Ep. 1712 - Let Him Cook! Stop Pretending You Understand Tariffs

Just when the free traders thought that President Trump really was going to hurl us into a global depression, and just when the protectionists were convinced that Trump was going to hold firm on all the tariffs, just when the pundits and prognosticators and all manner of bloviators were dead certain that they knew exactly what Trump was going to do and why he was going to do it, President Trump confounded all of them by pausing his tariff plan for 90 days on every country but China. And of course, as is always the case with pundits and prognosticators, both sides are claiming victory.
The free traders, the panic hands, as Trump dubbed them, insist that they prevailed in convincing Trump to abandon the policy. The protectionists, on the other hand, insist that this was really the plan all along, to bluff with all the other countries only to zero in on China, 5D chess.
And both of those theories have big holes in them, which we'll get to in one second. But amid all those voices of total confidence, among all the people who are frequently wrong but never in doubt, there was one man who offered an alternative view.
You know how much it pains me to say I told you so. But there was one man who said that both sides of the debate were talking out of their derrieres.
There was one man who admitted the unspeakable obvious, namely that no one, including senior administration officials, really had any idea what the rationale was behind the tariffs, that Trump's distinct political gift is unpredictability. A man who offered this advice on how to handle the situation.
In case you forget, here is a little clip from just a couple of days ago to jog your memory. We'll see how this goes.
It is entirely possible that this doesn't work out. It sends us hurtling into a global recession.
Republicans get completely destroyed in the midterms. A Republican never wins election again.
It's all possible. Okay.
But Trump's gut has been pretty good so far. He won re-election with a mandate to do something different, something much like this.
I would just say, channeling my inner spiritual Zoomer, let him cook. Okay.
Let him cook a little bit. See what he whips up in the kitchen.
Trump has a good gut. He's got a good track record.
No one knows what he's thinking.

But he won a big election.

And we should just let him cook for a little bit.

Then yesterday, while everyone was trying to explain why his own definitive theory was always correct,

the White House published this three-word statement on the matter.

Let him cook! Exclamation point. I'm Michael Knowles.

This is The Michael Knowles Show.

Welcome back to the show. Also, just when you think all the silly pronoun nonsense is over after the 2024 election, the Dems make a big point to double down on it during the CNN town hall.
And the White House responds with its own policy on they, them pronouns. We will get to all of that in one moment.
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The one thing that you are not allowed to do

