Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Well, folks, a lot of news to get to as always. But first, time is almost up. We are in the final hours of our Daily Wire 100-hour flash sale, celebrating President Trump's first 100 days back in office. This is your last chance to get the best deal of the season on a Daily Wire Plus and
Well, we have been hearing for a very long time that Doge, that would of course be the Department of Governmental Efficiency under the tutelage of Elon Musk, has been a giant fail. We've been hearing this from the legacy media who have been saying that all of this is a failure.
All the cuts are basically fake, that nothing is happening, that it's chaos, that it's wrecking the country. No one social security check has been stopped. The Medicaid checks are still going out. The Medicare checks are still going out. The government...
Unfortunately, my mind is still running much as before. However, much spending has in fact really been stopped. There's been an open question as to how much spending will be permanently stopped, how much can be temporarily frozen versus actually just cut. Will firing these employees actually stick? But Democrats are caterwauling because as it turns out, Doge actually has been quite effective in stopping an enormous amount of spending. Is it trillions of dollars? No. Is it hundreds of billions of dollars? The answer apparently is yes. According
According to Reuters, President Trump's administration has so far withheld at least $436.87 billion of congressionally approved funding, the top Democrats on the U.S. Congress's Appropriation Committee said on Tuesday. The frozen allotment spanned the federal government, according to the first estimate of potential impoundments in the project, led by Senator Patty Murray of Washington and Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut. You'll remember Rosa DeLauro, she of the purple hair. Almost $42 billion was frozen or canceled for the State Department. Of course, that includes the
the freeze on support for USAID, along with another $62 billion-plus in competitive grant funding for the Transportation Department, according to the estimate. Democrats also are detailing $943 million frozen for the Head Start early education program. By the way, Head Start is one of the great fails in federal history.
Head Start, the idea that you are radically increasing the chances for young children if they go to a federally funded, federally run preschool program. The data on Head Start has been pretty solid for a long time, showing effectively no difference between kids who go to Head Start and kids who do not. There's also been some $10 billion frozen and canceled for the National Resources Conservation Service as well. Democrats, of course, are very angry about all of this. Listen, all of the spending is going to have to be then cut
put permanently into the no-spend category by Congress. They can do so with a simple 50-vote majority in the Senate.
That is the path presumably Congress is going to have to take. And we are now moving in this administration from the sort of executive order side of the administration, what President Trump can do unilaterally to Congress. The focus needs to move to Congress because the truth is that President Trump does. They can temporarily freeze a lot of this funding, but unless it's rescinded by Congress, it will go right back into place after a certain period of time.
This is the reason why Democrats are freaking out about all of this. They're worried that Republicans are, in fact, going to start passing rescission bills that would make permanent many of the freezes and turn the freeze into a cut. According to the Reuters News Service, the administration is citing the Doge efficiency movement and the undoing of the federal government's DEI initiatives as reason for blocking congressionally approved funding. The question is,
how much the executive branch can actually block that funding under the 1974 Impoundment Control Act. Usually the president has to tweak levels by proposing cuts. That, of course, would be the rescission. That has not happened so far. Now it is up to Congress, which brings us to Congress. And again, right now it is
It would be an act of political magic. Every time you get a Republican majority together, it's a bit of political magic. That's just the way that it works. And the reason for that is because the Republican House of Representatives majority is so unbelievably narrow. And even in the Senate of the United States, you have to acknowledge just pretty much right off the bat that Collins and Murkowski are likely to go the other way on major legislation. So you're from 53 votes to 51 votes.
And then, of course, there are still holdovers like Mitch McConnell, who is still in the Senate, who may vote against something President Trump wants. There are a wide variety of other senators with various other interests. So getting this whole thing together is, in fact, an attempt to herd cats by Senate Majority Leader John Thune, as well as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Can they do it? That's the question. So the deadline keeps getting pushed off for the new tax bill, which presumably will include some elements of rescission, although rescission can be done separately.
Originally, the talk was that by Memorial Day, there would be a tax bill. Memorial Day, of course, is May 26th. Now, Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, is saying that the tax bill target is July 4th. He was speaking yesterday from the White House press room, and he said that the tax bill negotiation is actually going better than they thought it would.
