May 20, 2025 - The Benny Show - Benny Johnson
01:13:25
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| We're expecting President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to give an update on the development of the Golden Dome missile defense system. | ||
| Chief National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin has got the latest. | ||
| What can we expect from the announcement today? | ||
| Will the system ever be deployed? | ||
| Well, it's really interesting, John. | ||
| The announcement is slated to be made at 3 p.m. in the Oval Office. | ||
| President Trump will be standing side by side with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and also the vice of space operations, General Michael Gutline. | ||
| He will be put in charge of this Golden Dome. | ||
| This is something that the president has been talking about. | ||
| Since he took office, he signed an executive order when he took over on January 20th, asking for Defense Secretary Hegseth to come back to him with a plan in 60 days. | ||
| This announcement today is coinciding with very tense budget negotiations, of course, on Capitol Hill. | ||
| Now, as we mentioned, the president has been very impressed with the Iron Dome system. | ||
| That's the missile defense system that protected Israel from short- and medium-range missiles fired. | ||
| That missile defense shield protected the population of Israel, but Israel is the size of New Jersey. | ||
| This would be much larger and be space-based for the United States. | ||
| This would require satellite architecture, which would protect the entire U.S. from ballistic and hypersonic missiles fired from China, North Korea, or Russia. | ||
| The cost would be an estimated half a trillion dollars over 20 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. | ||
| That could be a problem for the president. | ||
| The president signed an executive order, as I mentioned, when he took office. | ||
| Fox News has also learned that Elon Musk's SpaceX and tech defense contractors Andrell and Palantir have pitched their ideas for the Golden Dome to the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, in what would be the Pentagon's largest procurement program in years. | ||
| $25 billion has been carved out in next year's defense budget as an initial down payment for the Golden Dome. | ||
| The head of the U.S. Space Force was questioned about this on Capitol Hill today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
As far as I'm concerned, we need to vastly, significantly increase the availability of funds to the Space Force, given the magnitude of the mission to which you've been assigned. | |
| I agree, Senator. | ||
| The last three years of funding has not allowed me to go as quickly as possible, putting counter-space capabilities together that address the targets that I'm being asked to address by U.S. Space Command, amongst other combatant commanders. | ||
| Democrats have expressed concerns that Elon Musk's SpaceX will be one of the lead contenders for this Golden Dome project. | ||
| They say that because Musk donated $250 million to President Trump's presidential campaign, that that is a conflict of interest. | ||
| But the problem is that Musk and SpaceX have are probably one of the few, if only, companies that exist that have that kind of space know-how and architecture and could help build this Golden Dome. | ||
| So, again, Democrats are going to raise concerns about conflict of interest. | ||
| And this will be a fight about budgets on Capitol Hill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
*Mario laughs* | |
| It's so aggressive! | ||
| Yes, ladies and gentlemen, here we are back live. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| We said if Pete Hegseth and Trump are going to be in the same room talking about many military things, we hear that it's not just going to be about the Golden Dome, although that's going to be very interesting, and President Trump's been talking about this for a long time, but it's also going to be more about prosecutions for those. | ||
| Who got our boys killed in Afghanistan? | ||
| Actually, boys and girls. | ||
| 13 American service members lost their lives in Afghanistan, and President Trump has always wanted to do the right thing here, and it seems like he's about to. | ||
| Now, right now, we have nothing but a holding screen so far inside of the White House. | ||
| This event was slated for 3 o 'clock. | ||
| It is 3.22 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, and so we are going to Go on Trump time. | ||
| Here he's had a very busy day. | ||
| President Trump has welcomed all the kids at the White House who are there for Bring Your Kid to Work Day. | ||
| We have some cute footage of that, but we have something I'd like to get to beforehand if we do have a little space to talk. | ||
| Something wild that we've talked about before. | ||
| Now, one thing that I hope that they cover inside of the White House today is this. | ||
| This was just released by Pete Hegseth, and I have no doubt that, in fact, it will get covered. | ||
| Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has launched a full investigation into the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal under President Biden. | ||
| Now that we know that Joe Biden was non-Compass Mattis and that Joe Biden was clearly, well, totally suffering from terminal cancer, something you don't wish on anyone, but it just is what it is. | ||
| We're all adults here. | ||
| We're living in the real world. | ||
| Joe Biden was dying and is dying. | ||
| And this is just what happens when you have terminal cancer that metastasizes to the bone. | ||
| This is what multiple medical experts, including, but not limited to, the doctors who served with Joe Biden, right? | ||
| This is what they've said. | ||
| We're going to have Ronnie Jackson on. | ||
| He was the physician for Barack Obama and Donald Trump. | ||
| We're going to have him on tomorrow. | ||
| I look forward to talking with him about this, about the malpractice that occurred and also the cover-up. | ||
| But imagine how you could be taken advantage of in that state. | ||
| And that's precisely what they did to Joe Biden. | ||
| And they took advantage of Joe Biden and then they killed Americans in the process. | ||
| Clearly no one was in charge when Joe Biden surrendered to Afghanistan. | ||
| And now the Secretary of Defense is saying that he's going to be looking into it. | ||
| They've already field-stripped General Milley, ripped his portrait off the wall. | ||
| Hey Alex, can you please grab that, please? | ||
| It's something I missed before we went live. | ||
| I need General Milley's portrait being removed from the Pentagon. | ||
| General Mark Milley. | ||
| Who screamed at the top of his lungs that he wants to understand white rage! | ||
| It's got to be raging right now. | ||
| He's had his commission stripped, his security clearance stripped, his portrait stripped, and now it looks like General Mark Milley may well be getting the punishment he deserves for the review of U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. | ||
| This signed by Pete Hegseth right here. | ||
| This just broke, by the way, so we assume that this press conference, and the Trump administration has been doing this a lot, and we assume this press conference is going to be this as well, right? | ||
| So it's going to be about the Golden Dome, but what it really is about is President Trump putting the pedal to the metal on this. | ||
| On August 26, 2021, President Joe Biden's administration led a chaotic withdrawal of military and embassy officials from Afghanistan. | ||
| It led to the death of 13 service members and 170 civilians in suicide bombings in Kabul and National Airport Abbey Gate. | ||
| President Trump and I have formally pledged full transparency for what transpired during the military withdrawal in Afghanistan, the Defense Department, an obligation both to the American people and the warfighters who sacrificed youth in Afghanistan to get to the facts. | ||
| This remains an important step towards regaining faith and trust in the American people and all those in uniform. | ||
| It's prudent based on the number of casualties, equipment lost during the execution of the withdrawal operation. | ||
| So now he's going through a review. | ||
| I've conducted that we need a comprehensive review to ensure the accountability for this event is met with the complete picture provided to the American people. | ||
| To meet this imperative, I'm directing the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Public Relations, To review this, oh, it's Sean Parnell. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| We love Sean. | ||
| He's one of our homies. | ||
| But this is going to be a big job. | ||
| Not limited to finding the facts, sources, witnesses to analyze decision-making that led to accountability for the American people. | ||
| There's one word that has been capitalized here, and it's accountability. | ||
| So we hope that that means something more than just a strongly worded letter. | ||
