimistic than World Bank forecasts.

IMS forecasts apparently systematically overpredict growth during global or regional recessions and in countries experiencing crises. So, I mean, if if trend holds, then their actual downgrade of the possibility of economic growth could still be too optimistic. So, again, these are serious economic slowdown projections from the IMF. Now, maybe it went the other way. Maybe it's possible that the IMF is wrong. That could certainly happen. However, those sorts of projections are a major problem for the future of President Trump's presidency.

If you want a successful presidency, you must have a thriving economy. This is like the number one rule of all politics, forever and always. Global economic leaders, meanwhile, according to the New York Times, are gathering in Washington this week for the IMF and World Bank meetings. Recent debates over industrial policy and whether the world economy could achieve a soft landing have been replaced by anxiety over the trade war. Well, all of this reversed itself yesterday. The markets actually started to climb. So there are a couple of reasons for this. One, President Trump yesterday said,

reversed a thing that he had been saying about Jerome Powell. So over the weekend, the president of the United States had suggested that he might fire Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. He was really, really pushing hard for Jerome Powell to lower the interest rates. This was supposed to compensate for the inflationary effect of the tariffs, but it would actually exacerbate the inflationary effect of the tariffs. The idea was if there was going to be an economic slowdown brought about by lower levels of trade, a market slowdown, maybe injection of more fuel into the economy would suddenly fix that problem. However,

The tariff regime was likely to strain supply chains, creating consumer-based inflation. And if you cut the interest rates, that actually exacerbates that inflation. So President Trump was putting heavy –

heavy pressure on Jerome Powell to cut interest rates again. And the markets weren't having it. They weren't liking it. They were saying the problem here is not Jerome Powell and the interest rates. The problem here is the tariff policy. Well, yesterday, President Trump openly said that he has no intention of firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell, which is a good way to make the market sanguine. I've been saying this for a while.

If you want the markets to go up, fire Peter Navarro, let Scott Besson talk, and the president should provide a level of stability in how he discusses the economy. He did that yesterday, and so the markets have been jumping. None whatsoever. Never did.

The press runs away with things. Now, I have no intention of firing him. I would like to see him be a little more active in terms of his idea to lower interest rates. This is a perfect time to lower interest rates. If he doesn't, is it the end? No, it's not. But it would be good timing. It would be it could have taken place earlier. But no, I have no intention to fire him.

Okay, so that made the markets feel a lot better. And then the thing that really made the markets feel better is there was a story that broke from CNBC about Treasury Secretary Scott Besson. Apparently, he had a closed-door meeting on Tuesday, and he told investors there will be a de-escalation. It's a direct quote. There will be a de-escalation in the Trump trade war with China in the, quote, very near future. Besson said, no one thinks the current status quo is sustainable with tariff rates at their current levels. This is a private investor summit in Washington, D.C., hosted by JPMorgan Chase.

And then he said that he believed that the prospect of de-escalation between the economic superpowers, quote, should give the world the markets a sigh of relief. Besant insisted that despite the U.S. ratcheting up tariffs on Chinese imports to 145 percent and then China retaliating with 125 percent duties, the goal of Trump's policy is not, in fact, to decouple. He said the negotiating with China will be a slog, but the goal is not to sort of separate off.

So the markets, because they do not believe that the tariff policy laid out by the president and the administration are actually well thought out or well calibrated, responded really aggressively. The markets jumped out a thousand points yesterday. They've been climbing all day today. Well, President Trump himself then said the same thing yesterday. He said tariffs on China are going to come down substantially. 145% is very high and it won't be that high. It's not going to be that high.

It got up to there. We were talking about fentanyl where, you know, various elements built it up to 145. No, it won't be anywhere near that high. It'll come down substantially, but it won't be zero.

