Ep. 1835 - Lib Magazine DISRESPECTS Trump With Botched Photo

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President Trump secures the release of the Israeli hostages, the end of the Gaza War, and for now at least, peace in the Middle East.

It is the most significant international achievement of a presidential administration in decades.

All of President Trump's critics have to eat crow.

He did the impossible, and Trump's enemies are so angry about it, they shaved off his hair.

I'm Michael Knowles.

It's the Michael Knowles Show.

Welcome back to the show.

Vice President J.D.

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They just can't help themselves.

They can't help themselves.

Trump did the impossible.

He did the thing that everyone said he couldn't do, that his enemies said, oh, wear a MAGA hat if Trump gets the Israeli hostages released.

Oh, could you imagine?

It was a punchline in the first term.

Can you imagine Trump?

What's he going to do?

He's going to bring peace to the Middle East, right?

Then this war breaks out on Biden's watch, the Israel-Gaza war, the October 7th massacre, two years of strife.

And then Trump ends it yesterday, and he brings the hostages home.

And it's just a completely unimpeachable, indisputable, astounding success.

So the libs know.

that they have to acknowledge that he did this amazing thing.

They already set the stage for it.

There was no way to back out of it.

They had to acknowledge it.

And even as they acknowledge it, they have to try to just twist the knife a little bit.

So Time magazine gives Trump this cover.

And it's Trump's face.

And it says, His triumph by Eric Cordalessa.

Then another article, The Leader Israel Needed by Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel.

Then How Gaza Heals by Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Isa.

Okay.

And what's the picture?

It's a picture from below of Trump looking up.

So already we're at an angle that is not flattering ever.

You never want the picture going up your nose.

But already it's a bad angle.

And

it's this angle that puts almost exactly in the center of the photograph.

Your eye is drawn because of the lines of his collar, of his necktie, of his neck, of the near centrality of this particular point of the image.

It's President Trump's neck kind of being pulled in a wrinkle wrinkle in at his collar.

So it's not, it's not a flattering image.

And I say this without, without myself attempting to flatter Trump.

He's a good-looking guy.

Trump is a good looking guy.

And before he got into politics, most people would acknowledge that.

He's a good-looking guy.

He's tall.

He's well-built.

I'm not saying he's fobby.

I'm just saying he's a good-looking guy.

He cuts a strong image on stage.

and on camera.

That's why he was a number one TV star on network TV for 12 to 15 years.

And this picture picture is not flattering.

This image of where that looks like it, I don't know, they're making his face look like it's saran wrap being wrapped around a basketball or something.

Then you look up at his head, and it's

a good facial expression that he's making.

It's optimistic.

It's looking up, looking up toward heaven.

We'll get to the significance of that.

But there's something missing.

Can you tell what's missing about this picture?

Beyond they make him look wrinkly and it's just an unflattering angle on anybody.

The angle gets rid of his hair.

You get a little wisp of hair on the right side of his head, the left side of his head, so the right side of the image, it basically looks like he's bald.

Light shining through it, a little bit of hair on the back, but it,

where does hair go?

They got rid of his hair.

So they take a picture of this man, who is, you know, for a man of a certain age, he's a good-looking guy.

They take the least flattering picture they can, but the key to it, and this is the part I don't think other people have really picked up on, they get rid of the hair

intentionally.

First of all,

images in newspapers, in magazines are selected with great precision and specificity.

There are people whose job it is, the photo editors, to pick the images.

Every part of the images are intended to convey something.

When you're talking about a legacy outlet like Time Magazine, the stakes stakes go much, much higher.

When you talk about a cover image, it's much higher still.

They picked this image intentionally.

And everyone's just focusing on, oh, they made it look like his neck is wrinkly.

Oh, they made it look like his head is kind of oddly shaped.

And the key to it is the hair.

And Trump picked up on that.

Trump is the only other person I've seen who's picked up on this.

He posted on Truth Social.

Time Magazine, wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the worst of all time.

They disappeared my hair and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely extremely small one.

Really weird.

I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles.

This is funny.

You know what's funny?

I saw that he posted about this.

This is my first time reading it, and he's picking up on all the points that I mentioned.

I never like taking pictures from underneath angles, but this is a super bad picture and deserved to be called out.

What are they doing and why?

Like, I skimmed it, but I actually hadn't paid much attention to what he actually said.