| Portrait of General Milley removed from Pentagon. | ||
| I'm not going to pay the New York Times for this article, but we have the photos here. | ||
| Here's the portrait of Milley with his elbow on a map of Ukraine. | ||
| So embarrassing, whatever that means. | ||
| Poor Ukraine. | ||
| I mean, that's a lot of weight right there. | ||
| And now that weight has been lifted from the walls of the Pentagon as the Mark Milley portrait was removed the first day, the first day of Pete Hegseth's tenure inside of the Pentagon. | ||
| So, here, ladies and gentlemen, we continue. | ||
| Hegseth revokes Millie's security detail and clearance portraits removed. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| Now, I would argue, I'm no lawyer, but we do talk to a lot of very smart lawyers on this program. | ||
| I would argue that what should really be happening here is a court-martial. | ||
| We've done a little bit of a look into this. | ||
| Turns out that when you alert the enemy... | ||
| to the movements of the American military ahead of time that that's called treason. | ||
| And we know as a matter of fact that white rage Mark Milley called his Chinese counterpart and said that he would alert him to American military movements when President Trump was in the process of leaving office in the year 2020 and 2021. | ||
| Mark Milley's on the record bragging about doing this. | ||
| He was Proud to usurp his commander-in-chief, and he was proud to take upon himself the role of the presidency, which of course would be to command our armed services, not to snitch to our enemies. | ||
| And so Mark Milley deserves a court-martial. | ||
| He deserves to have all of these awards. | ||
| Not sure how you get so decorated when you've never fought a war, but... | ||
| What do I know? | ||
| I'll leave it for the veterans or the active service members in the comment section to let me know, how do you get so much on your chest without having fought a war? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I do know that based on his actions, this is something that I do know, based on Mark Milley's actions alerting our Chinese communist enemies, To American troop movements usurping the chain of command that he deserves to be stripped of all of those medals on his chest. | ||
| People have been doing quite a bit of stripping right now. | ||
| Stripping down to the very brass tacks and bare bones on multiple issues. | ||
| It's very interesting what's happening when it comes to the Epstein files. | ||
| It's very interesting what's happening across the board. | ||
| It seems like we're on the precipice of something really big. | ||
| January 6th, the pipe bomber. | ||
| It seems like there really is a reckoning that's happening right now. | ||
| And I know you're going to say, oh, you know, listen, you're just, Benny, you're just like silver linings, right? | ||
| Glass half full. | ||
| And I do tend to be like that. | ||
| I'm an optimist at heart. | ||
| But then I witnessed today something that made me gasp. | ||
| There is a reckoning that is happening right now. | ||
| CNN's most famous news anchor, his name is Jake Tapper. | ||
| He has straight up admitted that there were two Joe Bidens. | ||
| Well, what's this about? | ||
| Two Joe Bidens? | ||
| Boy, that sounds very interesting. | ||
| It's almost like something that we've been talking about on this program for years. | ||
| We've shown you photos like this of Joe Biden in the same place, same set, same suit, but two very different people. | ||
| This was within hours of each other, these photos. | ||
| The video is even more startling. | ||
| When you watch Joe Biden, two very different people, different voices, different eye sockets, different pupils, different everything get trotted out to give messages. | ||
| Listen to this. | ||
| You can't be pro-insurrection and pro-cop. | ||
| Bringing down gas prices is a big part of the job. | ||
| You can't be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy. | ||
| You can't be pro-insurrection and pro-American. | ||
| And here's the good news. | ||
| Gas prices have dropped every day this summer. | ||
| That's more than 40 days in a row. | ||
| Donald Trump lacked the courage to act. | ||
| We now have 40,000 gas stations in the United States where the price of gas is $3.99 or less. | ||
| The brave women and men in blue. | ||
| You get it. | ||
| What were they doing to Joe Biden? | ||
| Well, there's only two options here. | ||
| One is a very highly medicated Joe Biden where he's unblinking. | ||
| You'll notice there his pupils don't move. | ||
| They're pinned back. | ||
| His voice is totally different. | ||
| Or there's two Joe Bidens. | ||
| Somebody in a rubber mask wandering out. | ||
| Talking about being Joe Biden. | ||
| And it's not really Joe Biden. | ||
| But now CNN's Jake Tapper is out saying there's two Joe Bidens? | ||
| Boy, what is this about? | ||
| Let's go ahead and research here, shall we? | ||
| Let's go ahead and look at what Joe Biden is doing and how he is debasing and humiliating himself, but how Megyn Kelly has called Jake Tapper to the carpet, and now he's telling the truth. | ||
| In fact, he's apologizing to us. | ||
| Again, we're gasping. | ||
| In the novelty of it all, I just can't really believe it. | ||
| Jake Tapper has admitted that there were two Joe Bidens in the White House. | ||
| Here's his explanation. | ||
| This is aired on Megyn Kelly's show just a short time ago. | ||
| The criticism has been that you're complaining about a cover up about Joe Biden's mental acuity that failed, that right wing pundits saw, the right wing in general saw, that independent media saw and reported on. | ||
| And that was no mystery even to left wing and so-called mainstream reporters who were not fooled, but chose willful blindness instead of honest reporting and that you were part of it. | ||
| How do you respond? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| It's a tough and fair question. | ||
| I would say that Alex and I, after Election Day, I interviewed more than 200 people, 200 mostly Democratic insiders, and almost all of these interviews were after the election. | ||
| And they justified to themselves what they had done in terms of misrepresenting how the president was, not just... | ||
| To me and Alex and other reporters, but also just to each other and to the world and to Democrats and to the cabinet, etc., by saying that there was this existential threat of Donald Trump and only Joe Biden could beat Donald Trump, and that justified everything in their minds. | ||
| After that existential threat was over, because the election was over and Donald Trump won, they were, we found, Alex and myself, remarkably willing to talk to us, either off the record or on background, or in some cases on the record, about what they saw. | ||
| One of the things that emerged was that there were two Bidens. | ||
| One was the fine Biden, serviceable, adequate. | ||
| And the other one was a non-functioning Biden. | ||
| And that's the one we saw the night of the debate. | ||
| And that's the one we saw some clips of here and there that you just showed. | ||
| And that non-functioning Biden, the one that lost his train of thought in a significant way, not in the way just that every human loses their train of thought, but in a way that shows that he's having trouble. | ||
| The one who forgot the name of close aides, who was not able to come up with George Clooney's name, didn't seem to recognize him, all that sort of thing. | ||
| That non-functioning Biden was, according to our reporting, showed up as far back as 2015, after the death of Beau, where one top aide said that that tragedy, the loss of Beau. | ||
| It was like watching somebody pour water on sand. | ||
| That was the effect on his psyche. | ||
| And there were other moments, 2017, 2018, you hear some, the Hurt Report, one of the reasons he came to that conclusion was because of the recordings they heard of Joe Biden in 2017 talking to his ghostwriter, in which he was similarly inclined. | ||
| Obviously, in 2019, 2020, there were other moments like that. | ||
| Most of his campaign staff and others would say, look, he's 78, he's 79, he has senior moments, but he's fine, he's fine, he's fine. | ||
| Well, he wasn't fine. | ||
| And throughout his presidency, that non-functioning Biden would show up more and more and more, and he was worse and worse and worse, really deteriorating tremendously the next time there was a really horrible family incident, which was when Hunter Biden's plea deal fell apart in the summer of 2023. | ||
| And then, obviously, in June, he was convicted. | ||
| And the thought, the fear of losing his son, not to jail, but maybe to another, to a relapse, to an overdose, to a suicide, who knows, was a very real fear. | ||
| So, there are two Bidens. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| None of this really answers the question, however, of why you covered it up, Jake. | ||
| Jake Tapper got... | ||
| A lot of access to Joe Biden. | ||
| A lot of sit-downs with Joe Biden. | ||
