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April 28, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:11
100 DAYS: Where Does Trump Stand?
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Well, folks, we are almost 100 days into the second Trump presidency, and we will give you our review where the polling stands and everything else.
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Okay, so Tuesday marks 100 days of President Trump's second term.
And it's been a lot.
It's been a lot.
President Trump has done an enormous number of amazing things, ranging.
From fighting DEI in every aspect of his administration to going after university campuses that are hotbeds of anti-Semitism and leftism and wokeness, ranging from his attempts to inject Pete's headset, the Secretary of Defense, in order to fix all the problems at the Pentagon,
to Doge, which is going through all aspects of government spending with Elon Musk and attempting to cut waste fraud and abuse.
He's issued more executive orders in his first 100 days than any president in history.
He's been incredibly...
Effective in terms of pushing forward many parts of his agenda.
With that said, the polling right now for President Trump is not good after 100 days in.
And that is a reflection of sentiment specifically regarding the economy.
So if you look at President Trump's brand new poll numbers, they're a bevy of polls and they're all telling the same story 100 days in.
According to a brand new Washington Post-ABC News Ipsos poll, President Trump's approval rating is down from February.
It was 45% in February.
It's down all the way to 39%.
That is lower than any other president at this point on record in his first term, or in his second term, actually.
President Trump historically has not pulled particularly well.
If you look at his first term, 100-day point, also fairly low.
President Trump has always had a very high floor and a very low ceiling in terms of his polling data, meaning that his floor is usually 38, 39%.
He rarely goes below that.
At the same time, he rarely gets above 45, 46% in the opinion polls.
With that said, he has dropped fairly significantly in these opinion polls, in many of them, and it's not just one.
This is particularly rooted in the economy.
Now, again, when it comes to the Democrats, the good news for President Trump is he's blessed by his enemies.
His enemies are awful, and the American people hate the people that President Trump faces down even more than they dislike President Trump.
So, for example, The same poll showing President Trump at a 39% approval rating shows that 7 in 10 Americans say the Democratic Party is out of touch.
6 in 10 say that about Trump.
Nearly 7 in 10 say that about the Democratic Party.
So whatever the American people think of President Trump, they think even worse about the Democratic Party.
By the way, there is a good reason for that, which is that the Democratic Party is so unbelievably unhinged.
They are so incompetent at this, truly incompetent.
It is amazing.
As we'll see, it's a target-rich environment for Democrats out there, particularly on the economy.
But they cannot help themselves because they are constantly running to the radical left of their own base.
They are saying idiotic things on a daily basis.
So over the weekend, for example, J.B. Pritzker, the rotund governor of Illinois, who has to be lowered into the Illinois capital by Crane, he was giving a speech in which he suggested that basically anybody who is a supporter of Trump ought to be harassed on the streets, a la Maxine Waters several years back.
Here was J.B. Pritzker doing this routine.
Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption.
But I am now.
These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.
They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have.
We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box.
So, Democrats are unhinged.
So instead of them just sitting there and saying, listen, President Trump isn't doing the job Americans want him to do, which would be the smart way to actually approach this, they've decided instead that they're just going to go psychotic.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, would-be House Speaker, yesterday is in the middle of a protest, and he started quoting Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War, suggesting that America could break down between patriots and traitors.
Presumably the traitors would be Republicans.
Reminds me of a letter that Ulysses Grant was said to have sent.
At the start of the Civil War, of course, the great general who subsequently became president.
And at that moment of great turmoil in the country, the country literally tearing itself apart, Grant wrote that whatever my prior political positions have been,
my prior opinions have been up until this point, I have but only one objective now.
He said we have a government and laws and a flag and they must all be sustained.
Government, laws and a flag and they must all be sustained.
And then he said something even deeper than that.
Because at that time in American history, there were multiple parties.
We're in a two-party system right now, but there were multiple parties.
And what Grant said is, there are but two parties in America right now.
Patriots and traitors.
Okay, so this is just psychotic.
Okay, because now he's not even arguing about the violation of law, supposedly by the Trump administration.
He's not arguing about emoluments.
He's arguing here.
About the budget.
He's suggesting if you're on the wrong side of the budget negotiation, then you are a traitor.
So again, President Trump is blessed in his opposition.
Absolutely blessed.
He brings out the absolute worst in all of his enemies.
John Ossoff, the soon-to-be ex-senator from Georgia, is the current senator from Georgia.
He's going to lose his next election.
He's trying to rile up the Democratic base, too.
And he literally said that he'd be in favor of impeaching President Trump.
Why?
For selling meme coin as a fundraiser.
So Democrats, again.
They remain wildly unpopular with the American public.
With that said, it is not good news for President Trump that he is riding so low in the polls that's particularly true with independents.
According to that brand new Washington Post, ABC News, Ipsos poll, among independents, only 33% approve, 58% disapprove.
