RFK Jr. Takes on Autism & Fed Fight | 4.21.25

The political and legal battle escalates over an alleged member of a violent gang deported to El Salvador.

What bothers me more than that is a U.S. senator traveled El Salvador on taxpayer dime to meet with an MS-13 gang member, public safety threat, terrorist.

How does a new Supreme Court ruling impact Trump's immigration plans?

I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Monday, April 21st, and this is Money Wire.
RFK Jr. launches a series of studies into the causes of autism, prompting both condemnation and praise.
Autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which are children.
And Democrats take aim at the president over his call for the Fed to lower rates, while Trump touts key economic wins. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire.
Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
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Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen is back stateside after visiting suspected gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador. And the Supreme Court has stepped in to make similar deportations harder.
Here to talk about Van Hollen and the latest news on President Trump's immigration agenda is Daily Wire reporter Tim Pears. So Van Hollen returned from El Salvador over the weekend and has been making the media rounds.
What did he actually accomplish there?

A photo op, essentially.

The Maryland Democrat was able to finally meet with suspected MS-13 gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia last week.

He then, like you noted, went on a media tour.

On ABC's This Week on Sunday, he said he achieved his goal.

My goal was to meet with him and make sure I could tell his wife and family he was okay. And I achieved that goal.
The optics here are messy. On the one hand, a federal judge has said Abrego Garcia's due process was violated.
But on the other, he's a suspected gang member and trafficker. And in 2021, his wife filed a protective order petition against him.
She said he had beaten her multiple times. She decided not to follow up on the petition after she said they worked out things between them.
Van Hollen was asked about Abrego Garcia's alleged gang ties on CNN and admitted that he actually didn't even ask him about it. Can you say with absolute certainty that he is not, nor has he ever been a member of the MS-13 gang? And did you ask him point blank? Well, Dana, 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.
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.
And that goes to the heart of this issue because he's being denied his due process rights. And Donald Trump is trying to change the subject.
So the senator won't deny that Abrego Garcia could be a member of a brutally violent gang.

He also confirmed on Fox News that his trip was indeed paid for by taxpayers.

Who did pay for this trip?

This was an officially cleared congressional trip.

So taxpayer dollars.

Yes, like every other trip.

So it's a weird look for Van Hollen to try to turn Abrego Garcia into a sympathetic figure.

It seems like a tough sell to the American people.

So there's the legal side of this and the political side, of course.

Thank you. So it's a weird look for Van Hollen to try to turn Abrego Garcia into a sympathetic figure.
That seems like a tough sell to the American people.

So there's the legal side of this and the political side, of course.

What are Republicans focusing on?

There's been a lot of focus on Van Hollen's trip because Abrego Garcia has such a checkered history.

Here's border czar Tom Homan on ABC News on Sunday.

Van Hollen never went to the border the last four years on Joe Biden when he had a 600% increase increase in sex trafficking women and children you have a record number of no inspector terrorists crossing that border you had a quarter million americans die from fattening overdose for the open border you got over 4 000 illegal aliens died making that journey which is a historic record i've met with hundreds of angel moms and dads who buried their children that were murdered by illegal alien how many angel many angel moms and dads has he met in the state of Maryland? On the legal side, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller last week blamed the initial admission of a mistake in Abrego Garcia's deportation on a DOJ saboteur who has since been fired. So in the Supreme Court over the weekend, the justices have frozen deportations under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.

That follows the court giving the administration a green light just a couple of weeks ago. What happened there? Yeah, the court hasn't stopped deportations entirely, but it did rule that the administration hadn't followed due process for a group of suspected Trin de Aragua members.
The majority sided with the ACLU, which argued that one illegal immigrant couldn't read his notice written in English and that dozens of others were not told they could challenge their

deportations. White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt pushed back on Saturday.

She said the ACLU lawsuit is part of an onslaught of meritless litigation brought by radical activists

who care more about the rights of these terrorist aliens than those of the American people.

Pretty strong words against the ACLU from the White House. Tim, thanks so much for joining us.
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Again, that's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash morningwire for $1,000 off. Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. is commissioning a series of studies to investigate potential environmental causes for autism.
Here to discuss is Daily Wire reporter Amanda Prestigiacomo. So Amanda, Kennedy had a press conference this week.
What did he say? Yeah, well, Kennedy first announced the results of a CDC study on autism. He said that autism now affects one in 31 children in the US,

and that's nearly five times higher

than when the CDC first started these surveys

back in 1992.

Just two years ago,

the prevalence was one in 36 children.

RFK broke down those findings even further.

He said that boys were far more at risk

with one in 20 chances of having autism.

And in California, it was even higher.

