Ep. 1694 - Trump Invokes "Alien Enemies Act" for MASS DEPORTATIONS

It is day 56 of Trump's second term, and the hits just keep on coming.

President Trump just vaporized a top ISIS leader, invoked a law from 1798 to deport

hundreds of Venezuelan gangsters over the impotent protestations of an Obama-appointed

federal judge, and he announced his probable plans to annex Greenland.

I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show. An Amazon delivery driver has gone viral for throwing a homeowner's packages on his stoop and screaming at the homeowner for a minute or two straight about how much the driver hates the person.
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The Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Man, you know, people say that we conservatives, we just want to go back in time.
You know, oh, you just want to relive the Reagan era. Oh, you guys just want to go back to the 1950s.
With the Trump administration, you sometimes hear, oh, you want to go back to the McKinley era. President Trump himself has invoked President McKinley in a curious way that actually helps us understand the Trump administration.
We'll get to that story a little bit later. But no, forget about even the McKinley era.
We're going back to 1798, baby, because the libs have tried to stymie Trump from deporting illegal aliens. And not just the nice abuela who makes street tacos in your neighborhood who you like, not just the guy that mows your lawn that's an illegal alien, but he's a generally amiable fellow.
We're talking about face tattooed, human smuggling, fentanyl dealing, absolute animals. Even those people, the liberal bureaucrats and judges will not let Trump deport.
So Trump has invoked a law from the 18th century to make it easier to get these animals out of our country. Trump's order reads, here's just a little bit.
It's obviously a long order. Here's just a little bit of it.
Trendy Aragua, TDA, is a designated foreign terrorist organization with thousands of members, many of whom have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States. Put a pause here.
How could you say they're conducting warfare? Well, they're killing people. They're breaking our basic laws.
They're invading the country. They're poisoning people, even the ones they don't kill.
They poison with fentanyl. They're smuggling human beings.
They're running brothels. They're doing all sorts of harmful stuff.
But would you call that warfare? Isn't warfare the kind of thing that occurs between two nations or at the very least between a terrorist organization and a national government?

Not just street crime, not just prostitution, not just murder.