Among independents who lean Republican, Trump's approval has dropped from 76% to 63% since February.
And it's a very quick drop, and there is one reason for it generally, one reason.
And that reason is not immigration.
That reason is not foreign policy.
That reason is the tariff war.
The tariff war has absolutely crippled him on pretty much every other issue.
According to that poll, only 31% of Americans approve of the recent turmoil in the stock market.
Only 34% of Americans approve of tariffs on imported goods.
Only 38% approve of his relations with foreign countries.
And only 39%, the same as his approval rating, approve on the economy.
So as the economy goes, so too does President Trump.
When it comes to immigration, his most popular issue.
He's at 46% approved, 53% disapproved, but that's because whenever a president is unpopular on one issue, it tends to drag him down on a wide variety of other issues.
When it comes to whether Americans think he's going too far on particular issues, the issue where only a minority think he is going too far is in deporting undocumented immigrants.
50% say that he's either handling it right or not going far enough.
So again, on immigration, which is his signal issue, that is his key issue since 2015, President Trump is succeeding.
But when it comes to the economy and expanding the power of the presidency, 64% of Americans say that he is going too far, for example.
And immigration remains his most popular issue.
The economy is where people are freaking out.
And again, that freakout is not unjustified given the current situation of the global economy.
And it's not just.
That particular poll.
And we are 100 days in, and so we are doing a sort of retrospective on where the administration stands.
And as I've been saying, if you're hoping for President Trump's success, because I'm a voter of President Trump, I'm a supporter of President Trump's, get money to his campaign, fundraise for him, campaign with him.
President Trump needs to succeed on the economy, because if he does not succeed on the economy, everything else goes down in flames.
According to a new national poll by CBS News, President Trump's approval rating is down from 53% in February to 45%.
Very significant decline.
On immigration, President Trump is only underwater by a couple of points.
That's not because people change their minds on immigration.
It's because of everything else.
Look at these numbers on the economy.
He went from plus two on the economy in February to minus 16 on the economy.
He is now at minus 24 on inflation.
Okay, those numbers are devastating for President Trump.
And again, it is a cross poll.
So this is not just one poll that I'm citing.
These are not outlier polls.
Absolutely clear trend.
When it comes to inflation and the cost of living, according to a new decision desk survey, only 40% approve.
60% either somewhat disapprove or strongly disapprove.
When it comes to trade and tariffs, only 39% approve.
61% disapprove.
So this is a trend.
And so the question is what President Trump is going to do about that.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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While President Trump over the weekend...
He continues, and his administration continue to give mixed signals about the tariff war.
So on the one hand, Scott Besson, every time Scott Besson talks, the market goes up, the Treasury Secretary, because he's trying to quiet the market.
He's trying to tell the markets everything's going to be okay.
We're going to come to trade deals.
We're going to get off of this tariff train.
So Scott Besson was on ABC News this week, and he was asked about President Trump suggesting that a bunch of tariff negotiations were taking place, that deals were going to be cut, and here was his answer.
Let's talk about the Time interview with President Trump.
He said that he has made 200 deals on tariffs.
200 deals?
Who has he made deals with?
Is there actually any deal at this point?
I believe that he is referring to sub-deals within the negotiations we're doing.
And, Martha, if there are 180...
But those aren't actual deals.
Martha, if there are 180 countries...
There are 18 important trading partners.
Let's put China to the side because that's a special negotiation.
There are 17 important trading partners.
And we have a process in place over the next 90 days to negotiate with them.
Some of those are moving along very well, especially with the Asian countries.
Okay, so that is not 200 deals that are being done, obviously.
So there's still confusion.
And here is the problem.
When it comes to these trade deals, they usually take a significant amount of time to negotiate.
It's not like you can snap your fingers and the trade deals magically get done.
There are lots of details.
Some of them have to be approved by Congress.
And meanwhile, President Trump went on Truth Social yesterday and decided to talk up the tariff war.
When tariffs cut in, many people's income taxes will be substantially reduced, maybe even completely eliminated.
Focus will be on people making less than $200,000 a year.
Also, massive number of jobs are already being created with new plants and factories currently being built or planned.
It will be a bonanza for America.
The external revenue service is happening.
So again, this is sort of a talking point that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has retailed is that we're going to replace the income tax with tariffs.
That is not going to happen.
We're not going to raise the amount of money in tariffs that would compensate for the loss of the income tax, for example.
And that is not how the American people are feeling about any of this.
Again, we have yet to actually feel the significant effect of the tariffs on the economy, but it is coming.
I'm talking to people who are in the wholesale and retail space, and they are freaking out about the tariffs.
They are seeing their orders cut.
They are seeing their prices increase.
They are seeing the supply chains break.
According to Port Technology, the U.S. tariff war is continuing to disrupt container shipping.
