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May 14, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:13:03
Trump’s Saudi TRIUMPH
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All right, folks, tons to get to on today's show.
President Trump's triumphant visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Plus, he heads on over to Qatar.
We examine negotiations in Ukraine and the state of the economy.
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So yesterday was a huge day for President Trump in Saudi Arabia.
He arrived in Riyadh.
He was greeted on the tarmac by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
MBS, as he is so-called, is obviously a signal figure in the Middle East.
He's completely shifted the direction.
of Saudi Arabia, away from sort of a Wahhabi version of Islam that was spreading terror tentacles all over the planet.
That's what we all grew up with in the early 2000s, in the 1990s, and toward a regime of modernization.
That, of course, is very difficult to do in the Middle East.
And MBZ, as he's called, requires credit for that.
And the reality is that modernizing the kingdom of Saudi Arabia so as to be more pro-Western, so as to be more modern, it's changed the entire Middle East.
It's one of the reasons why President Trump's major accomplishment during his first term, the Abraham Accords, everybody is sort of waiting on tenterhooks for Saudi Arabia to integrate with Israel, because that would sort of be the final sign that Saudi Arabia is now orienting away from radical Wahhabist Islam and towards something that provides a better future for his people.
So why exactly does President Trump have such a warm relationship with Saudi in a way that Joe Biden did?
Because if you'll recall, Joe Biden really Well, Barack Obama and Joe Biden,
who were really part of the same hole when it came to their foreign policy vision, made a bunch of big mistakes in the Middle East, particularly with regard to nations like Saudi Arabia.
First, They kept saying words like democracy and human rights, and those would then trump American interests.
So you'd have Joe Biden going out of his way during the 2020 campaign to talk about the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, who was a Muslim Brotherhood media member who was murdered by the Saudi regime in a Turkish embassy.
And he made this like a big point of his foreign policy.
Well, the reality is the Middle East is a place filled with terrible regimes.
The only truly democratic regime in the entire Middle East is Israel.
Everybody else is a tyrannical dictatorship.
And the question is whether those tyrannical dictatorships are going to move in the direction of the West toward a gradual accommodation with modern modernity or whether those tyrannical regimes are just going to oppose the United States wholesale.
President Obama and President Biden kept pretending that words like democracy and human rights trumped American interests.
That's how you ended up during the Obama era with the Arab Spring, which is the idea that you need, quote unquote, democracy in the Middle East, which was going to fix everything.
And it resulted.
In the Muslim Brotherhood, initially in power in Egypt, it resulted in the rise of terror groups all over the region, the complete decay of Libya, for example.
It turns out the Arab Spring was actually in Arab winter, and then powerful people took over in these places and had to quash all of these sort of Muslim Brotherhood-led rebellions in a wide variety of these countries.
So, well, Barack Obama and Joe Biden preach democracy and human rights.
Less democracy and fewer human rights were the result of the Obama-Biden matrix with regard to the Middle East.
The second thing that Obama and Biden did was create daylight with our actual allies in the Middle East in favor of our enemies like Iran.
So as I say, Joe Biden drew tremendous contrast with Saudi Arabia and also with Israel.
Same thing with Barack Obama.
Lots of overtures to Iran.
Lots of sort of pushing our actual allies in the region off into the corner.
Third.
The Obama-Biden matrix took at face value the idea that in order for any progress on anything to happen in the Middle East, Israel had to make all sorts of concessions to the Palestinians.
And President Trump in his first term said that that is not a thing.
President Trump in his first term said, hey, look, that issue is unsolvable.
The Palestinians don't want peace with the Israelis.
And so actually there can be commerce and cooperation outside of that particular issue.
And that is still something that President Trump deeply believes.
And then fourth, the Obama-Biden matrix tried to make overtures to Iran without any prospective consequences.
It was, we will make you a deal, and there will be no consequences.
And we will make you a deal, and there will be no consequences.
Well, Donald Trump has reversed all of those things.
And that is the reason why he's being more successful in the Middle East.
One, he acknowledges that different countries are going to govern differently.
The idea that democracy in Saudi Arabia is going to be a boon is a ridiculous notion on its face.
First of all, we should recognize that democracy in the West took...
A couple of thousand years in order to actually take root.
In places like Great Britain, which we consider sort of the great Western democracy, the powers of Parliament were not fully effectuated until, at the very least, the glorious revolution of 1688.
So you're talking about full-on hundreds of years of monarchy and oligarchy in Great Britain.
Okay, well, the same thing is going to hold true in the Middle East, particularly because...
The Judeo-Christian West and the biblical values upon which it relies have some strains of democracy.
There's nothing in the Quran that tends toward democracy.
And so that, of course, is going to be sort of a problem in a lot of Islamic nations.
So what does that mean in terms of governance?
It means that if you wish to do business with any of these places, if you wish to actually move these countries towards some level of moderation...
Democracy is not going to be the number one answer in these places.
If there were democracy overnight in Jordan, there'd be a terrorist state.
If there were democracy in the UAE, there'd be a terrorist state.
If there were democracy in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood would probably run the place.
So all of those big fancy words, those are those big idealistic words that Joe Biden and Barack Obama like to use in the Middle East, their sort of liberal universalism does not apply there.
And this is something that President Trump really does understand.
On the other hand, what President Trump also understands is that isolationism is not a real perspective in the Middle East.
Now, I know yesterday there were a lot of people on the sort of isolationist right who were championing what President Trump was saying in Saudi Arabia.
And I want to be clear.
President Trump is not an isolationist.
He has never been an isolationist.
I'll tell you what isolationists don't do.
Sell $150 billion worth of military weaponry to the Saudis.
You know what isolationists don't do?
Fly to Saudi Arabia and Qatar to cut.
Billions of dollars worth of business deals.
You know what isolationists don't do?
Try to broker accords between Syria and the Saudis and Qatar and the Turks and Israel.
