Ep 245 | Should the US Own Gaza? Ben Shapiro Explains Trump’s REAL Agenda | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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And now a Blaze Media podcast.

Trump is turning Gaza into Vegas and we're in a constitutional crisis.

Panic.

Or don't.

The media and the expert class told us no one can think outside the box in the Middle East.

They warned us that moving the embassy to Jerusalem would be a disaster.

It'll start wars.

They assured us that all of the surrounding Arab nations were very passionate about a Palestinian state.

Yeah, not so much.

Not so much.

All the experts have been wrong.

America is being shaken up like a snow globe right now, and the deep state can't figure out

what end is up.

My next guest is always good at breaking things down.

He'll make sure, I've asked him, go really,

really slow so bureaucrats can understand him.

Or maybe not.

Welcome, co-founder of The Daily Wire, number one New York Times best-selling author, wildly popular podcast host, and my good friend, Ben Shapiro.

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Ben, great to see you.

How you doing?

You too.

How's that?

Thank God.

Doing well.

Yeah, good.

Yeah, everybody's good.

Everybody's good.

And three weeks in, this is a hell of an administration.

Are you?

I mean,

he told me several times over the summer, he's like, I got it.

And I'm like, but you, I mean, we have four years.

And he's like, I got it.

I didn't expect this.

This has been phenomenal.

I mean, it is extraordinary.

I've never seen an administration move this fast.

And granted, I'm not as old as you, Glenn, but still, I've been alive for 41 years.

Okay, Frodo.

I've seen a fair number of residents, and I've never seen anything like this.

I mean, he is moving incredibly fast.

His team is really methodical.

I also have never seen a team defend itself this way.

Yes.

I'm old enough to remember the Bush administration, and I just remember being very frustrated with Team Bush being totally...

ineffectual at defending its own agenda.

They would put out an agenda item and then they would sort of let it sit there in the legacy media and let the legacy media spin everything from social security privatization to the war in Iraq in the way that the media so chose.

And they would do nothing.

They would just kind of assume best faith.

And Trump's entire team is mobilized to defend his agenda, literally everyone, the head of every single agency.

And it's not just that they're defending the agenda in that particular agency.

It's all connected.

And so they're, I've never seen the agencies work together like this and be so coordinated.

I mean, I am

blown away at how this this is

this shows the businessman that he really is, the negotiator that he really is, the businessman, the sharp mind that he has.

I've never seen anything like this.

I haven't either.

And I think that he's kind of a different person.

You know, it was kind of funny.

During his first term, there was that kind of running joke, well, this was the day that Donald Trump became president, right?

Right, right.

Shed the real estate magnate side, and now he's going to be.

But the truth is that him winning the second time, I think, has removed a lot of these sort of personal questions that he had, maybe about his role in the world or about himself.

And it feels like he is incredibly comfortable in his own skin.

He's much happier, right?

This sort of combative angry Trump is not there.

It's just gone.

Like he knows precisely who he is, what his job is.

He knows what the agenda is, and he is enacting it.

So all the Democratic attempts that you've seen, for example, that might have been more successful in the first term to try and put a wedge, for example, between him and Musk.

You'll have Elon in the Oval Office, and he'll just delegate to Elon, okay, talk about what Doge is doing.

And Elon will just go off.

And the entire media will say, oh, it's President Musk.

And Time magazine will put Musk on the cover.

That kind of stuff might have bugged Trump Trump in the first term.

And this time Trump's like, well, yeah, I mean, he works for me.

Whatever.

What are you going to do about it?

And that's just, that's so different and almost strange to watch.

And what they've done over the course of the first three weeks is the most transformative move by a president in my life.

If he continues at anything remotely like this pace, he's going to go down in history as probably one of the three most transformative presidents of the last century.

I agree.

And

maybe the most transformative, depending on which way it goes.

Yeah.

I mean, I think you could say

he'll be next to Abraham Lincoln.

I mean, if he continues at this pace and everything gets done,

I'm concerned about the economy because, and maybe you can help me on this.

I'm concerned about the economy because we are cutting spending, but a lot of our GDP is coming from the government right now.

We're pumping money, and as we cut that,

and we cut jobs in the government, you're going to see the numbers start to change.

And

have you seen the doge of regulations yet?

Because I haven't seen the regulations on business.

I haven't seen the strong unleashing of small business people.

I haven't seen the tax cuts yet.

Are you concerned that that should hurry?

Well, I mean, I think that everybody is concerned that it should hurry.

I think that, look, he's barely getting his nominees through at this point.

We're three weeks in.

His nominees are getting confirmed like today.

And so a lot of those regulations aren't going going to get cut until those nominees are actually in place at their various agencies cutting those various regulations.

I think that's going to happen.

Obviously, I think actually it'll be a militating factor against inflation that will get these cuts from government spending.

I mean, you spend too much money into the economy via the government, you end up artificially raising the price of goods and services.

And so if you actually cut the amount of money that's kind of being flooded into the economy and has been for the past, you know, 100 years, then what you will end up with is presumably prices starting to stabilize, maybe going down a little bit.

I think that's what he is aiming for.

As far as the tax cuts being enshrined into law, yeah, I mean, that's a major worry.

And I think that it'll be interesting to see whether the sort of one big, beautiful bill strategy or the two separate bills strategy ends up being pursued here.

The way I've been talking about it on my show is that

you can do it as two bills.

There's no guarantee you get both of them through.

It's almost impossible to get two bills through under reconciliation.

And what that means is that even if you do, let's say best case scenario, you you get both of them through, they will both be individually purer than the one big, beautiful bill.

It's just there's a lower chance of getting through.

If you do one big, beautiful bill, it's going to be more crap in the crap sandwich, but you'll also get everything that you want on the upside.

So it's more downside, but also more upside.

And, you know, again, I'm sort of risk averse here, which is get everything you can early on.

I think that's the way also Trump is approaching this administration.

He knows midterm is coming.

Midterms come up on you real fast.

By this time next year, everybody's running for reelection and basically everything stops dead.

So he doesn't have two years to get his agenda done.

He basically has a year to get the vast majority of his agenda done.

I said to him, you know, you only have four years and really two years before the midterms.

And he said, Glenn, I have 100 days.

He said, I have to have the majority of stuff done in the first 100 days because then it kicks in.

It needs time to kick in before those midterms because it's not going to turn around on a dime.

You know,

it is refreshing to see the no-nonsense.

And I have to tell you, when he had Benjamin Netanyahu and they did that joint press conference, I had a whole new level of respect for him.

A, his negotiating power with the tariffs and what he, he took,

oh my gosh, you're talking about a genocide

with the Palestinians and you're just going to liquidate all of them and try to send them all over, you know, the Middle East.

No one was talking about that the next day.

He said, we want them to go someplace else.

It's only right and compassionate, but they got to go someplace else.

And then he said, and, you know, maybe we'll build a Trump golf course.

You know, maybe we'll do, it's crazy.

That's what everybody in the Middle East was talking about, saying, no, no, no, no, no, you can't do that.

That's brilliant, I think.

I mean, I totally agree.

He totally changed the way everybody was talking about this because this is the thing that Trump really understands about the Middle East better than any president in my lifetime, bar none, and better than any president in American history, so long as the Middle East has sort of been an agenda item.

And that is he just doesn't buy into the sort of State Department foreign policy nostrums.

And this was clear from his first term, right?

The kind of centrality of the Palestinian question must be solved before anything else gets solved.

He totally blew that out of the water in his first term when he broke it at the Abraham Accords by basically taking that issue and putting it to the side.

The entire foreign policy establishment said there will be the Arab street will rise up.

There will be world war if you move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and Israel.

And he just did it it and nothing happened.

And now what he's basically saying is, listen, I understand that y'all are pretending that the Palestinian issue is central to your national calculus.

I know that it's not central to your national calculus.

And in fact, you wish it to be a thorn in the side of anything that happens in the Middle East from here until the end of time.

And you have proposed no solutions at all for 80 years on this particular question.

And here I am saying, let's take some people who are obviously living in a hellhole.

I mean, there's nothing left in Gaza.

Everything is rubble.

And let's move those people to a place where they're not living in rubble.

And by the way, then we can rebuild this place and actually turn it into a functioning polity where people can, you know, vacation.

And everybody who's freaking out about this, I have a question.

What's your alternative?

Because it seems to me your alternative is pouring billions more dollars internationally into a rat's nest of terror because Hamas is still running the place.

And what?

We do this whole shtick again in five or 10 years?

Well, that's what he said.

That is not an acceptable.

Yeah, I mean, that's not an acceptable answer.

And so for him, saying the thing that has been taboo for so long, which is, this is unworkable.

This is unworkable.

It's not going to happen.

So why don't we live in the world of reality?

People see this as something different than what he's doing with, for example, Ukraine.

I see it as exactly the same.

Trump is so pragmatic.

I mean, this is an actual pragmatic answer to a question.

The question is, you have a group of people who do not wish to live side by side in peace with another group of people.