We'll get to more on this in just a moment. First, the internet of the 90s promised a democratic virtual world where individuals, not governments or corporations, held power. Today, that vision seems distant. Big tech dominates our digital lives with companies not just serving ads, but potentially influencing our political choices through controlled content delivery. The original internet promised

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free. Also, you may have noticed the global economy is in a fair bit of chaos right now. Potential widespread inflation tied to supply chain disruptions. It's weighing heavily on everything, but there is a silver lining that most people missed. President Trump specifically exempted gold and silver bullion from these sweeping tariffs. While the new policies are triggering significant financial chaos and uncertainty, the administration preserved your ability to diversify into precious metals. If you're concerned about your savings,

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Ben, to the number 989898. There's a reason I use Birch Gold for my gold investments. And by the way, gold is now at all-time highs. Again, text Ben to 989898 to claim your free info kit right now. In times of economic uncertainty, precious metals are in fact a safe haven. Text Ben to 989898 and claim your free info kit from my friends at Birch Gold right now. Okay, so there will still be tariffs, but it'll be lower. And again, this approximates a better policy. As I've said before, financials,

Fighting a trade war with China could theoretically be a good thing, but you actually have to fulfill certain preconditions in order to make that trade war successful, including drawing very close to your other trade allies, giving businesses time to reshore so that we don't have broken supply chains.

Finding new places to get crucial materials like rare earth minerals, building up our militaries that if China decides to take a stab at grabbing Taiwan, we actually can deter them. All those are things you need to do before you rash up a massive trade war with China that would likely cause them to get more aggressive. And certainly, if you're going to do that, you cannot then alienate all of your allies who are then going to triangulate between China and the United States, which is, by the way, what Europe was actually doing.

They weren't caving to the United States and cutting off China. They were actually trying to flirt with both sides. Caroline Lovett yesterday at the White House, White House press secretary. She was grilled over the Trump trade war with China. What does it mean that President Trump wants to cut a deal with China?

I actually do have something to share on that. I asked the president about this before coming out here, and he wanted me to share with all of you that we're doing very well in respect to a potential trade deal with China. As I mentioned, there have now been 18 proposals in more than 100 countries around the world who are wanting to make a deal with the United States of America, and the president and the administration are setting the stage for a deal with China. So we feel everyone involved wants to see a trade deal happen, and the ball is moving in the right direction.

The Press: Setting the stage for a deal with China, what does that mean? Has the President spoken directly with Xi yet?

I don't have anything to read out on a direct talk between the President and President Xi, but we will continue to keep you updated. And Secretary Besson reportedly today told investors that the trade standoff with China, he expects, will be de-escalating soon because, as he described it reportedly, the situation is unsustainable. Is the President considering taking steps to de-escalate the situation in China? Again, I just read you words directly from the President of the United States. Those are moments ago. That's where his head is at right now.

So the markets are eager for any piece of good news because, again, the underlying fundamentals of the economy are not in bad shape here. It's that President Trump took a stick and put it right in the spokes of the bicycle, of the economic bicycle. And now he's trying to withdraw that, which is, in fact, a good thing. Well, meanwhile, Tesla is getting just banged in the public market. I mean, just absolutely knocked around in the public markets, not in terms of share price.

but in terms of their earnings reports. So according to the Wall Street Journal, their net income slid 71% in the first quarter as the company struggled to overcome competitive pressure overseas and a reputational hit from CEOs Elon Musk's polarizing role in the Trump administration. Musk did say that he will be spending less time, significantly less time, in his federal cost-cutting work at Doge.

starting next month. He said, I believe the right thing to do is to fight the waste and fraud and try to get the country back on the right track, which is good. It is also good for him to actually go back and run the company the way that it needs to be run. Musk actually was asked about the trade war, and apparently he sighed deeply before addressing the Trump administration's policy. He said that he was advocating for lower tariffs. He said, I just want to emphasize that the tariff decision is entirely up to the presidents of the United States. Whether he will listen to my advice is up to him. Investors are presumably still sanguine about Tesla's sales.

The media are making a bigger deal out of this than it probably is. Again, the lower sales are based on the fact that Tesla is likely this year to bring out some less expensive models with better supply lines. With all that said, the media –

Has been celebrating the downfall of Elon, even though there is no such downfall. That is what the members of the media do. Speaking of people celebrating downfalls that are not yet occurring. So the media continue to call for the ouster of Pete Hegseth. And let's be very clear why they're doing this. The reason they're calling for the ouster of Pete Hegseth is because Pete Hegseth is in fact a peace through strength, hawkish voice inside the Trump administration. The dirty little secret of the sort of horseshoe theory of foreign policy on the right right now is that there are right wingers who sound exactly like Barack Obama.

If you attributed quotes from many of the isolationist right wingers to Barack Obama, they would be absolutely indistinguishable. Pete Hegseth has always been a peace through strength advocate who believes that America needs to flex military might when absolutely necessary, should have a robust military capacity to be able to threaten military might and should take a strong position in leading the world.