He hones in on the key piece: the hair.

Why did they get rid of the hair?

Just to, because they think it's funny if they make them look bald?

No.

they had to get rid of the hair because the hair is president trump's most distinctive physical feature people have been making trump hair jokes since the 90s okay for my entire life and i grew up in new york where trump is a very well-known figure now he's a globally well-known figure but especially in new york people have been making trump hair jokes since the 90s for 30 years more than 30 years

they had to get rid of trump's hair because they had to diminish the distinctive nature of Trump's accomplishment.

Trump did something that other presidents have failed to do.

Trump has achieved the biggest foreign policy win since the end of the Cold War.

And while they couldn't deny that he did that, it's manifest, it's obvious,

the next best thing they could do was diminish the Trumpiness of the whole thing.

So what they're going to try to do is say, well, this was a victory for America, or this was a victory for the presidency or something, but they're going to try to diminish the trumpiness of it.

They have to detrumpify the moment.

And so they're detrumpifying the picture.

They're taking away his distinguishing feature.

And there is a deeply psychological reason behind this.

For 10 years now, since Trump seriously entered into politics, the image of Trump has been presented as the face of evil.

The next coming of Hitler.

Time magazine actually made Trump kind of look like Hitler.

Their photo editors previously had a picture, I wish I could call it up right now, that was reminiscent of Hitler in Time Magazine, sitting on a chair, looking over his arm.

And so they've made the typical picture you think of Trump, head on, serious expression, you know, hair in full view.

They've made that into an image of evil.

Because Trump has done something here that is undeniably good,

they have two options.

They can either try, implausibly, to say that it's actually bad, just like everything else Trump does, or

they have to try to convey that it's not really Trump.

They chose the latter course.

That's what this is about.

It's not just that this is a particularly bad picture of Trump.

It's that the image doesn't look like Trump.

Go back to the image.

Trump's head, when you look at it, is like rectangular.

He has a particularly rectangular rectangular head normally.

This image is weirdly round.

In

the typical Trump picture, he has a ton of hair.

In this image, he barely has any hair.

In the typical Trump picture, Trump's hair is blonde.

In this picture, because of the lighting, and who knows, maybe because of the photo editing, his hair is white.

It's not just that it's a bad picture.

It's that it doesn't look like Trump because they have to deny that Trump did this.

Because Trump can't have done this because they said he was Hitler and he was going to cause World War III.

And instead, he has brought about a considerable degree of world peace and he received a standing ovation in Israel, something that Hitler probably would never do.

That's what's going on here.

That's what the photo editors were getting at.

That is what the left is going to have to grapple with here.

If we have now reached, Trump's done a lot of great things that they've tried to deny.

Oh, no, the immigration policy is bad.

He's not actually deporting all those criminals.

And it's bad if he's deporting people anyway.

And his tariffs are going to cause the destruction of global trade.

And actually, shoot, the global trade's going fine.

All right, the tariffs aren't even implemented yet.

And it's just they keep tripping over themselves.

But with this one, it's just the hostages are back.

The hostilities have ended.

The major global conflict, regional conflict involving the entire world in the hottest area of the earth has been resolved for now.

Shoot.

Okay, let's just pretend it wasn't Trump.

Now, what does Trump think about all this?

We'll get to to that momentarily.

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President Trump on Air Force One, speaking to reporters,

takes a 30,000-foot view.

He's on Air Force One, so maybe it's a 40,000-foot view of geopolitics.

We're talking a lot about the Holy Land.

He's considering religious matters.

He previously had said that he wants to resolve these wars because he wants to please God so he can go to heaven.

Peter Doocy followed up on this and said, can you expound upon

upon where heaven fits into your political strategy?

Here's what he had to say.

Okay, I really don't.

I think I'm not maybe heaven bound.

I may be in heaven right now as we fly in Air Force One.

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to make heaven.

I love this answer.

I love it.

And it's not just the left that's criticizing him for this.

There are people who identify as Christian, who are baptized Christians,

who are very angry at this answer.

And they point to this answer and they say, this is evidence that Trump is not a true Christian and he's not really saved and we need to spread the gospel with him.

I don't know about Trump's personal religious convictions.

I see his public religious convictions and I'm very impressed by them.

I think he's obviously

a great leader for Christians in America and throughout the world.