| Picnic time with Joe Biden. | ||
| Jake Tapper never said, hey, why do you walk like a robot, exactly? | ||
| Jake Tapper never asked about the two Bidens, right? | ||
| Why do you walk like this? | ||
| Jake Tapper, in his position, had an opportunity to really do something important for the country. | ||
| Not now that it's convenient and we all know what's going on. | ||
| But back when it could have meant something, when it could have actually changed the direction of the country. | ||
| It's called courage under fire. | ||
| It doesn't matter when the game's over. | ||
| If you make a play on the field and the game's over now, it's all, the gig is up. | ||
| There's even rumors of a Biden apology tour that may well happen. | ||
| It's pretty remarkable here. | ||
| You have a president who walks up to the press. | ||
| And literally says, my butt's been wiped. | ||
| That's what he says. | ||
| And we were going through some of the clips of Joe Biden. | ||
| Isn't he actually remarkable what we have? | ||
| But just a reminder that Joe Biden went and walked up and said, my butt's been wiped to the press. | ||
| And Jake Tapper went along with it. | ||
| Here's Joe Biden doing that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What must be what? | |
| Great. | ||
| Jake Tapper thought that was great for a president to do. | ||
| He thought that was normal. | ||
| This is smart to do. | ||
| Good job, Mr. President, says Jake Tapper. | ||
| What a complete fraud. | ||
| Megyn Kelly called him out to his face and something quite remarkable happened and Jake Tapper apologized to the Trump family. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Do you want to apologize to Laura Trump now? | ||
| I've already apologized to her. | ||
| I called her months ago. | ||
| And what did she say? | ||
| I mean, I don't want to disclose the contents of a private conversation, but I thought the conversation went well, and she has said this publicly, so I feel fine sharing it. | ||
| She said that she would never mock anybody's stutter. | ||
| But I mean, you know, after we did the research for this book, and I realized how bad his acuity issues were, Like, I mean, I called Laura Trump and I said, you were right. | ||
| She was totally right. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| Because when I watch that clip, and I'm giving voice to what a lot of people watching the show are feeling, Jake, I feel angry because she was right. | ||
| And not only did you not allow her to make her comments, but you seemed to try to humiliate her. | ||
| You had a hostility toward the position. | ||
| But she was totally... | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then you lectured her on how she was in no position to diagnose cognitive decline, which you guys do at length, including on page four of your book. | ||
| You describe at length his cognitive decline, which is all she tried to do with you. | ||
| But you had such a visceral reaction to her. | ||
| And my feeling is that's because you didn't want to hear it. | ||
| Now, I'm happy to talk about this. | ||
| I didn't come here thinking that you weren't going to ask me about this. | ||
| I'm happy to talk to you about it. | ||
| The first time I saw the coverage of Laura Trump's comments, which were interpreted as her mocking Joe Biden's stutter, was in January 2020. | ||
| I read it in conservative media. | ||
| I read it in the Daily Mail. | ||
| And that's where I saw that her comments were being interpreted that way. | ||
| After those comments were publicized, it got a lot of coverage, and Sully Sullenberger wrote an op-ed in the New York Times criticizing her about this. | ||
| So that's the context for that, that I was following up on a story that had been out there months before. | ||
| This is also in the context of October 2020, a very intense time. | ||
| People on the Biden side are saying crazy things about Trump. | ||
| People on the Trump side are saying crazy things about Biden, including Don Jr. suggesting that Joe Biden is a pedophile. | ||
| So that is the larger context. | ||
| But as I said, her comments have aged well. | ||
| My comments have aged poorly. | ||
| I own that. | ||
| So does Jake Tapper own every time that he sat down with Joe Biden to do an interview? | ||
| Never asking once about how Joe Biden forgot where the Oval Office was. | ||
| And just for character reference, here's the clip at hand that is being asked about by Megyn Kelly. | ||
| It's a clip of Laura Trump saying correctly that Joe Biden is in complete and total collapse. | ||
| This is, of course, before the 2020 election, if you can call it that. | ||
| And Jake Tapper being a smug a-hole. | ||
| To Laura Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every time he comes on stage or they turn to him, I'm like, Joe, can you get it out? | |
| Let's get the words out, Joe. | ||
| You kind of feel bad for him. | ||
| How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that? | ||
| First and foremost, I had no idea that Joe Biden ever suffered from a stutter. | ||
| I think what we see on stage with Joe Biden, Jake, is very clearly a cognitive decline. | ||
| That's what I'm referring to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It makes me uncomfortable to watch the money on stage search for questions. | |
| And try and figure out an answer. | ||
| A cognitive decline. | ||
| But when you're trying to tell me that what I was suggesting was a stuttering, I had no idea, Joe Biden. | ||
| I think you were mocking his stutter, and I think you have absolutely no... | ||
| I'm not standing to diagnose somebody's cognitive decline. | ||
| I would think that somebody in the Trump family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses diagnosing politicians from afar. | ||
| Plenty of people have diagnosed your father from afar, and I'm sure it offends you, your father-in-law from afar. | ||
| I'm sure it offends you. | ||
| You don't have any standing to say... | ||
| I'm not diagnosing him. | ||
| What I'm saying, Jake, is that we can clearly see... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have one last question for you, Laura. | |
| It makes you angry watching that? | ||
| It makes you angry every time, like we're about to see Donald Trump in a room of reporters, right? | ||
| He's going to be in the room of reporters with Pete Hegseth, and he's going to be asked questions, and he's going to get all these, all the reporters are going to scream and yell. | ||
| And you never saw that with Biden. | ||
| In fact, they were talking about kicking Peter Doocy out because he would ask basic, normal, functioning questions. | ||
| The press completely silent every time Joe Biden enters a room. | ||
| Every time Donald Trump enters a room, he's screamed at and spit at. | ||
| Donald Trump had to do three, count them, three press conferences this morning in Capitol Hill. | ||
| And now we're gearing up for a fourth, fifth today. | ||
| President Trump has an entire slate today. | ||
| Again, we're going to cover it live when Trump's in the Oval Office with Pete Hegseth, and he'll have a phalanx of reporters there, and he'll take questions for who knows how long. | ||
| Oh, yeah, why not? | ||
| Yeah, whoa, whoa, whoa, yeah. | ||
| Please, Klein, from now on, never want to have to ask again. | ||
| Chat on screen, thank you. | ||
| We apologize. | ||
| This is a brand new function. | ||
| We're putting the chat on screen. | ||
| We apologize. | ||
| Klein, every show. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You guys have heard it. | ||
| You guys have heard literally the show notes. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| So this is a... | ||
| It makes your blood boil. | ||
| The difference in how they're treated. | ||
| You would never hear Jake Tapper talk to a Democrat like that. | ||
| You see how he taught how diminutive he is to Lord Trump? | ||
| How sneering and sniveling he is? | ||
| I don't care if he called and apologized. | ||
| That clip is grotesque. | ||
| And of course, again, Lord Trump is right and he's having to eat crow. | ||
| Megyn Kelly then got to work on Jake Tapper and went in very, very severely on Jake Tapper, refusing to ask tough questions of Joe Biden when he had Joe Biden live on air. | ||
| Here's a great segment. | ||
| And like I said, I feel humility about my coverage. | ||
| I mean, it's not like I was asking him his favorite movie or his favorite color we were talking about. | ||
| Putin, we were talking about other issues of national importance. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, of course, I've said, I look back at my coverage with humility. | ||
| And I wish I did cover the issues of age and acuity, but I wish I had covered them much more. | ||
| And I wish, I mean, of course, it's May 2025. | ||
| Do I wish that in that... | ||
| Well, it wasn't just that, though, Jake. | ||
| It wasn't just that. | ||
| I mean, you sat with him a couple of times in the course of his presidency, and these issues were not pressed. | ||
| Well, there was at least that time, and then there was the time at the beginning. | ||