Well, Trump explains, TDA has engaged in and continues to engage in mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming U.S. citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime's goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.
So what Trump is saying here is, these cartels are not just operating as ordinary street criminals or even as ordinary organized crime. They are working with foreign governments.
So they're working with the Maduro regime in Venezuela. They're working with hostile governments to undermine the United States.
They're not working against those governments that the governments are merely helpless to deal with them. They're actually working in concert with them.
TDA is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States. No one could deny that.
So the White House said they had 300 people who were in custody, who were identified as members of the gang, who could be deported soon. An Obama-appointed judge comes out, this guy James Boesburg, and he says that Trump has to stop the deportations.
He issues an emergency order. He says any plane containing these folks, I love the folksy talk, these folks, face tattooed, child smuggling folks, that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States, however that is accomplished.
So even if the plane is about to land in Latin America, it's got to go back up, turn around, go back to the United States. We will not allow you to deport these Venezuelan gangsters.
The judge concludes, make sure it's complied with immediately. And then one of the greatest tweets ever posted on the internet comes out.
This by way of the leader of El Salvador, Naibu Kele, who posts that headline and then just says, oopsie, too late, with a laughing face emoji. Because, as you might recall, us discussing on this show months ago, weeks ago, it feels like months in the Trump administration because so much is happening every day.
President Trump has a deal with El Salvador. Nayib Bukele, the greatest strongman in Latin America, said, we will take your prisoners.
You don't know where to bring your prisoners. He even offered to take American citizen prisoners that we don't want to deal with.
But the Trump administration said, okay, just the illegal aliens from Latin America, if we don't know how to deal with them, if our prisons are really light and easy and kind of a joke in the minds of these gangsters, and if we don't know exactly where to put these guys when we deport them, we're going to send them to El Salvador. We'll pay a small fee for that because El Salvador, naive Bukele, if he knows one thing, it is how to deal with gangsters because he locked up.
He undertook a mass incarceration program for face tattooed gangsters who had made El Salvador the most dangerous country on earth. And when he locked them all up and humiliated them, then went to their cemeteries and destroyed their gravestones.
This guy is not joking around, okay? When he did that, El Salvador went from being the most dangerous country in the world to the safest country in the Western Hemisphere. Pretty amazing.
So just the message this sends, first of all, that Trump can say, oh yeah, oh judge, you sent out that order. Oh, too bad.
Actually, the plane's already in El Salvador and Bukele's dealing with them. We'll get to the constitutionality of that, the legality of that in one second.
But even just imagine, you're one of these gangsters. You're just any illegal alien, but certainly if you're one of these gangsters, your view is that the United States is a joke, that you can just go right up to the border.
This is the Biden administration. They're inviting you in.
You go to the border, you present yourself to border patrol. Border patrol has to process you, and then border patrol lets you go.
You don't even really have to sneak into the country anymore. You just just walk up, say, hey, all right, I'm here.
Cuff me. You're going to uncuff me in five minutes.
Then I'm going to go into the country. I'm going to get lost.
I'm not going to show up for my court appearance. And now I'm on the path to being an American citizen.
I can do whatever I want. Your country is a joke.
And by the way, even if I get arrested, you guys are going to go really easy on me in prison. It's no big deal.
The Democrats want to abolish prisons in the first place. But even if I go to prison, those prisons are a joke.
No big deal. Why wouldn't I break the law? That's what the gangsters are thinking.
Then Trump comes out and he says, yeah, I just struck a deal with the strongman leader of El Salvador. And so what's going to happen, I think we have B-roll footage of it.
When you land in El Salvador, you're going to be ferried into one of Bukele's prisons by Salvadoran military. And then you're going to be paraded around like the absolute animals that you are.
You're not going to have any privacy and you're not going to have the cushy luxuries that people in the United States demand as rights. You're going to be treated the way you deserve to be treated.
That sends a message to anyone who wants to consider crossing our border illegally, which is illegal. It's a misdemeanor the first time.
It's a felony if you do it multiple times. And it's greatly offensive to the American people who, if they don't have the right to control their border, they don't really have any right of self-government.
They don't have really any political liberty. So the big question here is, can Trump violate this court order? Is this illegal? Is this unconstitutional for the plane to land in defiance of the court order? And you're going to hear a lot of prattling on MSNBC and CNN and all the liberal news channels about the separation of powers, checks and balances and the separation of powers.
Ironically enough, those arguments favor Trump. The arguments from checks and balances and the separation of powers, they justify what Trump is doing.
They do not justify what the judge is doing. The judge is overstepping his boundaries.
The judge has no right to stop the president of the United States from executing the most basic aspects of his job, protecting our border, the sovereignty of our nation. He has no right to do that.
Checks and balances and separation of powers mean nothing if the Supreme Court just has the final say over everything. The liberals have been arguing in recent years that the Supreme Court just gets to do whatever it wants, with some exceptions.
When the Supreme Court observes that there's no right to abortion in the Constitution, then we need to take away all the Supreme Court's power. When the Supreme Court rules that Democrats don't just get to throw the former president and current leader of the opposition in prison, then the Supreme Court should have no power.
But when it comes to stopping the enforcement of basic immigration law, then what the liberals are arguing for is not separation of powers and checks and balances. It's judicial supremacy.
But we don't have a system of judicial supremacy. That's not in the Constitution.
That's not in the Federalist. It's not what the founders and framers gave us.
Judicial review is what they'll say. They'll say, well, the Supreme Court has the right of judicial review.
And this comes from Marbury versus Madison, the longstanding precedent that the court has the right to interpret the Constitution. First of all, all three branches have an obligation to interpret and be faithful to the Constitution.
But furthermore, judicial review in Marbury v. Madison is a self-asserted right.
It's the court saying, hey, we have a lot of power. So obviously, there are some limits to that power.
The court just can't say, hey, by the way, we have decided, we on the Supreme Court, that we're the most important branch of government.

We can do whatever we want.

They don't get to do that.