This is one of the chief conflicts that led, presumably, to the ouster of Dan Caldwell, who was one of his top aides at the Pentagon. The suspicion is, and again, this is just suspicion, that Caldwell was leaking to some of his media buddies, presumably people like Tucker Carlson, about things that were going on inside the Department of Defense, and then that he was fired. Caldwell denies that. He says that he was not fired for leaking. Instead, he says he was framed. Here is Dan Caldwell appearing with Tucker Carlson. And this is after, about a month after, Tucker Carlson was tweeting out

Kind of strangely timed tweets about Iran. And then Caldwell, who is in fact very much aligned with Carlson, appears on Carlson's show to discuss how he was framed.

So I just want to be totally direct with you. Did you leak classified information against the wishes of your superiors to media outlets? Absolutely not. Did you photograph classified material and then text pictures of that material to an NBC news reporter? Absolutely not. And I have not spoken to an NBC reporter while at the Pentagon. Do you know what you've been accused of? No.

No, I don't. Sitting here right now, myself and Darren Selnick and Colin Carroll, the other two individuals that were escorted out of the Pentagon, initially placed on leave and then fired on Friday. We have not been told as of this recording. One, is there what we were being investigated for?

Two, is there still an investigation? And three, was there even a real investigation? Because there's a lot of evidence that there is not a real investigation. So according to Caldwell, there was no investigation. He's being ousted by people who are framing him in some way. Well, Pete Hegseth talked about the leaks inside the Pentagon. Here's what he had to say.

When you dismiss people who you believe are leaking classified information, and again, the investigation is ongoing and that will take time, and when the evidence produced it will go to DOJ, why would it surprise anybody, Brian, if those very same people

keep leaking to the very same reporters whatever information they think they can have to try to sabotage the agenda of the president or the secretary. So once a leaker, always a leaker, often a leaker. And so we look for leakers because we take it very seriously and we will do the investigation. And if those people are exonerated, fantastic.

We don't think, based on what we understand, that it's going to be a good day for a number of those individuals because of what was found in the investigation. So if they want to keep leaking and pushing and peddling things to try to sabotage the president's agenda, that's unfortunate. But that's how leaking works in this town. We're focused on recruiting, on rooting out DEI, on securing our southwest border, on the president's agenda. And it's going very well at the Pentagon, and I'm proud of it.

So he's right about all of those things. By the way, it is worth noting that in that interview between Caldwell and Carlson, Carlson kept asking, did you leak classified material? That's not the question. You can leak material that is also unclassified but damaging to, for example, the secretary of defense. That's still called a leak. It doesn't have to be classified material in order for you to be fired over it. So it's sort of an interesting distinction that was made even in the middle of that interview.

Again, one of the things that I think is an open battle inside the Trump administration that is yet to be sort of made clear is the battle between the sort of peace through strength crowd in the defense apparatus and the isolationist crowd in the defense apparatus. President Trump sometimes speaks like an isolationist, but in reality, Trump 1.0 foreign policy, the most successful aspect of his administration, by the way, ranging from the Abraham Accords to the deterrence of Russia to the attempts to box in China. All of those were rooted in peace through strength ideas.

And there are a lot of very frustrated people who don't seem to actually want President Trump to follow the peace through strength ideas that got him elected in the first place and that he pursued with alacrity and success in his first administration. Now, meanwhile, speaking of the State Department,

Marco Rubio is going through the State Department properly and I think in excellent fashion with a hatchet. According to the Free Press, the Trump administration has become an aggressive shakeup at the State Department. They'll close 132 agency offices, including those launched to further human rights, advance democracy overseas, counter extremism and prevent war crimes. What this really is, there are a lot of people who work at the State Department who are very much associated with sort of the John Kerry foreign policy.

And Marco Rubio is going through there with a chainsaw. The plans to reorganize the leading foreign policy agency in the United States are outlined in internal documents obtained by the Free Press. They show how the State Department will eliminate or restructure hundreds of offices in Washington, D.C. The State Department is bringing its number of offices down from 734 to 602.