They elected a body of people who then launched a terror attack.

Many of the civilians were involved in the terror attack.

They lost a war.

There's nothing left there.

So

how do you solve for that?

What do you do so that the future looks better than the past?

He says, okay, well, some of those people are going to have to move, and then we're going to build it up and we'll invest and we'll make it nice.

That's a pretty good solution.

And when it comes to Ukraine, his solution there is, listen, we all know for several years that Ukraine is not winning back Donbass.

It's not winning back Crimea.

And so what are we doing here?

Let's solidify the lines.

We all know how this is going to end.

And now it's just a question of getting from point A to point B.

And by the way, all these sort of isolationist talk on the one end and the sort of accusations of Trump being a Russian cat paw on the other end, he totally blew those up yesterday.

He said, Listen, we are going to continue funding Ukraine sufficient so if Vladimir Putin does not win this war, that's what's pushing Vladimir Putin to the table.

But he does have to come to the table, and so does Zelensky.

This is all perfectly common sense.

It's just that in foreign policy, common sense very rarely seems to take the fore.

It's always establishment wisdom that tends to be tried, no matter how often it's failed.

Well, I think him cleaning out USAID,

which is a CIA State Department

operation,

and

saying to the State Department, you work for me and we're not doing any of this crap anymore.

That's the first time in maybe 100 years since Woodrow Wilson that the State Department has been really put in its place.

No,

we're not going down that road anymore.

It never, ever works.

I mean, I don't know if people really understand how transformative.

It's not just the size of government.

it's the role of each of these agencies and the arm of the administration.

We're not doing that.

We've done it for 100 years.

We're not doing that anymore.

And what he's doing here, along with Elon, because both of them know how businesses work, is what you would do if you ran a business, you spotted a part of your business that was totally not working, which is you can't go in and par around the edges.

You just have to break the thing and then you have to rebuild it.

And so if you look at USAID, for example, USAID was initiated in 1961 by JFK in an attempt to fight the Cold War.

And many of the things that it was doing were setting up, for example, pro-democracy organizations in countries that were sort of wavering between the support of the Soviet Union and the support of the United States.

Okay, fair enough.

That's fine with me.

We want to fund pro-democracy organizations in Cuba, for example, or in Venezuela to, you know, militate against the regime.

But that's after the Cold War, that stopped.

And it suddenly became, for USAID, a giant way to trans the kids in Guatemala.

It became just a way to spread sort of blue America values abroad without any reference to actual American interests.

And so what Trump has said, and this is what Elon is saying too, is, okay, we'll just, we'll zero it out.

Let's zero it out and then we'll figure out what was good because we can redo the good stuff, but you have to zero it out first.

And this is a completely different approach than any Republican of my lifetime has taken.

Republicans tend to say, okay, we need to shift the sort of policy direction of a particular agency.

We need to pare around the edges.

We'll find the bad stuff and like cut a little bit off the end that's like the bad part and we'll keep all the rest.

And what Trump is saying, listen, these institutions, and this is not just USAID, it's a huge number of institutions.

These institutions have been internally gutted by the left.

And the face of the institution has been worn around like a Hannibal lecter mask.

And now the only way to cure this thing is to just break it.

You break the whole thing down.

And then if we want to rebuild parts of it that are good, we can rebuild parts of it that are good, which is basically what Elon did, for example, with X.

He came and he fired 80% of the staff.

He broke all the systems.

And then he rebuilt kind of on an ad hoc basis how the systems had to work.

Trump is doing that with a lot of these agencies.

And so that's freaking people out.

But it's also one of the reasons why, as you say, he has to move fast, because he has to break it and then rebuild the parts that we want to keep.

He has to do that quickly before all of these sort of resistance sets in.

The tale that he's telling right now on a PR level is really smart.

What he's doing is he's saying, okay, listen, we have a mountain in Pennsylvania under which we're filing manila envelopes, and that needs to be stopped.

That's ridiculous, and it's a waste of money.

Is that most of the waste and fraud and uselessness in the government?

No, it's like a tiny percentage.

But what he's doing is he's saying, this is representative of the kind of thing that needs to go away.

And the only way we can get rid of this thing is to chemotherapy, right?

The only way to get rid of this cancer before it spreads and already has spread is to just chemotherapy the thing.

And that's going to kill some good things, but it's going to kill the bad things too.

And we can always redo the good things, right?

All the money is still that.

We can redo the good things.

But first, you have to kill the bad things.

You know, he's going to move into two new areas, which

let's just start with the Department of Education.

He came out this week and said, you know, I just want to to shut the whole thing down.

When he appointed Linda McMahon, I didn't see her as a radical.

I saw her more as a manager.

I was talking to Betsy DeVos, our former Secretary of Education, and she said, no, Glenn, she'll do exactly, she is a manager.

And she'll manage the end.

If that's what Trump tells her to do, she will just manage the end.

And it looks like that's what's going to happen.

What are we going to find in the Department of Education and the teachers' unions?

How is this going to go, Ben?

Oh, man.

Well, again, I think that so much of this is going to be attached to a public relations strategy that points out exactly the kind, like the worst examples of the stuff the DOE has been doing.

I know my friend Chris Ruffo, who we're going to have on tomorrow to talk about some of his breaking news, he's been talking about bringing out...

insane videos from the DOE and from DOE-funded agencies and what they've been doing.

And again, that is a very successful approach, right?

It's personalizing it.

It's making people understand the story.

It's one thing to say the DOE wastes hundreds of millions, hundreds of billions of dollars on educational grants that just go down the toilet and the kids aren't getting any smarter.

But it's another thing to say, here is DOE money that is going to drag Queen's story hour at your kid's local school.

And this needs to be zeroed out and everything like it needs to be zeroed out, right?

Like you actually have to pick the examples.

And I think that's what they're going to do.

Linda McMahon was involved with the American First Policy Institute.

So it's kind of fascinating to see how Trump's actually staffed the administration.

He's drawing very, very heavily from AFPI.

AFPI was essentially created as a think tank, as an alternative to some of the other big think tanks in Washington, specifically dedicated to trying to flesh out sort of the philosophy of Trump and making, you know, putting flesh on the bones of sort of the Trumpian impulse.

And he's drawing very, very heavily from that group.

So yeah, I'm sure Lyndon McMahon has been thinking about this for a very long time.

And I think the ad hocery of the first administration is totally gone.

This thing is working like a smoothly oiled machine, which is the last thing anyone expected.

And it's why the Democrats are freaking out right now, because they were expecting Trump to come in and randomly tweet things and then there'd be a mistake and they'd have to walk it back and then it would just be, it would be chaos because the first Trump term, it was chaos and it was chaos because Trump didn't have a staff.

He didn't expect

he won and then he was staffed up by a bunch of people he didn't like, right?

It's a completely different thing.

He told me himself over the summer, he said, Clinton, I wasn't prepared.

I thought I was.

I wasn't prepared to be president.

I didn't know how it worked.

I didn't know how many people were going to be put into my orbit that were were stabbing me in the back.

He's prepared.

I think the loss of 2020 turned out to be a huge blessing.

I totally agree.

I totally agree.

You know, it's one of those things where, and this happens so much in life, where you're like, why would God allow a thing to happen?

Yeah.

And then only in retrospect can you actually look back and say, oh, thank God it happened.

It turns out, right, it turns out that you knew what you were doing all along.

Shocker.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, in the moment, it felt terrible, but now, I mean, he had four years to sit and think, what do I do with my first hundred days?

And he is not wasting an hour.

I mean, there's stuff happening on it.

I mean, you're covering it.

I know.

Basically, you go off the air and within an hour, your show is dated.

I know.

Within an hour,

he's doing something else.

I know.

And how do you even keep up with it?

And the Democrats certainly can't.

And that's the other thing Trump really understands.

He understands that the news cycle can't keep up with him.

And so on a day-to-day level, he will drop a new giant measure literally every day.

I mean, last week, he ended transgenderism in college athletics.

And then, like, the next day, he announced that the United States was going to be effectively taking over land ownership in Gaza.

And then, the day after that, he announced that he was going to be zeroing out the Department of Education.

It's like every single day.

And so, by the time there starts to be any sort of point of opposition that perhaps the enemy of his agenda can kind of coalesce around, he's already moved on to the next thing.

And so, they can't keep up with him.

He's moving too fast.

Well, I tell you, when I was at Fox, this is exactly what Obama was doing, but not at this speed.

I kept saying over and over again: they're overwhelming the system.

You can't watch everything.

You can't stand guard at every gate.

There's just, it's too fast.

That was in 2008.

This is hyper-speed in comparison and massive, huge, massive.

So huge, huge.

And I think this is the thing that the Democrats are so upset about in kind of their gut.

What they're really upset about is that the thing that he is now dismantling is the thing that they built for themselves.

Yes.

There is a permanent blue pipeline that was created over the course of the last 120 years in the bureaucratic state.

It was just a permanent taxpayer-funded mechanism for funding their friends.

And when they were out of power, that mechanism kept working.