| But separate and apart from that, you covered the Biden's presidency. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Let me just finish my point. | ||
| You covered the Biden presidency. | ||
| Okay, right, and it was 13 days after the Jackie Walorski thing. | ||
| But you covered the Biden presidency aggressively throughout the four years, and you didn't cover mental acuity hardly at all. | ||
| I mean, time and time again, when issues came up, you seemed to be running cover for the president. | ||
| I don't think that's true. | ||
| Jackie Walorski is a member of Congress that died, and Joe Biden, who had just, like, been out of her funeral, Got up on stage and asked, where's Jackie? | ||
| It's a really incredible clip. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's really something. | |
| Where's Jackie, Biden asks, referring to Jackie Walorsky, who died in a car accident in August. | ||
| The White House had played a tribute video to her. | ||
| And Joe Biden's asking, where is she? | ||
| And Jake Tapper interviewed Joe Biden. | ||
| Right after this. | ||
| I gotta play it. | ||
| Everyone's already seen it. | ||
| Jake Tapper didn't ask about this at all. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| But now when he can make a buck off of Biden's diseased corpse, Jake Tapper's all in. | ||
| What a fraud. | ||
| Something I never thought I'd see in my life, however. | ||
| Jake Tapper apologizing to us. | ||
| Jake Tapper apologized to conservative media. | ||
| So I guess if you're using that as a pejorative, you'd be, what, liberal media, right? | ||
| That's the battle. | ||
| Jake Tapper apologized to us, which is crazy. | ||
| He said that we had it right and he had it wrong. | ||
| And so I suppose I'll take the W here. | ||
| Jake Tapper. | ||
| I will acknowledge that after I was named moderator, co-moderator of the debate, I tried to make sure that my coverage was fairly vanilla, both about Trump and about Biden, because I just wanted to get to the debate. | ||
| And, you know, the Biden people and the Trump people, I'm kind of frankly surprised that either one of them agreed to have me as a moderator, because both sides disliked me so much. | ||
| But yeah, I remember that moment. | ||
| And I remember that moment, the glitch at the immigration event. | ||
| Not getting much attention outside of conservative media at all. | ||
| And Alex and I are here to say that conservative media was right. | ||
| And conservative media was correct. | ||
| And that there should be a lot of soul-searching, not just among me, but among the legacy media to begin with. | ||
| All of us. | ||
| For how this was covered or not covered sufficiently. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| So, I mean, I'm not here to defend. | ||
| Uh, coverage that I've already acknowledged, I wish I could do differently. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Let me bring Alex in. | ||
| Thank you for your patience, Alex, and apologies for the... | ||
| I think he's fine. | ||
| I think he's fine. | ||
| The audience may not be aware of this based on what just happened, but Jake and I are actually friends, and this is all said in, look, the context of I know what my audience wants to hear asked, and Jake has told me before he wanted the opportunity to answer these questions, so that's what we're doing here. | ||
| Megan, we didn't come on the show thinking, That this was going to be a softball interview. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| Listen. | ||
| First of all, nobody flagellates Jake Tapper more than Jake Tapper. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| I am fallible. | ||
| I make mistakes. | ||
| It's not just the Biden coverage. | ||
| I mean, I go back and I look at, like, I wish I had been covering terrorism more before 9-11. | ||
| I wish that I had covered the WMD with more skepticism. | ||
| You know, a million things. | ||
| This is definitely among them. | ||
| And conservative media absolutely has every right to say we were hip to this and the legacy media was not. | ||
| Now, I do not accept that I was part of a cover up. | ||
| I do not accept that I was just providing cover for Joe Biden. | ||
| I think a lot of these clips are not fair. | ||
| The one that is fair is the Laura Trump clip, and I own it. | ||
| Well, you did. | ||
|
unidentified
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You did. | |
| I mean, it's hard for us to even rationalize what the world would be like if Donald Trump was slipping and falling on his face, slipping and falling down the stairs, incapable of speaking, incapable of controlling his bowel movements, starting wars, getting American service members killed. | ||
| And, like, how would we cover that? | ||
| Well, of course, you'd cover it. | ||
| We'd cover every second of it. | ||
| And we'd say, this is awful. | ||
| I mean, maybe, like, out of care. | ||
| Some of it's, like, out of care. | ||
| Out of just care for someone. | ||
| You want to say, like, they're clearly non-compass matters. | ||
| They can't be president. | ||
| If you can't put a sentence together, if you can't walk off a stage, if you can't walk across a stage. | ||
| Something horrible has happened. | ||
| But Jake Tapper didn't cover that. | ||
| Jake Tapper looked the other way. | ||
| He's, of course, part of a cover-up. | ||
| I'm glad that Megyn Kelly put her boot in his ass. | ||
| I'm sorry to hear that they're friends. | ||
| I'm not friends with Jake Tapper. | ||
| We should invite him on our show. | ||
| Let's give him the exact same treatment. | ||
| Except for the difference, I suppose, would be why are you getting away with this cover-up? | ||
| It was clearly a cover-up. | ||
| Jake Tapper's going to have to point to a single piece of reporting, a single time. | ||
| He had an hour-long show on CNN every single night for the last four years. | ||
| He's going to have to point to a single time that he led his show, or even had a B, D, or C block in his show, where he said Joe Biden doesn't have the mental acuity, the sharpness, the ability to be president. | ||
| We think they're lying to us about Joe Biden's health. | ||
| But that doesn't exist. | ||
| There is no show like that. | ||
| He never did that. | ||
| He allowed all of these things to happen, and he liked it. | ||
| He was part of the cover-up, and now he's trying to make a quick buck off of it. | ||
| It's really humiliating. | ||
| Here's Jake Tapper. | ||
| I've saved this clip for last. | ||
| Because it's Jake Tapper talking about how dumb Joe Biden is and how stupid Joe Biden is. | ||
| Again, it's amazing how convenient it is to go on Megyn Kelly's successful show after the fact to try and make money off of saying Joe Biden's stupid. | ||
| Where were you the last four years? | ||
| You were part of a cover-up. | ||
| I don't buy it. | ||
| I don't accept it. | ||
| Jake Tapper is a fraud and a filthy fraud. | ||
| Jake Tapper is scum. | ||
| He tries to robe himself in the American flag and say that he's a patriot and he defends the troops and defends the soldiers and he loves the soldiers so much he writes books and makes money about that too. | ||
| But he didn't say jack about Afghanistan, something that I think Trump and Pete Hegseth are going to talk about very soon. | ||
| The White House has started their holding screen, so I suppose we'll be seeing President Trump quite soon here with Pete Hegseth. | ||
| But yeah, they're complete frauds. | ||
| So here it is, Jake Tapper. | ||
| Joe Biden was so stupid! | ||
| Okay, now it'll cost him nothing. | ||
| The comments of Joe Biden making gaffes, saying things stupid, tripping, are all important and all deserved to be aired and all deserve scrutiny. | ||
| But as you know, Megan, because... | ||
| Even though you look 30 years younger than me, we're roughly the same age. | ||
| Joe Biden has been saying stupid things for decades. | ||
| I get what you're saying, but this minimizes it too, because it was more than saying stupid things. | ||
| But I'm telling you, over here in my ecosphere, we were covering all of these. | ||
| It wasn't just falling down. | ||
| It was getting lost. | ||
| It was some of the stuff you report in your book. | ||
| We knew and we were reporting on like the multi jump cuts in the videos of him or it was obvious he couldn't get through a one minute take. | ||
| So they had to use those. | ||
| It was clear to us that he was using teleprompter in and and there was some reporting on that at the time, all of which the White House was denying. | ||
| Now, with the current White House, I have some connections with the Joe Biden White House. | ||
| I had none. | ||
| So, that's... | ||
| You've been in Washington 30 years, Jake. | ||
| You guys, you and CNN have White House connections, but there was no effort. | ||
| None to get to the bottom of this. | ||
| And now for you guys to write this book, like, there was a cover-up. | ||
| It's like you, there was a cover-up and there was an attempted cover-up. | ||
|
unidentified