But even on this answer, as it pertains to Trump's personal life, I love it because this answer is humble.

It expresses a kind of humility that is deeply Christian.

He's making a self-effacing joke about his own unworthiness of salvation.

He says at the top, he goes, you know, look, I was being a little cute about the...

I was being a little cute about the heaven thing.

He's setting the stage for it.

Look, I'm making a little joke again.

He said, but me, I don't know.

He said, hey, Mr.

President, if you fix the war in Ukraine, is that going to get you into heaven?

He goes, me, I don't know.

I don't think I'm heaven bound.

Some pearl-clutching Christians, they say, he's confessing that he's damned.

He doesn't have the theological virtue of hope.

He doesn't know that he is.

He's making a joke about his unworthiness.

Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Most politicians are the Pharisee who says, oh, Lord, I thank you that you you have not made me like these wretched sinners, these tax collectors.

Trump is in the person of the poor man who knows his unworthiness who says, Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.

I grant he's not saying, Lord, have mercy on me here explicitly.

I do think there is quite a bit of that implicit, though.

When he says, me,

I don't know, I don't know if that, could anything get me into heaven?

So certainly nothing of my own will could get me into heaven.

None of my own works could get me into heaven.

Not even solving the war in Ukraine could get me into heaven.

What is left unsaid here is, I would require God's grace to get me into heaven.

That's a deeply Christian expression, even if lots of it are

being left implicit.

And let's say, let's not even fill in the gaps.

Let's say we don't know Trump's personal religious views.

So it remains to be seen.

And I'm sure he's had a lot of religious conversations.

He's insinuated as much, certainly since his near assassination in Butler.

But I'll go a step further.

I know this is going to be controversial.

We're going to stir the pot, kick the hornet's nest a little bit right now.

now.

Without weighing in on various debates between all of the different Protestant points of view, you know, Calvinism and Lutheranism and Arminianism and antinomianism and thisism and thatism, without weighing in on those particular debates,

without weighing in on the merits of, say, Catholicism over the various Protestant views or Eastern Orthodoxy or whatever, I just want to make a purely historical observation.

President Trump's uncertainty about where he's going to end up

is much more in line with the traditional Christian understanding of salvation than modern views of salvation, such as the one popularly described as once saved, always saved.

In other words,

Trump saying, look, I don't know, I want to go to heaven.

I hope I can go to heaven, but I don't know.

I definitely don't deserve heaven, and I don't know where I'm going to end up.

That is

indisputably

the much longer standing traditional Christian view of salvation

than the notion that one can be saved as a one-time event and then go and then not even possess the freedom to turn away from God's grace.

I know that there are many people who hold to that view.

There are very interesting conversations that can be had about Calvinism and eternal security and the distinction, as in the Johannine epistles, between mortal and venial sin.

And

there are many interesting theological conversations.

I'm making an historical point.

What Trump is saying here would be clearly understood historically by Christians going back to antiquity.

The notion that one does not possess the free will to reject God's grace is

a little bit more modern, okay?

The too long didn't read version of that, lay off Trump, okay?

I really, I actually, it's not just let's not talk about when Trump brings up religion.

I really like when Trump brings up religion.

This is refreshing to me.

This is not pharisaical.

This is not

theologically innovative and cocky and prideful and presumptuous.

This is an expression of humility in the leader of the free world,

specifically pertaining to eternal things.

I really like.

I, for one, like that.

Raise your hand if you like that.

I do.

Can we get a hands up?

I don't know.

Some people won't like it.

That's okay.

There are plenty of opportunities for interesting theological conversations.

For me, I find it very, very refreshing.

Now, one last note about what

Trump's affairs with world leaders.

Trump was caught on a hot mic amid all of this great news and the resolution of the war in the Middle East.

The new prime minister of Canada, not Trudeau, but the other guy, whatever, Prime Minister Maple Leaf, he shows up and

apparently Trump had referred to him as president.

So just offhand, you know, president is the head of state, prime minister is the head of government.

In our country, it's both in the same office, but in parliamentary systems, they're divided up.

So he just, he mixed it up.

He called the prime minister president.

The prime minister says to Trump, hey, thanks for the promotion.

Here's Trump's response.

I'm glad you upgraded me to president.

It's good.

I started.

It's a little hard to make out because the microphone has trouble picking it up.