One in 12.5 boys were

diagnosed. Obviously, very alarming findings and even more troubling, Kennedy said that a lot of these cases are now severe.
25% of the kids who are diagnosed with autism are nonverbal, non-toilet trained, and have other stereotypical features, headbanging, tactile and light sensitivities, stimming, toe walking, etc. RFK also asserted that the increasing rate of autism can be attributed in large part to environmental factors.
He specifically cited mold, pesticides, other food chemicals, and medications as potentially being linked. Kennedy really stressed that he believes the increased rate of autism is an epidemic.
Now that's significant because critics have said that autism is mostly genetic. RFK called such critics epidemic deniers.
He also had Dr. Walter Zorodny touch on this issue at the conference.
He's a long-term autism researcher, and he's an associate professor at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. Whether you call it an epidemic, a tsunami, or a surge of autism is a real thing that we don't understand.
For the last 20 years, we've collected data but not made real progress in understanding what causes autism or how to effectively prevent it or treat it effectively. Kennedy announced earlier this month that his department will find the cause of autism in a matter of months.
Here he is speaking to President Trump. The autism rates have gone from now most recent numbers we think are going to be about 1 in 31, from 1 in 10,000 when I was a kid.
And at your direction, we've launched a massive testing and research effort that's going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world. By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we'll be able to eliminate those exposures.
They're so big. An autism organization, Autism Speaks, suggested that the rise in autism cases is largely due to better screening, better understanding of the disorder, and therefore a higher diagnosis rate.
The organization said other genetic and environmental factors are still being studied, but that only likely accounts for a small part of the increase. Kennedy believes that's flipped, that only a small portion of the increase can be attributed to a better diagnostic process.
If you accept the epidemic deniers narrative, you have to believe that researchers in North Dakota miss 98.8% of the children with autism, that thousands of profoundly disabled children were somehow invisible to doctors, teachers, parents, and even their own study. Doctors and therapists in the past were not stupid.
They weren't missing all these cases. The epidemic is real.
Well, it'll be a major breakthrough if these studies find something. Amanda, thanks for reporting.
You're welcome. Democrats are up in arms about the president's latest economic moves.
But Team Trump says he's doing exactly what Americans elected him to do. Joining us to discuss the latest on the economy and Trump's handling of it is Daily Wire senior editor Virginia Kruda.
Hey, Virginia. So things have settled down a little bit since the first turbulent week of the initial tariffs.
But Democrats are now sounding the alarm over Trump's moves related to the Fed. What's going on here? Well, Democrats are accusing Trump of crossing the line by pressuring Fed Chair Jerome Powell to lower the interest rate.
Trump has been leaning on Powell to take action, and that's turned into the rhetoric from both sides really heating up. Powell appears to be digging in while the president's team is reportedly even looking into whether or not there are ways to remove Powell early.
His term is scheduled to end May 15th of 2026. But Democrats are now painting this as an unprecedented violation of the balance of powers.
Here's Senator Amy Klobuchar making that case on CNN. There's a reason we have an independent fed and it has served us well through many crises, through downturns, through depressions, through the pandemic, they're able to respond and stabilize things.
And what Jerome Powell is doing right now is warning that these tariffs are having a huge destabilizing effect on our economy and hurting everyday people. And that's going to affect decisions that the Fed make.
That's his job and he's doing it. She also said that the chair of the Fed can't be fired unless it's for malfeasance or criminality.
To that point, the chair is appointed by the president for a four-year term, but it's considered an independent role, so traditionally the chair is allowed to complete that four-year run. And we should note that Democrats, including Senator Klobuchar, have previously pressured the Fed to lower interest rates, just as Trump is doing now.
Right. Now, this all comes obviously amid the ongoing trade negotiations.
We've been tracking those pretty closely. Where do those stand now? Well, Trump is maintaining his pause of the higher tariffs for most countries, except China, for 90 days.
And he set a low 10 percent baseline tariff on imports to encourage negotiations. At least 75 countries have reached out to negotiate at this point.
As we've reported, the major outlier is still China, who has escalated tariffs in response. A few days ago, Trump did indicate an openness to making a deal to protect consumers, but no talks with Xi Jinping have been confirmed yet.
We do know that Japanese negotiators met with U.S. officials recently, with Trump citing big progress.
Toyota is considering shifting RAV4 production to the U.S. to mitigate tariff impacts.
Likewise, Trump reported a great call with South Korea, focusing on steel and automobiles. Vietnam has also offered to remove all tariffs on U.S.
goods, and discussions with India are also in progress, with India angling for a bilateral trade agreement to boost trade to $500 billion by 2030. The EU has paused retaliatory tariffs on the U.S.
and is advocating for a zero-tariff agreement. As for the U.K., talks with Prime Minister Keir Starmer are ongoing, and Vice President J.D.
Vance has expressed optimism that any deal they reach will be mutually beneficial. Now, final question on the mood of the country.
Where is the public sentiment at now when it comes to Trump's economic policies? The trends seem to show him losing some ground on his handling of the economy. His average approval is hovering around 47%, with disapproval a few points higher, around 51%, according to RCP.
But he does still have solid support among Republicans, and CNBC notes that blue-collar workers still remain in the positive for Trump, although disapproval has increased with that group since his first term. Like we've highlighted on this show, though, Trump is not afraid to course-correct if he's seeing negative fallout from his policies.
So we'll see how this approach evolves. It's been fascinating to watch all this play out so far, and the White House remains bullish that they're working out better deals for Americans in the long run.
Virginia, thanks so much for reporting. Thank you for having me.
Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back later this afternoon with more news you need to know.
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