Separately, undersecretaries at the State Department are also being instructed within 30 days to present plans to reduce their U.S. personnel in individual departments by 15 percent, according to a senior State Department official. These include six top offices employing thousands of people. The reorganization comes as the Trump administration seeks to drastically reduce the size and scope of

the federal government. Secretary of State Rubio said, quote, in its current form, the department is bloated, bureaucratic, unable to perform a central diplomatic mission in the new era of great power competition. That is why I'm announcing a comprehensive reorganization plan that will bring the department into the 21st century.

And again, all of this is very much in line with traditional Republican thinking on foreign policy. So Mike Pompeo, who for some unspecified reason became persona non grata inside the Trump administration 2.0, despite the fact that he was a highly successful secretary of state in Trump administration 1.0. He said the State Department is desperately in need of significant reorganization. There's much efficiency that can be gained there.

So these planning documents are mostly about cutting jobs in Washington, D.C., not cutting jobs sort of all over the world in places that the State Department is particularly necessary. The rest of the Trump administration is following suit. The EPA is also making similar moves. According to the Washington Post, the Environmental Protection Agency has informed more than 450 employees working on environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion. They will also be fired or reassigned, according to an agency spokesperson.

So the EPA led by Administrator Lee Zeldin making very similar moves to what's happening over at state, what's happening over at defense, what's been happening the rest of the Trump administration.

Finding the employees who do not belong and then getting rid of them, which is what should have happened long ago inside the federal government. EPA Assistant Deputy Administrator Travis Voiles sent notices late Monday to staffers at agency headquarters who work in the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, which the administration plans to close. The reduction in force would cut 280 employees and reassign about 175 employees to other offices, according to the spokesman.

Again, why precisely? There's a diversity, equity, and inclusion and environmental justice arm of the EPA is beyond me on a logical level. What does that have to do with keeping the air clean and the water fresh precisely?

The agency said this is the first step in a broader effort to ensure the EPA is best positioned to meet its core mission of protecting human health and the environment, empowering the great American comeback. So, again, all of this is good. There are important things being done by the administration. That's why I'm glad to see the administration swiveling when it comes to some of the economic measures that were put in place on April 9th. I'm glad to see the State Department making cuts, the EPA making cuts as well. The Trump administration is also poised for another win at the Supreme Court.

On Tuesday, there was a hearing in a case regarding the question of whether local school board members, parents could ban LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign propaganda from the classroom, particularly for elementary schools.

We'll get to more on this in a moment. First, many fitness influencers offer minimal value at premium prices, but FitBod provides comprehensive workout planning and tracking tools designed to help you maintain consistency and achieve the kind of progress you want. You've heard me talk about FitBod before. Let me reiterate, it is a game changer when it comes to building muscle and creating workout routines that are ideal for you and your body. So just last week, I opened up the app

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who continue to want the complete annihilation and devastation of the Jewish state here in America. It's nearly impossible to comprehend the reality of living under that kind of threat. For Israeli citizens, this terrifying situation is just called normality. It affects every moment of their existence. I urge you to stand with me in demonstrating your solidarity with the people of Israel during this period of aggression and profound uncertainty. One of the most effective ways to show your support is through contributions to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Your generous donation today will help provide crucial security resources, including bomb shelters,

protective gear like flak jackets and bulletproof vests, armored security vehicles, life-saving ambulances, and numerous other essential items. The timing could not be more meaningful than now, right after the sacred Passover holiday where we commemorated Israel's historic liberation and establishment as a nation. Please consider making a special contribution today to help safeguard the people of Israel in their time of need. You can make your donation at benforthefellowship.org. That's benforthefellowship.org. Thanks for your generosity, and may God bless you. NBC News reports that members of the 6-3 conservative majority

Seems sympathetic during a lively two and a half hour oral argument toward the parents claims the Montgomery County Board of Education violated their religious rights by failing to provide an opt out for their kids. Some justices indicated the board's refusal to provide an opt out might have been motivated by hostility toward religion, which, by the way, it certainly is.

One of the funnier aspects of this particular hearing was that the justices were quite familiar with the books that were being referenced by the defendants in this case who wanted to stack a bunch of far left sexual agitprop in elementary schools.

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch was one of several justices who raised comments made by a former member of the school board who had suggested that a student who objected to the books was parroting dogma passed on by her parents and compared their complaints to those white supremacists who opposed civil rights law. Again, that is very typical of the left. The basic idea on the left is that you cannot have a truly held religious belief. All truly held religious beliefs are just a guise for bigotry. They're really secretly just a bigot and are using the Bible as a cover for your bigotry.