But he goes, thanks for upgrading me from prime minister to president.

Oh, did I say that?

Oh, that's funny.

He's a laugh and he slaps him on the back and then he goes, at least I didn't call you governor.

I just, I love it.

I love

the

ribbing, the kind of vaguely threatening joke.

We might invade you.

We might, hey, watch out.

But also the camaraderie.

They kind of seem to get along.

It's not this stodgy, clinical, sterile, defensive posture with international leaders.

It's an aggressive posture.

This, too, I think, has Christian resonance because there's a line that we say about about the church, and we say it because it's in the gospel,

and it's a line of our Lord, which is that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church, which is often misunderstood as saying that evil forces will never overcome the church.

But that gets the direction totally wrong.

We're not talking about the armies of hell.

We're talking about the gates of hell.

Gates are themselves defensive mechanisms.

So when they say the gates of hell will never prevail against the church, the image is not on the armies of hell attempting to vanquish the church.

The image is of the church militant conquering hell, conquering death.

In other words, the church is on the move.

And this is how we should be thinking.

For far too long, Christians have put themselves in a defensive posture,

apologizing for everything, and not only the things that we should apologize for, but apologizing for just everything, for being Christian, for holding good and virtuous views.

We're always on the defensive.

You've got to go on the offensive.

Politically speaking, the American right,

which has a lot more to do with religion than the left does, the right has been on the defensive.

Oh, we're not this.

We're not that.

We're not racist.

We're not this.

We're not that.

No, we don't want to do this.

We don't want to do that.

We just want to shrink the government.

We don't want to do anything, actually.

Trump flips that on a whole host of issues.

He says, no, no, we are.

going to deport people.

We are going to force a resolution to foreign conflicts.

We're not just going to allow wars to fester forever.

We are going to change our trade policy.

We are going to prosecute the bad actors, the corrupt people in government.

We are.

The left has been doing that for a long time.

And then we get into office and we say, we're not going to do that because of some principle about losing all the time.

No, no, no.

We are, we are, we are.

We're doing stuff, baby.

We're doing it.

That is the right attitude.

We got to be on the move, all right?

Sometimes the best defense is a good offense.

Okay.

The libs are up in arms.

They're furious.

They have to eat a lot of crow today.

There might be a MAGA hat on the view.

We'll get to that momentarily.

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Alyssa Farah,

the fake Republican on the view.

She is at least the fake Republican.

She's not an overt Democrat, but she's a lib.

She's a lib like all the ladies on the view.

She previously said something that she might have to make good on vis-a-vis the war in Israel.

My point when I say I'm not going to be apocalyptic, it's not changing a tune.

It's not making every single thing a five-alarm fire.

If he does good, if he gets the Israeli hostages out, I promise I will wear a MAGA hat for one day on the show and say, thank you for doing it.

She'll knock it right off my head.

But like, you have to be able to cheer for wins when they happen and then call out relentlessly the wrongdoing.

Okay, great.

Well, it happened.

So are we going to get it today?

I don't know.

I don't know what time the view airs.

I assume it's after my show in the morning.

I want to see that MAGA hat.

I'll be curious to see if she makes good on this bet.

Obviously, the clip is going around.

She knows that she made this bet.

I'll be curious to see if she can do it.

Because on the one hand, it would be gracious.

It'd be fun.

You know, even I remember Glenn back in 2016 really didn't like Trump.

And then when he saw that Trump was doing great stuff, Glenn had the grace.

to say, oh, you know, I guess I underestimated him or I got things a little bit wrong.

And he wore the MAGA hat on his show.

And it was a great image.

Ben, actually, Ben Shapiro didn't like Trump in 2016.

I did like Trump a lot.

I forget what the particular issue was.

Trump did something that Ben really, really liked.

And he said, All right, Knowles, I'll we'll wear your MAGA hat.

Give me the MAGA hat.

I'm going to wear it on the show.

It was good.

That's a very gracious thing to do.

It's very self-aware.

So, okay, I got something wrong.

All right, I got it.

I'm going to make good on that.

Can Alyssa Farah do that?

Who cares about Alyssa Farah and the view?

Can the left do that broadly?

Or do they have to get the nasty picture of Trump?

Not just the nasty picture, but the picture that tries to detrumpify Trump.

Can they acknowledge what Trump just achieved?