And the tax bill is moving forward. It is going to give permanence to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Job Act, which will go back to the question on certainty. It will give American business certainty. It will give American people certainty. So obviously that needs to happen. If the tax bill were not to pass, that would be a disastrous problem for the Trump administration, which is already fighting significant headwinds caused by the tariff war.
Best in told reporters, we have three legs to the president's economic agenda, trade, tax and deregulation. We hope we can have this tax portion done by the 4th of July. Now, on the deregulation front, again, I think one of the reasons why the business community has not let the bottom fall out on the stock market is because there are a bunch of sort of conflicting pieces of data that the Trump administration is putting out. Business, investment, people don't like the trade war. People do like the deregulation and they want the tax cut.
So if those are the three legs of the stool in terms of what business would like, the trade war is not something that business typically likes. Business does want the tax cuts made permanent because uncertainty there, if you suddenly have to pay a significant percentage more of your income into the federal government, well, that's going to be a serious problem for a lot of businesses, for a lot of individuals, for investors. If the tax regime were to return to the 2015 status quo, for example, that'd be a huge problem.
And so the tax bill does have to pass. And then there's the deregulation side, where, again, business is very optimistic about deregulation and sort of hoping that President Trump backs off the tariff war. The deadline, according to Politico, pegged to the Independence Day recess comes as Republicans work through significant sticking points to get the party line mega bill through the House by Speaker Mike Johnson's Memorial Day target.
Besson's updated timeline came out long after Senate Majority Leader Thune told reporters early on Monday the speed of the process would be dictated in part by the need to raise the nation's debt ceiling. He said that would constitute a hard deadline for lawmakers because the debt ceiling hike is going to be included in the one big, beautiful bill. Democrats, of course, are not going to get on board with any hike to the debt ceiling because they are going to use that as leverage in the same way that Republicans use the debt ceiling as leverage.
President Trump has suggested the possibility of completely blowing out the debt ceiling and basically getting rid of it as a tool of legislative control. Most members of Congress, including Republicans, are not in favor of that because were that to happen, then it would basically remove a giant point of leverage.
Besson told reporters after a big six meeting of top GOP negotiators that they don't have a new X date, but they'd have more information about when the country will need to raise its borrowing limit before the end of the week or next week as well. So again, there are a lot of things that are up in the air and Speaker Johnson is going to have to magic this thing through. The same thing is true when it comes to Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
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And meanwhile, speaking of the trade war, and one of the heavy pressures to get this thing done, one of the biggest pressures to get this thing done in terms of the tax bill is the continued fallout from the trade war. The reality is, as I've said before, we still are not feeling the actual fallout from President Trump's declared Liberation Day trade war. That fallout will be felt over the coming weeks.
It takes ships a while to get to the United States empty. It takes a while for people to not fulfill their orders or for prices to rise. Well, all of this broke out into the open yesterday when controversy erupted over a proposal from one group within Amazon to basically list on products what the cost of tariffs would be.
Punchbowl News had reported that Amazon was going to show how much Trump's tariffs are adding to the price of each product. According to a person familiar with the plan, the shopping site would display how much of an item's cost is derived from tariffs right next to the product's total listed price. Now, I have to tell you, I think this is a great idea. I do. In fact, I would love for Amazon to go even further. I think that Amazon should break down how much of a product's price is the sales tax in each individual state.
I think that they should tell us how much of every product's individual price is attributable to the business having to pay social security tax payments.
I think we should have a full breakdown on what actually goes into the pricing mechanism here. But I think it's good. I think that in the same way, I thought it was good when businesses were listing the additional cost of Obamacare in their bills in 2011, 2012, right after Obamacare passed. There are businesses that actually put on the receipt how much higher the prices were because they had to pay for the Obamacare of their employees. I actually am in favor of this sort of transparency. I think that it's a good thing in the same way that I don't think
Companies should be forced to do anything like this, but I kind of like it on a personal level when companies list the calorie counts of particular products because if you're on a diet or you're trying to figure out what sort of calorie counter you're trying to hit, you go into a restaurant, it tells you the calories. That's good. It helps me have more information before I make my decision.