This is just another reason why the Trump administration has now launched a task force investigating anti-Christian bias. It was hosted by Attorney General Pamela Bondi yesterday. The inaugural meeting of the task force to eradicate anti-Christian bias in the federal government was joined by peaceful Christian Americans who were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration for their religious beliefs.

Attorney General Bondi said, quote, as shown by our victim stories today, Biden's Department of Justice abused and targeted peaceful Christians while ignoring violent anti-Christian offenses. Thanks to President Trump, we've ended those abuses and we'll continue to work closely with every member of this task force to protect every American's right to speak and worship freely. And that, of course, is a very, very good thing. FBI Director Kash Patel stopped by to talk about the fact that the FBI under Joe Biden had targeted Catholics.

Secretary of State Rubio raised concerning allegations of bias, including some against Christian Foreign Service officers who wanted to homeschool their kids. There's no question, by the way, that the sort of DEI and everything agenda of the Biden administration was, in essence, directed at white Christians. Because the basic idea of DEI is that white Christians represent the majority of the country, and therefore they are the sort of evil overlords of the American system and must be brought to heel.

The only way that you could possibly reverse that is to actually start ferreting out anti-Christian bias inside the federal government. It was, by the way, a meeting that included pretty much all of the secretaries, literally all of them. So this is something the administration is taking absolutely seriously, as it certainly should. Meanwhile, in the big media news of the day, 60 Minutes looks like it might be on its deathbed.

This comes after Paramount owner Sherry Redstone has been policing 60-minute stories to find out about their bias. According to Semaphore, Ben Smith's organization, Paramount owner Sherry Redstone in recent days sought to know which upcoming 60-minute stories were about President Trump, according to two people familiar with the situation that triggered a series of events that ended with the Tuesday resignation of the show's longtime producer, Bill Owens. He resigned, complaining he no longer had the editorial independence to run the iconic Sunday evening news show.

He said over the past two months, it's become clear I would not be allowed to run the shows. I've always run it to make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes and right for the audience. I'm stepping aside so the show can move forward. Now, he provides no evidence that Sherry Redstone or any of the management were actually telling him to change the stories. They were just asking to see which stories were actually being pursued, which given the fact they are the owners of 60 Minutes is well within their remit. The claim they're making is that she's only doing that because of Trumpian pressure. But let's be clear about this.

If the Obama administration were bringing pressure on media outlets, which they routinely did to do their bidding, or the Biden administration was bringing pressure to, for example, ignore the fact that the man was brain dead for several years and the media did that work, there would be no coverage from the media about this sort of scandalous behavior and pressure. A spokesperson for Sherry Redstone, according to Semaphore, has denied that she saw or sought to see 60 Minutes pieces and emphasized to Semaphore Redstone and Paramount were not seeking to kill stories.

One person familiar with the situation noted Redstone had both publicly and privately criticized 60 Minutes in recent months. Oh, no, you're not allowed to criticize a show that you're paying for? That'll come as a shock to Michael Knowles. And if I can't criticize shows that we pay for here at Daily Wire, what am I going to do with my life? My goodness.

Owens' resignation comes as Paramount is hoping to close a merger with the entertainment company Skydance. Again, the media are speculating that the reason that Cherry Redstone is putting an eye on all of this is not because she's ticked off by the bias of 60 Minutes, which, by the way, she should be. 60 Minutes is a wildly leftist-oriented show. The real reason, they think, is because she's trying to essentially curtail the freedom of 60 Minutes in order to broker some sort of better deal with the FCC to allow the merger between Paramount and Skydance.

Now, if that were the case, by the way, then CBS already would have settled with the Trump campaign. So Trump has sued CBS News and 60 Minutes, and they've not settled that out yet. So theoretically, they already would have settled that. They're not, in fact, doing that, which, again, I think this is an overread by the media in attempt to basically suggest, as always, that anytime the owner of a major media outlet says that a newspaper or a television show or station is too far to the left, that is a form of censorship.