Because

you got to sympathize with them a little bit.

If they acknowledge that, they will simultaneously be acknowledging that they were completely wrong about him for 10 years.

Completely wrong about him.

They said he was going to bring us war, he brought us peace.

They said that he was

incompetent in politics.

He's the best foreign policy president, at least since George H.W.

Bush.

They said that he turns the whole world against us.

He's palling around even with the prime minister of the country that he's threatening to invade, and they're like joking together.

He achieves something other people couldn't achieve.

He's not just okay at being president, which would be a major concession for the left.

He's really, really good at it.

He's better than any other president, probably in my lifetime.

Yes, certainly in my lifetime, because George H.W.

Bush wasn't good enough to get reelected.

George H.W.

Bush did a lot of great stuff, but he did not have the political skill of a Trump.

We need to see a lot of that.

I want to see that MAGA hat.

Weirdly enough, the view is going to be a weather balloon today,

or a weather vein, rather.

The view is going to show us whether or not the left can actually come to grips with this, because it would represent a sea change in American politics.

Certain big figures on the left simply cannot.

Barack Obama in recent days has taken the occasion of Trump's triumph to

sit.

And it's unbelievable.

Even the way he's sitting is so beautiful.

It's Obama.

He's not wearing a suit.

He's not presidential.

He's not strong, established.

He's sitting on some cushy,

weak looking modern chair with his legs crossed over his legs and his arms arms crossed.

Always a terrible thing.

Sometimes I see people do this at public events.

It really drives me crazy.

Sitting with their arms crossed in public, which just conveys to people that you don't like them, you don't want to be there.

You're angry, you're upset.

It's very, very off-putting.

People do it, though.

At least top politicians should know better than that.

Sitting, arms crossed, wearing his like dark, looks like a turtleneck.

It would be very fitting if it were a turtleneck, but it's not.

I think it's an Oxford shirt.

In any case, sitting there, me, me, me.

I don't like what Trump is doing.

Me, me, me, me, me.

And listen to what specifically Obama objects to.

Yeah, we don't want,

you know, kangaroo courts and trumped-up charges.

That's what happens in other places that we used to scold

for doing that.

You know, we want

our court system and our Justice Department and our prosecutors to be, and our FBI to be just playing things straight and looking at the facts and not meddling

in politics

the way we've seen later.

We need people who have whatever platforms they have to be able to say, no, that's not who we are.

That's not who we are.

I mean, that is who I am because I'm the one who started all of that.

It almost boggles the mind that he could make this statement with a straight face.

We don't want our DOJ and our FBI to be prosecuting our political enemies.

We want them to be playing it straight.

We don't want them, for instance, to be cooking up fake dossiers with the Democratic nominee for president at the end of the second term of the Democratic president to create a false pretext to spy on the rival's presidential campaign.

And then, for instance, if that rival manages to make it to the White House to be used as a predicate for undermining his entire administration.

And

we don't want to be wielding

once that rival is running for reelection, we don't want our federal prosecutors to be trying to put him in jail four ways from Sunday.

Okay.

And we don't want the FBI under a Democratic president to be raiding that rival's house.

And we don't want.

We don't want me.

We are not who I am.

Wait, uh-huh.

Say that again.

He did all of it.

He did it.

You can't even only blame Biden.

It started, crossfire hurricane, all the investigation into Trump's campaign started

on Obama's watch.

With Obama's knowledge, one asks.

Would seem so.

Cooking up the fake dossier with the Democratic campaign.

That was on Obama's watch.

He did all that.

Take Trump out of it for a second.

Barack Obama was the one who turned his IRS

under his flack, Lois Lerner,

to

spy on and

persecute the Tea Party groups.

I was there.

Some of you will not be old enough to remember this.

I was a member of some of these Tea Party groups.

The Tea Party was growing up.

It was a populist groundswelling.

It was kind of setting the stage for the Trump populist movement that took the White House in 2016.

This was back in 2009, 2010.

All these great groups, and Obama sicked the IRS on these Tea Party groups, on all these conservative groups, the conservative group in LA, Friends of Abe.

They were doing everything they could to get the member list.

Something tells me if they did get that member list, a lot of people would have had audits from the IRS.

We know this all happened because of him.

Maybe that's why he's so like whiny and shriveled up and bitter and angry and resentful.