With a significant uptick in blank sailings on Trans-Pacific Roots reported over the past week.
Blank sailings are where you have these gigantic ships that are carrying all sorts of cargo.
And they can't just sit in port waiting to be loaded indefinitely because there's something else coming behind them.
It's more like a train than it is the way we tend to think of boats floating across the water.
And so if they arrive in a port and there's nothing to be put on the ship, they just move on to the next port.
Well, it used to be because it's extremely expensive to ship this sort of stuff.
I mean, the giant cost to move these giant ships all over the planet.
It used to be that pretty much no ship left port without anything on it.
There were no blank sailings.
Well, as we are now seeing, that is not true anymore.
Data from sea intelligence illustrates a steep rise in blanked capacity on the Asia-North America East Coast trade.
In week 12 of 2025, there were zero blank sailings scheduled for the period between April 7th and May 12th.
By week 15, 35% of all planned capacity for the week starting May 5th had been canceled.
Those figures rose to 42% by week 16, representing a 7 percentage point increase in just one week.
And a similar development is happening on the Asia-North America-West Coast route.
For the week commencing, 28 April, blank sailings increased from 13% in week 15 to 28% by week 16. This is a dramatic change in the market, obviously.
You're starting to see a bunch of importers saying, well, we're not going to be able to sell these products with these giant tariffs on them.
And so ships are just arriving that are empty.
Ships are just not being filled up.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of fears of actual shortages, price hikes, sort of like when the supply chains broke during COVID.
According to Axios, many retailers stocked up on inventory in the first months of 2025, realizing a storm was coming.
Their inventories are poised to dwindle quickly.
The National Retail Federation expects U.S. imports to plunge by at least 20% in the second half of 2025 if the current tariffs remain.
Shortages are a real possibility, John Harmon, who is a Corsight research analyst, told Axios.
The CEOs of Walmart, Target, and Home Depot warned President Trump in a meeting last week that his trade policy could trigger massive product shortages and price spikes as well.
And that's the big guys.
The smaller guys basically have no options because maybe President Trump relieves tariffs on some of the big guys the way he did with Apple.
But if you're a small retailer, you might be screwed.
Again, I know people who are in the import-export business, and they're getting hammered.
I mean, they're looking at the possibility of actual bankruptcy.
A slew of companies are already warning of higher prices, or have already increased them, including Procter& Gamble, Best Buy, Unilever, Ford, Shine, Timu, AutoZone, and Hermes.
Now, May.
The Halloween and Costume Association warrant tariffs are threatening to wipe out Halloween and severely disrupt Christmas as well.
And back-to-school season is already at risk.
Remember, there's a long tail to these sorts of policies.
Meanwhile, Magnificent Seven, are suffering in the stock market a little bit.
They're bruising losses, according to the Wall Street Journal, pose a new test for markets.
Even after a rally last week, the Magnificent Seven are off to their worst start to a year since 2022.
Each stock has fallen more than 6.5%.
They've collectively lost $2.5 trillion in market value.
Meanwhile, China is upping its own game.
So, one of the big places where America has a systemic advantage is in the field of AI.
That requires sophisticated semiconductors.
This is why one of the big worries right now is that even if the United States were able to successfully box in China, if China tried to go after Taiwan, TSMC, which is where 92% of all the world's sophisticated semiconductors are produced, would be in their crosshairs.
If that were to happen, China would actually benefit.
Because if the biggest producer of the sophisticated microchips goes down, China has been doing a great job ramping up its secondary microchips.
And now it turns out they've been working.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Huawei Technologies is gearing up to test its newest and most powerful artificial intelligence processors.
The company hopes could replace some of the higher-end products of NVIDIA.
The study advanced by one of China's flagship technology companies points to the resilience of the country's semiconductor industry, despite efforts by Washington to stymie it, including by cutting off access to some Western chip-making equipment.
Huawei is approaching Chinese tech companies about testing the technical feasibility of a new chip.
It's called a Sen 910D.
The company is slated to receive the first batch of samples of the processor as soon as late May.
Now again, maybe it's not ready, but the bottom line is that right now the world is not prepared for the loss of TSMC chips, except for probably China.
And again, when you take a look at the status of the economy, most of the impact of the tariffs has not yet hit.
That is the big problem for President Trump.
When you look at President Trump's trade war on China and his elevated tariffs on the rest of the planet, as I have said now about a thousand times, there are preconditions to fighting a successful trade war.
You need to get ready for it, just like a regular war.
If you're going to win a regular war, you need to make sure your supply lines are in place.
You need to make sure that you actually have the materiel.
You need to make sure that you have the recruitment efforts.
You have to have the strategy, right?
You have to have your allies in place.
All that stuff happens in a war and it also happens in a trade war.
If you just run into the trade war, you end up with the situation in which President Trump currently finds himself with public opinion and with the economy in a bit of a box canyon.