Okay? And this is what gives you a little clue into Trump's view of the second term. great american presidents great in the historic sense really really significant American presidents, have ignored the Supreme Court on much shakier, more dubious grounds than Trump is doing.
Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, men who are considered among the great presidents of the United States, have ignored the Supreme Court with far less justification than Trump is ignoring the court, this federal judge, this random district judge, James Bozberg, when it comes to the deportations. Now the case is going to go up to the Supreme Court, and I remain hopeful and confident the Supreme Court will side with Trump, as they should.
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Okay. Once Trump got rid of the face-tattooed gangsters, sent them over to Bukele for Bukele to do whatever he wants with him.
Then Trump turns across the Atlantic on the other side of the world to take out a top ISIS leader. This is Abdallah Maki Muzli al-Rifa, also known as Abu Khadija, and a second ISIS operative.
He takes him out. Khadija was the chief of global operations and the delegated committee Amir for ISIS.
So officially the second in command for the Islamic terror group. And Trump just vaporized these guys from the sky.
He tweeted out or he truth socialed out, today the fugitive leader of ISIS in Iraq was killed. He was relentlessly hunted down by our intrepid war fighters..
His miserable life was terminated, along with another member of ISIS,

and coordinated with the Iraqi government and the Kurdish regional government.

And then this is the key for understanding the deeper level of politics here.

He goes, peace through strength, all caps.

So this reminds us, of course, of when Trump took out the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,

during the first term. And he came out, he said, instead of doing the diplomatic thing, saying, you know, well, the United States government has conducted an operation that has neutralized and eliminated, you know, kind of that Obama thing.
Trump comes in and goes, he died like a dog. He was begging for his life, that disgusting, sweaty animal.
And, you know, so he does another iteration of that here with this other leader of ISIS. But then he concludes, peace through strength.
Two takeaways to understand about Trump here. One, Trump is good at multitasking.
It sounds a little bit trite, but it's an important reminder. Presidents sometimes get tunnel vision and they only focus on one or two at most, three things in their administration.
There's so much to do. Trump seems pretty good at multitasking.
He's moving the ball down the field on a lot of fronts. On tariffs, on immigration, on resolving the war in Ukraine, on resolving the war in Gaza, on annexing Greenland, we'll get to that later, on taking over Canada, on maybe taking back the Panama Canal, on this, on that.
He's pretty good on deporting the 300 gangsters, on killing the leader of ISIS. The machine is moving very efficiently right now, and it's covering a lot of bases at the same time.

But, and the second takeaway, from the peace through strength line. Peace through strength, which is a slogan that Republicans have repeated for decades now.
Virtually every Republican repeats it. It harkens back to the Reagan administration, goes back to Barry Goldwater.
Peace through strength. Peace through strength does not work if you always fight every battle everywhere.
Okay? Peace through strength does not work if you're constantly invading every country on earth for whatever reason. Then you're not going to remain strong.
You're going to be overextended. This is what happened by the end of the second Bush term.
He said, oh, look, we're fighting every war. We're trying to bring Madisonian democracy to the Middle East, and we're just overextended, and it's not working.
The center's not going to hold. On the flip side, peace through strength doesn't work if you never fight any battle.
If you just say, we're going to come get you someday, but you never actually make good on your threats,

then your adversaries are going to know that you're just always bluffing, and they're going to take advantage of you. This is the special Trump genius.
Trump is more of a dove, probably than any president in my lifetime. I was going to say maybe George H.W.
Bush, but no, George H.W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm.
So Trump is the Republican least inclined to war of my lifetime in the presidency. And yet, every so often, he drops the Moab.
Every so often, he kills the top Iranian general. every so often he goes in and vaporizes an ISIS leader.

And so you never know. Is he going to do it? When Trump goes to Putin and says, if you invade Ukraine, I'll blow up Moscow.
If you're Putin, you have some reason to think that there's some chance that the guy might just be crazy enough to do it. That's how peace through strength works.
And it's a reminder that politics is not an abstract philosophical endeavor. It is a practical science.
It is, in the words of the political philosopher John Gray, less an argument, more a conversation. I think it's a really helpful way to understand politics, practical politics.
It's not just some argument that you make from a lectern with absolutely precise, rigorous logic that totally wins the battle, totally vanquishes one's opponents, and gives one absolute power. That's not how politics works.
Politics is always a negotiation. It's always a compromise.
It's always trying to find out what really people want, what's really making them tick, what they really mean when they say a phrase, what the true meaning of what they're trying to convey. It's a conversation.
And that's what Trump is doing here. Is he a dove? Is he a hawk? He's just, he's having a conversation.
And really, when he does things like this, he's not only having a conversation with terrorists in Iraq and Syria, and he's having a conversation with Xi Jinping in China.

He's having a conversation with Vladimir Putin in Russia.

FAFO, may guys proceed at your own risk.

Now, speaking of Trump's aggression and expansionism, Trump has come out.