None of that's isolationism.
What President Trump is not is, one, an isolationist.
Number two, he is not a Wilsonian interventionist.
And those are not the only two options.
Wilsonian interventionism, what people like to call the sort of neocon idea.
And again, that's a misnomer because the neocons were a specific group of people who were very hawkish on foreign policy.
In the 1960s and 70s, liberals were mugged by reality, became hawkish on foreign policy, and turned against the welfare state.
And then that was sort of associated with Wilsonian interventionism in the early 2000s.
But today, there are no neocons.
The number of Wilsonian interventionists who believe in quote-unquote nation-building in Iraq or Afghanistan, who are those people?
Please, name them.
So that is also obviously not the president's perspective.
The president is a realist.
What is a realist?
A realist is somebody who understands.
That different nations have different interests, they have different cultures, and that there's different nations with different cultures actually have to be negotiated with on their own level.
We get to more on this in a moment.
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So, President Trump goes to Saudi Arabia and he praised MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, who really is the power over there.
In pretty glowing terms.
What a great place.
What a great place, but more importantly, what great people.
I want to thank His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince, for that incredible introduction.
He's an incredible man.
Known him a long time now.
There's nobody like him.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it very much, my friend.
We have great partners in the world.
But we have none stronger and nobody like the gentleman that's right before me.
He's your greatest representative.
Greatest representative.
Okay, so, again, that sort of praise, not rare.
President Trump likes to butter up the people with whom he is making deals.
This, of course, is true for pretty much everybody.
But he does have a warm relationship with Mohammed bin Salman, specifically because he believes that Mohammed bin Salman is driven by commerce.
Rather than being driven by Wahhabist ideology.
And then President Trump started speaking in sort of broad terms about his vision for the Middle East.
And here's where some of the isolationists on the right were chanting triumphant slogans yesterday.
That's not what he's saying.
I'll explain in a moment.
Here's President Trump in sort of the core of the speech.
This great transformation has not come from Western interventionists or flying.
People in beautiful plains giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.
No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal non-profits.
Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives.
In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies Okay, so he's saying a few different things here.
And in order to really understand what he's saying, we have to play the next clip of him talking about how he approaches the Middle East, where he says that a lot of presidents are worried about, you know, big words like democracy or looking into the souls of the people they're dealing with.
That's not how you do this.
In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it's our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.
I believe it is God's job to sit in judgment.
My job to defend America and to promote the fundamental interest of stability, prosperity, and peace.
Now again.
What he's saying there is the sort of Wilsonian interventionism, right?
Big words like democracy, human rights.
Sure, that stuff matters, but it's his job as president of the United States to preserve America's interests.
So, what does that mean?
Well, he's mixing up a few things here in this part of the speech.
One, he's suggesting, you know, interventionism is bad, nation-building is bad.
Let's be clear.
Saudi Arabia was, in large part, nation-built by the United States.
And there, what I mean is...
The entire Saudi economy is reliant on Western drilling for oil.
But when he says that you guys created this domestically, that is not true.
I'm sorry, it isn't.
The flattery is fine, but the idea that the Saudis, on their own, without Western involvement in their economy particularly, would be sitting on trillions of dollars in wealth, it's not true.
Saudi Arabia would look like most other countries in the Middle East, namely incredibly poor and fraught with peril.
Were it not for the fact that the West basically drilled their oil for them?
Standard Oil of California created the entire Saudi oil industry in 1933.
In 1938, what was called SoCal at the time succeeded in deep mining that uncovered Saudi's seas of oil.
That company, SoCal, would later be named Aramco, which, of course, you now know.
Texaco joined as a partner in 1937.
It was American know-how, Western know-how, that built the Saudi economy.
In 1980, the Saudi government nationalized Aramco.
By the way, I think if President Trump had been president at the time, he probably would have done something about that because the idea of foreign countries nationalizing assets that were built by the West, that's not something President Trump typically likes.
Ask him about the Panama Canal.
American and European firms are largely responsible for Riyadh's skyline.
If you go to Riyadh, it is filled with Western stores.
It's not filled with Arabic stores.
It is filled with Western chain stores.
The United States has basically been providing security for the Saudi regime since the end of World War II.
FDR and the king, then Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, established strategic cooperation together in 1945, and we signed a mutual defense assistance agreement with the Saudis in 1951.
This idea that non-interventionism in the Middle East was actually the way the Middle East was done, that's not true.
The reason that the United States pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait is because the Saudis were afraid.
Saddam Hussein was going to continue pushing into Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi regime is in fact reliant on the United States and has been in fact reliant on the United States for 80 years or so.
So again, this is not saying that President Trump is wrong about his approach to the Middle East.
It's saying that President Trump is a realist.
He wants to be involved where it is in the interests of the United States.
To, in fact, be involved.
He doesn't want to dictate to the South that what they have to do is take counterproductive measures that will undermine their capacity to actually run the country.
Because that's not how deals get done.
And President Trump was there to get deals done.
I mean, that's what he is there to do.
President Trump's signal contribution to foreign policy thought in the Middle East, his biggest contribution is the idea that commerce trumps ideology.
And this was considered a fool's errand when President Trump first took this on during his first term.
The kind of basic idea was that no matter What commerce you offer to various nations, that commerce will never trump the ideology.
And President Trump basically said, no, the commerce can, in fact, trump the ideology.
Now, in order for that to happen, there have to be strings attached.
And here is where things get a little bit complicated for what President Trump was doing in Saudi Arabia yesterday.
He gave them an enormous number of benefits.
The Saudis are spending an enormous amount of money in the United States or pledging to do so.
We'll get into how much they're actually spending in the United States in a moment.
The question is whether enough strings are attached.
Just giving the Saudis or the Syrians, as we will see, benefits from the United States without strings attached in the hope that they will, through their own goodwill, then do something nice and integrate further into the world system, that seems to be a mistake.