It's because he is the one,

not Trump, Barack Obama is the one who upended American norms.

If any president is responsible for that in recent history, it's Barack Obama.

He's the one who did it.

And he did it because he endeavored to fundamentally transform America.

His words, not mine.

And he thought he won.

He thought he did it.

He thought the Republicans were done.

He thought conservatism was, for all intents and purposes, out in America.

And maybe there would continue to be two parties, but he would, his ideology would dominate.

His apparatchi would dominate.

And if he had to go after his political rivals and weaponize the government, well, okay, that was, that's all we needed to fundamentally transform America.

And it didn't work.

It just didn't work.

And now he's whining.

He says, hey, hey, stop doing, stop doing to me what I did to you.

Stop doing to me a much more just and justifiable version of the thing that I did to you.

That's not who we are.

That's not, I am not who we are.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're right.

Your thing is not who we are anymore.

And we're going to make sure that you pay a political price for that.

Okay.

He makes one point even more explicit, and this bears some discussion.

He talks about the distinction between friends and enemies.

The point is that we have blown through, just in the last six months, a whole range of

assumptions, but rules and laws and

practices

that

were put in place

to

ensure that

nobody's above the law and that we don't use the federal government to simply reward our friends and

punish our enemies.

And the same thing's obviously happening in the Justice Department.

So people are right to be concerned.

Just pure, pure projection.

I even remember his his Attorney General, Eric Holder.

What was the line Eric Holder said about Obama?

He said, I'm your boy, I'm your guy, I'm your main man, where, you know, I'm your friend who's going to punish your enemies.

The distinction here, I think, is key.

Because

as is often the case, when the left is accusing, the left is projecting.

But it gets to something that has entered a little bit of the political discourse and controversy lately, namely the distinction between friends and enemies.

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Comment yesterday is from Dill Meister93.

All those that shouted free Palestine should thank Trump for freeing Palestine.

That's true.

Hey, Greta, where are you?

Greta,

we will make America great again.

We will make America greater again.

How dare you free the hostages and declare war in the Middle East?

You have destroyed my flotilla.

Okay.

We don't want to we don't want to make any jokes about Greta, obviously.

Obama says you don't want to have a government that is just punishing its friends and punishing its enemies and rewarding its friends.

Okay.

This distinction between friend and enemy has come up.

People have bandied this about.

And there are all sorts of accusations flying around if you even bring up the distinction between friend and enemy.

The reason for this in political philosophy is because this term, the friend-enemy distinction, is attributable to a philosopher named Carl Schmidt.

And Carl Schmidt is controversial because he happened to be a German philosopher in the 1930s and 40s.

You know, it was not a great, it was a little tough time to be.

And so he was a Nazi.

Yeah, not great, not good to be a Nazi.

Heidegger was a Nazi too.

Heidegger is still taught in philosophy classes.

For some reason, Schmidt in particular

remains extremely controversial.

The point that Schmidt is making, though, is a really important one in the concept of the political.

He says that there's this kind of pre-political even distinction.

The distinction that defines politics is the distinction between friend and enemy.

And when he says enemy, he's very clear.

He's not talking about personal enemies.

He's not saying, you know, my friends are morally good and my enemies are morally bad.

And he's not even talking about personal enemies, like, you know, Billy slept with my girlfriend in high school and I've never forgiven him.

He's talking about political enemies, which is distinct from personal enemies.

The political enemy is, he uses the Latin ostis, and the personal enemy would be inimicus.

And he's just saying, he's not saying it's good or bad.

He's just saying it's a fact of politics that politics is distinguished between

people in groups that are friends and people in groups that are enemies to the political community.

And

it seems persuasive to me, at least.

It's a fair telling.

I don't think there's anything particularly groundbreaking about that.

What's funny about Obama using this phrase is the left in particular.

has been advancing not only this idea, but advancing this idea in a really irresponsible way.

Because what they have been saying, at least since the 2020 campaign, and actually much further back, is that

conservatives in America are not merely inimicus, you know, people that they don't like, that conservatives in America are not merely the rival political party that they're going to endeavor to beat at the ballot box.

They have been arguing that they pose, that we pose, an existential threat to the country.

That's their language.

They said Donald Trump poses an existential threat to the country.

He's a threat to democracy, but an existential threat to our country,

which justifies his assassination.