They just kept funding their friends.

They just kept sending money out to the American Federation of Teachers.

They kept sending money out via USAID to blue organizations that they knew were going to help them get elected and change the culture.

And this is all done in the executive branch.

The legislature never had any real oversight over it.

And Trump comes in, he says, well, hey, I'm the head of the executive branch, actually.

All these people work for me.

And that was the thing that no other Republican had done was basically say, well, if they're going to treat the executive when they're in power like a unitary executive, but then shout balance of power the minute a Republican gets elected, that doesn't work.

I think one of the differences between the Trump movement and sort of the MAGA movement and everything else, and I think this is a function of that statement that people have said, you know, what time it is.

Obama accelerated time.

Obama, the Obama era, I think, in many ways broke the country.

And I think what we're seeing now is a restoration.

That restoration can't take place unless the rules are equivalent for everybody.

I think Republicans kept saying, okay, we're going to play by the rules.

Marcus of Queensbury rules all the time.

And if they're bad, well, we'll be good.

When they go low, we'll go high.

And Trump is saying, listen, they set the rules.

These are the rules they set.

And now, it turns out, mutually assured destruction.

If you don't like those rules being set that way, well, let's talk about switching the rules for everybody.

But Democrats cannot in principled fashion claim that Barack Obama gets to use a pen and a phone to rewrite the way American government is done.

And the minute Trump does the reverse, they start screaming constitutional crisis.

That's not the way that this works.

And we're not going to take that seriously.

And it's not a constitutional crisis.

The administrator, the CEO, if you will, of the administration runs the administration, the bureaucracy.

That is his branch of government.

If they don't work for him, who the hell do they work for?

Well, here's the other thing is that they keep saying constitutional crisis because J.D.

Vance tweeted about the judiciary.

First of all, the executive has struggled with the judiciary for literally the entire history of the country.

I mean, going all the way back.

I mean, Marbury versus Madison, there's a solid case we made, is legally erroneous.

But even assuming that Marbury versus Madison is legally correct, the extent of Marbury versus Madison has, you know, been put into question.

And even if you accept the most maximalist version of Marbury versus Madison, the court says what the law is, nothing in Marbury versus Madison says that a federal district court judge in Washington gets to put a nationwide temporary injunction on a presidential measure for the whole country because there's one judge in California or Washington or New York.

That is not the way this was supposed to work.

I mean, that, by the way, only became an issue in the 1960s.

Before that, nobody had ever assumed that a district court judge had the ability to issue a temporary nationwide injunction on a gigantic piece of executive action.

Before that, it was basically there might be an injunction as applied to this plaintiff locally, right?

So if you sue against a law in California, maybe they put a hold on it in California, but they don't put a hold on it in Nebraska.

And so

if you're creating a constitutional crisis, that's largely because the judiciary is way out over its skis on this sort of stuff.

And by the way, it will be found to be over its skis if it reaches the the Supreme Court.

So Democrats are picking the form of their destroyer.

If they really wish to launch 100 different lawsuits claiming that Trump is wildly overshooting executive power, maybe they win on two of them, and maybe that power gets upheld on the other 98 by the Supreme Court.

And so you actually have not defeated Donald Trump at all.

All you have done is actually give

the Supreme Court the opportunity to clarify the unitary executive theory and actually spell out what the lines of that authority are.

Let me switch to, well, before I leave this section entirely, let me go back to Israel.

Two things.

I don't want to own Gaza.

I don't, a bad idea.

Nobody wants to own Gaza.

Yeah, nobody wants to own Gaza.

That's a bad idea.

I think this is a massive

negotiation tactic.

And like with everything with Donald Trump, if they

said, okay, you you rebuild, would he do it?

Yeah, I think he would.

But

I don't think that's the plan, but he'd do it if the world said, okay.

I think this is a negotiation,

and I'm hoping that's true, but I can't understand how Israel would even be for this.

That sacred land, I think this would be so bad in the spiritual sense.

for the United States to take that land.

That belongs to Israel.

Right.

So, you know, we can,

my view on Trump with the Middle East is basically just let him cook, right?

I mean, like, he seems to know what he's doing over that.

Right.

But I think that what he's talking about, one of two things is happening with regard to his Gaza proposal.

One is a syndicated real estate deal.

Under no circumstances, he's made this clear.

Will there be U.S.

troops on the ground in Gaza policing the place, clearing it up?

Like, that's not a thing.

What he has talked about pretty openly is having the IDF basically do all that work for him, right?

Essentially having the IDF clear the ground, make sure that it's terrorist-free.

And then, you know, the United States gets 99-year ground leases on all the really nice beachfront property.

And you get a bunch of investors from the United States and from UAE and from Dubai and

from Saudi and from all these other places to actually put in the money to build.

I think that's kind of what Trump is thinking, actually.

And so, what that means for the American taxpayer is not that the United States, quote-unquote, owns it in terms of like it's the 50, Gaza's the 51st state or something.

No, that's going to be Gaza.

It's the 51st state, as we all know.

Right, exactly.

But

what he's talking about, really, is basically an American economic interest in a place that

could be lucrative.

So he's talking about an economic interest, and he's saying that Israel should go guarantee the security there.

I think Israel would be very much in favor of that because I don't think that Israel would give up probably the ground rights to that area in that circumstance, mainly because the United States, again, does not want the ground rights because then the United States has to provide security there, which I don't think the United States, I don't want us doing that.

No, I don't think Trump wants us doing that.

No.

I mean, I don't want American soldiers on the ground over there.

What's our interest over there?

That doesn't make any sense to me.

But having the idea of clear something and the U.S.

makes money off of it sounds pretty good to me as an American.

I kind of like that.

And then it's also possible that it's a bargaining gambit.

And basically what he's saying is, listen, I'll take it, right?

You guys kept shouting free Palestine and Trump said, okay, I'll take some.

But, you know, but if you guys, you know, I'm offering to like build it up.

If you don't want me doing it, I need an alternative plan.

What's your plan?

Are you going to build it up?

Are you going to provide security?

If you want to provide me an alternative, I'm happy to hear your alternative.

And we'll see whether they come up with an alternative.

But yeah, again, without getting into sort of like biblical borders of historic Israel and whether the Gaza Strip actually is within those biblical borders, there's some questions about whether that's the case or not.

The truth is, Israel has never wanted sovereignty over the Gaza Strip in terms of

controlling that amount of land.

In fact, in 1967, during the Six-Day War, there was an open debate inside the war cabinet in Israel over whether to go into the Gaza Strip.

They tried desperately to tell the Egyptians to keep it.

And the Egyptians are like, nah, you got it.

All yours, man.

This has been like a perennial problem over there.

So, you know, whether it is an opening gambit for Trump to get the place rebuilt and refunded by other people, or whether it is a serious proposal that effectively

Israel is capable of clearing the area and then the United States makes bank on the real estate upside, either way is fine with me as an American.

And I think that the Israelis are probably okay with either one of those as well.

They're going into the DOD next, doge.

And I love this because what are the Democrats going to say?

The right-wing warmongers that just are always for defense every time.

When we start screaming from the rafters, are you kidding me?

You spent or you lost what?

What are the Democrats going to say?

Yeah, I mean, this is, again, he's wrong-footing them at every turn here.

And I think one of the big things that's going to happen in DOD, obviously, there are going to be examples of, you know, screws that cost $800,000

and million-dollar gold-plated toilets and that kind of stuff.

Those tend to be a little bit overstated.

But what will happen is the giant weapon systems that are basically a waste of money are going to get zeroed out.

What you're going to see is a shift in the kinds of weapon systems that the United States is focusing on.

Aircraft carriers are a thing of the past.

This is right.

This is right.

So I was talking with Sham Sankar, who's the CTO of Palantir, and he was talking about the kinds of new technologies that need to be pursued by the Department of Defense.

And he has a website called 18 Theses where he spells out what needs to happen with the Defense Department.

He basically says, this place is a bureaucratic nightmare.

It takes forever to get anything approved.

Everything moves through establishment proxies, which means that there's a bunch of people who have a stake in just doubling down on the stuff that's already not working.

And basically, you need to break the system and you need to make it more innovative, faster.

You need to experiment in kind of a free market way with 10 different things, and then two of them work.

And those two that work are just groundbreaking and dominant and are new technologies that nobody else has.

And that's where the United States really can leverage our innovative workforce and the fact that we are a leader in innovation in every sphere to really leap ahead of our enemies.

That's the kind of stuff I hope that Secretary of Defense Hegseth is going to do.

Aside from the fact, I think that it makes an absolutely enormous difference to have a Secretary of Defense who isn't wearing a face mask

to meetings and is actually going in training with the troops and is giving off an image of what young men would like to be if they joined the military.

I think that actually makes an enormous difference, both domestically as well as internationally.

I think Hegseth was a brilliant pick.

I think he's doing an amazing job so far.

And I couldn't be more enthusiastic about that.

But yeah, I mean, what are Democrats going to say when Hegseth and Doge go through?