in- slash Knowles today, get these very luxurious, delicious potato chips for 25% off. The one thing that you are not allowed to do in political commentary, in politics generally, is to admit uncertainty in anything.
But sometimes admitting uncertainty is the most precise take. All of these people, they were so smart.
They knew exactly what Trump was going to do. They knew exactly why Trump was going to do it.
And they all look foolish today. And look, it takes a big man, it takes a very big handsome man with a great cigar company to admit when he doesn't know exactly what Trump is doing.
But if you admit that fact, then when Trump reverses course and zags when everyone's zigging and confounds everybody else, at least you were honest. You actually give the correct take on things.
So what are the alternative views? You're going to have the pundits and prognosticators declaring victory today for their perfect predictions. They're going to say, no, no, this was always the plan.
This was always the plan. We just threw global markets into turmoil and obliterated a lot of wealth on paper and irritated all of our allies because we were actually always trying to arrive at this exact position where we take away most of the tariffs on basically everyone except for China.
And there is some good evidence for that position. Some good evidence is that the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a very intelligent, very capable man, obviously senior administration official, has said this was the plan all along.
This was driven by the president's strategy. He and I had a long talk on Sunday, and this was his strategy all along.
And you might even say that he goaded China into a bad position. They responded, they have shown themselves to the world to be the bad actors.
And we are willing to cooperate with our allies and with our trading partners who did not retaliate. It wasn't a hard message.
Don't retaliate. Things will turn out well.
So you might say Trump has goaded China into a bad position. And what is the bad position? The bad position is they've revealed themselves to be bad actors.
And so anyway, we were just kind of fooling around with our allies, but China looks really bad. Okay.
The one side can point to them. The side of the argument that says, actually, Trump just got spooked and this wasn't the plan all along and he was just reacting to markets can point to this somewhat off the cuff statement that Trump himself made yesterday.
Is it the bond markets that persuaded you to reverse course? I was watching the bond market. The bond market is very tricky.
I was watching it. But if you look at it now, it's beautiful.
The bond market right right now is beautiful uh but yeah i saw last night where people were getting a little queasy i think everything had uh well the big move wasn't what i did today the big move was what i did on liberation day we had liberation day in america we're liberated from all of the horrible deals that were made all of the horrible trade deals that were made and i was helped by people just like this senator congressman and friends right and uh we had great help in the senate our republican senators have been amazing they stood tall and likewise in the house okay so there you got it right from trump he says yeah i bond market. People were getting a little bit queasy.
So anyway, but that's not the big deal. The big deal is what I did when I implemented the tariffs.
So both sides of this are going to declare victory and that they were right all along. And the fact is, even today, we don't really know.
We don't really know. To this day, I could not tell you exactly what Trump was after on April 2nd with the tariffs.
I can't tell you exactly what he's after right now. And neither can you.
And neither can any of these pundits who are pretending like they got a crystal ball. They don't know anything.
You think you can predict Trump? Okay, cool, man. Good luck.
I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. We still don't know.
So there's a 90 day pause on the tariffs. That means that the Dow Jones shot up what, 3,000 points yesterday.
Trump here is talking about the bond market. The US bond market cratered yesterday.
Some people were wondering, well, hold on, did the bond market crater because China started dumping US bonds? Don't forget, China owns a lot of U.S. debt.
China owns something like, on paper, $800 billion worth of U.S. Treasury securities.
And in reality, probably it's closer to a trillion dollars or even more than a trillion dollars. So there was this thought, okay, we're in a trade war with China.
China's really playing tough. They're going to stick it out to the end.
Maybe they started dumping US bonds to destroy the US bond market, which obviously did spook a lot of people. President Trump is admitting there.
He says, yeah, people are getting a little queasy about that. Regardless of what this means for the strategy on the tariffs, which I don't really care about.
Trump's got a good gut. He's got a good track record.
It's a fool's errand to try to predict what he's going to do.

And I think we're just going to let him cook for a little bit.

I'm not saying forever.

I'm not saying give him a total blank check to do whatever he wants.

But the guy won a big election.

He's got a good track record.

Just whatever, man.

Don't sweat it.

Don't be a panicking.

I'm all for that.

But this does reveal, I think, the vindication of the Trump protection strategy writ large, by which I mean this. I don't think that China was dumping US bonds yesterday.
I was talking to an investor friend of mine who said, no, I don't think it was China. I think it was actually some other firm.
And it was other market forces beyond the Chinese government trying to really get us. However, what that revealed was a major strategic weakness for the United States.
We are really susceptible to fluctuations in the bond market because we're a country that has an insane amount of debt and a ton of our debt, what, two to three percent of our debt is owned by our biggest geopolitical adversary. And that's a problem.
That's not Trump's problem. It's not even, it is Trump's problem, but it's not a problem created by Trump.
It's not a problem created by Joe Biden. It's a problem that goes back decades at this point, but it's a major problem.
It highlights the absolute urgency of reordering our relationship with China, which went off the rails during the Clinton administration because we stupidly allowed China into the World Trade Organization. And we said that bringing China into global trade in a robust way was going to lead to democracy, and China was going to westernize even more and liberalize, and we were all going to hold hands and sing kumbaya as citizens of the world.
And that didn't happen. And now we're extremely vulnerable to China.
It's unclear who would win a trade war, US or China. And it's clear that we have a lot of weak points that China in particular can exploit.
Now, on top of all of that, the market rallied like crazy yesterday. When Trump said we're going to put a pause on most of the tariffs for 90 days, the market went nuts.
3,000 points up on the Dow. The investors loved it.
However, we should not draw the wrong political conclusion from that because while the markets love freer trade and the markets seem to hate protectionism and certainly seem to hate the volatility, public opinion polls are revealing that the American people are on exactly the opposite side of that issue. We'll get to that in one second.
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Before the announcement yesterday that Trump was going to pause the tariffs for 90 days, before the big market jump, Trump's approval rating was still up. Not on Wall Street.
I don't think his approval rating was up on Wall Street, not with big investors, but with the American people. 45 percent, according to Rasmussen, of likely U.S.
voters said the government does not do enough to protect U.S. manufacturers and businesses from foreign competition.
In other words, 45% saying, we love the tariffs. Only 17% said that the government protects American business too much.
So when you hear all of the pundits and all of the prognosticators and all of the fancy people at the think tanks and on TV with the bow ties saying, actually, the real problem is that the government is doing too much to intervene in the economy. And actually, they're picking winners and losers.
And actually, here's my economic analysis of why that's really bad. Just know that is a view held by 17% of American voters.
45% of voters, almost three times that group of people, say that the government needs to do more to protect U.S. manufacturing.
25% think that the current level of protection against foreign competition is about right. 14% are not sure.
25% saying the current level of protection against foreign competition is right is a little confusing because that poll came out after Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs. Now, it's before the effects of those tariffs were really felt, but that might mean a quarter of people saying, yeah, Liberation Day tariffs, that's good.
That's the right amount of protection. On top of that, 45% of voters said the country was on the right track, up from 44% before the Liberation Day tariffs were announced.
So you've got this amazing scenario where the market is saying one thing and the American people are saying the polar opposite. The market's saying, we hate these tariffs.
This is horrible. We've lost confidence in Trump.
Everything's good. The Dow Jones is going to tank, the NASDAQ, the S&P, the bond market.
everything's going to go into the gutter. And yet after the