Ronald Reagan used to say in the 80s, I have no enemies here in America, only opponents.

And that's a really nice way to think of it.

But the left doesn't think of it that way.

They say we're existential threats,

which justifies

in their view, in self-defense, assassinating someone like Donald Trump, which explains why they would excuse or minimize or even celebrate the murder of someone like Charlie Kirk.

That's a very dangerous way of viewing your fellow countrymen.

That's how they view it.

Okay.

And so when they say, we don't want to just punish our enemies, well, then how about you stop calling us existential threats?

How about you stop celebrating it when some of us are murdered?

How about you do that?

We don't want to weaponize the government.

Well, then maybe you shouldn't have done that.

Maybe you shouldn't have set the stage for that.

The only way out, though,

is through.

You know, I've said this before.

The distinction between a personal enemy and a political enemy is actually an important distinction because it means that things are not merely petty and it's not just about

petty vengeance and grievance or whatever, that it's about viewing political interests, which is actually a better thing.

It's a more rational way to think about politics than just trying to slaughter everyone who's ever offended you.

Well, I make the same point about political violence.

We talk about political violence here.

There are two kinds of political violence:

There's personal violence, vigilante violence, when the left goes out and murders people.

That kind of political violence being a uniquely left-wing phenomenon.

And there's state violence.

And that's kind of it.

The choice is not between violence and kumbaya.

That doesn't exist.

When you have 100,000 gang members in Chicago, that's not your choice.

When you have leftists going around assassinating conservative campus speakers, that's not, you don't get that choice.

Okay.

The only two options are vigilante violence, which generally speaking is unjust, and state violence, when the state, through all the institutions that Barack Obama is talking about here, the prosecutors and the courts and the jails and actually effect justice.

Those are the only options you have.

And the left wields the unjust kind of violence.

We need to wield the just civil authority to restore order.

I think Trump has shown that.

It's a more aggressive posture in politics than conservatives have exhibited in recent years, but I think that's important because the weak defensive posture is what allowed people like Barack Obama to rise up and really screw up our whole political order.

Now we have an alternative in the Trump decade, and I think it's worked out pretty well.

Okay.

Now, speaking of friends and enemies, an important story, I meant to get to it last week.

I really want to get to it today.

The United States has deported at least 10 people to Eswatini.

Do you know where Eswatini is?

No, no, me neither.

Eswatini is a very tiny, landlocked country in southeastern Africa.

This story came out from Reuters.

Trump administration sends another third country deportation flight to Eswatini.

And

the people who have been deported here,

just to let you know, as the left cries and wrings their garments over it,

these people are rapists and child rapists and murderers.

It's not like Abuela who, or your gardener or something.

These are like really, really bad people.

But the question is, why are they being deported to Eswatini?

Well, because we want to get them out of the country.

And there are all sorts of roadblocks to sending them to different places.

And what the left wants is for the rapists and the murderers to stay in America because they apparently have some right to it or something.

But we want to get them out.

And

we also want to send a message.

Okay, first of all, the illegal aliens who come to this country, even the very, very vanishingly small number of them who claim to be asylum seekers, even they are generally not really asylum seekers because if they're from Venezuela and they're seeking political asylum because they're going to be killed by the Maduro regime or something,

they could...

They could stop the minute they get out of Venezuela.

They certainly could stop in Mexico.

Why are they coming all the way to the United States?

That involves more danger.

That involves more trial.

Because they're not really seeking political asylum.

They could get that in Mexico.

What they're seeking is economic opportunity and to exploit the system and to take the invitation of Democrats who have invited them in.

Okay, so we got to get them out.

And now the libs, if they don't want to explicitly defend rapists and child rapists and murderers in America, they'll say, well, You should send them someplace closer.

You should send them to their country of origin or whatever.

And my answer is, well, if these guys didn't want a one-way ticket to Eswatini, they probably shouldn't have broken into our country in the first place, huh?

They certainly shouldn't have broken into our country and then committed some of the most heinous crimes.

I think we're going to send them wherever we want to send them.

I think they're lucky we didn't send them to some far-flung island in the South Pacific without any food on it.

Or with cannibals or something.

How about that?

That was the other option.

I think Eswatini is the moderate option is what I think.

And if you don't want to go there, don't break into our our country.

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There's so much more I want to talk about.

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America is harvesting organs from suicidal Canadians.

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