I think when it comes to public policy like tariffs, the American people should know the cost of the tariff war. It helps us make better decisions. The White House, however, took this as a gigantic insult. Caroline Leavitt at the White House, she said that this was terrible and that actually it was doing the work of China to show how much additional cost was created by the tariffs.
This is a hostile and political act by Amazon. Why didn't Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years? And I would also add that it's not a surprise because as Reuters recently wrote, Amazon has partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm.
So this is another reason why Americans should buy American. It's another reason why we are on-shoring critical supply chains here at home to shore up our own critical supply chain and boost our own manufacturing here.
So actually, it was not going to apply to all of Amazon. Apparently, it was going to affect items that were sold on haul, which is Amazon's answer to Timu, the Chinese retailer. So it's actually in competition with Timu, showing exactly how much tariffs were going to cost. Now, again, the idea that this is some sort of horrible thing that Amazon is taking an anti-Trump administration approach to the tariffs, they're a retailer. It would be shocking if Amazon did not oppose massive importation taxes that
that the Trump administration is placing on product. Again, I know too many people in the business community who are having to hike their prices, who are seeing their demand plummet, who are going to have to lay people off as the tariffs start to actually bite. So more information is better from where I sit. As far as the suggestion that Amazon should actually have put a listing of the effect of inflation,
on pricing. I mean, they do. You can go to Amazon right now and you can see what a product cost four years ago versus what the product costs today. It's actually not hard to find out at all. And it's one of the reasons why Joe Biden is no longer president of the United States. I mean, aside from the fact that he's dead, one of the reasons is because Americans very obviously knew that inflation was taking a massive toll on their pocketbook, that things cost a lot more in 2024 than they cost in 2021.
Again, if you think it's a good economic policy, you should probably be in favor of the transparency. If you think the tariff war is a good idea, that it's good for American consumers, then you're going to have to explain why the American people should not know about the impact of the tariffs on pricing. Speaking of which, the Trump administration has been trying to carve some holes into a variety of these tariffs. One of those holes was going to be tariffs for U.S. automakers.
According to Axios, the Trump administration said on Tuesday will ease tariff pressure on automakers with reimbursement for taxes on foreign auto parts. So senior administration officials say the relief came after conversations with domestic auto manufacturers, many of which have warned about the economic damage from the previously imposed 25% tariff rate.
President Trump is expected to sign an executive order that would reimburse automakers for as much as 15% of those tariffs paid on imported foreign parts. That would move down to 10% next year. So it's still going to hike the tariffs on imported auto parts. It'll make it a little bit less egregious for domestic American auto manufacturers. However, at the same time, Howard Lutnick has now said that foreign automakers are still going to get slammed.
He says that there will be tariff relief for U.S. built cars with 85 percent domestic content. But there are a bunch of factories in the United States owned by places like Honda, for example, that is a foreign company that may not actually be freed of all of this. So why would you then buy a factory or build a factory if you're Honda, if you're a foreign car, if you're Volkswagen? Why would you build a factory in the United States if it doesn't even help you escape the tariffs?
So even internally, this policy has some serious problems. Speaking of Volkswagen, by the way, on Wednesday, they reported a substantial drop in first quarter profit. Europe's biggest carmaker reported an operating profit of 2.9 billion euros. That's 3.3 billion dollars, according to CNBC. For the first three months of the year, that is down 37 percent from the same period last year. And again, Volkswagen is sold in the United States, meaning there are American jobs that are attached to Volkswagen. There are dramatic fallout events from the tariffs.
And as far as the Amazon of it, apparently President Trump called Def Jeff Bezos and he wanted Bezos to kill it. So Bezos did. That seems to be the impression, at least. So how's all this affecting China? Right. Because this was all supposed to be directed against China. It was all supposed to be directed against the Chinese government, preventing them from growth, reshoring manufacturing in the United States.