You have to make this stuff conditional on them doing something that we want them to do.
Now, I understand there are many things that the United States is getting here, including, for example, a bunch of Saudi oil money that is going to pour into the American economy.
To be realistic, however, That Saudi oil money was already pouring into the American economies.
That is a reality.
Many of the firms that were there negotiating with the Saudis while President Trump was there were already in deals with the Saudi Arabian government.
However, President Trump did say yesterday that there was going to be a $600 billion deal with the Saudi.
According to the New York Times, the White House on Tuesday said that President Trump, while in Saudi, had secured $600 billion in deals with the Saudi government and firms.
But the details the White House provided are still vague.
They totaled less than half that number.
Many of the projects were already in the works before President Trump took office.
As I say, the Saudis are not shy on the spending on American companies and American products.
They own enormous amounts of American companies and American products already.
President Trump mentioned, of course, that the biggest deal would be a $142 billion agreement to provide the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with state-of-the-art warfighting equipment and services from over a dozen American defense industry companies.
Presumably, Saudi wants that mainly to fend off the threat of Iran in their north.
Here's President Trump announcing this yesterday.
In addition to purchases of $142 billion of American-made military equipment by our great Saudi partners, the largest ever, this week there are multi-billion dollar commercial deals with Amazon, Oracle, AMD, they're all here.
Uber, Qualcomm, Johnson & Johnson, and many, many more.
Thank you.
you Again, all that's great.
All that is terrific.
You want the Saudis to invest.
I mean, you want more money in America, obviously.
So that is a very good thing.
And President Trump, again, is tying all of this to an overall vision of the Middle East in which commerce dominates rather than chaos.
Here is President Trump talking about it being time for commerce rather than chaos.
Now, again, if I have one ask of the Trump administration, it's that when this stuff is actually effectuated, there should be pressure on the Saudi royal government to actually engage in things like the Abraham Accords, because otherwise, what you could see, and this is the big danger in doing business with dictatorships, what you could see is something akin to what China has done, which is make bank on capitalism while still opposing the agenda of the United States.
So attaching strings is actually quite a good thing.
We'll see the same sort of attitude prevail when it comes to Syria in President Trump's Saudi visit.
But here is President Trump's overall vision for the region, which of course is correct, that it's time for commerce.
Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos, where it exports technology, not terrorism, and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other.
And then President Trump said that he wants the Abraham Accords to happen.
He said it would be an honor to him if the Abraham Accords happen.
Now again, I wish that some of the stuff that he's giving to the Saudis had been tied to the Abraham Accords because if he's going to broaden out his Nobel Peace Prize worthy accomplishments in term one, which that's what the Abraham Accords are.
It seems to me that using leverage is a better plan than simply giving people things and then hoping on the back end they'll do the right thing.
But here was President Trump yesterday.
It's been an amazing thing, the Abraham Accords, and it's my fervent hope, wish, and even my dream that Saudi Arabia, a place I have such respect for, especially over the last fairly short period of time, what you've been able to do, but will soon be joining the Abraham Accords.
I think it'll be a tremendous tribute to your country.
Now, again, my hope is that it goes beyond hope, and it's made a condition of some of the things that we are doing for Saudi Arabia since...
If the United States is to use its leverage in order to get countries to do more of the things that we want them to do, we should use leverage rather than simply giving them the things that they want and then hoping on the back end that they are going to give us what we want.
Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Whitcoff was speaking with Breitbart yesterday on specifically this topic, and he suggested that he believes that there will be a bunch of countries that come into the Abraham Accords under President Trump's administration.
And we are out there.
I have a very, very good team.
We work with the State Department exceptionally well, which allows us to take advantage of talent from there as needed in some of these conversations that we're having.
And I'm really confident that we're going to have four or five, maybe six countries enter the Abraham Peace Accords in the next couple of months.
And the countries that he was mentioning there include, as we will see, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan.
Azerbaijan, Armenia, and he hopes Saudi Arabia.
Now, President Trump did speak about the issue of what goes on in Gaza.
Sort of the precondition to the Abraham Accords being expanded is the ending of the war in Gaza.
And Trump said Gaza's leadership has to go, meaning Hamas has to go.
My administration shares the hope of so many in this region for future of safety and dignity of the Palestinian people.
But that cannot happen as long as Gaza's leaders take delight in.
Torturing and murdering innocent people can't have it.
I greatly appreciate the constructive role that the leaders in this room have played in trying to bring the terrible conflict to an end, including by helping secure the release of American hostage Idun Alexander.
It was a big day yesterday, a very important day.
I was told just before I left that they were going to be releasing Idun.
We thought Idun was dead.
Three weeks ago, they said Idun was no longer living.
And it was a very, very good thing.
Ultimately, all hostages of all nationalities must be released as a stepping Okay, now speaking of a nation that he's attempting to bring into the fold, President Trump, he made a huge announcement with regard to Syria.
So Syria, as we know, Fell to HTS, which is, in fact, a terror group sponsored by the Turks.
HTS is run by a man who now calls himself Ahmed al-Sharaa.
Again, he switches his name all the time.
His name used to be al-Jolani.
You know him as al-Jolani, but he switches his name sort of like Prince switches his name.
So now he's the terror leader formerly known as al-Jolani.
And he's now the Syrian president sponsored by the Turks.
President Trump actually met with him yesterday.
There's a picture of him shaking hands with a person who had a $10 million bounty on him as of about two weeks ago because he was a member of al-Qaeda and then he was a member of ISIS and then he was a member of HTS.
Well, yesterday in Saudi Arabia, President Trump announced that he would be ending sanctions against Syria at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
After discussing the situation in Syria with the Crown Prince, your Crown Prince, and also with President...
Erdogan of Turkey who called me the other day and asked for a very similar thing.
Among others and friends of mine, people that I have a lot of respect for in the Middle East, I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness.