Now, maybe President Trump is able to extricate himself from that box canyon by cutting a bunch of trade deals very quickly.
That obviously is what Scott Besson is working on.
But the markets are freaking out.
And again, The main effect of the tariffs have yet to actually hit on a practical level for most Americans.
Meanwhile, it is unclear if Republicans are actually going to be able to get their big, beautiful tax bill through.
So I think it would be almost unthinkable for Republicans not to be able to get their big, beautiful tax bill through this one big bill that's going to include defense and immigration spending, as well as a tax bill.
If that doesn't happen, that's already been baked into the market.
If that doesn't happen, you will see a market collapse.
If the tax bill does not go through, if the tax rates suddenly skyrocket, Back to what they were before the Trump tax cuts of his first term.
If that were to happen, faith in the ability of the federal government to even ensure any level of consistency and predictability in the economy would drop as well.
So are Republicans going to get it together?
Because so far, it seems like the Republican Congress has achieved virtually nothing.
They've not actually enshrined any of the doge cuts that Elon Musk's doge have made at this point.
Congress has not yet been able to get this big, beautiful tax bill through.
They need to get it through like ASAP.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Republicans push President Trump's big, beautiful tax and spending package closer to the finish line with votes earlier this month approving a budget framework.
But hard intra-party fights remain in writing and ironing out the multi-trillion dollar package.
Most GOP lawmakers are on board with the broader plan to extend expiring pieces of the 2017 tax law, introduce no tax on tips, boost border spending, cut other government outlays.
Speaker Johnson wants to get the bill finished by Memorial Day.
But fights are smoldering over details.
You have some deficit hardliners who are very skeptical of the tax bill.
That includes members like Chip Roy of Texas and Andrew Clyde of Georgia.
Meanwhile, you have people who are concerned that there will be some sort of changes to Medicaid because that health insurance program does have a bunch.
It's a means-tested welfare program.
There are a bunch of people on it who probably don't necessarily need to be on it.
But there are a lot of Republicans in Purple District who are afraid that any Medicaid cuts whatsoever means their seat goes away.
Such members, according to the Journal, include Representatives David Valadao of California, Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania.
Those are both in battleground districts.
And again, you have a bunch of senators also who are in sort of purplish states.
Susan Collins, who's in a blue state in Maine, Murkowski, who's been in a red state, Alaska, but is a very moderate senator, and Howley in Missouri, have all opposed deep cuts.
We'll get some more on this in a moment.
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Meanwhile, there are a bunch of Republican lawmakers.
Who want President Trump to get rid of the ban on SALT deductions?
Again, those would be Republicans in places like New Jersey, New York, California.
Right now, the way that it works is that you don't get to discount the taxes you pay on the state level before you pay your federal income tax.
A lot of Republicans in blue states would like to see that go away again to preserve their seats.
So, will Republicans be able to square all those circles?
I think they will be able to get there, but they had better get there.
President Trump's presidency now relies on a couple of things.
One, ending this trade war or...
Recalibrating it so that it will be more likely to be successful, which requires dramatic moves, or two, and or two.
It actually requires both.
The tax bill.
Both those things need to happen.
If both those things do not happen, then President Trump's presidency will continue to spin out.
Because as the economy goes, President Trump's subtle promise, not so subtle promise.
For all of his career is he's a great businessman and he'll make sure the economy is okay.
And right now, a lot of investors, including many investors that I know, have a lot of faith in President Trump that he's going to be able to create a solid business environment.
One of the reasons that so much of tech country voted for President Trump is because they were deeply afraid of Kamala Harris's anti-tech perspective and anti-market perspectives.
Many of them have been shocked by President Trump's tariff war.
They're still hopeful that President Trump is going to Back away from that and move in a more free market oriented direction.
That is what President Trump needs to do if he wishes to make the American people happy with his presidency again, which will give him the political capital necessary to do everything else.
And again, the part of this 100 days in that's a problem is that he's doing so many other really, really important things.
Last week, he signed an executive order, which is one of the most important executive orders that he signed his entire presidency.
It was an executive order to get rid of disparate impact analysis.
That has been a hallmark of federal government policy.
For decades, basically disparate impact analysis suggests that any policy where, in aggregate, say black people don't do as well as white people, even if the policy is totally neutral, must be presumed to be racist.
And he got rid of that because he said that's stupid.
There are lots of policies that are neutral and that have a different impact on groups because it turns out people in various groups don't behave the same way, aren't interested in the same things and all the rest.
As I've said many, many times, if you draw a line down the middle of literally any room with a lot of people in it, You'll end up with two groups, and those two groups will be unequal in a wide variety of ways.
Height, weight, good looks, brains, all of it.
So disparate impact analysis was always terrible.
President Trump got rid of it on the federal level last week.