And the administration keeps saying that China is going to come to the table. So Scott Pesent, the Treasury Secretary yesterday, he said over time, we're going to see the Chinese tariffs are actually horrible for China. China is going to have to back down.
Over time, we will see that the Chinese tariffs are unsustainable for China. I've seen some very large numbers over the past few days that show if these numbers stay on, Chinese could lose 10 million jobs very quickly. And even if there is a drop in the tariffs, that they could lose 5 million jobs. Okay, so...
that is all fine and dandy. There's only one problem. China doesn't seem to care. Why doesn't China seem to care very much? Well, the answer is China has some systemic advantages against the United States. Their biggest systemic advantage in a trade war is they don't give any dams whatsoever about their citizens. That's the biggest advantage. They're an absolute communist tyranny. When I say communist, I don't mean that they actually practice communism. They don't. They practice a form of mercantilism. But
And is the Chinese Communist Party running the place? And they don't care about their citizens whatsoever. If you disagree with them, they will gulag you. If they don't like you enough, they will just kill you. So you think China cares that its citizens are going to suffer from the trade war so long as it also makes the United States suffer? They're actually in favor of it, which is why China is not coming to the table. There is no evidence whatsoever that China is actually negotiating with the United States at any serious level at this point. In fact, China put out a defiant propaganda clip yesterday on Twitter. Here's what it sounded like.
Have you heard of the eye of the storm? It appears calm for a moment, but is actually a deadly trap. But calm before an even fiercer storm. The US has stirred up a global tariff storm and deliberately targeted China, playing a 90-day pause game with other nations, forcing them to limit trade with China. This is just like the deadly trap of the eye of the storm.
Bowing to a bully is like drinking poison to quench thirst. It only deepens the crisis. China won't kneel down. Because we know, standing up for ourselves keeps the possibility of cooperation alive. While compromise snuffs it out, China won't back down. So the voices of the weak will be heard. Bullying will be stopped. And justice will not disappear from the world. For China, for the world, we must rise and fight on.
Okay, so China is trying to build a multipolar world in much the same way that Russia wants a multipolar world with itself as sort of the center of Eurasia. China would love a multipolar world with itself at the very least at the center of the Southeast Asian continent.
part of the globe. Plus, they're spreading their tentacles all the way across Eurasia into Africa, even into South America. So they are very pleased, actually. The President Trump, in declaring a trade war on China, also decided to simultaneously declare a trade war on everybody else because that pushes all those countries toward China and away from the United States. That is why China is perfectly happy with this situation. They actually are quite pleased with all of this. They don't care about their citizens.
They're happy to make trade deals with other countries. They have been traveling all Xi Jinping has been spending every day in other countries trying to cut trade deals. And meanwhile, the United States is trying to claw its way back to kind of status quo ante. They're claiming that they're cutting brand new magical trade deals. We haven't seen any of those trade deals as of yet. It is currently April 30th.
President Trump declared Liberation Day April 9th. So when do we get to see the trade deals? Well, again, the markets are waiting for it. The markets are enthusiastic about the possibility. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Tuesday teased that the Trump administration had reached its first trade deal. He didn't say who it was with. He didn't say what exactly the trade deal would constitute. But the markets responded by being very enthusiastic because they clearly want the off ramp. The markets want the off ramp. They don't feel that this trade war is well thought out.
Doug Burgum, the secretary of the interior, was asked specifically by CNN's Caitlin Collins, which deals are closed? When can we expect to see some deals? Here is his answer. Do you know of any trade agreements that they are close to actually closing it out? And not just top lines, a memorandum of understanding.
Well, I know that they're very focused in taking a look at those 35 who is ready to come to the table. The top half of those 35 have been broken into three tiers. And these folks are working around the clock over the weekends to get trade deals. And I think for President Trump, you're going to see one trade deal after another announced. When you start walking through 100 announcements with 100 different countries and every single one of those, we end up with a better trade deal than we have right now.
I mean, how could anybody say that's not a good deal for this country? I mean, he's arguing that he's made 200 trade deals so far. Well, there is a all kinds of companies, countries, excuse me, that are showing up at the doorstep because they understand America is serious about leveling the trade issues. Right. I'm sure that that is true. I'm sure there are a bunch of countries who want to trade with the most powerful economy on planet Earth, the United States. And maybe we get some trade deals that are marginally better than the old trade deals.