And he's asked about one of the more eccentric projects of his second term. He's asked if he's serious about taking over Greenland.
What is your vision for the potential annexation of Greenland and getting the potential? Yeah, well, I think it'll happen. And I'm just thinking, I didn't give it much thought before, but I'm sitting with a man that could be very instrumental.
You know, Mark, we need that for international security, not just security, international. We have a lot of our favorite players cruising around the coast, and we have to be careful.
And we'll be talking to you. It's a very appropriate, really a very appropriate question.
And there's an issue in the High North, so the architects, what you did, so when it comes to Greenland, yes, we're not joining the U.S., I would leave that outside for me, this discussion, because I don't want to direct NATO in that. But when it comes to the high north and the Arctic, you are totally right.
The Chinese are now using these routes. We know that the Russians are rearming.
We know we have a lack of icebreakers. So the fact that the seven outside Russia, seven Arctic countries working together on this under U.S.
leadership is very important to make sure that that region, that part of the world stays safe. And we know things are changing there and we have to be there.
Have to be there. Simple as.
Trump says, yeah, I think we will add in Greenland. We need it.
We need it for national security. And this really opened up my eyes.
I already had an intuition of this, but this really opened up my eyes. Trump has been comparing himself to McKinley on the campaign trail for the second term, into the second term.
People made all sorts of comparisons for Trump in the first term. Oh, he's like Reagan.
Oh, he's like Nixon. Oh, he's like Teddy Roosevelt.
Oh, he's like Andrew Jackson. Trump himself has focused on this McKinley comparison.
And a lot of people have just observed that McKinley was very pro tariff and McKinley made us really rich with tariffs. And Trump is talking about tariffs.
So it's all about tariffs. You know what else William McKinley did? McKinley got us Puerto Rico and the Philippines and Cuba, sort of, and Hawaii.
And he set the stage for the Panama Canal, which Trump also now wants to take back. I think that's the vision.
Trump wants to be a great president. He wants to make America great.
He wants to have a great legacy. And presidents don't go down as great.
History does not consider presidents great if they give up territory, if they give up influence, if they give up power. Name me the great presidents who just gave things away and made the country smaller, maybe a little bit weaker, maybe less influential at least.
There aren't any. So there are a lot of people who voted for Trump because Trump was going to forget about the American empire and make us into just a normal nation again, maybe even a yeoman republic like some of the founders envisioned.
That was always a pipe dream. That is not Trump's vision.
The guy who puts his name in gold letters on every big building he can get his hands on, that's not the guy who wants to go back to a yeoman republic. Trump has a great vision of himself, of the country, and I think he wants to go down in history as expanding America's influence, America's power, and probably America's territory.
Get ready for a second golden age. Get ready for that second McKinley term.
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Then you submit the headline. Then you submit all that great stuff.
And it will go to Mr. Davies and Professor Jacob and the young Markella.
And they will sift through all of it and pick the very best stuff. Speaking of power in the presidency, President Trump has just asserted a power that might be unprecedented, but it's to undo an abuse of power that also might be unprecedented from the previous president.
Trump is rescinding all of the executive orders under Joe Biden that were signed by an auto pen. And that includes Joe Biden's pardons, his many, many pardons in the last moments of his presidency, including the pardons of his family.
Now, wait, what are we talking about with the auto pen? The Heritage Foundation conducted a marvelous analysis of the Biden executive orders. As the Heritage Foundation said, we gathered every document we could find with Biden's signature over the course of his presidency.
What they discovered was, in Heritage's words, all used the same auto pen signature except for the announcement that the former president was dropping out of the race last year. And it shows the auto pen signature.
So according to reporting, Heritage examined more than 20 Biden-era executive orders documented on the Federal Register's office between 2021 and 2024, found each had the same signature. So what does this mean? Just anecdotally, I'll tell you I've heard, and it's just scuttlebutt, it's not real.
One hears stories in Washington of Joe Biden having been surprised when told of certain things in executive orders that he supposedly signed. At the very least, no one seriously believes that Biden was fully cognizant for his presidency.
That's why the Democrats had to swap out their presidential nominee after that disastrous debate when the man was drooling on stage. So Trump's argument here is Biden had the power to issue these executive orders.
Biden has the pardon power

in particular, but he didn't really do it. It was whoever was running the country while Joe Biden was drooling and not aware of what his name was.
That's who did it. And the evidence is he didn't even sign them.
He used an auto pen. An auto pen is just a machine that uses a pen to copy the the user's signature.