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It could only ever work if you allowed it. | |
| There. | ||
| Now that's the Megyn Kelly I want to show you. | ||
| I'll ask my producers to source a couple other clips that I found very interesting about this interview. | ||
| But that's what needs to be exposed here. | ||
| Everyone's well aware, nobody, like, it's a snooze fest. | ||
| You can't, nobody will even... | ||
| Nobody will even watch or click if you're like, there's a White House cover-up of Biden's health. | ||
| We all knew that. | ||
| It was self-evident. | ||
| It was demonstrable. | ||
| What's important right now is that gremlin frauds like Jake Tapper are going out to try and make money off of what he covered up. | ||
| Babylon Bee article from, I think, yesterday saying that Jake Tapper is about to write a book that Joe Biden has cancer. | ||
| It'll be out in a year. | ||
| It's like, why are we allowing this? | ||
| It's totally degrading, and they should be held into great contempt and shame over this. | ||
| I know you already hold CNN in great contempt and shame, but I'm glad that Megyn Kelly isn't letting him get away with it. | ||
| There are stronger clips of Megyn Kelly really getting out the buzzsaw on Jake Tapper. | ||
| We'll pop them up if we're still in a waiting screen. | ||
| Here's the waiting screen, ladies and gentlemen, for the President Trump and Pete Hegseth inside of the White House. | ||
| We hope, now that it is rounding the corner on 4 o 'clock, that this event will begin soon. | ||
| Well, because we have a lot to do. | ||
| This is a moment, I suppose, for some type of For some type of blowback on Jake Tapper, he did get properly whipped today by Megyn Kelly, and she wouldn't let him squirm an inch. | ||
| And I suppose you've got to shrug your shoulders and say, well, he didn't have to go on Megyn Kelly's show, and he didn't have to write the book, but I'm not going to grant that. | ||
| He's not going to do it. | ||
| So, Jake Tapper talking about the reaction to Joe Biden at the debate. | ||
| Now, he was the moderator at the debate. | ||
| And so, obviously, Jake Tapper's... | ||
| This was the famous debate where Joe Biden just completely and totally collapsed. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| My producer is telling me that the press wrangler is putting the press together inside of the... | ||
| Inside of the Oval Office. | ||
| So all the press have been brought into the Oval Office. | ||
| So imminently soon we will have Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth live inside of the Oval Office making a large military announcement. | ||
| Jake Tapper's response to the debate that he moderated with Joe Biden that ended his political career. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Ben in the front row of the presidential debate in big moments. | ||
| Oh, I remember. | ||
| I remember. | ||
| One of the interesting things is always, like, what's the dynamic between the anchors on the set when you know big news is being made? | ||
| So walk us through that moment when he completely fell apart with the, "I killed Medicare," and everybody was left with their own agape moment. | ||
| Presumably your viewers and listeners know the agape reference by now. | ||
| So that front row seat was really disturbing. | ||
| And again, as you say, we all watched President Biden age. | ||
| We all watched his gaffes. | ||
| We all watched these moments that were uncomfortable and obviously representative of a decline going on. | ||
| But there was something about that debate that was utterly shocking. | ||
| And maybe you and your listeners were not shocked. | ||
| Maybe you thought that this was going to happen. | ||
| I think it was one of those shocked but not surprised moments for us. | ||
| So he comes out and, you know, he's obviously shuffling as had been going on with him for years because of his degenerative spine. | ||
| And although, by the way, that was another thing that the White House wasn't being honest about. | ||
| They were saying it had to do with his, like, breaking his ankle or something in December 2020. | ||
| And his refusal to wear the, like, the foot cast or support. | ||
| Yeah, that's not true. | ||
| Yeah, not true. | ||
| So he comes out, and he has a cold also, and he sounds so even. | ||
| His voice, obviously, go back and listen to him. | ||
| In 2020, his voice is much deeper and stronger. | ||
| And then he comes out, it's thinner, it's readier, he obviously is coughing a lot. | ||
| But there was something about that moment. | ||
| My first text to my producing team read phlegm, and I saw that same word in your book referencing what you were thinking. | ||
| It was phlegmy. | ||
| He was definitely very phlegmy. | ||
| But it was a few minutes in. | ||
| I mean, his first answer was not good. | ||
| But that wasn't ultimately particularly surprising. | ||
| I think it was the second answer, the second long answer in that economics block that we did, where he just completely lost his train of thought in such a way that he was grasping for words. | ||
| And look, he has those crutches where he starts wandering off and then he says, "Anyway," because he's lost his train of thought. | ||
| That's something that we've seen. | ||
| But this was something else. | ||
| This was something more shocking. | ||
| And then he says we finally beat Medicare. | ||
| And presumably he was trying to say we finally beat COVID, but it was really shocking. | ||
| Also interesting at the time was Trump obviously was very Trumpy during the debate. | ||
| He did his thing. | ||
| If you like it, you like it. | ||
| If you don't, you don't. | ||
| For Trump, given what was going on to his left, he was... | ||
| He was fairly restrained. | ||
| He wasn't really commenting on the self-immolation that was going on. | ||
| I think he only made one comment that night about Biden's incoherence. | ||
| He said something like, "I'm not really sure what he just said, and I'm not sure that he does either," or something like that. | ||
| It's pretty wild, man. | ||
| I think... | ||
| I'm not trying to find something nice to say about Jake Tepper. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| I'll let you know. | ||
| Giving it to Jake Tapper, both barrels. | ||
| I was like, I don't like Jake Tapper. | ||
| But you will recall, and I recall, that the debate questions on CNN for the Biden-Trump debate, that those were real questions. | ||
| Those were good questions. | ||
| Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we finally have President Trump inside of the Oval Office. | ||
| We're going to pop on over to the feed right now. | ||
| Pop it up. | ||
| Here is the... | ||
| This is Trump at his desk. | ||
| No audio yet. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here we go. | |
| Very low audio. | ||
| Fix this. | ||
| ...about the Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield. | ||
| That's something we want. | ||
| And Ronald Reagan wanted it many years ago, but they didn't have the technology. | ||
| It's something we're going to have. | ||
| We're going to have it at the highest level. | ||
| I want to thank Secretary Hegseth, who's been fantastic, and Secretary Rubio and Space Force Vice Chief of Space Operations, General Mike Gutlein. | ||
| I also want to recognize Senators Dan Sestek and Secretary Rubio and Space Force Vice Chief of Space Operations, General Mike Gutlein. | ||
| I also want to recognize Senators Dan Sullivan, Kevin Kramer, and Jim Banks. | ||
| Fantastic senators, great talents, great political talents, and people that love our country. | ||
| In the campaign, I promised the American people that I would build a cutting-edge missile defense shield to protect our homeland from the threat of foreign missile attack. | ||
| And that's what we're doing. | ||
| Today, I'm pleased to announce that we have officially selected an architecture for this state-of-the-art system that will Deploy next-generation technologies across the land, sea, and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors. | ||
| And Canada has called us, and they want to be a part of it. | ||
| So we'll be talking to them. | ||
| They want to have protection also. | ||
| So, as usual, we help Canada do the best we can. | ||
| This design for the Golden Dome will... | ||
| Integrate with our existing defense capabilities and should be fully operational before the end of my term. | ||
| So we'll have it done in about three years. | ||
| Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world and even if they are launched from space. | ||
| And we will have the best system ever built. | ||
| As you know, we helped Israel with theirs. | ||
| It was very successful, and now we have technology that's even far advanced from that. | ||
| But including hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, and advanced cruise missiles, all of them will be knocked out of the air. | ||
| We will truly be completing the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago, forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland, and the success rate is very close to 100%, which is incredible. | ||