Okay, so big applause in the room in Saudi Arabia.
Of course, Saudi Arabia wants the sanctions ended on Syria because they're hoping to forge some sort of common agreement with Syria.
HTS is opposed to Iran.
So there's this kind of Sunni-Shia split, obviously, in the Middle East, Iran representing the Shia.
Sunni powers include Saudi Arabia as well as Turkey and now HTS, which is, in fact, a Sunni regime in Syria.
President Trump apparently told al-Jolani, who he met today, That he wants to see Syria enter the Abraham Accords, clear out all Palestinian terrorists from Syria, and all of the rest.
Well, again, all I will say here is that I don't think that President Trump's orientation here is wrong.
I think the possibility of ending sanctions on Syria, in order to get them to do things that are good for the West, good for the United States, and good for Middle Eastern peace, that's fine.
But it better be a string attached, not a hope for a gift at the end of that process.
Because otherwise, let's remember, okay, it was three weeks ago that al-Jelani and his team We're murdering Druze.
And they're murdering Druze wholesale in southern Syria to the point that the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, had to deploy in southern Syria to save the Druze from al-Jelani's terrorist thugs.
And by the way, they were killing the odd Christian as well.
So before we all cheer the removal of the sanctions, we should recognize that al-Jelani is not, in fact, a friend to minorities in Syria.
Also, there ought to be strings attached.
So trust but verify would be the order of the day with both Saudi.
And with Syria and with everybody in the Middle East.
Trust but verify.
Strings attached should be the way that we approach our foreign policy in these areas.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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Now, meanwhile, President Trump has also rejected the soft Biden-Obama approach to Iran.
So yesterday in Saudi Arabia, he said that he wouldn't hesitate to wield American power.
I will never hesitate to wield American power if it's necessary to defend the United States or to help defend our allies.
If you threaten America or our partners, however, then you'll be faced with overwhelming strength and devastating force.
We have things that you don't even know about.
And so then he slammed Iran and he said, listen, the choices for Iran to make, he said he slammed Iran, he said they're a terror-spreading entity.
Saudi, of course, agrees with this.
So this is a popular perspective in Saudi Arabia.
Our task is to unify against the few agents of chaos and terror that are left and that are holding hostage the dreams of millions and millions of great people.
The biggest and most destructive of these forces is the regime in Iran, which has caused unthinkable suffering in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, and beyond.
There could be no sharper contrast with the path you have pursued on the Arabian Peninsula than the disaster unfolding right across in the Gulf of Iran.
you Okay, so again, his views on Iran are correct.
He said the choices for Iran to make.
He said that if Iran doesn't get off the nuclear train, then there will be consequences.
But with that said, Iran can have a much brighter future but will never allow America and its allies to be threatened with terrorism or nuclear attack.
The choice is theirs to make.
We really want them to be a successful country.
We want them to be a wonderful, safe, great country.
But they cannot have a nuclear weapon.
This is an offer that will not last forever.
The time is right now for them to choose.
Right now, we don't have a lot of time to wait.
you So, again, that's fine.
He talked about maximum pressure there.
You'll notice that some of the language that has disappeared is the possibility of military action in that particular speech.
We'll see what President Trump means by that.
He also spoke about the Houthis.
Now, again, the American take on the Houthis, which is that the Houthis are no longer attacking American shipping in the Red Sea, and therefore the United States no longer has an interest.
First of all, the shipping in the Red Sea has not returned.
People are not sending their ships through the Red Sea because they don't trust that the Houthis aren't going to attack it.
Number two, the Houthis, while President Trump was in Saudi Arabia, fired multiple missiles over Saudi territory in order to fire them at Israel.
So again, the Houthis have not, in fact, been defanged in any really serious way.
But President Trump, again, this is sort of the balancing point that President Trump is at.
And it's sort of an inflection point for what Trump means by realism.
Because there are more interventionist strands of realism.
More hawkish strands, more dovish strands of realism.
Unclear how President Trump comes down on that question.
Here he was with regard to the Houthis.
Following repeated attacks on American ships and freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, the United States military launched more than 1,100 strikes on the Houthis in Yemen.
As a result, the Houthis agreed to stop.
They said, we don't want this anymore.
This was a swift, ferocious, decisive, and extremely successful use of military force.
Not that we wanted to do it, but they were shooting down ships.
They were shooting at you.
They were shooting at Saudi Arabia.
We don't want them shooting at Saudi Arabia if that's okay.
So again, he said he doesn't want them shooting at Saudi Arabia.
They literally fired missiles over Saudi Arabia.
I think the hope here.
Is that by arming Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia will then be given the capacity to go back into Yemen and push the Houthis out.
That would be part of the goal here in all of this.
Bottom line is that this is a triumphant trip from President Trump.
He ends up with a bunch of committed Saudi money into the United States, a warmer relationship with the Saudi government, which of course is quite good, better tech relations with the Saudis.
What I would love to see from President Trump and the American administration more generally, just the entire American government.
If we are going to be doing these sorts of things with Saudi Arabia or relieving sanctions on Syria or making deals in the Middle East, make the strings attach.
Make the strings attach.
That's what President Trump did in his first term.
And the reason UAE, Bahrain, Morocco ended up in the Abraham Accords is not because of pure goodwill for the United States or for Israel.
It's because the United States made strings attach to the joining of all of those things.
And that doesn't mean the United States has to act on behalf of Israel, obviously.
The United States should pursue its own interests.
But one of those interests would be a greater integration in the region because that means more commerce.
It means less conflict.
It means less military funding.
It means less weaponry in the region.
It means less proliferation in the region.
If you want a peaceful Middle East, the United States has always had a thumb on the scale.
Only President Trump has properly used that thumb in order to achieve peace in the Middle East.
He's the only president in my lifetime who truly did that.
And I'd love to see him pursue that same sort of policy in Saudi.
Meanwhile, President Trump headed on from Saudi Arabia to Qatar.