Trump in his own words.

The pardons, quote unquote,

the pardons, quote unquote, that sleepy Joe Biden gave to the unselect committee of political thugs and many others are hereby declared void, vacant, and of no further effect because of the fact that they were done by Autopen. In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them, but more importantly, he did not know anything about them.
The necessary pardoning documents were not explained to or approved by Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime.
Love this. This is Trump usurping unprecedented power, is it? I don't know.
The kinds of pardons that Joe Biden issued, forget here about just the unselected committee, the House committee that went after Trump and the J6ers and all the rest of it. What is implicit here is that these pardons, including the pardons of Biden's family, including especially the Hunter Biden pardon, those were also a major usurpation of power.
Never before in American history, before Joe Biden pardoned his son, had a president pardoned anyone, much less a family member, for a 10-year period for crimes that the person may or may not have committed, crimes that were never brought up in a court for anything. For a 10-year period, the guy could have been guilty of federal murder charges.
He would have been pardoned for that. That is a major usurpation of power.
And so what you're seeing here shift from Trump is, for many, many years, for most of my childhood and young adult life, I heard from Republicans, listen, when we come into office, we need to give up as much power as we can. Because if we ever exercise power, then that will set the precedent for the Democrats to abuse power in the future.
No, no, sir, we can't wield the government. Because if we do that, imagine what the Democrats will do next time.
Well, they already did it last time and they already do it every time they're in office. I don't need to worry about some hypothetical abuse of power by the Democrats in the future.
They already abuse it all the time. So you need to use the power that we, the people have given you to rectify that situation, to make sure that they won't be able to abuse their power in the future.
That's the lesson Trump got. That's the lesson that Trump got that pretty much every Republican in my lifetime, until Trump, had not gotten.
Now, we turn to a major news story, at least according to social media, probably not according to law or political philosophy. But there are important

political lessons here. An Amazon driver just screamed at a homeowner through a doorbell camera.

Alex Stein 99 posted this video. It's an Amazon delivery person dumping packages.
Well,

I'll give it to you in the driver's own words. I've been waiting on this day to tell you how much I hate this house.
The waters, all the you order, all of this. I hate it.
I hate this house. I hate that you order.
You are the laziest house in this whole neighborhood. You're inconsiderate.
You're full of. I hate everything about y'all.
I hate it. All you have to do is order the store from Walmart pickup or central pickup or whatever and go put the shit in your own truck and go do it yourself.
You are the laziest sons of ever. And if people bring this shit this s***, we break our backs, we break our necks, we break our nails, we break everything to bring you this s***.

If you're ungrateful as s***, I hope you know that. rough day at the office well actually you can see from the video it's multiple days rough week rough rough job i guess first off the bet this could be fake there's no real way of knowing if this is an actual delivery driver.
I don't see any Amazon insignia, so there's no way of knowing that it's an Amazon delivery. We just assume it's Amazon because Amazon delivers most of the packages.
Even if it is real, this could just be a total lunatic. It could just be a woman who is not well adjusted.
However, regardless, there is some political

reality to this. I mean, most conservatives are going to watch this and say, well, this lady,

she's awful. She's off a rocker.
She's ungrateful. She's entitled.
She's this, she's that. And it's

like, all of that's probably true. However, there is a political reality to people complaining

about the state of the economy and the state of the political order. Okay.
Prices have risen a lot

Thank you. reality to people complaining about the state of the economy and the state of the political order.
Okay. Prices have risen a lot in recent decades.
Wages have barely risen. Real wages have pretty much never risen.
You actually did see a little bit of a rise during the first Trump administration, but pretty much the rest of the time for the last 50 years, you haven't seen real wages rise. Then COVID happened.
COVID, which represented the largest transfer of wealth from the lower economic classes to the higher economic classes ever recorded, in large part because of deliveries, in large part because people stopped shopping at stores and started just shopping at Amazon or maybe Walmart or whatever and just having it all delivered to the house.

And so the delivery driver actually is at the crux of this major transfer.

I remember, just a little story, I remember I was down in Cuba.

I was visiting Cuba right when it was sort of opening up.

Got to get a feel for the place, see how it is.