| When you think of it, you're shooting bullets out of the air. | ||
| I'm also pleased to report that the one big beautiful bill will include $25 billion for the Golden Dome to help construction get underway. | ||
| That's the initial sort of a down posit. | ||
| And we have probably, you're talking about, General, we're talking about $175 billion total cost of this when it's completed. | ||
| This afternoon I'm also announcing that I will appoint, very importantly, General... | ||
| Good line to lead the ambitious new effort as the direct reporting program manager for the Golden Dome. | ||
| Very talented man, and I'm very honored to have been the one that helped or really created Space Force. | ||
| Space Force has turned out to be a tremendous success. | ||
| We were third in space, and now we're number one in space by a lot. | ||
| It's not even close. | ||
| And Mike is a four-star Space Force general, the recipient of the defense. | ||
| Just most respected people in the world having to do with defense. | ||
| You know, we have offense and we have defense. | ||
| I bet he's good at offense, too. | ||
| And he has an unmatched background in missile warning technology and defense procurement. | ||
| General Goodline also knows that we need to move fast. | ||
| No one is more qualified for his job. | ||
| And everybody, this was a universal acceptance of General Goodline. | ||
| Everybody that knows him and knows everybody else has said there's only one man for the job, so I have a feeling we have the right guy. | ||
| But now I'd like to invite Secretary Hegseth and the General to please say a few words and describe the system a little bit. | ||
| And we appreciate you being here. | ||
| The press has really been very fair over the last period of a couple of months. | ||
| I don't know what happened to you. | ||
| It was so much more exciting the other way. | ||
| But you've been very, very fair. | ||
| We have very high poll numbers. | ||
| The highest we've ever had. | ||
| And we appreciate you being here. | ||
| The press has really been very fair over the last period of a couple of months. | ||
| I don't know what happened to you. | ||
| It was so much more exciting the other way. | ||
| But you've been very, very fair. | ||
| We have very high poll numbers. | ||
| The highest we've ever had. | ||
| And I think we're doing a great job. | ||
|
unidentified
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We had a tremendous trip to the Middle East. | |
| Canada, they want to hook in and they want to see if they can be a part of it and sort of make sense. | ||
| I guess that's what I was talking about from day one, you know, it just automatically makes sense and it won't be very difficult to do, but they'll pay their fair share. | ||
| Thank you very much, everybody. | ||
| And Pete, go ahead. | ||
| Well, Mr. President, add this to the long and growing list of promises made and promises kept. | ||
| Ultimately, this right here, the Golden Dome for America, is game changer. | ||
| It's a generational investment in the security of America and Americans. | ||
| Mr. President, you said we're going to secure our southern border and get 100% operational control after the previous administration allowed an invasion of people into our country. | ||
| President Reagan, 40 years ago, cast the vision for it. | ||
| The technology wasn't there. | ||
| Now it is, and you're following through to say we will protect the homeland from cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles. | ||
| Drones, whether they're conventional or nuclear. | ||
| And it's not lost on me, sir, also, that you had the vision of hypersonic missiles, drones, whether they're conventional or nuclear. | ||
| And it's not lost on me, sir, also, that you had the vision to start the Space Force. | ||
| And here we are, when others said we didn't need it, here we are in the Oval Office with one of the leaders of the Space Force, General Gutlein, leading the charge on putting in place a game-changing... | ||
| Golden Dome for America. | ||
| So, sir, it's an honor to be a part of this bold initiative. | ||
| We're going to get to work on it. | ||
| We have been since you signed that executive order on January 27th. | ||
| We've been fast forward on this. | ||
| We're here on this day, and this is just one stop in delivering this defense of the homeland, which is something you've charged us with doing, and we'll keep going until it is complete, sir. | ||
| Thank you, Pete. | ||
| Pete's done a great job, by the way. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| General, please. | ||
|
unidentified
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President, today is a great day for the nation as we double down on protection of the homeland. | |
| As you're aware, our adversaries have become very capable and very intent on holding the homeland at risk. | ||
| While we have been focused on peeping the peace overseas, our adversaries have been quickly modernizing their nuclear forces, building out ballistic missiles capable of hosting multiple warheads, building out hypersonic missiles capable of attacking the United States within an hour and traveling at 6,000 miles an hour, building cruise missiles that can navigate around our radar and our defenses. | ||
| Building submarines that can sneak up on our shores and, worse yet, building space weapons. | ||
| It is time that we change that equation and start doubling down on the protection of the homeland. | ||
| Golden Dome is a bold and aggressive approach to hurry up and protect the homeland from our adversaries. | ||
| We owe it to our children and our children's children to protect them and afford them a quality of life that we have all grown up enjoying. | ||
| Golden Dome will afford that. | ||
| I greatly appreciate your trust in me, and your nomination in me, and your trust in the team to deliver this. | ||
| It is a great day for America. | ||
| And also, very importantly, we're the only ones that have this-- we call it "super technology." Nobody else has it. | ||
| And nobody else has nearly-- really near what we have. | ||
| So this is a very exciting project. | ||
| This is something that will-- I mean, the General said close to 100 percent protection, so that's something we need. | ||
| I think it's a very-- And everything's going to be made in the USA, by the way, very importantly. | ||
| So it's something that I've been looking forward to for a long time. | ||
| And I just noticed you, too, Jim, you're standing there. | ||
| Behind you is a very important document, "Decoration of Independence." And that was in the vault for many decades, right under this area. | ||
| They have vaults with pictures on top. | ||
| You have Abraham Lincoln. | ||
| You see, that was the original Abraham Lincoln, the original Washington. | ||
| Does everybody know who the medal was? | ||
| General Grant. | ||
| And so it's very exciting. | ||
| You look over here and above Ronald Reagan, you have Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| That's Monroe from the Monroe document. | ||
| And you know who that is, right? | ||
| Andrew Jackson. | ||
| So we have a lot of very exciting pictures. | ||
| And on the other side, likewise, just some great presidents and great people on these. | ||
| Many of these, because people were asking about them, many of them, almost all of them, were in the vaults, or nearby, but generally in the vaults, downstairs, where we have some great, so it's very exciting. | ||
| The place has become a little different than you first saw, Jim, right? | ||
| Yes, much better. | ||
| Slightly better. | ||
| But I think we had them, and some were in the vaults for over 100 years, so it's pretty cool stuff. | ||
| Everybody knows Jim Banks. | ||
| He's great. | ||
| Congressman, and now he's a great senator from Indiana. | ||
| And you might want to say a few words. | ||
| Well, your legacy with Space Force, Mr. President, is already big. | ||
| But the Golden Dome is going to be an even bigger legacy for our country. | ||
| And Indiana is going to help you make it. | ||
| The space satellites that are made in Fort Wayne, Indiana by L3 Harris, all the work done at Crane Navy Base in southern Indiana is going to be a big part of it. | ||
| And Hoosiers are very proud of that. | ||
| We're proud of you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| It'll be a big factor. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And good luck. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| You won that race by a lot. | ||
| That wasn't even a contest, right? | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Thanks to you and all of your support. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks. | |
| Please, go ahead. | ||
| This is Senator Kramer, and he's one of our best. | ||
| Can't get any better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Well, you're very nice, Mr. President, and thanks for this. | ||
| I remember the day in your first term when you called, and I was a brand-new baby freshman senator on the Armed Services Committee and said, You said, "I want to have a Space Force. | ||