And again, here you get into some very dicey territory because Qatar is, in fact, a state sponsor of terrorism.
Qatar is the number one funder of Hamas.
The dirty little secret about the release of Yudan Alexander, which was done at the behest of the Qataris, is that if the Qataris wanted all hostages released, they could make that happen.
The thing the United States should have done under Joe Biden and should still do under President Trump is not engage in this warm, cozy relationship with the Qataris.
What the United States should say is all hostages out, Hamas gone or the airbase goes away.
The United States used to have its major Middle Eastern airbase in.
Saudi Arabia, the United States could do that again.
The Qataris have basically used the giant airbase that they pay for in Qatar as a way of getting the United States to treat their support for terrorism, for anti-American hatred via Al Jazeera and the Muslim Brotherhood with a wink and a nod.
The Qataris play both sides.
There's a fascinating piece from the free press.
It's a very deep, deeply researched piece called How Qatar Bought America, pointing out that Qatar, which is a tiny little nation, it's a postage stamp, has spent almost $100 billion to establish influence in Congress, universities, newsrooms, think tanks, and corporations.
They are not doing this out of the goodness of their heart.
And they have honeycombed both parties with their cash.
They've just slathered their cash over people in both parties.
According to the free press, that airplane deal, which I've criticized on the show, is giving of a $400 million Air Force One ready airplane.
It's not Air Force One ready, by the way.
We have to completely remake it.
We have to check it for Chinese tech.
We have to make sure there are no bugs in it.
It'll take years to retrofit that particular plane.
And then it will be in use for a fairly short period of time before it is given to the Trump presidential library, where presumably President Trump, I know he says he's not going to fly around on it.
It's not going to sit there.
Okay?
It just, it isn't.
According to the Free Press, the airplane deal was signed off on by Attorney General Pam Bondi.
She used to work at a Washington, D.C. lobbying firm that received $115,000 a month from Qatar to fight human trafficking, according to a 2019 contract reviewed by the Free Press.
Which, by the way, that is an absurdity.
Qatar engages in slave labor.
The idea that Qatar is an opponent of human trafficking?
Who do you think built the World Cup Stadium?
It's a major issue in Doha.
But it's not just the Attorney General.
Who's being paid over a million dollars a year to fight trafficking by Qatar.
President Trump's chief of staff, Susie Wiles, led a lobbying firm called Mercury Public Affairs when it was representing Qatar's embassy in Washington.
The FBI director, Kash Patel, worked as a consultant for Qatar, though he didn't register as a foreign agent.
We've already talked about Steve Witkoff, the special envoy to the Middle East, who has nothing but warm words for the Qataris.
And so he should, because in 2023, they bailed him out of a crappy real estate deal by buying out.
Park Lane Hotel for $623 million.
Meanwhile, as I've mentioned, the Trump Organization is planning a luxury golf resort near Doha in partnership with a Qatari government-backed company.
As I mentioned, the president's son, Donald Jr., is speaking next week at a Qatar Economic Forum.
Originally, the session was called Monetizing MAGA.
Omid Malik of 1789 Capital, whose partner at 1789 Capital, was also supposed to speak there.
Qatar, of course, is a terror supporter, as I mentioned yesterday.
They support the Muslim Brotherhood.
They support Hamas.
They used to support the Taliban.
They've cheer-led pretty much every form of radical Islamic terrorism in the entire region.
So where did they spend the money?
They spend the money everywhere.
If you don't like what Qatar is doing in American universities, and they are literally the number one spender at American universities, why?
You tell me.
Why is a tiny, little Middle Eastern dictatorship that is rich in oil expending tens of billions of dollars On American college campuses, explain.
The only reason is for propaganda purposes and to infiltrate these universities and put their messages out there.
According to the Free Press, Qatar has spent, over the course of the last few years, in the United States, $29 billion on weapons purchases, $30 billion on business investments, $20 billion on energy plants and export facilities, $6.3 billion on colleges and universities.
$224 million on lobbying and public relations.
The influence built by Qatar in the United States says the free press has no modern parallel.
Whether compared with large American companies seeking to influence antitrust policy, energy firms trying to win new drilling rights, or other foreign governments aiming to shape U.S. policy or shield themselves from it.
For comparison, Qatar spent three times more in the United States than Israel did on lobbyist public relations advisors and other foreign agents in 2021.
Qatar spent almost two-thirds as much as China.
Qatar is a country with a population of 2.6 million people.
China is a country with a population of over a billion people.
And they spent two-thirds as much as China.
Why?
Because they're a stand-in for terrorists all over the region.
They're a clearinghouse for terrorism all over the region.
Qatar's not doing this for free.
And just as the president should be attaching strings to things the United States does for other countries, if you think Qatar is not attaching strings and they are doing stuff for just the bleeps and the giggles of it, they're doing it out of the kindness of their heart.
That's a ridiculous notion.
Of course Qatar is not doing it that way.
By the way, you know who knows that?
Other Arab states.
In 2017, according to the Free Press, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Arab states launched a formal economic siege of Qatar, accusing the country of supporting terrorism and extremism and threatening the stability of their own regimes.
They demanded that Doha end its support for the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Jazeera.
The Alfani family, which runs Qatar, saw the siege as an existential threat to their rule.
The operation included attempts to sever Doha's external sea and air routes, There were rumblings of a Saudi cross-border ground invasion.
Qatari nationals worried about food shortages, necessitating emergency supplies from Iran at one point.
So what did the al-Fanis do?
They started spraying the cash everywhere.
The U.S. government found that in 2021 alone, Qatar employed 35 registered lobbyists and public relations firms at a total cost of more than $51 million.
In comparison, the total expenditures for the UAE were $35 million for Saudi, $25 million.
So the free press sifted through every single filing it could find since 2017 by lobbyists and public relations firms.
Qatar has spent $225 million since then.