At the same time, China has strengthened its hand in a lot of ways. A lot of countries are de-dollarizing because they're not betting on the volatile nature of the Trump administration's foreign policy.
We need to get back to some sort of stability in the trade situation. And as fast as humanly possible, the markets are begging for it. We'll get to more on this in a moment. First, FBI data shows most break-ins happen during daylight, not at night. As the summer days get longer and you're out more, your empty home becomes an excellent target. SimpliSafe's proactive security stops threats before they happen, protecting your home while you enjoy those sunny days. Millions of Americans trust SimpliSafe as their new standard in home security, giving them peace of mind whenever they're
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And that divide is kind of tripartite. There are some of us in the Trump camp who are very upset that Mark Carney won the election in Canada because he is in fact a shill of the World Bank. He worked for the IMF. When you talk about like globalists, Mark Carney is sort of the definition of a globalist, meaning international institutions ought to rule the roost. Immigration ought to be relatively open.
There ought to be commerce, not regulated by country or bilateral deals, but commerce with some of the worst places on earth, including places like China. Carney is very much in favor of regulation. He was a net zero guy.
That guy's the prime minister now. So I think that it's quite bad on a personal level that President Trump intervened in the Canadian election by basically just crapping all over Canada repeatedly to no actual effect, by the way. Like, where's the big win? And so Carney got elected. I think that's bad. And then there's another wing of the Republican Party that says that basically Trump's activities had nothing to do with the victory of Mark Carney, which to me is just...
pretending or coping. I don't think that there's any argument that can plausibly be made that President Trump saying repeatedly that Canada was going to be the 51st state and then suggesting over and over that tariffs were going to force them to capitulate their sovereignty to the United States. Maybe we'd invade that had no impact on the election whatsoever. That is not what the polls show.
But there are some people in Team Trump land who are making the case that basically this is about Pierre Poliev blowing it in some way, despite the fact that he was leading by 25 points in December. And then there's the third category of people who seem to be perversely happy that Mark Carney is the prime minister. And that group of people, a lot of those folks seem to be convinced that if there is a right wing leader who is allied with principles of conservatives in the United States,
but it's not quote unquote Trumpy enough, better to have a left-wing leader than somebody who is not what a Trump knockoff. It's a sort of bizarre perspective. I see people dunking on Pierre Poliev. You're happy that ugly Justin Trudeau is gonna be the prime minister over there. Well, if you think that Trump had nothing to do with the election, then I defy you to answer why exactly the new Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, thinks that Trump had a lot to do with the election. Here he was torching Trump at his victory rally. Our old relationship with the United States,
A relationship based on steadily increasing integration is over. The system of open global trade anchored by the United States, a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that, while not perfect, has helped deliver prosperity for a country for decades, is over. These are tragedies, but it's also our new reality. We are over.
We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves, and above all, we have to take care of each other. When I sit down with President Trump, it will be to discuss the future economic and security relationship between two sovereign nations.
And it will be with our full knowledge that we have many, many other options than the United States to build prosperity for all Canadians. So I have a question. Why is that better for the United States? Seriously, why is it better than Mark Carney is the prime minister of Canada? He's openly saying, by the way, that he wants to reorient away from the United States and toward Europe and China. So what's the upside? Seriously here.
Here he was, again, making the case that Trump is trying to break us so he can own us. It was this campaign slogan that basically allowed him to defeat Pierre Poliev, who is in every way a better candidate. By the way, Poliev is not going away. The Conservative Party actually won a larger percentage of the vote in Canada than they have at any time since 2011 when they last won the government. The big story of the election is not just that Carney won, it is that he also drew votes from a lot of the sort of fringe left-wing parties who consolidated around him in order to quote-unquote fight Trump. Here's Carney.
As I've been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. Never. But these are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us.