| Would you lead the effort on the Senate Armed Services Committee?" And I felt so proud thinking that you chose me and only to find out later no one else would do it. | ||
| But nonetheless, it worked out really, really, really well because North Dakota has some great space assets that contributed to that. | ||
| And to Golden Dome, no surprise that you would be the one, the president, that would come along and put the homeland first. | ||
| And this is just one more example of that. | ||
| So thanks for this and for allowing me to stop doing. | ||
| By the way, let me just add my strong endorsement of General Goodline's role in leading this. | ||
| I don't know anybody better, for sure, better equipped to do it than he is. | ||
| Everybody said that. | ||
| That's for sure. | ||
| Dan Sullivan, Alaska Senator. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you for your continued leadership on missile defense. | |
| We were talking earlier how in 2019 at the Pentagon... | ||
| You laid out a speech about the Missile Defense Review that had all these principles on missile defense. | ||
| You articulated then, during your first term, and now the Golden Dome is all of that. | ||
| So you're continuing to lead. | ||
| We really appreciate it. | ||
| You know, the Congress is stepping up, as you mentioned, right now on the budget reconciliation bill. | ||
| $25 billion for the Golden Dome in what Senator Kramer and Senator Banks and I and many others were working on our... | ||
| And I briefed you on this before, sir, on our Golden Dome Act, which we think will have in terms of legislation that can help cement what you're doing right here, getting the Congress behind it, not just with the funding, but with authorization. | ||
| So we're working closely with Secretary Hegseth, General Guttlein, the whole team. | ||
| So we're very honored to be here, sir. | ||
| And, you know, Alaska is the cornerstone of missile defense right now in terms of ground-based missile interceptors. | ||
| In terms of radar systems that track incoming missiles. | ||
| So my state is honored to continue to play a critical role in all of this and build on it. | ||
| And we're really excited to be here. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much, Dan. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Any questions? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Mr. President, you had mentioned at the beginning of your remarks that this was a campaign promise of yours. | |
| Have military commanders asked for this system specifically? | ||
| Because NORAD had said previously that the current system was adequate. | ||
| So what does this get the United States? | ||
| There really is no current system. | ||
| We have certain areas of missiles and certain missile defense, but there's no system. | ||
| We just have some very capable weapons that hopefully we never have to use, but we have some very capable weapons. | ||
| Now, this is a different league. | ||
| There's never been anything like this. | ||
| This is something that's going to be very protective. | ||
| Rest assured, there'll be nothing like this. | ||
| Nobody else is capable of building it either. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Was it something that military commanders asked you for? | |
| Did they ask you to do this? | ||
| Well, let me put it differently. | ||
| I suggested it, and they all said, "We love the idea, sir." The way it's got to be, right? | ||
| But they want it, and they wanted it badly once it was suggested. | ||
| I don't know if they ever thought they would be lucky enough to have it, but we were able to get it done, and we have all the funding, so... | ||
| Pretty much tucked away. | ||
| I think most people feel it's very important to have. | ||
| Yeah, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. President. | |
| When you first announced this idea, critics said it would be prohibitively expensive, potentially ineffective, and could trigger an arms race in space. | ||
| What do you say to those critics about that? | ||
| Well, the wrong is about as close to perfect as you can have in terms of real production. | ||
| I told you Canada wants to be a part of it, which would be, you know, a fairly small expansion. | ||
| But we'll... | ||
| Work with them on pricing. | ||
| We'll be dealing with them on pricing. | ||
| They know about it very much. | ||
| They've asked to be a part of it, actually. | ||
| They've asked us to be a part of it. | ||
| I think it's something that is great. | ||
| If you can afford to do it, we can afford to do it. | ||
| You know, we took in $5.1 trillion in the last four days in the Middle East. | ||
| And when you think about it, this is a tiny fraction of that. | ||
| But we make it all here. | ||
| We're going to make it all here. | ||
| We have... | ||
| When, I will tell you, an adversary told me, a very big adversary, told me the most brilliant people in the world are Silicon Valley. | ||
| He said we cannot duplicate, and we can't. | ||
| This was somebody that I won't tell you who it is, but you'd be amazed. | ||
| We have the most brilliant minds in the world doing this kind of thing, the equipment, the space, the computers, everything. | ||
| But I said that we just can't duplicate what you have there in Silicon Valley. | ||
| We never have been able to, and this is a very strong group of people. | ||
| And very strong minds, but they can't. | ||
| So we have things that nobody else can have. | ||
| You see what we've done helping Israel with that. | ||
| You probably wouldn't have an Israel. | ||
| They launched probably 500 missiles altogether, and I think one half of a missile got through, and that was only falling to the ground as scrap metal. | ||
| It's pretty amazing. | ||
| In terms of technology, far advanced from that system. | ||
|
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And just one follow-up on the adversaries. | |
| Have you addressed Russia's ventures in space with a space-based nuclear weapon and told Putin to stop in your conversations with him? | ||
| We haven't discussed it, but at the right time, we will. | ||
|
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Mr. President, with the goal of keeping Americans safe with this, can you talk about the timeline? | |
| How long will this take to complete? | ||
| We think it's going to be about a little bit less than three years. | ||
| And we'll have a big phase in very early. | ||
| You know, we're starting immediately with $25 billion. | ||
| It'll cost about $175 billion completed, but we think in two and a half to three years. | ||
|
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Are you confident that you can get the funding needed from Congress quickly? | |
| It's amazing how easy this one is to fund. | ||
| You know, some funding is tough and some is easy. | ||
| When we say we're going to save everyone's lives in a crazy world, it seems to be very easy to get. | ||
| Yeah, we've already spoken to everybody that we have to speak to. | ||
| Everybody's in-- I would say, Dan, everybody's in line here. | ||
|
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Yes, sir. | |
| $25 billion is a down payment in the budget reconciliation bill right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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So I think people-- Mr. President, on Russia-- People actually love it. | |
| Mr. President, on Russia, are you worried about the reports on a military buildup along the borders towards Finland and Norway? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I don't worry about that at all. | ||
| They're going to be very safe. | ||
| Those two countries are going to be very safe. | ||
|
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And the secondly, sir, if I may, is Volodymyr Zelensky is saying today that he's hoping for you to impose new sanctions on Russia. | |
| Are you considering that? | ||
| Well, that's going to be my determination. | ||
| That's going to be nobody else's determination. | ||
| We'll see how Russia behaves. | ||
| We see what's going to happen. | ||
| You know, we have a pretty critical time right now. | ||
| I had a talk yesterday for two and a half hours with President Putin, as you know. | ||
| I also spoke. | ||
| To all of the European, or to many of them, leaders, but they were representing the whole. | ||
| And I think we had very good conversations yesterday. | ||
| Please. | ||
|
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Thanks, Mr. President. | |
| What companies have asked to be involved in building this system, and have you decided on who will be building it? | ||
| Yeah, I think I'll let you answer that. | ||
| You can mention some of yours from Alaska's involved. | ||
| And Alaska's a big part of it, because locationally, they're sort of perfect. | ||
| I think that's your first line of defense in certain instances. | ||
| Kevin will tell you that his state is involved. | ||
| But honestly, Georgia is going to be very big. | ||