They say, you know, we need to cut $100 billion from the defense budget this year just to get rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse.

And what happens then?

What is he doing

with Canada?

I mean, I don't know.

This is what I can't read.

I don't know.

I can't read it either.

Yeah, I mean, like, I have have no, do we want Canada?

Like, do we want it as our 51st state?

I mean, I mean, kind of in the sense that, like, screw those guys for the Battle of Montreal.

But, but I'm just like, and, and why are you, why are you a country in the first place?

Right, yeah.

But, um, like, but um, yeah, aside from kind of generalized antipathy for Canadian maple syrup, I'm not sure exactly what, what this is about.

I think that it's more about giving off an image of maximalism.

And that, I think, is fine.

Again, I would prefer that it be directed against countries that that we have more antipathy for and more problems with.

I mean, I'm glad that he's putting serious pressure on Mexico.

I wish we're putting even more pressure on China, right?

I would like to see him actually ramp up the pressure on China.

I think so far we've been a little bit too soft for my liking with regard to some of the measures that we're taking with regard to China, whether it's TikTok or a 10% tariff rate on China, but a 25% threatened tariff rate on Canada and Mexico, right?

It seems to me that we should reverse that.

When it comes to Canada,

listen, what I want out of Canada is Pierre Polyev to be the prime minister.

Me too.

And Justin Trudeau and the Liberals to to be out.

And so anything that gets in the way of that, I'm kind of against.

And anything that facilitates that, I'm very much for.

Do you think he's running a risk with these tariffs?

Because I see them as negotiating tactics.

He does believe in tariffs, and he believes in tariffs in the way I think our founders did.

Get rid of the income tax, let tariffs pay for everything.

But he also looks at them as a big stick to negotiate

and maneuver.

Do you think he runs the risk of

the world kind of going, hey, why don't we all get together

and say, no, once they all start to band together and it's an actual trade war, we're in trouble.

I agree with this.

So I think this is one of the mistakes that could be made here.

Tariffs can serve a number of purposes.

You can raise revenue.

You're never going to be able to replace the income tax at the current levels with tariffs.

It's just not going to happen.

The amount that we brought in with tariffs last year was like $80 billion, right?

It was $80 billion.

And the amount of tax revenue to the federal government was, you know, several trillion dollars.

So you're not going to replace that by any stretch of the imagination.

So the idea of substituting one for the other, I'm for it, but that also means you have to cut the government by 98%, which I'm also for, actually.

But I don't think that that's going to happen.

It's conservative porn.

Keep talking, baby.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, exactly.

I'll have what we're having.

Yeah, so I think that

as a replacement mechanism for revenue, I think unlikely to replace the income tax as a threat, sure.

I mean, it worked on Colombia.

It seems to have worked a little bit on Canada.

It worked a little bit on Mexico.

As a sort of negotiation tactic, bullying other countries into doing what we want, Panama.

I'm all for that.

I think that that's good.

I think it's a good negotiation tactic.

As a sort of principled, we're in favor of tariffs.

I think that's a pretty bad idea.

And the reason that's a bad idea is because exactly what you're talking about, the first move move that Canada and Mexico are going to make if those tariffs were to go into place, say, permanently without a negotiated way out, is to open their door to China because they're going to have to have another market to which they can send all of their stuff.

And so actually, it's going to open the door to China.

And this is one of the things that I think we have to be very careful about, even with things like USAID, right?

USAID needs to get zeroed out.

And then we actually do need to rebuild some of the structures that were there, but in a better way, because otherwise China will fill the gap in a globally competitive environment.

I think one of the mistakes that sometimes people on the right make is assuming, you know, in a vacuum, in a vacuum, we're never in a vacuum.

I mean,

if we actually create a vacuum,

that vacuum is very likely to be filled by China.

I mean, we did create a vacuum, which is why China ended up taking over both ends of the Panama Canal, for example, or ended up intervening pretty significantly in Mexico,

or is now taking over the South China Sea.

Vacuums are abhorred when it comes to international politics, and they're generally filled by our enemies if the United States is not in a pinpoint accurate, not bloated way, trying to act in those areas.

But yeah, I mean, I'm deeply fearful that I don't think the trade wars are good or easy to win

as a general rule.

I think that they can be a good negotiation tactic.

And I think this is where Trump excels, is that

he plays chicken a lot.

This is something President Trump loves to do.

Oh, yeah.

One of the ways you win when you play chicken is before you play the game.

You take a brick and you hold it up and you say, this is going right on the accelerator.

You think I'm not willing to go over the cliff?

I'm not even in control, man.

The brick's on the accelerator.

We're going right toward that cliff.

And listen, my feet are up on the dash and the brick's

on the gas.

And

I'll do it, man.

I don't care.

I'll just do it.

And I think that that's a lot of Trump when it comes to tariffs.

I think he's like, listen, I love tariffs.

I love tariffs so much.

I want to do tariffs.

I'm begging to do tariffs.

So if you want to have this fight, like, man,

don't threaten me with a good time.

Let's party, boys.

And I think that's part of the negotiation tactic as well.

Except I think

he is willing to go over the cliff.

And it very well might be.

Yeah, he never get there, right?

Yeah, I hope so, too.

But it's going going to be bad.

Yeah, I mean, his negotiation, the skill that he has in negotiating is the fact that

people look at him and go, that son of a bit might just do it.

He might do it.

You have to take him seriously.

He told me, he said he was having dinner with

leader of China.

What's his name?

Xi.

Yeah, Xi, President Xi.

And he said, we're at Mar-a-Lago and we're having dinner.

And he said, I knew I was going to strike Iran.

And he said, so I scheduled that to happen right in the middle of our dinner.

He said, so they came, whispered in my ear, Mr.

President, we're about to go.

He said, excuse me just a minute.

He left.

20 minutes later, he sat down at the table and said, yeah, I just struck Iran, killed.

this guy, this guy.

And he said, President Z looked at him like, whoa, you know, that's not what the president usually does.

And you did it with me sitting here.

And then he said, as they continued to talk, President Zi said something that he was thinking about doing, and Donald Trump said, you're not going to do that.

He said, it'd be bad for us.

You're not going to do that.

I mean, because I could make Beijing disappear.

And

Xi kind of laughed kind of half-heartedly and just stared at Donald Trump.

And Donald Trump just stared back.

And he walked away with not knowing if the president was serious or not.

I mean, that's

great.

No, that's him.

Your sausage mimuffin with egg didn't change.

Your receipt did.

The sausage mimbuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5.

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Prices and participation may vary.

And that's typical Trump.

I mean, when we did a fundraiser for him down here at Trump Dorale, and we were kind of in the back room, and he was talking about Ukraine, and he said, they never would have gone to Ukraine if I had been president.

Okay, why, Mr.

President?

And he's like, well, because I told that, I called it blad i said vlad vlad if you go into ukraine i'm gonna bomb the out of you right and he and he said and and vladimir putin said no you won't mr president i said well i might

and then he said right right and then and then and and then trump you know gives the punchline and the punchline is he says if there's a five percent chance the most powerful military in the world is going to bomb you you don't do it which yes but you have to be credible right i mean because joe biden is the least credible president in american history joe biden would say no no i'm all i'm saying is don't do it.

Don't do it.

Stop.

No, don't do it.

Everybody's like, well, he ain't going to do nothing.

I'm just going to walk right across that.

Hell, I'm going to, I'm going to Samba across that line.

Like,

ain't nothing stopping me from going across that line.

Trump, it's like, if you get within 100 miles of that line, maybe he warned you and maybe he didn't, but you don't know what's coming, right?

I mean, he could, he could clock you, he could give you a rose.

No one knows.

And I think that that's part of the magic of it.

So let me ask you: when this podcast is released

globally,

it will be Saturday,

noon.

The president said earlier this week, all hell will break loose.

And I don't mean some of the hostages.

I mean every single hostage.

If Hamas does not release them by noon on Saturday, all hell will break loose.

He's not one to paint a very vivid red line without backing it up

if you cross it.

What do you think's coming?

Right.

Well, I mean, I think that what he's doing there is something that's strategically quite smart.

So he's basically saying, listen, if there is no phase two of this negotiation, right?

It was a hostage deal that was supposed to have a phase one with these kind of drips and drabs, and then it goes to phase two, which is supposed to be quote unquote the end of the war and gradual release of more of the hostages.

He's saying, listen, I'm not investing in that deal.

That deal makes no difference to me, right?

If this deal goes sideways and Israel has to go back in, that's not on me.

That's on you guys, right?

You're the ones who are

doing this.

So I think that's the first thing that he's doing is disconnecting himself from the quote-unquote permanent end-of-the-war nonsense that was supposed to be in phase two of this deal.

The truth is that, listen, I agree with Trump and I disagree with the Israeli government.

I think the Israeli government is wedded to the idea of trying to get back as many hostages as they can, even with drips and drabs and releasing hundreds of terrorists in the possibility in the process.

I think it's a dumb policy.

I think that they actually should do exactly what Trump is saying.