tariffs, the American people say, oh, we actually approve of Trump even more now. Before the tariffs, before that increase in his approval rating, Trump had a 44% approval.
That was 98th percentile over the last 19 years of polling when it comes to presidential approval. That's pretty good.
and it went up with the tariffs.

Most people are not panicans, to use that great phrase, and most people, or the plurality of American voters at least, are not ideological free traders. Virtually everyone in the chattering class and the political class and the elite class and the investor class are are ideological free traders the lion's share of americans are not so what does this tell you this tells you that there's a showdown between wall street and main street which is exactly what the treasury secretary mr besant pointed out yesterday when he was speaking to the American Bankers Association.

For the last four decades, basically since I began my career in Wall Street,

Wall Street has grown wealthier than ever before, and it can continue to grow and do well.

But for the next four years, the Trump agenda is focused on Main Street. It's Main Street's turn.

It's Main Street's turn to hire workers. It's Main Street's turn to drive investment.
And it's Main Street's turn to restore the American dream. The ideological free traders and the libertarians and the ideologues are not going to like that statement because they're going to say, actually, a rising tide lifts all ships.
And actually, when Wall Street does well, that is good for Main Street. And actually, it doesn't matter if American manufacturing exists at all because Americans are going to save so much money on cheap Chinese goods that they're going to get an extra $5,000 or $6,000 a year effectively in their pocket.
And so who cares if they have a job? Who cares if they have skills? Who cares if they're rooted in their community? Who cares? They're going to get a bunch of cheap stuff. And in the abstract, that's really, really good.
And yeah, they might not have families and they might overdose on fentanyl and they might just kill themselves, but we don't need it. Let middle America die.
There were people who wrote and said such things the first time Trump was talking about this in 2016. But Besant and Trump understand a really important political point, which is that politics is not just about some ideology that you can write in a university textbook.
And politics is not just about ticking up GDP a little bit because there are going to be downstream effects that are really good. And everyone's a consumer as well as a producer.
And if we're saving money on our consumption, that's really actually good when you really think about it. There were decisions that were made at the level of the federal government over the past 30, 40 years that allowed, as Besant points out, Wall Street to flourish a lot of the time

and Main Street to suffer.

There were trade deals that were signed.

There was an intentional move in policy to do this.

And it was because the men at that time,

going back at least to the Clinton administration,

weighed the costs and benefits and said,

okay, at this moment,

this is what's going to benefit our society.

But politics is applying eternal principles to changing circumstances.