| Florida is going to be very big. | ||
| They're all going to be very big. | ||
| Jim, do you want to talk about Indiana? | ||
| Yeah, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where I live, we make all the space satellites, the L3 Harris. | ||
| Across the board, we're the top manufacturing state in the country. | ||
| By the way, the terrorists have been very good for auto manufacturing in Indiana. | ||
| But this is going to be really good for the defense industry in my state. | ||
| There's so much money involved here, there are going to be a lot of American companies involved in making the Golden Dump possible. | ||
| You might also say you're talking about the tariffs. | ||
| Here's some of the biggest auto plants in the world moving into Indiana, only for one reason, maybe two reasons, November 5th and the tariffs, okay? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| But the tariffs have driven tremendous business into this country, but you have one of the biggest in the world being built. | ||
| The Honda Civics, the new Honda Civic made in Indiana. | ||
| GM has added jobs. | ||
| Eli Lilly moving pharmaceutical manufacturing from China to the United States, $27 billion. | ||
| You go on and on with good news in Indiana and across the country because of the tariffs. | ||
| Our country was cold as ice a year ago, and now we have the hottest country in the world. | ||
| This is the hottest country in the world, nobody even close. | ||
| If you look at even this last trip that I made, the respect that is paid to our country, we went from being laughed at all over the world. | ||
| And now we're the hottest country in the world by far. | ||
| Dan, go ahead, please. | ||
|
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Sir, Mr. President, I think when you look at the system that you've laid out, it's an idea in your executive order of a layered defense. | |
| So you have initial ground-based missile interceptors, which are made by some of the big defense companies, Lockheed, Martin, Raytheon. | ||
| But the beauty of your vision, Mr. President, is that it's layered, it's open architecture, and it goes up into space. | ||
| So this is going to be some of the new defense tech companies that are very interested in it and can bring missile defense at a cost that I don't think, you said it, Mr. President, is unimaginable in terms of how much lower the cost is. | ||
| So it's all across the board in terms of companies, Senator Kramer and I just met with a bunch of them last week, that are interested in this. | ||
| And you said it earlier, Mr. President, our... | ||
| The global technology sector is head and shoulders above any other place in the world, and they're going to be a key part of this, and I think that's why it makes it so exciting. | ||
| Mr. President, I think one of the things that's, and you alluded to this, the new autonomous space-age defense ecosystem is more about Silicon Valley than it is about big metal, right? | ||
| And so what's exciting about this is that... | ||
| He makes it available to everybody to participate, to compete, big companies, mid-sized companies, small companies, but General Goodline is the perfect person, again, to sort all that out, because he understands how it has to work together, ultimately. | ||
| And, Pete, maybe we'll close with you. | ||
| We've been discussing this for a long time. | ||
| Pete and I used to discuss it when I was going to go on a show that he did very well and had tremendous ratings, but all he wanted to talk about was the military. | ||
| He didn't want to talk about anything else. | ||
| We used to talk about this. | ||
| How about you closing it out? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| I mean, like I said, without your vision willing to say and do things when other people wanted to look away and pretend like the threat didn't exist or be focused on foreign adventurism, some other threat that we've been told is affecting us. | ||
| When you looked at the data, sir, from Russia to the Communist Chinese and other and their capabilities, what they're trying to do to supersede us and threaten us, how do we find the best innovators? | ||
| The best military leaders, the best tech companies. | ||
| You mentioned open architecture. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| So multiple companies can pour into this, sir. | ||
| It's a layered defense. | ||
| So if you miss at one, you catch at the next. | ||
| And it integrates existing technologies that can speak to each other. | ||
| So it moves quickly while also investing in further ranging space-based interceptors. | ||
| So our enemies, our adversaries are going to pay a lot of attention to this. | ||
| Just like they have to President Trump from day one. | ||
| So you're defending the homeland, defending the American people. | ||
| It's going to benefit my kids, grandkids, all of ours in this room. | ||
| So thank you for your leadership. | ||
| We're in charge of that as fast as we can. | ||
|
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Very good. | |
| Great job, everybody. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you very much. | |
| Well, Elon Musk, you can be a part of this, Mr. President. | ||
| Thank you, President. | ||
| No cuts. | ||
|
unidentified
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No cuts to Medicaid. | |
| Thank you, everybody. | ||
| No cuts to Medicaid. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, thank you, thank you. | |
| Thank you, President. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Thank you, everybody. | ||
| It's always fun to watch from the inside, right? | ||
| Bet in some of those rooms. | ||
|
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Look at all the gold in the new Oval Office. | |
| Bet in some of those rooms. | ||
| Then brought into the Oval Office to sit at Trump's desk and interview Trump. | ||
| This was in the first term. | ||
| We're working on it. | ||
| In the next term, we'll be heading up to D.C. tomorrow, in fact. | ||
| Maybe that's when we'll do... | ||
| We're built for battle around here, but it's intimidating. | ||
| It is. | ||
| He showed me the little button where you get Diet Coke. | ||
| We appreciate you being with us for this live. | ||
| Again, we've been live now for an hour and a half. | ||
| This is a little bit late on the president's schedule. | ||
| Trump's on Trump time. | ||
| Donald Trump announcing the Golden Dome. | ||
| I really hope that this turns into not only a missile defense. | ||
| But also drone defense, this is obviously the next generation of warfare, is going to be completely and totally unmanned. | ||
| It's not like it's for me to lecture them about this. | ||
| But I want it, like if this is a Reagan-era idea, things have progressed, right? | ||
| So making sure that this is a totally unmanned defense system and that we're not spending a lot of money on sort of like building old battleships, right? | ||
| Like you don't win wars with those anymore. | ||
| This country protected. | ||
| I want the future protected for my children. | ||
| Here's a close-up of the Golden Dome that they've released. | ||
| And then also Elon Musk, he said, bidding for this, along with Palantir, Anadril, and a number of other major defense and tech companies. | ||
| Clearly, $25 billion is a sweet pot of money. | ||
| And this is something, again, that has been talked about for quite a while to build a massive space protection over our country. | ||
| And then, of course, what our enemies are going to see is a, well, space attack system against their country. | ||
| So, sucks to suck! | ||
| You know, this is what it means to be the world's leading superpower and military superpower. | ||
| So that was the... | ||
| I wish that they had talked about Millie. | ||
| We set this up. | ||
| If you're joining late, right before this, Pete Hegseth issued a memorandum saying we are going to do a full-scale... | ||
| Retrofit investigation of what happened in Afghanistan. | ||
| And we're going to go after the people responsible for the killing of 13 American service members. | ||
| And it's refreshing and well and long overdue. | ||
| So hopefully more on that. | ||
| Mark Milley, Mr. I-want-to-study-white-rage part of that. | ||
| We'd love to bring that home. | ||
| Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is... | ||
| I'm glad we have plenty to talk about here, right? | ||
| Because sometimes you have to just kill 50 minutes. | ||
| But here we are. | ||
| And thank you for joining us. | ||
| You never quite know what you're going to get with this and President Trump live inside of the White House. | ||
| It is our obligation to you to be the front seat to the golden era. | ||
| And ladies and gentlemen, we're going to make good on that. | ||
| We'll see you tomorrow morning for our regularly timed morning show at 10 a.m. | ||
| And we'll see you in Washington, D.C. It's your boy Benny. | ||
|
unidentified
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See ya. | |
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