You remember that the media did the same exact thing when Jeff Bezos said that he was going to redo the sort of editorial structure at The Washington Post. The idea was that he had somehow violated the compact, whereby, what, if you buy a media outlet, it has to be run according to the people who were running it before or according to the low-level staffers. That is not the way to run any sort of business in actuality.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, you may have noticed that pretty much all headlines right now revolve around, you know, President Trump and the Republicans. It's almost as though the Democrats don't exist because they kind of don't at this point. They have lost almost the will to resist. Obviously, you have Bernie Sanders and AOC taking private jets to large venues. And, you know, that's a thing. But Democrats are kind of struggling for what their message ought to be. Now they have unleashed a new term. It is called dark woke.

which is going to go about as well as dark Brandon did. So you'll recall just a few years ago that in a NASCAR race, people started chanting F Joe Biden and the anchor who was covering that NASCAR race then suggested the crowd was actually chanting. Let's go, Brandon. So conservatives, Republicans, we started using the slogan. Let's go, Brandon, to refer to F Joe Biden. And then the

Biden administration trying to seize back the language, put out memes of old Joe Biden with laser eyes calling him Dark Brandon, or they put out memes of him with his sunglasses grinning. They call it Dark Brandon. It didn't go well because then he physically died in the middle of the race and then dropped out of the race. So it went very poorly. Well, now they are trying something new. They think that just by adding the word dark to things, it makes it cool, which is really silly.

And they're obviously copying right now the Elon Musk memory of dark MAGA. And so now they have dark woke. According to The New York Times, there was a time last summer when the Democratic Party was cool. Yeah, that was that was really, really a short period of time.

And there was a point in time when I was significantly closer to like 150 pounds. It was a moment. It was a moment. And then it went away. Kamala Harris had just stepped in as the Democratic Party's nominee for president in the waning days of Brat Summer. She went on the popular podcast, Call Her Daddy. Tim Walz's outdoorsy drip led to a Chapel Rowan-inspired camo trucker hat. The memes were flowing. The party's mood was high. Now, you'll recall that even by the end of Brat Summer, it was pretty much over for Kamala Harris. The Call Her Daddy appearance was a giant fail.

and cost her a bunch of money. Tim Walz was never a bro. Nobody ever saw Tim Walz as a bro unless the bros were hanging out at a high school musical production with jazz hands. But now apparently Democrats are in search of a new memery. So says the New York Times, as liberals try to get their groove back, some party insiders say Democratic politicians have been encouraged to embrace a new form of combative rhetoric aimed at winning back voters who have responded to President Trump's no-hold-bars version of politics.

Online, it has a name, Dark Woke. According to Bhavik Lathia, a communications consultant and former digital director for the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Republicans have essentially put Democrats in a respectability prison. There's an extreme imbalance in strategy that allows Republicans to say stuff that really grabs voters' attention, but we're stuck saying boring pablum. I see this as a strategic shift within Democratic messaging. I'm a fan of Dark Woke. So what exactly is Dark Woke?

Well, during a meeting of the House Oversight Committee last May, Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas, you'll recall her from such hits as suggesting that Marjorie Taylor Greene had a bad butch body before shouting about her fake eyelashes. She is dark woke. She is dark woke. And that's because she's very meme friendly. It got her an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel, by the way, when she said that Marjorie Taylor Greene had a, quote, bleach blonde, bad built butch body. Good times.

And so presumably Democrats are very in love with this sort of stuff. Well, good luck to them because this is not what's going to get you out of the morass. You know what else isn't going to work? Calling Republicans Nazis. Believe it or not, the Democrats are still apparently going to trot out the line that Donald Trump is a Nazi. The latest iteration of this comes courtesy of Larry David, who used to be funny, but apparently lost his sense of humor.

I don't remember sitting Shiva for his sense of humor, but somebody should have because it's been dead for a while. In any case, he has a piece in The New York Times titled Larry David, My Dinner with Adolf. And it's supposed to be making fun of the fact that Bill Maher actually went to the White House to meet the president of the United States, which is verboten. You're not supposed to acknowledge that Donald Trump is a human.

It is not funny at all. There is literally not a laugh line in the entire piece by Larry David. Quote, imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939, a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the old chancellery with the world's most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of him on the radio from the beginning, pretty much

Now, again.