Either they all come out or we're going in.

Whether the Netanyahu government actually does that, I think Netanyahu's wrong.

I think that Trump is exactly right on this.

And that's precisely what Israel's position should have been literally day one.

I mean, it should have been their position October 8th.

Should have been either all those hostages go out or we're going in.

And we are not stopping for love or money.

We are going all the way.

We will do whatever it takes to get our people back.

And we don't care what the rest of the world has to say.

Trump's basically saying it for them now.

So for Israel not to actually enact that, I think, is actually a political miscalculation.

Now, I understand, obviously, the politics are different in Israel.

The families of the people who are there are in Israel.

If you're one of the families of the three people who are supposed to come out on Saturday and suddenly they're not coming out and it's full-scale war again, and you've got to assume that those people are going to die.

That's got to be extraordinarily difficult.

With that said,

if I were advising Natania High, I say, listen to the president.

The president is right on this.

You've got a window to do the things you need to do.

You need to go do the things that you need to do.

And you can't win a war with drips and drabs and negotiating with terrorists.

But that's been my position since literally day one.

So

I have a friend who was

part of an elite military team

years ago.

And he said he was just in Israel.

And he said

he saw all these operators that he knew.

And he's like, Glenn, these are the people that don't write books.

These are the people that go in and kill people and then go to the beach afterwards.

He said, These are the elite teams.

And he said,

I saw a few of them there.

And they were like, oh, we're just vacationing.

You're vacationing in Israel?

Okay.

And his theory was, he said, I don't know, but his theory was

if they don't release him by noon,

Trump will go in with our special forces, our special teams, and get them and kill the people that had them.

Do you think that's a possibility?

I think it's less likely.

Again, I think that Trump does not want to throw Americans in harm's way.

Right, exactly.

I'm not in favor of American boots on the ground.

Now, there are American hostages who are being held, so I could see a world where Trump authorizes the attempted extraction of those hostages.

But But from what I understand from military intel on sort of both sides, meaning America and also Israel, is that the reason that Israel has not attempted a rescue of these people is because they're basically on hair trigger, meaning that all of the hostages, they know exactly, apparently Israel knows exactly where every hostage is in the Gaza Strike, like down to the room.

But the problem is that the minute that they go in, they're standing orders from Hamas to just shoot the hostages.

And so any sort of operation, because Israel is excellent at these operations, like truly amazing at these operations.

So if Israel can't do the operation, it's going to be difficult to see what United States operators on the ground would be able to do that the Israelis can't, given Israel's experience with this sort of stuff.

Again, I think that Trump's baseline proposal is correct here, and that is that either they all come out or none of them come out and

release them now or all hell breaks loose is the proper approach.

Again, I agree.

in a conflict between Netanyahu's sort of slow-rolling approach, trying to get as many hostages out for humanitarian purposes for the families, and Trump's let them all out or we're going to

exist tomorrow.

Then, you know, I agree with Trump.

I've always agreed with Trump.

I think that Trump's perspective on this is exactly correct.

What do you think of the idea?

I mean, that press conference between Netanyahu and

Donald Trump was like almost two hours late.

I mean, they were in the office two hours after they were supposed to be talking.

And

I saw him

take to the stage and say things like, all the Palestinians have to go.

I'm going to just move them out.

That's not something Benjamin Netanyahu can say.

By the way, that's also not something that Benjamin Netanyahu proposed.

Correct.

Okay, like I like it.

No, I know that.

Let's be clear about this.

Donald Trump literally told Netanyahu probably five minutes before they went on stage what he was going to say, if at all.

I mean, if you were watching that presser, Netanyahu looked like he'd been blindsided in the same way as the rest of us were, right?

I was watching it, and I'm pretty in the know about these particular issues.

I feel like I have good connections on pretty much all sides of these issues, from literally like the Arab side to the Israeli side to the American side.

I talk to people all the time on this particular issue, and I was like, what is happening right now?

I've never heard anything remotely like this, which, by the way, also shows, number one, Trump's the one in control, right?

It ain't nobody around him.

Nobody is controlling him.

He's nobody's puppet.

This is coming direct from Donald Trump.

And two, this White House is run like a machine, like a damn machine, because that you know that in Trump number one, that thing is leaked three weeks before.

Oh, yeah, yeah, right.

That's in the front page of the New York Times, three weeks beforehand.

And this thing, not only didn't it leak, people like Susie Wiles, right, who is his chief of staff, who is don't cross her up by what he was saying.

Yeah, yeah, no, Susie, Susie's a professional.

I mean, she's great.

She's running this thing like clockwork.

She is tremendous.

And she looked like, okay, this is the first time hearing about all of this.

And, you know, it's

all I can say is I've, and I feel tired saying this, but I've never seen anything like it.

I was, I will say, Donald Trump lied to me.

He said that I would tire of the winning, and I have not yet tired of the winning.

I demand more winning.

But the winning must continue at this base.

But it is.

The supply of winning is insufficient to meet demand.

It's coming close, but it's insufficient.

Yeah, it is

quite remarkable.

What does this say to you?

You know, people always said that he was stupid and

he's not an intellect.

He's probably one of our dumbest presidents ever, all that crap.

I look at him,

especially in things like you were just saying, that came from him.

He kept that quiet.

That's inside of him.

This whole approach is coming from him.

He's not being handled by anybody.

I think he is one of the

most out-of-the-box genius thinkers we may have had.

I mean, the thing about him is because he's undefined as a sort of political political entity, meaning that he doesn't have a thoroughgoing ideology, right?

Like some of us have spent our entire lives creating a thoroughgoing worldview on politics, and then things kind of fit within that worldview.

Trump is not a worldview guy.

He's a utilitarian when it comes to politics.

I want to get to point B.

How do I get to point B?

What is the easiest, best way to get to point B?

And that means he ends up cutting an enormous number of Gordian knots.

Because those of us who are sort of in the business of how does this fit into our ideology, it's like, okay, well, I want to do this policy, but it does kind of cross swords with this other thing that I think in general about the world and about kind of this principle that I have.

And these two principles are always in tension, but how do I push them to the brink without break?

And Trump's like, listen, we need to get here.

Okay, so we're going to go through here.

That's all.

We're just going to go right through here.

And so that is out of the box.

And that's what true innovators in a lot of spaces do is they think simply.

And by thinking simply, they end up cutting out all the complications.

It turns out that Gordian not, yeah,

he's a disruptor.

He's breaking a lot of the systems that have existed before.

And it's also why I have a a lot of faith that Hakor is correct.

I think that there are a bunch of things that have changed between Trump one and Trump two.

I think the number one thing that has changed is just, as I say, his emotional state makes an enormous difference.

Cool, collected Donald Trump is so good at this.

He's so good at this.

And I think that was the thing that was missing in Trump term number one, both because he didn't expect to win and he was badly staffed at the beginning and then because he was running up against the Mueller investigation every single day and two impeachments and all the things that we know about.

That's likely to stagnate anybody and put them on the back heel.

Oh, sure.

Because if you have to spend eight hours a day talking about how you're not a tool tool of Russia and then being subpoenaed by lawyers, obviously that's going to kind of mess up your presidency.

Trump comes in.

He's got an overwhelming mandate from the American people.

He knows how to do this.

He has a team he trusts around him.

And he's had four years to sit there and think of the things that he wants to do.

He can't run again.

So it's not like he has to like win another thing.

He doesn't have his eye on that.

And so that means that he can just sit there knowing that his balance, he's playing with house money now.

And because he's playing with house money, he can be as cool and he doesn't have to actually throw out the big gamble, or he can.

It doesn't really matter.

He can make those decisions on a sort of calm and collected basis.

His Twitter account is more sane, right?

That was the thing that we thought would never change.

We always thought, okay, Truth Social is going to be the place where he just kind of throws out random ideas and angry tweets.

His Truth Social is not an angry place.

He's announcing actual policy

in a fairly meticulous way on Truth Social.

Something has changed, right?

And the thing that changed is that he won.

The thing that changed that the American people,

I've talked about this before, usually when you have a first presidency, and this is a second first presidency, when you usually have a first presidency, it's unclear what the mandate is exactly for.

When Trump won the first time, was that a rebuke of Obama, or is that a mandate for Trump's agenda?

And we tend to equate the two things, but they're not the same thing, right?

Because most elections are about rebuking the other party very often.

You can say that Biden was elected because it was a rebuke of Trump in some way.

Trump was elected the first time in some way because it was a rebuke of Hillary Clinton.

Exactly, Exactly.

But here's the thing.

Normally, because he's elected the first, so the question remains, is it a mandate for Trump's agenda or is it a rebuke of the other guy?

In this particular case, because Trump had already won once, because he'd been president once, it wasn't like there was a roll of the dice.

What are you going to get from this guy?

We knew precisely what we were going to get from him, like down to the jot and tittle, like literally everything.

And so what that means is that is a mandate for his precise agenda.

He's not an untested quantity.

He's not a mystery.