That will never, that will never, ever happen. Okay, so, by the way, the person who is saying that he basically lost the election for Poliev is President Trump. This is one of the things I like about President Trump the most. He's totally transparent at all times. He did an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg. Again, don't do interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg. Jeffrey Goldberg is an absolute Barack Obama mouthpiece. He always was. He was a Joe Biden mouthpiece. He still is.
I don't understand the deep desire by President Trump to reach out to, say, the New York Times or the Atlantic. In any case, he did an interview with Goldberg and Goldberg asked him about Canada. And here's President Trump's answer, quote, well, the Canadians, here's the problem I have with Canada. We're subsidizing them to the tune of $200 billion a year. There, I assume that he is talking about our trade deficit with Canada, which is largely based on their oil. If you take out the oil and gas from Canada, which, by the way, we do need that. We have refineries in the United States that are built for the kind of oil and natural gas that we import from Canada.
But if you take that out, we actually have a trade surplus of Canada. In any case, Trump says, we don't need their gasoline. We don't need their oil. We don't need their lumber. We don't need their energy of any type. We don't need anything they have. I say it would make a great 51st state. I love other nations. I love Canada. I have great friends. Wayne Gretzky is a friend of mine. I mean, I have great friends. I said to Wayne, I'm going to give you a pass, Wayne. I don't want to ruin his reputation in Canada. I said, just pretend you don't know me, but they're great people. They know, you know, they do 95% of their business with us. Remember, if they're a state, there's no tariffs. They have lower taxes. We have to guard them militarily.
And then Goldberg says, you want them to become a state? And Trump says, I think it would be great. And then Trump added, quote, you know, until I came along, remember, the conservative was leading by 25 points. Then I was disliked by enough of the Canadians that I've thrown the election into a close call, right? And so President Trump knows that President Trump basically threw the election to Mark Carney. And my question is, how does that benefit President Trump? How does that benefit the United States? Mark Carney is openly saying he wants to reorient toward China. He literally is saying that.
In that same speech, he said that he wanted to supercharge Canada's trade with Europe and Asia, quote, the system of open global trade anchored by the United States, a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that, while not perfect, has helped deliver prosperity for our countries for decades, is over. These are tragedies, but it's also our new reality. He is pledging closer integration with the European Union. He's also, presumably, going to be turning toward China.
That is no shock. He is eager to turn toward China. So are many of the people on the left. President Trump, in revolutionary fashion during his first term, told the world, including the left, that China was a geopolitical opponent of the United States who needed to be treated that way. And large swaths of even the Democratic Party in the United States understand that. So that he deserves credit for. But if you are going to
If you're going to box in China, that requires a meticulously thought out strategy. And you know what would help is allies like Pierre Poliev in power in Canada and not Mark Carney in Canada. Now, Carney is going to face some serious problems in Canada. Carney's economy, which again, he inherits from his own party, the Liberal Party, is really, really sluggish.
If you look at the first year of the Trudeau government, 2016 through 2024, according to the Wall Street Journal, Canada's real GDP growth per capita was 2.5% versus 18.7% for the United States. And business investment per worker, excluding housing, actually fell between 2015 and 2023. So he's going to have to face down a lot of this stuff. But...
That does not mean that it is a good thing that he ends up as the actual prime minister of Canada when all this is said and done. It would be much better for the United States to have an ally in that position rather than somebody who hates President Trump. Poliev likes Trump. Poliev likes conservatives.
The best case scenario at this point for conservatives in Canada is that the Liberal Party, which does not have an open majority in the parliament, they have to ally with some fringe parties in order to achieve a majority, that they govern poorly, the government falls within the next 24 months, and then Polio is prime minister. That is quite possible. However, this election was within grasp of people who are more conservative. And if you don't think it had anything to do with President Trump bashing the Canadians over the head,
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Meanwhile, in good news, apparently President Trump is, in fact, shifting his position with regard to Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zelensky and Ukraine, Russia in general. There's a good article in The New York Times about the Finnish leader, President Alexander Stubb of Finland, who is optimistic that Vladimir Putin will, in fact, be stared down by the president of the United States. In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, Stubb downplayed his effect on Mr. Trump. He apparently has a good relationship with President Trump.