That's an important accomplishment.
President Trump has been fighting DEI, tooth and nail.
President Trump has been going after these left-wing universities, which, by the way, it is now appearing, are disproportionately funded by foreign sources.
There's a piece in the free press today, a shocking piece.
That shows an explosion in overseas funding for American universities between 2021 and 2024 under Joe Biden.
Basically, our American universities were infiltrated by Qatar and China in the main.
Between 2021 and 2024, $29 billion in foreign money was donated.
Qatar and China were among the largest sources of funding.
That, by the way, dwarfs any other period in American history.
According to the Network Contagion Research Institute, The floodgates opened during the Biden era.
It's not a financial issue.
It's a national security issue.
Qatar is the single largest source of foreign donations to U.S. universities since reporting began in 1986 with $6.3 billion coming from Qatar, which, by the way, is a cutout for Iran.
Just another reason why the administration should not be using Qatar as a proxy in Middle Eastern peace talks or Hamas hostage releases or Iranian nuclear talks.
Qatar is, in fact, an Iranian...
You think Qatar has billions of dollars?
Just to like blow on American universities.
You know exactly the purpose of that.
Qatari donations ramped up significantly during the Biden administration.
Nearly a third of all donations from Qatar, over $2 billion over that period, were given between 2021 and 2024.
Also, by the way, huge source of foreign funding coming from China.
The biggest recipients?
Harvard, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, UPenn, MIT, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Yale.
So all the top schools.
So President Trump has been fighting these schools.
All that's really important.
On immigration, President Trump has been fighting the good fight.
It remains the bright spot of his administration in terms of the polling data, despite all the attempts by the media to simply lie about President Trump's immigration policy, to suggest that he's deporting innocent people, innocent two-year-olds, for example.
They just lie about what exactly he is doing.
The latest example of this, by the way, a judge over the weekend is raising alarms.
The Trump administration deported a two-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras with, quote, no meaningful process.
Even as the child's father was frantically petitioning the courts to keep her in the country, U.S. District Judge Terry Dowdy, a Trump appointee, said the child appeared to have been released in Honduras earlier Friday along with her Honduran-born mother and sister who had been detained by immigration officials earlier in the week.
Well, it sounds from this article as though this kid was just basically a U.S. citizen randomly deported with mom.
Okay, except that mom wanted the child to go with her.
That's the actual story here.
Trump administration officials pointed out the mother told ICE officials, That if she was deported, she wanted to take her two-year-old with her, which is a perfectly natural thing to do.
Most people don't leave their two-year-olds behind in a foreign country.
The filing from the Trump administration included a handwritten note in Spanish that was claimed was written by the mother and confirmed her intent.
So, again, the media tried to report that as the Trump administration kind of stealing away in the dead of night two-year-olds.
That's not happening.
And meanwhile, the left wing has been very, very bothered and hot.
That judge's name is Hannah Dugan.
Hannah Dugan is a Wisconsin judge, and she was arrested for obstructing justice.
By the way, she deserved it.
This is the part that actually is hilarious.
So, here's Chuck Schumer, for example, suggesting a constitutional crisis has arrived because a judge in Wisconsin has been arrested by the FBI.
What Trump, Biondi, and the whole Justice Department are trying to do is push that judge, threaten that judge, so the judge is no longer impartial.
It is outrageous in both cases.
In both cases, you can't believe what they said.
You know, in the case with the two-year-old girl, they're saying, oh, the mother wanted to take her.
Well, she's entitled to due process.
The father says that's not true.
And I don't believe ICE or anything they say, because they've made up things so many times in the past.
This is a constitutional crisis.
You cannot have a democracy without an independent judiciary, and they're trying to clip the wings of that independence.
Okay, so that's actually not what happened here.
So what exactly happened here?
Well, there was a judge, and this judge had in her courtroom a person named Eduardo Flores Ruiz.
He was a Mexican national illegal immigrant who was there for a hearing on battery charges.
Before the hearing, a lawyer told Judge Dugan that ICE agents were waiting outside the courtroom in the public area, and they were going to arrest this guy and deport him.
So Judge Dugan spoke with the federal agents and said they needed a judicial warrant and to speak with the chief judge of Milwaukee County.
So they did.
One of the officers went to the chief judge, who told the officer there was a policy in the works about where in the courthouse ICE agents could actually arrest people.
Ashley told the agent hallways were areas where an arrest could be made.
So, this illegal immigrant, who has a rap sheet as long as your arm, was going to be reported as soon as he stepped out of the courtroom into the hallway.
So the judge took this person, who was in fact an allegedly violent criminal, right, was there for an assault charge, and said, wait, come with me, and ushered this person through a door leading to a non-public area of the courthouse.
Agents then saw Mr. Flores Ruiz and his lawyer, this is the New York Times, again, this is not like some right-wing publication, and his lawyer in a public hallway.