And when you've got the average American life expectancy declining because of deaths of

despair, driven in particular by middle-aged white guys, when you've got American towns

being hollowed out, when you've got America strategically really, really vulnerable,

because if there's an epidemic and the supply chains get messed up, we're not going to get our food or our medicine. Even if there's not an epidemic, if China just decides that it's going to dump American debt, we're going to be up the creek without a paddle.
Okay? That means that you need to reorient your policy. It's not, when Besant says we're going to privilege Main Street, we're going to stop focusing so much on Wall Street, he's not engaging in leftist class warfare.
He's not saying we hate the Wall Streeters. Scott Besson is a very famous and very successful Wall Streeter.
What he is saying is in order to advance the common good and in order to have a functioning polity, we need to refocus a little bit. We need to rebalance.
We have neglected one group for too long. And so we're not going to punish the other group, but for the good of everyone, we are going to refocus our priorities.
This is good stuff. This is a very serious conversation taking place on the right.
Meanwhile, on the left, there were no serious conversations taking place. CNN held a town hall last night for some reason with Bernie Sanders.
And as they're attempting to find the Democrat answer to the real debates on the right, to the real policies that are being enacted, Democrats don't seem to know what they believe about anything. While they're trying to work through these issues, some woman asking a question focuses on the real issue and corrects Anderson Cooper

because he referred to her as she. We're back with Senator Bernie Sanders.

I want to introduce Grace Thomas. She's a local civil rights attorney.
She's a Democrat, Grace.

Say them pronouns, actually. Thank you.
Good evening, Senator Sanders. Polling and turnout data indicate that men of all racial demographics are turning away from the democratic party okay i want to translate that exchange jake tapper sitting there saying okay we're doing this show because we really want democrats to have a chance at even possibly winning elections okay so we're going to turn to you lady in the audience and then the lady takes the mic she goes uh yeah i actually don, I actually don't care.
I don't want to win elections. I don't want to.
I don't care at all. I want to make myself as repulsive as possible to the American people.
I want to identify myself in this party with an issue that is so deeply unpopular that we're going to get blown out of elections for the next millennium. And you see Tapper, there's, or not Tapper, sorry, Anderson Cooper, tomato, tomato, Anderson Cooper, they're just saying, okay, we're still doing this.
We were still doing they, thems. Okay.
Hey, you know what? Let's just wrap it up. Good night, everybody.
We're going to, we'll try this again in two or four years. And maybe then the Democrats will have any interest in even attempting to win votes from people.
But good night to you and they and them and those maniacs. Are you looking for a better quality meat? Good Ranchers delivers 100% American beef, chicken, and wild-caught seafood Bernie to try to give some sort of vision for America.
And Bernie decides he's going to articulate the new Democrat vision by trying and failing to quote Ronald Reagan. So the idea that this nation, which all of us want to see as a, what did Ronald Reagan call it? The city on the mountain.
Shining city on a hill. City on a hill.
Close. Sorry.
I don't quote Reagan all that often. But, you know, we want to be a model to the world.
We want people to look at us and say, we want to be like the United States, not, oh God, United States, what are they doing? A nation with this degree of biblical illiteracy cannot long endure. That nation is doomed.
I don't, what did Ronald Reagan say? America's like a big, fat, shiny mountain or something like that. I think he called it a shining city on a hill.
Yeah, whatever. I don't really, I don't quote Reagan that much.

Where'd he put that?

Was that in win one for the Gipper?

What movie, was that the movie with the monkey?

No, actually it was a,

Reagan got it from Governor John Winthrop.

Model of Christian charity.

One of the most important speeches ever given

in the United States.

Oh yeah, Winthrop, I like him.

Yeah, where's that? Where's he from? He was from somewhere in Massachusetts. It was a Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Yeah, anyway, he was a smart guy. Actually, he didn't.
He got it from the Bible. He got it from our Lord.
You don't know where the phrase a shining city on a hill is from? It would be like saying, yeah, what's that that phrase a man had seven daughters no i'm you're thinking of a man had two sons yeah yeah man had two sons i don't quote veggie tales very often no it's not there there was a time there was a time in this country not so long ago where if if you uttered the phrase, a shining city on a hill, everyone would immediately know, not only where that comes from, that that is a statement from the Bible, from our Lord, but also would have known the rhetorical and intellectual history of that phrase in America. They would have known that it comes from Governor Winthrop.
They would have known that Ronald Reagan liked to articulate it. There was a time where if you said there was a man who had two sons, people would immediately know.
Their mind would immediately go to the parable of the prodigal son. There was a time when we had a common cultural language and common cultural idiom and vision that happened also to be Christian, the religion that has animated not only our country, going back to the Mayflower, which is a great cigar company, and also goes back to the religious zealots who founded our country, but also that animated our whole civilization.
And. And we don't have that anymore.
A US senator who is super old can't tell you the phrase, a shiny city on a hill. I don't mean to make a mountain out of a molehill, as it were, but this is pathetic.
We are becoming just babbling baboons in this country, okay? And our country is going to get uglier and stupider and much less coherent and much less powerful as a result of that. We are truly becoming Philistines.
This is completely unacceptable. And I don't mean to just single out Bernie Sanders.
I remember, I think it was Leon Cass made this point, the great bioethicist at the University of Chicago, made this point years ago, maybe decades ago at this point. He said he was teaching some of the creme de la creme students at the University of Chicago, one of the elite institutions of higher learning in this country.
And he said every year, he would just ask out of the blue, he would say, hey, who's noah who's noah one of the most important figures in the bible he said every year, he would just ask, out of the blue, he would say, hey, who's Noah?