He says that President Trump is going to actually stand down Vladimir Putin. Stubbs said, quote, everyone has to understand the only thing that Putin understands is power. I mean, there's a reason why Finland has one of the strongest militaries in Europe. And the reason is not Sweden.
The reason is because Russia shares an 835 mile border with Finland and they fought a bunch of skirmishes and wars with Finland. And in fact, Russia, Alexander Dugin, who we talked about last Friday on the show, he has openly called for the quote unquote Finlandization of much of Western Europe, meaning sort of regimes that are puppet regimes friendly to the Russians. And Finland doesn't like that very much. So according to the New York Times, Stubb has been having discussions with President Trump
He said, the president is running out of patience. We've now seen statements which are quite tough on Putin in Russia. I hope the Kremlin understands you don't play with President Trump. Obviously, I certainly hope that this is the case. I think that the proper way to get to the end of the war is, in fact, to stand Russia down. Otherwise, Russia is not going to accept an end of the war. I've been calling for precisely the same thing in this war since about month four. The same thing. Freezing of the lines. Essentially a Korean armistice. That is the best available thing.
And everybody, I think, understands that. I think that the Ukrainians understand that the prospect of them winning back the Donbass and Crimea regions are basically non-existent at this point, given their current levels, weaponry and military materiel and manpower. However, you know who doesn't understand that right now is Vladimir Putin, who continues to up the ante every single day. Vladimir Putin is basically waiting for the United States to drop out of this, and then he's going to push incredibly hard.
And if Vladimir Putin were able to ingest Ukraine full scale, that would be quite bad for the United States. It'd be quite bad for NATO. He claims that he doesn't want to actually be on the borders of NATO. So first of all, NATO is already on his borders. Since April 2023, there are other countries that are on Russia's borders that have actually joined NATO, including Finland. Finland was not a NATO member and then it joined NATO. But NATO already borders Ukraine.
the Russians in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. Were the Russians to actually ingest Ukraine, there'd actually be more on the borders of NATO, not less on the borders
of NATO, obviously. They're worried about Ukraine turning into a NATO country. There is no actual offer by NATO right now to have Ukraine join. So that is just a reality. Ukraine's constitution does call for them since 2019 to actually try to join NATO. You can see the reason why, and it's because Russia actually does not want a direct fight with NATO at this point. Although if they gathered Ukraine in, it's quite possible they might try something in Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania.
Probably Lithuania, considering that Kaliningrad is actually like a small province that exists bizarrely as Russian territory on the borders of Lithuania on the other side, like physically disconnected from Lithuania. In any case, if they were to ingest Ukraine, it would actually put them on the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, all of which are NATO members. So it broadened their confrontational capacity with regard to NATO.
But put all of that aside, the bottom line here is that the Russians very much would love for this war to continue so long as it gives them the possibility of victory. President Trump, I think, is understanding that at this point, which is a very, very good thing.
And meanwhile, in another thing that the Trump administration ought to understand, the Iranians are playing them. The Iranians are always playing them. The Iranians have no intention of giving up their nuclear facilities or giving up any of their nuclear program. The idea that you're going to be able to contain the nuclear program a la Barack Obama and the JCPOA is fabulous nonsense. It is not true. Simultaneously, by the way, the idea that a military strike
by Israel or by Israel accompanied by some B2s from the United States would result in a full scale regional war in which the United States would have boots on the ground is a lie. It is not true. There is no evidence that that is the case. I would not be in favor of such a war. No one is in favor of such a war. The United States killed Qasem Soleimani during Trump's first term, and we did not end up in a full scale shooting war with the Iranians with American boots on the ground in Iran or anything remotely like that.
Killing the Houthis in Yemen, which is actually quite far away from Iran, geographically speaking, does not amount to a shooting war in Iran with American boots on the ground in Iran. That is not what that is. That is an attempt to free the Red Sea of Houthi piracy and allow free shipping.