Is there a laugh line anywhere in here? Also, please explain the similarity between Donald Trump and Hitler. Like, please explain. Has Donald Trump invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity? If so, please name them. Start your next California adventure behind the wheel of an exciting new Toyota hybrid. With the largest lineup of hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and electrified vehicles to choose from,

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He was wearing a tan suit with a swastika armband and gave me an enthusiastic greeting that caught me off guard. Frankly, it was a warmer greeting than I normally get from my parents. And I was accompanied by a slap on the back. I found the whole thing quite disarming. I joked I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as unfurl-like. That amused him to no end. And I realized I'd never seen him laugh before. Suddenly, he seemed so human. It just goes on in this vein for hundreds of words. And the conclusion is that at the very end of it, Larry David is now a Nazi.

So apparently Bill Maher is also a Trumpy Nazi type. And if you weren't satisfied with that Nazi comparison, Al Gore is still wandering the landscape somewhere. You remember Al Gore? He was vice president of Bill Clinton. Then he ran against George W. Bush, and then he lost to George W. Bush. And then he spent like a decade claiming that all the polar bears were going to die and the entire earth had a fever. Remember that? Well, on Monday, he came back to declare that President Trump's administration was like Nazi Germany.

Speaking at an event at the start of San Francisco's Climate Week, according to Politico, Gore said the Trump administration was, quote, trying to create their own preferred version of reality to achieve sweeping objectives. Just like, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, Hitler, quote, I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler's Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil, full stop, I get it. But, but, there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil, quote,

Yes, this is just like that time that Hitler signed an executive order to increase the flow on showerheads. It's exactly like that. I mean, man, the parallels are just eerie. Well, one of the problems for Democrats is, of course, that they ain't got nothing. And so if you are stuck, if you are down to dark, woke, and Trump is a Nazi, you're in trouble.

Even their thought leaders can't answer basic questions. Elizabeth Warren, the senator from Massachusetts, former Harvard Law School professor, well, she was asked over the course of the last couple of days, she's on a podcast, and she was asked about lying about Joe Biden's mental and physical health. And this is something that the Democrats are not gonna be able to live down for quite a while, is the fact they all were complicit in the cover-up of the fact that Joe Biden was brain dead. Here's Elizabeth Warren struggling with this question almost as much as she struggled with the question of her Native American ancestry.

Do you regret saying that President Biden had a mental acuity? He had a sharpness to him. You said that up until July of last year. I said what I believed to be true. And you think he was as sharp as you? I said I had not seen decline and I hadn't at that point. You did not see any decline from 2024 Joe Biden to 2021 Joe Biden? Not when I said that. You know, the thing is, he look,

He was sharp. He was on his feet. I saw him. Live event. I had meetings with him a couple of times. Senator, "on his feet" is not praise. "He can speak in sentences" is not praise. All right. Fair enough. Fair enough. It is... The question is, what are we gonna do now? Okay.

That's the question is what are they going to? Well, I mean, I think one of the questions is why you lied for so long about his health and mental acuity. But we know the answer to that. That's what the Democratic Party was deathly afraid that Kamala Harris was going to be the nominee, which, of course, she ended up being. So we now have a compendium of elderly white people lying to you and people calling Donald Trump a Nazi. And we have dark woke. Do any of these sound great to you? Like Americans, do we have any takers here?

Well, maybe we have a hot new star. Apparently, there is a new mayor of Oakland. The new mayor of Oakland is a person named Barbara Lee. Now, remember, Barbara Lee is a human who was actively considered for Joe Biden's vice presidential slot before it went to Kamala Harris. Because, again, don't worry, it wasn't the DEI administration in any way. Why would I say that Barbara Lee is sort of a DEI possibility when it comes to picking her for VP?

because here she was fairly recently suggesting that a $50 minimum wage would solve inflation. Oh, the levels of genius, like an onion of genius. Every layer you uncover reveals yet another layer of genius. My goodness.

Just do the math. Of course we have national minimum wages that we need to raise to a living wage. You're talking about $20, $25, fine. But I have got to be focused on what California needs and what the affordability factor is when we calculate this wage. Ms. Lee, thank you.

Yes, yes, it was going to it was creating it was going to create affordability. A $50 minimum wage was going to create affordability. Oh, the levels of why are Democrats having such a tough time? Again, it's target rich environment for them and they can't seem to hit on any of it. It's pretty incredible. Already, folks coming up, we are going to get into the mailbag and answer some of your questions. Just remember, you actually have to be a member to view any of that or be part of the mailbag. Become a member right now. Use code Shapiro. Check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.