Who's Noah? One of the most important figures in the Bible. And he said every year, fewer and fewer students knew who Noah is.
You can't understand Western art. You can't understand the development of Western thought.
You can't understand Western society without knowing who Noah is, without knowing what the shining city on a hill is, without knowing the basics. Good grief.
Now, speaking of a religious foundation, really, really important piece in the New York Times. And I'm almost willing to say it's a really good piece.
It's a pretty good piece. It's called, Are Embryos Property? Human Life? Neither.
Here it is. It's an opinion piece.
I say it's almost a really good piece because it's taking the issue of IVF and surrogacy and the baby industry seriously. So that's why it's quite good.
It doesn't go deep enough on an extraordinarily important question, but it's quite good. I don't mean to counter-signal it.
I give a lot of credit here to Anna-Louise Sussman and the New York Times for even running this. I'm going to read just a little bit from this piece.
Are embryos property human life? Neither. Before fertility patients, this is right at the top of the piece, before fertility patients begin the long journey through hormone treatments, egg retrieval, fertilization, hopefully if everything goes well a baby, there's the paperwork.
As a first order of business, would-be parents are typically presented with a form that requires them to choose the fate of embryos they do not use in the course of building their families. And it goes on to talk about three couples who filled out such contracts.
The clinic later said that one family chose to donate any remaining embryos to scientific research. Another decided to destroy any embryos that were frozen after five years.
And a third said any embryos deemed not suitable for reproductive purposes, whatever that means, could be used for research and eventually disposed of. It was not clear, in other words, that these families intended for all of their embryos to be born.
So you're saying you create a child, you create multiple children from sperm and egg. These are your little kids.
And then you have to fill out a form. You can donate them to unethical scientists who can experiment on your children, eventually kill them, or you can just kill them straight away or after a period of five years after you've frozen them for five years, or you can take the ones that you don't think are good enough, that might, maybe they have some defect, maybe they're not going to be tall enough.
They're not suitable for reproductive purposes, and they can be both experimented on and destroyed. However, this is where the piece gets really interesting.
Ultimately, their preferences were moot. In December 2020, a hospital patient wandered into an unsecured room where the couple's embryos sat in cryogenic storage, picked up the frozen embryos, and stung by the cold, dropped them on the floor.
So he just oopsie-daisy, you know, instead of carrying out your cocktails and dropping them at a restaurant, he's carrying out cryogenically frozen children of yours, drops them on the ground, and kills and kills all of them now you might think that the parents wouldn't care that much because they've already signed these forms they say whatever we're gonna you can destroy them you can experiment on them you can do whatever you want but we don't really care however in february 2024 the alabama supreme court ruled that these lost embryos were extra uterine children which allowed the three families to proceed with lawsuits against the fertility clinic under the state's 1872 wrongful death of a minor act. So here, don't just try to pin this on those crazy socially conservative Republicans who are ruling that little embryos are actually children, which they obviously are by any serious definition.
It's the three families too. The three families who had signed away their kids to be experimented on and destroyed, they now could sue.
Between the creation of these embryos and their destruction, and as the cases wound their way through years through Alabama courts, their meaning shifted. No longer potentially destined for research or disposal, each embryo had taken on the status in the court's interpretation of a minor child.
Then a friend of mine, Leila Bresco Sargent, wrote, as the New York Times quotes, as the New York Times writes rather, the case turned embryos into, quote, Schrodinger's persons, resulting in one parent bizarrely needing the embryos to be considered persons in order to prevent them from being born, and the other parent needing to argue that the children were property in order to let them be born. Eventually, Judge Richard Gardner reasoned that, quote, as there is no prohibition on the sale of human embryos, they may be valued and sold and thus may be considered goods or chattels.
In other words, the only way to rule on this issue of IVF and surrogacy in the baby market in a way that satisfies the liberal pro-IVF side is to use the language and legal reasoning of chattel slavery, antebellum southern chattel slavery. Then in March, another judge rejected Judge Gardner's rationale, calling his reasoning that human embryos could be valued and sold as enslaved people once were in Virginia, a strained construction.
How is this a strained construction? This is the only construction that makes sense if we are to tolerate IVF and surrogacy and the baby industry. How else do you do it? In order to defend IVF and surrogacy, you have to argue both that the babies are babies and people, and property rather.
You have to argue both of them at the same time. You have to argue that they're babies in order to protect your babies so that when some clinic worker drops them, you get to sue.
You have to argue that they're babies if you're to have any kind of coherent conversation about what you're even doing, why do you go to the baby store in the first place?