And that's just part of the picture.
Because according to lawyers, governments are not required to tell the DOJ how much they spend on things like think tanks or hosting U.S. political and congressional delegations.
In 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported.
That Qatar targeted a list of 250 people close to Trump aimed at, quote, getting into his head as much as possible in the words of a lobbyist involved in the effort.
And let's be clear, I mean, President Trump is very, very warm toward Qatar these days, for sure.
Here is President Trump just yesterday.
He refuses to give up on this idea of the Qataris giving them 400 million.
Okay, they say that he's giving it to the Air Force.
If it goes to your presidential library after, and that's a condition of the transfer of the jet, yes, it has something to do with you.
It's not just a magical gift to the DOD.
Some people say, oh, you shouldn't accept gifts for the country.
My attitude is, why wouldn't I accept a gift?
We're giving to everybody else.
Why wouldn't I accept a gift?
Because it's going to be a couple of years, I think, before the Boeings are finished.
And they'll be wonderful when they're finished.
So the answer is, you wouldn't accept a gift if it is a Trojan horse, and inside of it are enemy soldiers.
And that is what Qatar is doing with all of its money.
That's what it is doing.
Great example of how Qatar pays people off, according to the Free Press.
Over the past decade, there's a man named Elliot Broidy.
He used to be the finance chair of the Republican National Committee.
Broidy used his connections to try to expose Qatar.
He helped pay for conferences at think tanks like Hudson Institute and Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
And he solicited anti-Qatar opinion articles from American diplomats and scholars.
In 2018, he accused Qatar of engineering a computer hack of his devices.
So Broidy spent a bunch of money targeting Qatar, and then he went completely quiet.
After secret talks in Qatar and Europe that included Broidy and senior aides to Qatar's ruling Alfani family, he agreed last year to a settlement that paid him more than $150 million, according to people intimately familiar with the deal.
He agreed to abandon his legal fight and any funding of efforts aimed at tarnishing Qatar.
This sort of stuff apparently is very common.
Actually, the free press name checks Lindsey Graham as a person who may be associated with Qatar.
Qatar, his perspective on Qatar shifted.
So, for example, he had ripped into radical Islam for a long time, but in December 2023, a couple months after Hamas invaded Israel, he showed nothing but admiration and respect to Qatar.
So the Free Press says, back in 2018, when Graham was known more for his vigorous support of the Iraq war and friendship with John McCain, Qatar began investing hundreds of millions of dollars into Graham's home state of South Carolina, including via Boeing, Graham and South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster met with leaders of Qatar's sovereign wealth fund to discuss additional investments in the state.
Charleston and Doha became sister cities.
Qatar's embassy donated $100,000 to Charleston for COVID aid relief.
Qatar, by the way, says it has invested more than $21 billion in Texas and $8 billion along the Gulf Coast.
On the day of the 2023 Hamas attack, Graham took a phone call from Andrew King, a former deputy chief of staff, to Graham, whose firm earns $50,000 a month.
As a lobbyist for Qatar's embassy, In Washington, and then they met seven more times by the end of December.
Al Jazeera is a massive influence campaign that is run by Qatar.
And they pay an enormous number of big-name people in the United States in order to push their propaganda.
Those people include, for example, apparently, Ali Velshi.
In May 2024, Ali Velshi interviewed America's ambassador to Qatar, Timmy Davis, at the Global Security Forum, co-hosted by the Qatari government and the Sufan Center, a global research and events organization headed by a former FBI counterterrorism expert, Ali Sufan.
Velshi, who used to be at Al Jazeera America.
Again, this sort of stuff is really...
When I said skeezy earlier this week, This sort of stuff is more than skeezy.
Qatar is doing this sort of stuff because they want influence.
That is why Qatar has funded universities and colleges in the United States to the tune of $6.3 billion, the highest number for any nation, not close.
You think they're doing this out of the goodness of their heart?
They're a terrorist-supporting country, obviously.
And the fact that the United States, the Trump administration, continues to treat them as an honest broker is wrong.
It is not true.
And it's from people on both sides.
Again, Democrats are jumping on the jet question, but that's not really the question.
The question here is, what is Qatar doing at the university?
You can't say it's good for Qatar to fund our universities, but bad for them to give President Trump a jet.
Both things are not good.
Both things are very bad.
Qatar is a cancer from within the Western coalition.
That is what they are.
And pretending otherwise is a mistake.
Meanwhile, again, as I've said, it does not benefit President Trump to continue to take this jet.
It just doesn't.
It's not just people like me saying this.
Obviously, there are Republican senators who are going to be up for re-election, who are going to be asked questions about all this.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that there are lots of issues associated with that offer I think need to be further talked about.
Senator Rand Paul said, I think the jet probably sends the wrong signal to people.
I don't like the look or the appearance of it.
I would hope he rejects it.
Senator Cruz noted Qatar's financial support for Hamas and also that Qatar backed Hezbollah.
He said, I think the plane poses significant espionage and surveillance problems.
We'll see how it plays out.
Again, this is going to be a problem.
It will.
And Democrats are going to make hay out of it.
Apparently, Democrats are planning to fly some flags in Florida, near Mar-a-Lago, calling it Qatar-a-Lago.
I mean, honestly, it'd be political malpractice for them not to jump on this, considering they basically have no other ground to attack President Trump.
Hakeem Jeffries is hopefully...
With stars in his eyes, attacking the $400 million jet quote-unquote gift.
A $400 million flying palace is an unconstitutional gift to this president or any president if it is not explicitly approved by the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate.
Okay, so by the way, that is a thing that actually happened with the Statue of Liberty.
So people saying this is like the Statue of Liberty, a few differences.
One, the president couldn't personally fly the Statue of Liberty.
Two, it actually did have to be approved by Congress.
Three, it was from an allied country, France, not a country that supports terrorism, Qatar.
So a few differences.