We rejected Joe Biden in favor of a person that we knew better than any person on earth.

So what it's more like, it's not like, you know, a guy leaves his first wife for the second wife and then, you know, finds a third wife.

It's not like that.

What it's more like on a sort of a personal level is a guy leaves his first wife for a second wife and then he decides, no, no, no, you know, I had it better the first time.

I'm going back to my first wife, knowing all the flaws, knowing all the problems, knowing all the risks.

Okay, so that's not, that's not falling out of love with the second wife.

That's buying back into the thing.

And I think that Trump acknowledges that and realizes that.

And that's why the mandate feels different.

I've been watching politics my entire life, basically, and I've never seen a just generalized feeling in the, in the public like there is right now that a mandate has actually been given to the president.

Every president claims a mandate.

Obama claimed a mandate, but the mandate that he claimed in 2008, what was that about?

What it really was about is America wanted a black president.

We wanted to get past the sort of racial problems of the past in the United States.

It wasn't a mandate for Obamacare.

And as soon as he rolled out Obamacare, he got whomped, right?

The 2010 elections just go wildly the wrong way.

He loses 63 seats.

I mean, it's a disaster for him.

For Trump, right now, he's at somewhere between plus six and plus 10 in the in the public approval ratings.

And 70% of Americans are saying he's keeping his promises.

70% of Americans.

And they knew what his promises were.

And this is the thing Democrats are having such a tough time with.

They're saying he's a chaos president.

We're all saying, no, he's doing exactly what he said he was going to do.

Like, literally.

Literally the thing, right?

They're saying, how dare you leave Elon Musk in these places?

We didn't elect Elon.

No, you actually did.

He campaigned with him.

He said he was going to do the Department of Governmental Efficiency during the campaign.

He was a public speaker at the RNC.

Like, what are you talking about?

He's been at every single one of these big events for the last year.

What do you say?

Like, every single thing has been telegraphed, and that means there's a mandate for those things.

Now, could Trump blow that mandate sure?

Could there be an exogenous situation where the economy tanks, for example, and throws everything into chaos and now everything swings?

Absolutely.

But Donald Trump has a mandate to do what he's doing, and that's why the American people are giving him a lot of wherewithal to do it.

Do you think there is anything other than the economy that could slow this down?

That could...

I mean, I look at David Hogg as,

you know,

what vice chair.

I mean, that is crazy.

That's crazy.

They haven't learned a thing.

And

I can't imagine their strategy.

The only thing that I think can turn this is if things get, if they go poorly, really poorly, for the average person, the economy.

Where are the Achilles heels here?

I mean, that is the big Achilles heel.

I think that the economy is the thing that people really elected Trump based on, and that was largely based on inflation.

If the inflation doesn't come down for another year, it's going to be a real problem for him.

You know, the inflation is still running too hot because we're in sort of the aftermath of the Biden era.

I'm very hopeful that the inflation does come down, but that's going to be a major issue.

The economy is really the big one because Trump promised to be a pro-business president, and you can feel the mood.

I mean, you're a business person, I'm a business person.

The mood right now in the country about business is, oh my God, I can actually invest and be sure the government isn't going to try to steal my money or destroy my business.

Like the NLRB isn't going to be just sitting on my shoulders every single day waiting for me to make a boo-boo on air.

This is, it's a different field.

So if he's got all those things going for him and the economy tanks, it's going to be a disaster, like a historic problem.

Like this is, this is the, the way it could go wrong is that it goes all wrong at once.

And that, that could be a really, really like enormously horrifying thing because right now, the forces, as we've been discussing with all this, I mean, Glenn, you've known me for a very long time.

I've never been an optimist, as you well know, and yet a new

optimism has pervaded my being.

Me too.

I mean,

right.

I mean, and so when I get optimistic, I start to get a little worried because that's just the way I am.

And so it's like, okay, things are going really, really right.

How could they go wrong?

And if they do go wrong, here's here's what I see.

What I see is that he has perceived President Trump correctly as an incredibly pro-business president.

He's up there at the inauguration with the heads of all the big tech companies standing right next to him.

The most powerful, richest people on earth standing next to him.

He has unleashed Elon Musk on the federal government.

If the economy were to tank,

the claim that he was leading a greedy business oligarchy and that capitalism is to blame would go through the roof.

And you'd get a progressive revolution very quickly, right?

You could see the American people swivel from side to side.

It wouldn't take that many votes to swivel it.

I mean, Trump won.

He won by 10 million votes, right?

He won fairly, he won

large in the Electoral College, but relatively narrowly in the popular vote.

And so you could easily see a world, horrifying as it sounds, where a Bernie Sanders acolyte ends up running on a super progressive, a populist progressive agenda and ends up winning if the economy goes out.

That to me is the most predictable bad thing that could happen.

And then, of course, there are unpredictable bad things that can happen.

But I don't think those really affect Trump in the same way.

I mean, only if they lead to an economic downturn.

So, for example, China tries to take Taiwan, economic downturn breaks out.

That sort of thing could, but that would be more of an economic issue than a security issue.

I think security issues tend to play in favor of Republicans generally.

So

if there's an economic downturn due to war or a strategic move by somebody else, you think that hurts him as much as just an economic downturn?

I think that the willingness to attribute economic downturns to whoever is in office

is almost overwhelming.

And it almost doesn't matter even if a recovery begins.

We learned this from George H.W.

Bush, where there was an economic downturn in 91.

By 92, the economy was already recovering.

Didn't matter.

His approval rating had dropped from 73% down into the 30s.

The American people are really unforgiving of bad times economically, and they tend to attribute it to whomever is the president, regardless of sort of the underlying rationale for that thing.

And so, you know, whether it's China attacking Taiwan, disrupting all of the microchip markets and disrupting the trade routes, and that leads to a bad thing, or whether it's just the bottom falls out of the price-earnings ratio, you know,

any one of those things could really hurt President Trump, obviously.

So,

you know, you look at

this, and

it is

the strategy.

If I were evil on the other side, the strategy was,

how do we trigger that?

How do we trigger that?

You know, because we're losing all of our money, all of our funding.

We've lost the pipeline to forever blue.

We've lost all this.

We have nothing else to lose.

We've got to collapse this.

How, what are the odds that there are those

of our own country that are thinking that way?

You know, I always hesitate to call anybody a a traitor because what you're talking about is actual treason.

Treason.

If you're attempting to tank the economy in order to get a president out of office, like deliberately tank the American economy and hurt all of your fellow Americans in order to get a president out of office, that makes you a traitor by definition.

So I'm always hesitant to sort of accuse people outright of treason.

I'd be more worried about a foreign adversary doing it.

I mean, China has an enormous amount of control.

China has tentacles nearly everywhere.

China has bought an awful lot of people in this country, and a lot of people have made themselves willing to be bought by China.

Again, I think all it would take to trigger a global economic downturn, if that's what China wanted to do, would be some sort of blockade of Taiwan.

And that's sort of the most predictable action that could be taken that would almost overnight destroy a huge percentage of the world economy.

Because people don't understand it's not about the United States intervening in Taiwan.

It's about the fact that 92% of all sophisticated superconductors on the planet are made in Taiwan.

And so

even if the flow stops, forget about China getting control, even if the flow stops, then stuff stops working really, really, really quickly.

It's one of the reasons why President Trump is trying to reshore a bunch of this stuff.

The problem is it takes a long time to reshore a lot of that stuff, right?

He's trying to convince TSMC, which is the chip maker in Taiwan, to start building domestically in the United States.

But the ramp-up period there is fairly significant.

It's not like it happens overnight.

It takes a while to get there.

So to me, that is the single greatest risk is that China decides to go for it with Taiwan simply.

to screw Trump, feeling that their window is closing.

That to me is the single greatest, which is one of the reasons we really need to upgrade our defenses in the South China Sea.

We need to start thinking creatively about the kinds of, you know, to get back to what we were talking about with the Department of Defense, we need to modernize a lot of the ways we're thinking about this.

Aircraft carriers ain't going to do it anymore.

You know, there's a lot that needs to be done.

The aircraft carrier is the horse of World War I.

Yes.

I mean, we'll send them in and they'll all be dead.

It'll all be dead because it's just, it's not

feasible anymore.

You know, you're talking about chips.

The race to AGI ASI

is

profound.

I was struck this week with

our vice president compared to our last vice president who sat with the tech moguls and said, AI is

two letters, but it actually means artificial intelligence.

And I'm thinking, oh my dear God.

And then here comes J.D.

Vance this week

laying out our position on AI.

our energy, where we don't have the power systems at this point to be able to really actually command ASI.

We're going to need new power plants, new nuclear power plants, most likely,

and server farms that are beyond the imagination.

China is already building all of the power.

I mean, they're building it like crazy.

I think they have 14 nuclear power plants under construction right now.

do we win this race is it possible to win this race

yes i mean i think that it's certainly possible but it will require an effort to as you say the energy grid is is one matter and then there's just the innovation and the truth is that china because it offend it essentially has a fascist economy top-down directed uh largely based on sort of intellectual property theft.