One agent entered an elevator with them and watched them leave the building, but did not immediately make the arrest.
The complaint said other agents then arrested him on the street after a foot chase.
A week later, FBI agents came and arrested Judge Dugan at the courthouse and she was charged with obstructing immigration officers and concealing someone to prevent an arrest.
Which, by the way, is the correct charge.
Under 18 U.S. Code, section 1505, it literally says, whoever impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law under which any pending proceeding is being had before any department or agency of the United States, or the due and proper
exercise of the power of inquiry under which any inquiry or investigation is being had by either house shall be fined under this title in prison not more than five years, or if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism in prison not more than eight years or before
So, she tried to help an illegal immigrant escape from the Trump ICE department by taking him through a secret entrance, and they arrested her.
As they should.
Even Andrew McCabe.
You'll remember Andrew McCabe from Russiagate.
Andrew McCabe, who is no right-wing fan of Trump, even he admits this is a solid case against the judge.
I think it's fairly strong, Victor.
As I said, there's a number of witnesses here who perceive these events in real time.
They've reported what they saw to the agent who's put that into the complaint.
There's a bunch of law enforcement officers who were there who listened to the things she said, who will testify about how she reacted negatively to the discovery that there was law enforcement outside of her courtroom.
So there's a lot of circumstantial evidence there.
Okay, so again, even the left is sort of admitting that this person ought to be arrested, but according to the left, it's also a constitutional crisis.
The New York Times is David Brooks, a man so ridiculous.
He once suggested that Barack Obama would be an excellent president because he had a nice crease in his pants.
I'm not even kidding.
That's a real thing he did.
Here's David Brooks suggesting it's time for civil disobedience.
Let's say she did escort this guy out the door.
If federal enforcement agencies come to your courtroom and you help a guy escape, That is two things.
One, it strikes me as maybe something illegal, but it also strikes me as something heroic.
And in times of trouble, then people are sometimes called to do civil disobedience.
And in my view, when people do civil disobedience, they have to pay the price.
That's part of the heroism of it, frankly.
And so you can both think that she shouldn't have legally done this, and that morally, protecting somebody against, maybe not even in this case, but in other cases.
Frankly, a predatory enforcement agency.
Sometimes civil disobedience is necessary.
Again, if they think this is heroic, then good luck for them in the polls.
Again, if the American people are focusing on immigration, President Trump is popular.
It's the economy that is sinking him right now.
President Trump put out a truth over the weekend saying, quote, we need courageous justice in our country.
If the courts don't allow what we've been allowed to do for 250 years, America can no longer be the same.
Crooked Joe Biden will have destroyed our country with his open border madness and allowing criminals of every type to enter.
Meanwhile, President Trump does look like he is shifting on the war in Ukraine,
as he should.
The fact of the matter is that the Russian government has shown little Desire, predilection, interest in natural end to this war.
Over the weekend, more drone attacks across Ukraine, four dead in those drone attacks.
That's after President Trump actually asked Putin to stop multiple times.
He literally last week said, Vladimir, stop after a gigantic drone and missile assault on Kiev, among other areas of the country.
Well, President Trump put out a statement on Truth Social, literally saying that he is tiring of Vladimir Putin playing around.
He said, with all of that being said, he has a long thing about how it was Biden's fault that the war happened, which is true.
But then he says, with all of that being said, there was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns over the last few days.
It makes me think maybe he doesn't want to stop the war.
He's just tapping me along and has to be dealt with differently through banking or secondary sanctions.
Too many people are dying.
Well, I mean, there's a third way that he could be helped along, and that would be increasing the amount of military aid to Ukraine's put actual military heft.
Behind any sort of secondary sanctions.
Russia economically has escaped many of these sanctions by selling oil to the Indians or the Chinese.
They've created their own sort of shadow banking system.
So the sanctions have been effective in some ways, but they have not been completely effective for sure.
And if Ukraine does not succeed on the military front, the rest of it becomes sort of a moot point.
Over the weekend, President Trump did meet with Vladimir Zelensky.
This happened at the funeral of the Pope.
Pretty iconic photo that happened at the funeral of the Pope in which President Trump was sitting tete-a-tete with Vladimir Zelensky in St. Peter's.
Apparently, the French President Emmanuel Macron wanted to sit with them, and Trump was like, no, not happening.
And so Macron's chair ended up being taken away.
So President Trump had this long conversation with Zelensky.
The cameras and microphones were far away, but they're obviously talking mano y mano.
President Trump is...
That does suggest some sort of warming to the idea, the reality, that Russia is the problem here because Russia is the problem here.
The New York Times has a piece today saying President Trump's standing among Ukrainians is practically on life support, but many cheered one statement he made on Saturday after meeting with Zelensky.
That would be the statement that I just read.