Also, the Statue of Liberty did not have surveillance technology, probably honeycombed throughout the technology.
On the most sensitive security site in America.
So there are a few differences that I will note there.
Chuck Schumer is using this as an opportunity to hold up President Trump's Justice Department nominees, according to the New York Times.
Senator Schumer, who is the Democratic minority leader, intends on Tuesday to put a hold on all Justice Department political appointees awaiting Senate confirmation until he gets more information on plans by President Trump to accept a luxury airliner from Qatar.
Schumer said on the Senate floor, it's not just naked corruption, it's a grave national security threat.
And he's expected to call on the Justice Department's Foreign Agents Registration Act unit to report on any activities by Qatari agents in the United States that could benefit the president or any of his family's businesses.
This is why, again, you've got to stay away from the shady activity because Democrats are going to make hay out of it for no other reason.
Now, I have moral objections, but put aside the moral objections.
Just for practicality's sake, if you want President Trump to succeed, this is not helpful in doing all of that.
Democrats, meanwhile, also jumping on the Trump family's crypto investments.
According to Axios, Senate Democrats are asking President Trump to divest from his own cryptocurrency empire as he embarks on a Middle East trip this week.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen urged Trump on Monday to divest from his stablecoin before reaching any agreements with foreign governments on his trip abroad.
Why?
Well, because the New York Times reported earlier this month that the Trump family members could profit from $2 billion worth of their stablecoins that would be used for a foreign transaction involving an Abu Dhabi investment fund.
Again, there are all sorts of questions about crypto and world liberty financial and the Trump family and foreigners being able to buy that sort of crypto, influence operations and all the rest.
Democrats are going to make hay out of this because, again, it would be political malpractice for them not to do so.
Okay, meanwhile, in other news from the Middle East, yesterday it appeared that Israel killed Yahya Sinwar's brother.
Sinwar, of course, was the leader of Hamas.
After Israel assassinated Yahya Sinwar, They apparently took out Mohammed Sinwar, who is the new leader of Hamas.
It was all running in the family.
According to the Wall Street Journal, they launched a strike.
It hit an underground site near a European hospital.
It's called European Hospital in Khan Yunus because this is where terrorists hide.
This again is why it is so absurd for the French government to yell at the Israelis about, oh my God, you're attacking your civilians.
They're not civilian sites when you use them as terror bases.
If you use a hospital as a terror base, it is now a terror base, not a hospital.
This is why Mohamed Sinwar hid there.
The unspoken acknowledgement, by the way, that the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, are actually targeted and moral lies in the fact that the Palestinians are constantly hiding beneath civilian sites.
You know who doesn't care about hiding beneath civilian sites?
Terrorists in Chechnya.
You know why?
Because they know that Vladimir Putin is just going to blow away their families, everybody around them.
They don't care.
Vladimir Putin does not care.
So if terrorists in Chechnya hide behind their kids, Putin just blows away the kids.
The reason that terrorists in Gaza hide behind children is because they know that Israel is reluctant to kill children.
They know that Israel is reluctant to hit so-called civilian sites.
That is the specific reason they do it.
Acknowledging the innate morality of the IDF is the key to understanding why Hamas is hiding in these places, obviously.
So, footage is available of the strike.
It could take days for Israel to determine whether the strike was successful in killing Senwar.
But it's very likely that Sinwar is dead.
They blew a crater in the middle of the street.
They targeted the tunnel.
This could lead, presumably, to a broader conversation because if you've defenestrated the entire leadership of Hamas, then basically there's no chance that Hamas is going to lead the Gaza Strip.
So hopefully this leads to a faster off-ramp, including the complete destruction of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, in other foreign policy news, direct talks have now been set in Turkey.
Now, originally, Vladimir Putin said that he was going to go to Turkey and negotiate with Vladimir Zelensky.
That was something that he had said he was going to do.
President Trump then encouraged Zelensky to put aside his demands for a 30-day ceasefire in order to have those direct talks.
Zelensky said yes, and now it appears that Putin is not actually going to show up.
So, shock of shocks, it turns out that Putin is slow playing this thing, figuring that President Trump is going to withdraw support from Ukraine, and then he'll just be able to roll the tanks right through Kyiv.
That is the game.
It is a slow play.
And again, this is something the Trump administration needs to watch out for.
Because there are a few different things that help America's enemies.
One of them is just slow-playing America.
This is what Iran is doing.
Iran has no intentions of giving up its nuclear programs.
None, zero, zip, zilch.
They are slow-playing Special Envoy Steve Whitcoff right now to give them time to rebuild their air defenses, to give themselves time to rebuild their ballistic missile supply, and to allow them to move closer to the development of a nuclear weapon.
That is what they are doing.
Iran can win in two ways.
One, a bad deal cut with the United States.
And two, no deal cut with the United States, but a lengthening of the time period for their nuclear program to gain steam.
Putin seems to be doing the same thing with regard to Ukraine.
He's slow playing the negotiations in the hope that President Trump and the administration will basically get bored and walk away.
And here's the problem in Ukraine.
The Europeans are ready to pick up the ball, spend more money, give more military weaponry.
I've been in Ukraine.
I've talked to people who have fought in the army over there.
The Ukrainian weaponry is largely reliant on American munitions.
You can't just switch those over overnight to European munitions.
It takes a period of time to switch those over to European-made armaments.
If the United States stops supplying, there will be a gap in the armaments.
If there's a gap in the armaments, Russia can steamroll.
That is what Putin presumably is hoping for.
So, going to Turkey will be Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoys Steve Witkoff and Keith Kellogg.
Putin apparently will not be going.
Zelensky will be going.
So again, Putin had offered direct negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Turkey for Thursday.
He made the move, even though Russian pundits have been pushing a narrative for weeks that talks with Kiev are not possible because of Zelensky's supposed lack of legitimacy.
It'll be interesting to see whether or not anything comes of these talks.