I mean, even some of the claims that were being made about DeepSeek originally, that it was running, you know, they built it for a few million dollars, or they weren't using NVIDIA sophisticated microchips.

They were using the crap that was in your Teddy Ruxbin from 1992.

All of that was nonsense, right?

A lot of it was being made with NVIDIA chips that had been basically pirated or bought through third-party sources.

The innovation that could be unlocked in the American economy is always, I think, going to put us ahead.

But China is going to pour tremendous resources into one type of specific AGI, right?

There are a bunch of kind of angles that you can take.

And it's not that they didn't do something clever.

They actually did something quite clever with DeepSeek.

I mean, for those who are sort of interested in AI, you know, AI has been seen as sort of a giant data crunch.

It combs the internet.

Chat GPT is basically reading all the internet and then trying to predict.

It's effectively a very, very sophisticated predictive text mechanism, trying to predict what would be the most likely and more useful next word.

What DeepSeek did is it basically siloed information into, I think, 17 different silos and then said, okay, this question belongs in this silos.

That meant it was faster because it was now referring to the experts within this silos.

So you don't have to comb the entire internet.

You're just combing this particular section of human knowledge.

But the sort of constraints that are going to be put on AI in China for political reasons are going to be pretty significant and pretty severe.

And that's not true with all of the iterations that we're seeing.

I mean, I am constantly astonished by what the AI can do now and whatever it can do now.

Remember, you are seeing the worst version it will ever be right now.

Oh, yeah.

Right.

Today is the worst version of it.

Tomorrow is going to be better.

And it's going to be better the day after that.

The stuff that this stuff can do is,

I mean, it's world breaking what it's going to be able to do in a bunch of ways, both good and bad.

And the other day I was working with Perplexity, which is another one of these AIs.

And Perplexity, I wanted it to summarize the arguments in like a three-hour YouTube video.

I found the YouTube video.

I put the address into Perplexity.

I said, summarize the main points of this video.

And within two seconds, two seconds, it had scraped the entire video and provided me a full breakdown and outlined form of the arguments that were being made on both sides.

I mean, that sort of, that sort of efficiency is insane and radical.

If we don't win that race, then China is going to win because they're just going to be able to do things faster and better than we are.

And if you want to see what that looks like, just look at Europe.

Europe, there are all these memes online about China is having a wrestling match with the United States and Europe is over there playing with a TI-82.

Europe has no clue what's going on.

They've regulated themselves out of the game, which is the point that JD was making.

The thing about JD that people forget is JD is a tech bro, right?

I mean, he got started by going over to Silicon Valley and working with Peter Thiel and starting his own firm.

And JD knows all the people who are doing the AIs.

So it's not as though J.D.

is some sort of like backwoodsman from Ohio who's never seen a computer before.

And he's not old either.

He's a kid.

I mean, he's younger than I am.

And he's the vice president of the United States.

So, yeah, again, I think that I'm optimistic about the future of AI in the country.

And I think the Trump administration understands that if we don't win that battle, we're going to lose the war.

And that's a bad one.

Let me talk to you about

different figures.

Let's start with Fauci.

I

didn't think Fauci would go to jail.

I didn't think there'd ever be an investigation.

I was so jaded and so blackpilled on these people get away with everything.

I think there's a chance Fauci goes to jail and it may happen through the States.

Your thoughts?

Yeah, I could see an attempt.

I think that to peg him down to a particular crime, just put it on the lawyer hat for a second, to peg him down to a particular violation of particular statute is much more difficult than to sort of generically say he's a criminal.

I think that many of the things that he did were criminal.

I think that he effectively committed perjury when he was talking about the funding of

the Wuhan laboratory overseas.

I think that his attempt to suppress alternative methodologies of addressing the pandemic by going after people like the new head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, those should be criminal.

But again, putting on my lawyer hat, I'd have to find which statute he actually violated, violated and then what is the likelihood that you can actually convict him on violation of the statute that that really is more of a legal question and i will there be desire absolutely i mean there'll be it'll they'll go down a lot of paths i think there'll be a lot of paths gone down with fauci

uh what about what about others what about uh

uh

what about the bidens is there going to be anything done on the bidens that that seems to keep rearing its head strangely

yeah well i mean i i think that you know president we now are in an era where Trump on his way out the door is going to pardon himself and his kids.

Because now that Biden has done it, he's going to have to.

That's just going to be the way that this goes from now on.

Because Biden breaking that sort of taboo by accusing Trump of wanting to prosecute his kids and him, it means that Trump can't now leave it up to chance, whether that's going to happen with him or with his kids.

And so this is just going to be the way that it goes from now on, probably to the end of American history, whenever that is, a thousand years from now, it's going to be every president who is, you know, pardoning his kids and himself on the way out the door.

The only person that Biden didn't pardon, obviously, was himself.

I think the idea that Trump is going to put Biden in the dock, I don't think that Trump ⁇ here's the thing about Trump.

I don't actually think that in this particular way he is that vindictive.

I think there's this kind of feeling in the public that he sometimes is.

And you can see evidence of it in removing security details from people that he feels is crossed and that kind of thing.

But when it comes to actually putting Joe Biden in jail as an 80-some-year-old man who's clearly seen out, I think that his judgment is probably the same as Robert Hurst was.

And that judgment lost Joe Biden.

Like history's judgment has already been made on Joe Biden, and it could not be a worse judgment.

I mean, Joe Biden is going to go down in history as the interregnum between two Donald Trump terms.

And as a person, Joe Biden's entire image, which was based on this lie that he was sort of a garrulous, kindly, you know, well-spoken, glib young man who then became a nice uncle, like every bit of that was destroyed.

He leaves office as one of the most disgraced people in American history, both on a scandal level, from pardoning his own family level, to not being able to speak words out of his face hole, to just

to being effectively dead and being wheeled around.

I mean, the minute that Donald Trump was elected, he was president and he wasn't president yet.

I mean, November 5th, Donald Trump was effectively the president of the United States and the rest of the world treating him as such.

It's unbelievable.

And so, yeah, I think that any more kind of jumping on the corpse,

we're now in the Simpsons.

Stop, stop.

He's already dead, but he's actually already dead.

Right.

Is there something to be said with setting

the precedent that

no,

we're at least going to expose you if we can't put you in jail.

We are going to expose this whole thing.

Well, that I think will happen.

I think there'll be House investigations of Joe Biden.

I think that there should be investigations into nearly every aspect of the Biden administration.

I do.

I think the amount of money that was flowing around the Biden administration is insane.

I think that the amount of misappropriation of funds to, again, these, I think what Doge is uncovering is for purposes of cutting.

What Congress should be uncovering should be for purposes of prosecution.

And I think that a lot of what was going on inside the Biden administration, I think, probably does violate statute and needs to be investigated every which way.

The Epstein files.

I talked to Alan Dershowitz today, and he was adamant.

I want everything.

I want every tape.

I want absolutely everything released.

He said nothing can be held back.

I agree with that.

However, I am a little concerned about how these lists are being made.

Is it a phone book?

Is it a client list that we're signing up for the massages?

I mean, I don't want to witch hunt.

You know what I mean?

But I do think

all of it needs to come out.

It's too much information and power for anyone to hold.

I mean, I totally agree with that.

Every single bit needs to come out.

And absence of information isn't going to cut down on the conspiracy theorizing.

It's going to increase it.

So if you say, well, we don't want to let out the list because we're afraid that somebody who's mistakenly mentioned on the list is going to then become a target of iron.

I promise you that person has probably already become a target of irr just because people are speculating about who the hell's on the list.

Right.

And so, you know, more information is generally better.

Like, let's get it all out there.

Listen, Derschwitz is a case in point, right?

I mean, Derschwitz has been mentioned in sort of proximity to Epstein Island.

And the reason he's saying that is because he's saying, okay, put all of it out there.

And then if you find me guilty, find me guilty.

But that's actually the way that an innocent person would act, right?

If you were on the list, I know, or if I were on the list, I'd be like, I want all the information out there.

I don't want anything held back because you guys are just sitting there speculating about me all day long.

Like, put everything out there, every single little bit of it.

Of course, the American public have a right to see all that information.

We have a right to see what the, how the hell, what I want to know is where the hell the guy's money was coming from, right?

Like, how did he get so rich?

Like, no, no, nobody ever talks about like where his money was coming from.

And I want to know that.

Like, what, what the hell was there?

There are too many questions, right?

I'm the least conspiracy-minded person that I personally know in this space.

And he he knows we've discussed this before.

I tend to believe that conspiracies require actual intelligence and a coherent ability to put together a plan.

And I think most people are morons with no ability to do any of that.

And so I tend to attribute nearly everything to human stupidity, frailty, and idiocy, as opposed to, you know, kind of malevolence and people in backrooms.

But when you look at Epstein, you're like, something was going on.

I would love to know all the things that were going on.

Of all the sort of scandals and conspiracy theories that are floating around, I always found the Epstein ones to be the most plausible and most credible as opposed to many of the others.