It's to get a baby.

But you have to argue that their property, in order to buy them, in order to sell them, or to sell your eggs or rent your womb out,

you need to argue that their property, in order to order them destroyed, you have to argue that they're property in order to donate them for scientific experiments. It has to be both.
And so if you support IVF and surrogacy in the baby industry, you must adopt the precise reasoning that was used to defend slavery in the antebellum South. And that is going to make a lot of libs super uncomfortable.
And I want to give props to the New York Times here, because even if they get the issue a little bit wrong, the New York Times is more willing to discuss this issue than even some conservatives, than even some pro-lifers. Because there are some conservatives and pro-lifers, and I understand it, who will say,

well, I got my kid through IVF

and I hadn't really thought through

the bioethical implications.

And I love my kid.

And my kid is obviously a good in himself.

And anything that would prevent me

from having my kid, I oppose.

And so I'm just going to,

I'm going to turn my reason off for a second.

And I'm just going to say I support this thing blindly

without ever dealing with the bioethical implications of it. New York Times is saying, no, we'll deal with it.
Good on them. This debate will occur.
And one final point on it. I don't want to hear in the debate that, you know, this is really just a scientific question.
This is not even a religious question. This is a scientific question.
You hear this sometimes from pro-lifers, from social conservatives, who are trying their best to appeal to a liberal, atheistic culture. So they say, no, no, we're not talking about religion.
No, religion, no, no, we'll keep religion out of this. We're just going to talk about science.
Well, yeah, science is only going to take you so far. if you're having a debate over policy and ethics, you need to have recourse to religion because you need to come to certain conclusions about morality.
You can't talk about ethics without morality. You need to come to certain conclusions about human nature, what a human is.
Politics is how human beings live together. So you got to know what a human being is.
You got to define it. And that's going to partake of religious reasoning.
Okay? It is a religious question. All politics ultimately comes down to religious questions.
The slavery debate in the 19th century came down to religious questions. Can't avoid that.
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Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe. My favorite comment yesterday is from SandyK067, who says, I'd rather admit that I don't understand how tariffs work than pretend that I do and look foolish.
Yeah, well, that makes you smarter than 99.9% of pundits and economists going on TV right now. No one knows how these tariffs work.
Even if you understand in principle how tariffs work, and there are some people who do, recognize we haven't had a tariff regime like this, or like what could have been before the announcement yesterday, the 90-day pause, since like 1930. Okay.
It's been about 95 years since we've seen something like this. And actually, the Trump Liberation Day tariffs are more expansive than the Smoot-Hawley tariffs.
Okay, so that's best case scenario. But then you add on to that Trump's unpredictability, yeah, no one knows.
No one knows. And if you admit you don't know, at least you're being honest.
These are the other people. They're not being honest.
And their predictions don't come true. Now, speaking of honesty and truth in the media, the White House press secretary has just made a really important policy decision when it comes to how the White House is going to communicate.
Caroline Levitt has told the New York Times, quote, as a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters who have pronouns in bios. There were some reports coming out that journalists were writing to the White House and they were having their emails ignored.
They were told they wouldn't get an answer because the journalists listed pronouns in their bios.