And I went into a cigar shop there and got a bunch of cigars. And the thing that struck me most about going and buying a bunch of cigars is, in America, generally, if you go and you buy a bunch of stuff at a shop, the clerk is really grateful to you.
He's really happy. He's really nice to you.
In Cuba, the clerk resents you as a general rule because the clerk has no incentive, no upside whatsoever to sell you the goods. It's not like the clerk is getting commission.
The clerk is being paid a very low government set wage. And then you come in there with all this money and you're spending six months of that person's salary on cigars.
That person is going to resent you. These are natural political dynamics.
And when governments become corrupt and when economies become incoherent and unreasonable, this generates passions. This contradicts the liberal ideological view on the left and the right.
That, you know, no, well, hold on. There are just these eternal principles of the economy, and there are these rules, and no one can ever complain about them, and it's just, we just all have to operate like automatons.
That's not how polities actually work. And when you have major transfers of wealth from the lower to the upper classes, when you have real wages stagnating for years and decades, when you have great corruption from the elite of a country, sometimes people are going to yell at you at a doorbell camera.
And I'm not saying that woman was justified. I'm almost certain she was not justified.
And I hate that kind of behavior and people need to be educated better at home and all the rest of it. But we ignore political dangers at our own risk.
Okay the left says we need to pay attention to wealth disparities or whatever, there is a political lesson in that from the matter of prudence. You don't want the society to spin out of control.
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Join the fight at dailywire.com slash subscribe. My favorite comment yesterday, or on Friday, I suppose, is from Carolyn Moore, 796, who says, I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and I'm a 71-year-old native Arizonan.
I'm angry that I heard this news about a major 200-plus person sex ring bust, which involved even child material and child trafficking. I heard this news about Scottsdale from you and not the mainstream media.
Shows how pathetic they become. Yeah, it is weird.
I talked about this story. If you missed the episode on Friday, maybe go back and listen to it.
Over 200 people, over 200 people arrested in a sting for weird sex stuff, sex rings involving children in Scottsdale, which is a very wealthy town in America. And the media are basically totally silent on it.
That's very odd. There's something very strange about that.
okay speaking of exactly what we were just talking about in the Amazon delivery driver, whoever, the delivery person's ring invective. Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, has just come out and addressed the major complaint about Trump's economic policy and tariffs, namely that it could raise consumer prices.

Scott Besson gets to the heart of the matter and I think knocks down the liberal objections.

Ask you about something that you actually said last week, and we'll discuss it on the other side.

Take a look.

Access to cheap goods is not the asset, is not the essence of the American dream.

The American dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility and economic security. Mr.
Secretary, are you there essentially saying that the Trump administration is comfortable to have consumers pay more for goods in America? Not at all, Christian. What I'm saying is the American dream is not let them eat flat screens.
That if American families aren't able to afford a home, don't believe that their children will do better than they are. The American dream is not contingent on cheap baubles they have from China, that it is more than that.
And we are focused on affordability, But it's mortgages, it's cars, it's real wage gain. Hear, hear.
That is so beautifully put from Treasury Secretary Scott Besson. Our policy is not let them eat flat screens.
The American dream is not contingent on cheap baubles from China. Notice here that NBC is trying to get Besson into a corner, say, so you're okay with rising prices.
If you institute these tariffs, especially tariffs on China, then the cost of some consumer goods is going to go up. And you think that's fine? And Besson says, no, I'm not saying that's fine.
I'm not saying we want the price of consumer goods to go up i'm saying that we have sold our society out we have sold out the american family we've sold out the american worker we have sold out the integrity of our communities we have sold out social solidarity so that we can get some cheap trash from china and look i've enjoyed cheap trash from china okay i like that my flat screen i't even watch my flat screen TV that much, but I like that I could get it at a cheaper price or whatever. But at what cost? That is not what the American dream is.
That has become the American nightmare, I guess, is that we all just sort of sit, we're all depressed, we're sitting alone, families have collapsed, our economy is in great disorder, but we watch whatever slop comes up on Netflix, and we do it on our cheap TVs from China. But the American dream is about more than that.
And so we have to consider other metrics beyond merely GDP, beyond merely the cost of certain imported consumer goods. There are other goods in the economy.
That is a political way of thinking about things. Not the way of economists, sophisters, and calculators, to use a phrase from Edmund Burke.
Not the way of technocrats. Not the way of robots.
Not the way of ideological liberals. That's how conservatives think about it.
It's a political question. And that's always a conversation.
And that's always balancing various goods. And that's always highlighting the chief political virtue, which is prudence.
Chief political virtue is not spreadsheets. Okay, the chief political virtue is not some single algorithm that determines exactly what we're going to have in society.
It's prudence. It's balancing different interests and using our judgment as human beings.
Now, speaking of NBC News, great story here that's going to confound a lot of liberals and squish Republicans. We're told constantly that the Constitution is being shredded and we're on the brink of war and Trump is selling us out to Russia.
And even if you don't believe that nonsense, we're being told that the economy is about to go to pot and consumer goods are going to increase and we've got tariffs that are going to create trade wars that are going to bankrupt all of us. And yet, NBC News, one of the most left-wing news outlets, finds that more Americans today believe the country is on the right track.
A greater percentage of Americans think the country is on the right track than at any time in over 20 years. First of all, the mood of the country, this really jumped out.
We ask folks, is it on the right direction or the wrong direction? That 44% you say right direction, that's up since November. And if that doesn't seem like a lot, the last time it cracked 40%, you got to go back to 2012.
The last time it actually hit 44 or higher, January of 2004. So a lot of this is Republicans, but independents, that number is also up since the election on the direction of the country.
So at the time of the election, 27 percent. This is this is peak Joe Biden.
Twenty percent. Twenty seven percent of the country is on the right track.
Now we hit records that we have not seen since 2004. Coinciding with a Republican winning the popular vote for the first time since 2004.