Yeah, I think there was, I mean, I don't know if he was gathering information, he was

getting people that, you know, our CIA, you know, needed to have in their pocket.

I don't know what it was, but something was very, very wrong.

I mean, besides the children's stuff, something was very wrong.

How do you get away with that for so long?

I agree.

And you can't.

And the problem is, I can't, I like debunking conspiracy.

I like good explanations.

So like, give me the material so I can debunk it or give a good explanation, or at least get to the point.

As you know, I'm not a fan of just asking questions.

I think just asking questions is very often cover for people pushing an agenda without actually having to provide information.

It's one thing if my children are just asking me questions, they're children.

If I'm an adult and I'm just asking questions, typically it's because I have an idea of what I think the answer ought to be.

But in this particular case, I think that we're allowed to just ask questions because I have no idea what the hell is going on.

And

it's hard for me to determine what's even a plausible conspiracy theory at this point with regard to this story.

JFK files.

They come out.

I mean, release all of it.

Yeah, I mean,

release all of it.

Release all of it.

I mean, listen, I'm a super big believer that Lee Harvey Oswald shot the president.

There was no second shooter.

If there is any conspiracy related to Lee Harvey Oswald, by far the most plausible theory is that he was working with the communists.

The communists were very much afraid that that was going to be the conclusion that was drawn by the United States government in the aftermath of JFK's assassination.

I mean, Lee Harvey Oswald had literally been in the Soviet Union.

He went to the Cuban embassy shortly before he went and tried to assassinate JFK.

At the same time, he did have a screw-loose.

He tried to assassinate somebody like a week before.

He failed, right?

There was a general in Texas and he shot through his window and missed him.

So

I've never been a believer in the sort of like dark CIA, JFK wanted him dead kind of stuff.

I've never seen the plausible evidence for that.

And the sort of Oliver Stone, it was everyone.

It felt very, you know, bizarrely Agatha Christie to me.

You're right.

Okay, so yeah, we're all on the train and we're all combining to stab this guy.

Like, okay, or, or maybe all the forensic evidence stacks up in one particular direction.

And I've done a fair bit of reading on the JFK, like every other American.

Yeah, yeah.

We've all done a better bit of reading.

I just, I find the conspiracy theories surrounding JFK the least plausible because we have the most information, but not all of it, right?

I mean, put all of it out there.

And if I'm wrong, then okay, let's talk about it.

I would be,

I think, remiss if

I don't,

if I have you on, a disruptor, early disruptor of the media,

and me an early disruptor of the media, you did Daily Wire, I did Blaze.

I have to ask you, Ben,

the state of the media and the power of the

what now is, I think, mainstream,

but was called the alternative media, it's astonishing what's happened, isn't it?

Yes.

I mean, it's amazing.

There are people who are claiming all the way back in like 2004.

I remember when Dan Rather put out that fake letter about George W.

Bush.

Yeah, yeah.

And

people on our side were like, ah, the mainstream media is dead.

And then they spent the next

nearly 20 years proving they certainly were not dead.

And they could define narratives and they could lie.

And they could really define how Americans thought on a wide variety of issues, ranging from BLM to

COVID to Russia gate to all of that sort of stuff.

I think 2024 was a definitive nail in the coffin, maybe the last nail in the coffin for the legacy media.

Like the legacy media's ratings are awful, awful.

That doesn't mean their numbers are awful, meaning they're a fan club, right?

The New York Times is a left-wing fan club.

It's no longer seen as the sort of objective source of news.

The New York Times is what we are, but for the left, right?

I mean, everyone knows we're conservative.

And so if you're conservative, maybe you subscribe to Daily Wire, you subscribe to The Blaze.

And if you're a lefty, you subscribe to the New York Times.

It's the paper of record for leftists.

But no one perceives the New York Times as a sort of middle-of-the-road, objective newspaper newspaper that's simply trying to separate the facts from the opinion.

No one perceives them that way.

And with that, they lose an enormous amount of their sort of brand leverage.

That's even more true, the Washington Post, which doesn't have the circulation of the New York Times and is becklowning itself every single day.

And I think one of the things that the media are struggling with right now is they keep trying to turn the ship and they don't realize that the wheel has been disconnected from the rudder.

They actually don't have control of the ship anymore.

That rudder is not connected to the thing they're trying to steer.

And so they keep trying to create and craft new narratives and throw them out there.

So they went went from, it's a threat to democracy to constitutional crisis.

And everybody's just like, no, no,

no, and no, the answer is no.

And I think that that is a tribute to what all of us in the alternative media have done, weathering, by the way, an extraordinary number of storms thrown at us by the federal government and its apparatchex and social media.

I mean, I think people need to understand, we've spoken about this before between us and also just generally.

The amount of pressure that was put on social media by Democrats in the federal government to shut down alternative media was extraordinary and it was real.

It was an attempt to destroy all competition to the legacy media.

And that was the prevailing way that social media acted basically from 2017 all the way until 2024.

There were intermittent periods where they sort of let up the boot off the neck briefly.

And then the Democrats would threaten them and they'd put the boot right back down on the neck.

And I think that 2024, by Trump winning in spite of all of that, by Democrats not being able to control the narrative, I think that the legacy media has been definitively castrated here.

And I think, by the way, the turning point is not just the perseverance of people in the alternative media, which obviously is a huge thing.

The thing is that Joe Biden is guilty.

Joe Biden did this.

And the reason Joe Biden did this, I think that the most undercovered story of the last election is maybe the most covered story, but still I think people underestimate its significance.

Joe Biden effing that debate with Trump was the single most important political moment probably of our lifetimes because it wasn't just that it forced him out of the race.

What it did is it exposed the entire legacy media infrastructure, all of them, all at once, right?

They had been saying for years, for years, you and I were talking about Joe Biden being senile in like 2019.

I know.

And they were like, no, no, no, he's fine.

He's totally fine.

It was a cheap, like weeks before, literally weeks before that debate, they were saying it was a cheap fake to show tape of him on stage with Obama, Obama guiding him off stage because he didn't know where the hell he was.

So they were maintaining that narrative consistently.

And then Joe Biden was stupid enough to get on that debate stage.

And I was like, well, maybe he knows something we don't.

Maybe the media knows something we don't.

Because what moron would go on a debate stage knowing he's senile only to class.

I said, I remember because we were covering the debate for Daily Wire.

We'd be at our backstage and then we covered the debate.

I remember saying right before him, well, the one thing we know is not going to happen is he's not going to just die up there, right?

I mean, like, he wouldn't do it if you were going to just die up there.

That'd be crazy if you were just going to go up there.

Like, they'll shoot him up with something, right?

We were all having these conversations between us.

It's like, okay, what sort of concoction are they going to pump meth?

Like, what's it going to be?

What's the jab that goes into him to keep him fairly alive throughout this debate?

Because we'd seen it before, right?

State of the Union, you get him a little bit pumped up.

It's like 8:05 at night.

He could go for like 30 minutes.

He'd start to wind down, but he wasn't going to die up there.

And then he went up there and he died.

I mean, he almost literally died on the state.

Almost immediately.

Right out the gate.

I mean, it started, and there was a picture of him staring at the grim visage of death off-screen with the goggly eyes.

And you were like, oh my God, death is going to take him in the middle of this.

Like, he can actually see the grim reaper with the scith standing off to the side no one else can see it it's an episode of the twilight zone and he's staring at it and we're watching him on split screen and i think in that moment the legacy media died in that moment it became clear that they were not surprised by this because none of us had access to biden right you had an interview biden i didn't interview biden and they wouldn't give us access to biden but all these guys had access to biden And so that means they knew.

They were in the know for years.

And then the story started coming out about how the legacy media actually did know for years, about how they'd been at events with him, where he'd had to be basically guided out, where he would blankly stare at people, not understanding that he was in the middle of a conversation.

And so at that very moment, the entire American public was subjected to the reality, which is these people lie and they lie with an agenda.

And you can't put that genie back in the bottle.

They tried to do it by pretending they were shocked.

They went on TV that night.

Oh my God, we're so shocked.

No, you're not.

You all knew him.

You saw him last week.

You went to the White House and watched him fall asleep and his face fall into his gruel.

Like you watched it happen.

And then you lied to us with motivation.

And so we know you don't get back your credibility after that.

You blew it and you blew it irreparably.

Ben, it's great to talk to you in a, I mean, because we're both optimistic for the first time in our relationship.

I haven't been optimistic since, I don't know, 1974, maybe.

I don't even know.

It's been a long time, but

it's...

It's a nice respite and nice to have the faith that there are people who are actually looking out for the future of our country and freedom.

I hope this continues for a very long time, but it's good to have this and good to be with you.

Thank you.

You and me both.

And I hope that we look back on this in a couple of years and we say that that was just the beginning of the good stuff.

And that we don't look back in a couple of years and think, man,

were we optimistic at that point?

Said like a true pessimist.

Thanks, Ben.

God bless.

Thanks.

You too.

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