Any kind of pronouns, even if you're a man, it says he, him, or a woman, she, her. But even the crazy ones where you're a man, but it says she, her, or you're an individual person, but your pronouns are they, them, or something.
Regardless, Caroline Leavitt says, quote, Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story. So true.
And this gets back to the point, I think the Trump administration, I think Caroline Levitt, the whole communications team has done such a great job. I said during the transition, I said this is a great opportunity, not only for Trump to reset the relationship between the citizen and the government, but also the relationship between the citizen and the press and the government.
And in order to reset that, in order to boot some hack establishment reporters out of the White House briefing room, in order to give new voices a seat at the table, in order to reset all of this, you have to first ask yourself, what is the press briefing room for? What is the White House press pool for? Why does the government talk to reporters in the first place? There's two reasons. One, so that the White House can communicate with the people, typically done through a medium.
There was a medium of communication. Media is the plural of medium.
And the other reason is to have the people's questions asked of the government. That was also done through this medium or multiple media.
Today, in the age of social media, those reporters are much less important, just off the bat. But, assuming we're still going to keep some reporters in the room, if the purpose is to truthfully communicate what the government's doing to the people, and truthfully communicate what the people want to know to the government, then if you have reporters who are dishonest, whose views and priorities are totally out of sync with those of the American people,

who bear an irrational hatred of the government and will lie about the government to the people, then what's the point of having them there? The first thing you have to look for in a reporter, especially one who is going to be given the privilege of access to the White House, is their trustworthiness.

Are they going to tell the truth?

Are they going to tell the truth? Are they capable of telling the truth? Are they willing to tell the truth? Can they be trusted to do their job with integrity? If a reporter feels the need to write his pronouns in his email bio, that tells you right off the bat,

that person has a tenuous at best relationship with the truth.

Even if they're the correct pronouns,

the fact that he even thinks it's necessary,

if a guy named Johnny feels it's necessary to write his pronouns,

or if a big husky dude walks up to someone and says, my pronouns are he, him, or what,

even if they're the correct pronouns,

you say, oh, you don't have a strong relationship with reality, so we're not going to talk to you. That is a good policy.
That is not only a justifiable policy, and it's certainly not punishing the White House's enemies needlessly. That's just doing what the White House communications team was built to do.
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Now, speaking of the administration, I've been meaning to get to this for a little while now, a couple of days, but the news just keeps coming in so fast. Are we going to World War III? We have just seen, and this is barely being reported, the largest deployment of stealth bombers in U.S.
history. Six B-2 aircraft sent to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
B-2 aircraft that are designed to evade Iranian radar and air defenses. Aircraft that are not being held in hangars.
They're being put out for all the world to see, all the spies of the world, all the satellites can take pictures of them. Trump, meanwhile, telling Iran that hell will rain down on them, that's a quote, and bombing the likes of which they have not seen could result if Iran proceeds with its nuclear program and doesn't come to the table.
Are we headed to World War III? Are we in World War III? What is this about? Very clear what Trump is doing here. Sometimes it's a little dicier to interpret what Trump is doing, as we've discussed today.
This one to me seems pretty clear. Trump is speaking in blunt terms to Iran to bully Iran into toning down the nuclear program.
Trump is sending a message to Iran by sending the largest deployment of stealth bombers in history out right in the open for all to see.

But he's not posting pictures of those bombers on Truth Social or Twitter.

Why?

Because he needs to convince Iran that he will strike them.

He needs to convince Iran that he will do it, that he will blow up Tehran if they pursue the nuclear weapon.

But simultaneously, he needs to assure Americans that he won't really do it. Because Americans don't want war with Iran.
But the United States needs to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon for our long-term strategy. So Trump has this very difficult balancing act.
And are we in World War III? I heard there are Chinese troops fighting in Ukraine right now with Russia. That's what Zelensky said.
We were talking about Schrodinger's baby earlier. This is sort of Schrodinger's war.
Got massive tariffs, massive trade hostilities, massive buildup of arms, direct threats of war. Are we? Lots of uncertainty.
All right, that's where we've been. Embrace the uncertainty.
Don't immanitize the eschaton. Don't imagine that we need to, we don't know.
We don't know what is going to happen, even tomorrow. But what I do know that's about to happen right now is that Congressman Mark Harris is going to come on the show to discuss a really,

really important legislative priority, which we'll get to in one moment. The rest of the show continues.
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