Why do people think that things are going well when we have the threat of tariffs,

when we have the threat of rising prices on certain consumer goods,

when we have mass deportations,

when we have the president talking about securing our interests in Greenland and elsewhere?

How on earth?

Why are people saying the country's on the right track? Because this is what they voted for. People voted for this.
They voted for tariffs. Most voters, the majority of voters, voted for tariffs, voted for prioritizing other political and economic goods above merely cheap baubles from China.
The majority of voters voted for mass deportations. The majority of voters voted for things like Trump telling an Obama-era district judge to stuff it while he ships hundreds of gangsters down to Naibu Kele to be dealt with the right way.
That's what most voters voted for. And you're going to see think pieces from the liberal media and from the squishes, swampy, fake Republicans who say, this is not what people voted for.
People voted for Trump because they were upset about inflation and it was really nothing to do with Trump or any of his agenda. And they didn't really, they don't want mass deportations.
They don't want tariffs, they don't want trade wars, they don't want, they do. They do.
Nobody responding to that poll is unaware of what Trump has been doing over the past 56 days, okay? Trump is pretty good at being in the news, all right? This is what people voted for. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, which should be rising in strength, the Democrat Party, which should be taking advantage of Trump's supposed missteps, they're in shambles.
AOC, one of the most prominent members of the House, attacking the Democrat leader in the Senate. I think there is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal.
And this is not just about progressive Democrats. This is across the board, the entire party.
I think it is a huge slap in the face. Not just AOC, Nancy Pelosi, a more establishment Democrat in the House, says Democrat senators should listen to the women.
Appropriation leaders Rosa DeLauro and Patty Murphy have eloquently presented the case that we must have a better choice. They're all attacking Chuck Schumer because Chuck Schumer made a deal with Trump and the Republicans not to shut down the government.
And Schumer did that, not because he likes Trump and the Republicans, but because he knew he was going to get clobbered if he, as the Democrat leader in the Senate, were responsible for a government shutdown. Because the Democrats had no options, so now they're at each other's throats.

Why are they at each other's throats? Because they have no leadership.

Who's the leader of the Democrat Party right now? Kamala Harris? No. Joe Biden? No,

he hasn't been the leader of the Democrat Party since before he got elected president.

Who? Barack Obama? Maybe you could have said Barack Obama. I don't think after this election you could.
Who's the leader? Schumer? No. Pelosi? No.
AOC? No. Hakeem Jeffries? No.
Who's the leader? You go down the whole list. Gavin Newsom? There's no leader.
And there's no leader because there's no leadership. And there's no leadership.
There's no vision. They have no idea what they want.
Despite the constant negative press, despite the constant negative press about how the Trump admin is in shambles, the country's going to pot and the Democrats can't wait to pounce, the Republican Party has not been stronger in my lifetime than it is right now. And the Democrat Party has not been weaker in my lifetime than it is right now.
And it's only day what, day 56? Pretty good. The best cars for the money are Hondas.
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