The reason I bring all of this up is because Iran is now basically trying to wheedle their way into the good graces of the Trump administration. Steve Witkoff, of course, has been deployed over there. He's quite friendly with the Qataris. The Qataris are a cutout for the Iranians. They funnel over the past decade and a half or so something like $1.8 billion to Hamas when they are not spending hundreds of millions of dollars on American universities for some odd reason that no one can discern. According to Bloomberg,
Iran is now pitching a sanctioned economy to him as an investment opportunity, which again, listen, I'll give it to the Iranians. That is smart. And President Trump is a dealmaker. He likes deals and he likes economic deals. That's why he talks about the possibility of an economic deal that would include Russia in the world economy. Maybe new economic opportunities arise. Now, that does have its positive aspects. The Abraham Accords are largely based on the idea that commerce conquers all. However, as China shows, commerce does not always conquer all.
Countries that hate our guts are perfectly willing to use the tools of capitalism to
using mercantilist theory in order to enrich themselves and then oppose us wherever they can. China has done that. So here's the question. Is Iran more like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, or is Iran more like China in terms of its actual intentions with regard to the United States? The answer is pretty obvious, but Iran is attempting to basically play the Trump administration into allowing them a nuclear program by pledging that they're going to allow for some sort of economic cooperation, according to Bloomberg, with
With talks between Iran and the United States over the Islamic Republic's atomic activity showing signs of progress, top Iranian officials are for the first time in decades overtly promoting their economy to the White House to secure a lasting and more effective nuclear accord. If Trump wants a deal that's better for the U.S. than the one he jettisoned in 2018, the Iranians want the same for Iran. Tehran's top envoy, Abbas Arahi, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last week, a new nuclear deal could give the U.S. companies...
access to what he claims is a trillion dollar economic opening in a country of about 90 million people with some of the world's biggest oil and gas reserves. Obviously, this is a way of attempting to draw President Trump in, to draw him into a deal.
Russia is also attempting this same sort of tactic. Again, our enemies are smart. They're not stupid. They understand that if the Trump administration is looking for economic deals, offering them economic deals is a great way to get themselves off the hook while simultaneously promoting the most anti-American activity in respective regions, whether you're talking about Ukraine, whether you're talking about Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, the Gaza Strip or any of the rest.
Again, the question that the Trump administration should be asking itself is if the Obama-Iran deal was bad, which it was, and if China is capable of using capitalism as a tool against the United States, why in the world would we think that Iran is incapable of using market integration as a tool for the spread of terrorism, for example, or that Russia is incapable of the same? The answer is they are very much capable of the same. Meanwhile, the culture shift in the United States is very real.
And we have said here at The Daily Wire that we are now norming in America. It's not mooring in America. It's norming in America. We're getting back to something looking like normal. You can see it happening, right? Yes, there's a lot of world chaos. Yes, there's a lot of market chaos. But just culturally speaking, people are done with the sort of cultural chaos that suggests that, for example, the kids must be trans. According to The Wall Street Journal, MasterCard is not renewing its corporate sponsorship of the New York City Pride March, the city's annual march for LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign rights for 2025.
MasterCard has supported Heritage of Pride. That is the nonprofit group that organizes the New York March. But now they are not returning. That also includes Pepsi, Nissan, Giant in Banking City, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Most have not opted out of all pride activities in the United States. They'll instead kind of downgrade it to a branded booth or something.
But they're not going to be making a major spend. Why? And the answer is because it turns out that it alienates a lot of the normies when you have men in assless chaps walking down the street with a Budweiser brand on them. People don't like it very much. Other pride events in recent weeks have lost key sponsors, including Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis and Diageo in San Francisco.
So again, many of these companies are starting to minimize their sort of overtly DEI-driven attempts to woo the radical left. That is a good thing because it turns out that most Americans, they don't care if people who are gay wish to live lives they want to lead. What they don't want is giant pride parades sponsored by America's biggest corporations walking through the middle of their cities,
with men with ball gags. That's just not a thing that they're very interested in. And some of these corporations are starting to figure that out. All right, guys, coming up, we'll jump into the vaunted Ben Shapiro show mailbag. Remember, in order to watch, you actually have to be a member. If you're 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.