The day's events were a victory at sorts for Zelensky and Ukraine at a critical junction in the war, which began with Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The United States has been pushing Ukraine to accept a peace plan that seems in part a gift to Moscow.
But now Ukrainians see a small glimmer of hope that Mr. Trump will not try to force Ukraine into a lopsided peace plan.
Now again, the United States can't actually force Ukraine into a lopsided peace plan.
We can't.
Nor should we.
Because Ukraine simply cannot give up all that territory and have no security guarantees and vow never to join NATO and not have any European troops on its soil to provide a trigger force or anything like that.
It can't do those things.
It just will refuse.
Because that's essentially guaranteeing that in two years Russia invades again and takes the rest of the country.
However, it is very good that President Trump is seeing reality when it comes to the Russians.
He should.
According to Vladimir Dubovic, the director of the Center for International Studies at Odessa Mekinov National University, Trump's team has had too much exposure to the Kremlin and its talking points lately, so for Kiev to be able to present their perspective directly to Trump was useful.
And I think that that is right.
Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, he mentioned over the weekend that there are options for those held responsible for not actually wanting peace.
We should all be happy that we have a President of the United States and Donald J. Trump who wants to end and prevent wars.
And that's what we're trying to do here.
And so ultimately, look, if it doesn't happen, it doesn't come to fruition, then as a nation state, there are options that we have for those who we hold responsible for not wanting the peace.
But we'd prefer not to get to that stage yet because we think it closes the door to diplomacy.
So, again, I think that that is the proper perspective.
But the person who obviously doesn't want peace here is Vladimir Putin.
Speaking of which, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Russians have been increasing their military presence not just with regard to Ukraine, but also along the entire NATO border.
Quote, some 100 miles east of its border with Finland in the Russian city of Petrovodosk.
Military engineers are expanding army bases where the Kremlin plans to create a new army headquarters to oversee tens of thousands of troops over the next several years.
Those soldiers, many now serving on the front lines of Ukraine, are intended to be the backbone of a Russian military preparing to face off with NATO.
According to Western military and intelligence officials, the Kremlin is expanding military recruitment, bolstering weapons production, upgrading railroad lines in border areas.
And again, this is part of the broader Eurasian vision that Russia has, what it would like to be.
Russia sees itself as the center of the universe.
We discussed this on Friday on the show when we were going through the philosophy of Alexander Dugan, who's widely perceived to be Putin's brain.
But it's also been repeated by people like the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
It is just a generalized Russian perception that Russia needs to be an empire.
That that empire is eventually meant to span all the way from China in the east, all the way to the Atlantic in its west?
That means finding or creating friendly regimes not only in Eastern Europe, but eventually in Western Europe as well.
Now, not all of that's going to be done through military conquest.
But if you're Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, you're the Baltic states, if you're Finland, and you're looking across the border at a giant Russian military, and you have a NATO that seems bizarrely unwilling to face up to the problem, if that is the issue, Then maybe you see Putin try to break NATO directly by invading a small country and then making the argument,
well, do you really want to die for Moldova?
Do you really want to die for Latvia or Lithuania?
You could easily see that case being made and forced by Putin.
Or you could see Putin do with these various states what China has been trying to do with Taiwan, which is through threat of military force and the possibility that no help is coming, try to convince people in those areas to vote for governments that are more Russia-friendly.
Create a Russian proxy state the way that Russia has created Russian proxy states in places like Kazakhstan or in Belarus.
These are all areas that Russia has really flexed its muscles and has come up with administrations that are extremely friendly to the Russians.
Russia is again a country that has its own actual driving force.
One of the great fallacies of isolationist foreign policy is this idea that everyone is just reacting to what America does in the world.
That is not true.
Not everybody thinks the same way.
Not everybody's an American or a Britisher.
It turns out the Russians have their own perspective on the world, and it's quite aggressive.
The Chinese have their own perspective on the world.
It's quite aggressive.
The Iranians have their own perspective on the world, and it is quite aggressive.
Speaking of which, over the weekend, a massive explosion in Iran at a port.
It killed at least 40 people.
What blew up were clearly munitions.
I mean, you can see it from the video.
There was a fire at the port of Bandar Abbas.
It killed at least 40 people.
You can see from the fire, it is not burning in sort of a normal color.
It's clearly burning chemicals.
Those chemicals are supposedly used to make missile propellants.
The death toll has now spiked sharply.
At least a thousand others are reported injured, according to the Associated Press, citing Iranian state TV.
190 are still in the hospital.
There is a surveillance video that was distributed by Fars News Agency, which is Iranian, showing a small fire that begins among the containers.
And you can see workers moving away from the scene.
And then...
Gigantic explosion that probably killed some of the workers.
This is an area where Iran typically ships munitions to places like Lebanon for the help of Hezbollah.
So there's speculation as to whether this was an attack by the Israelis.
There's been speculation that maybe it was just them failing because they've actually had that problem before.
Remember, there's a giant explosion at the port outside of Beirut just a couple of years ago in Lebanon, enormous explosion.
And it turns out that that might have just been by accident.
The Iranians are not particularly good at handling their munitions.
This we know.
According to Andrea Sella, professor of chemistry at University College London, this bears the hallmarks of an ammonium nitrate explosion.
Ammonium nitrate is a commodity chemical widely used as fertilizer and as an industrial explosive.
But poor storage can significantly raise the risk of an explosion in the event of a fire.
so again the Iranians
Meanwhile, things are heating up between India and Pakistan.
According to the New York Times, India seems to be building a case for striking Pakistan.
There was a terrorist attack in Kashmir last week.
Kashmir is a border area between India and Pakistan that is controlled, at least titularly, by the Iranians.
It's heavily Muslim.
There are basically really three areas of Kashmir.
One is controlled really by the Chinese, one is controlled by the Indians, one is controlled by the Pakistanis, but it's supposed to be under the control of the Iranian government.
There is a massive terror attack killing some 26 people by a Pakistani Muslim terror group.
Narendra Modi, who is the leader, the prime minister of India, has made the case that there's going to need to be military action against Pakistan for it.
According to the New York Times, according to four diplomatic officials aware of discussions, New Delhi appears to be building a case for military action against its neighbor and archenemy.
Modi said in a speech on Thursday that he was going to deal out severe punishment and the raising of terrorist safe havens.
Already, there are security forces between India and Pakistan who are firing at each other.
Two of the past three nights, actually.
In Kashmir, Indian forces are also doing a clampdown right now.
And India is declaring its intention to disrupt the flow of water to Pakistan.
They have an irrigation system that depends largely on the Indians.
Pakistan, in the meantime, is saying that it will suspend participation in bilateral treaties as well.
Now remember, both of these countries have nuclear weapons, so things could get very hot very quickly between India and Pakistan.
Obviously, India is a democratic ally of the United States.
Pakistan is effectively an Islamic dictatorship.
So, in terms of rooting interest, the West should be rooting for India in this particular conflict.
In terms of the actual dangers of the conflict heating up, obviously those are quite real.
Meanwhile, speaking of sort of pseudo-democracies that aren't actually democracies, Turkey is heating up its own ambitions.
According to the editorial board of the New York Times, Erdogan continues to...
Erdogan, of course, has total control over the military at this point.
When he was first elected, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is going all the way back to the beginning of the century.
He's now been 22 years in power, Erdogan.
When he was first elected, he was elected as a sort of pseudo-moderate, actually.
And then he turned into an Islamic radical.
And he has basically reoriented his entire country toward Iran, toward Russia, toward a wide variety of terror states in the region.
Turkey, kind of famously, has taken over Syria now.
Well, Erdogan, he's moved away from the EU, even though there's a large trading relationship between Turkey and the EU, and Turkey is a NATO member, which is absolutely insane, because Turkey supports terror regimes, including Hamas.
According to the New York Times, Erdogan continues to retain control.
The Turkish people are not necessarily in love with Erdogan at this point.
By whatever polling data is available, His chief rival, apparently, is a person named Ekrem Imamoglu.
And now Erdogan has detained him.
He's now arresting him.
Imamoglu is more likely to form relationships with the West.
Meanwhile, Erdogan is going more and more radical.
So, you know, the West should be looking very seriously at what to do about Turkey.
Certainly, the notion of selling Turkey F-35s, which is something, apparently, the Trump administration has discussed.
That's ridiculous.
We should certainly not be doing that with the Turks, given their current orientation.
Finally, in sort of foreign news, the Canadian election takes place today.
Unfortunately, Pierre Poliev, who was leading by 20 points in the polls at the beginning of the year, right now in the polling data is trailing Mark Carney, who's the person who took over for Justin Trudeau.
And there's only one reason for that, one and one alone.
That is the trade war with Canada.
That is the only reason.
It is because the United States launched a trade war with Canada that this happened.
Because Poliev dumped in the polls.
Canadians decided to orient against the Trump administration.
Poliev was perceived as an ally of the Trump administration, and so Carney jumped.
It's that simple, which is ridiculous and sad and really, really frustrating because the United States could have had an excellent ally in Canada in Pierre Poliev.
I hope, I hope, by the way, there is a late surge for Poliev where people may be waking up from the reverie just long enough to vote.
I'm hopeful that maybe that puts Poliev over the top.
But if Poliev loses to Mark Carney because of the trade war, That is one of the biggest own goals for the Trump administration over the first 100 days.
Alrighty, coming up, we'll get to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where things were said that were bizarre, plus breaking news.
You remember that helicopter and plane crash that happened outside Reagan National?
We now have some information that is really disquieting about it.
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