Again, I think that it is highly unlikely that anything comes of these talks because given the fact that Russia's innate goal is the destruction, Of the Ukrainians as an independent polity, that their goal at the very least is to set up some sort of puppet regime, I say Belarus, in this region, that the notion that you're going to be able, I think, to negotiate a deal there is lackluster.
With that said, obviously the United States has an interest in trying to promote that as much as humanly possible.
Okay, meanwhile, when it comes to the economy, obviously President Trump getting off.
The Schneid with regard to the tariff war moving away from the 145% tariffs that the Treasury Secretary said were unsustainable on China, moving toward what will be probably a 30% tariff, moving the rest of the world to a 10%.
That's better than it was.
It's not as good as it could be.
It is still the truth that the overall tariff rate, the average tariff rate after all of this, is still going to be significantly higher than it was before.
The tariff framework in the United States remains as high as it has been since the 1930s.
And the current tariff rate on average will remain somewhere in the 13% range.
Now, the average tariff rate until all this happened was much closer to zero.
So this is why people are still worried about inflation.
Despite the fact that the CPI came in lower than expected, people are still waiting for the inflationary policies to actually hit.
Basically, the tariff war was the old Yiddish joke.
There's an old Yiddish joke about a man and his wife.
He's not getting along with his wife.
So he goes to the rabbi and he says, Rabbi, I'm not getting along with my wife.
It's just loud in my house.
It's dirty in my house.
I can't deal with it.
And so the rabbi says, I want you to take a chicken and put it in your house, a live chicken and put it in your house.
And he says, okay.
I mean, it doesn't seem great, but okay.
He's the rabbi.
He takes a chicken, puts it in his house.
A week later, he goes back to the rabbi.
He says, Rabbi, it's unthinkably bad in my house.
I've got problems with my wife.
It's dirty.
It's loud.
And now I've got a chicken in there.
The rabbi says, I need you to take two goats into your house.
So the man takes two goats and puts them in his house.
And he comes back a week later and says, Rabbi, I can't deal with this.
I'm going to lose my mind.
This is crazy.
I've got a chicken and two goats and my wife and it's dirty and it's just terrible and loud and awful in the house.
And the rabbi says, I need you to take a cow and put it in the house.
And so the man says, all right, he puts the cow in the house.
Comes back a week later and says, Rabbi, it's awful.
I can't handle this at all.
I'm committing suicide.
This is awful.
The rabbi says, okay, now it's time to take all the animals out of your house.
The chicken, the two goats, the cow, take them all out of your house.
The man does.
A week later, he comes to the rabbi.
He says, rabbi, I gotta tell you, it's so quiet in my house.
It's amazing in my house.
My wife and I are getting along for the first.
That's basically Trump's tariff war.
But Trump decided to stack on what was a good economy that he himself was building, a giant tariff war, and then he removed most of it.
The difference is the chicken's still in the house.
So, the chicken still being in the house means that inflation is not yet dead.
It is still a serious concern.
According to the Wall Street Journal, inflation was relatively mild in April, but economists said tariffs will end a recent lull and push up prices in the coming months.
The Consumer Price Index rose a seasonally adjusted 0.2% in April, according to the Labor Department.
Analysts said this was good news because it didn't reveal bad news.
And by the way, this seems to be...
The sort of way that we are now viewing how the markets work is that if it's not bad news, it's good news.
Well, actually, if it's not bad news, it's just news.
There's a difference between good news and bad news.
And just to point out the obvious, when President Trump took office, the stock market was at 45,000.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is at 45,000 or so, 44,600.
Today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is at 42,220.
That is not growth.
It's not a massive dump, but it's not growth.
And what you would like to see is actual growth.
You want to see that number going up and to the right.
If you had said to me when President Trump took office, at five months into his administration, the stock market would essentially be flat.
I'd say that's kind of weird.
I mean, President Trump is a better president economically than Joe Biden.
Really, it should be going up and to the right.
So removing most of the bad policy, but leaving some of the bad policy is actually not going to be, I think, enough.
To forestall the possibility of some sort of stagnation, which is why the tax plan becomes so important.
By the way, I think the tax plan is still baked into the stock market.
I think that the stocks are already assuming the tax plan will get done.
So I don't think after the tax plan gets done, there will be a major stock market increase.
We need a bunch of things to happen economically.
We need massive deregulation.
We need true AI breakthroughs.
And we need better free trade agreements with all these countries that we are currently slamming with 10% tariffs when we are close to zero with most of them.
A moment ago.
So we are not out of the woods yet.
And the sort of early triumphalism, again, just I'm going to warn, there's a difference between avoiding the really, really bad thing.
There's a big difference between not having the cow, two goats, and a chicken in your house and having nothing in your house.
Right now, we still have a chicken.
The chicken is still making trouble.
That's not wonderful.
We need to fix that.
Well, joining us online to discuss President Trump's latest economic move with regard to big pharma is Tevi Troy.
He is a bestselling presidential historian and former White House aide, as well as the deputy secretary of health.
And of course, he has a brand new book out called The Power and the Money.
The epic clashes between American titans of industry and commanders in shape.
chief, which is a fascinating read, especially given the close relationship between President Trump and business leaders today.
Tevi Troy, thanks so much for joining the show.
Really appreciate it.
Ben, thanks.
And thanks for reading my book.
So let's talk about President Trump's announcement with regard to big pharma.
So he had said this was sort of the biggest announcement of his presidency so far.
It is a unilateral attempt to lower pharmaceutical prices by doing what he calls most favored nation status.
The idea being that Medicaid should basically pay the lowest price that anyone is paying The case that I've been making is that that is the wrong way to approach this issue.
But the reality is that if you actually want big pharma to charge lower prices to Americans, what you actually ought to do is use the kind of tariff measures that President Trump is using on foreign countries to get those foreign countries to pay their fair share.
Basically, all of these nationalized health care systems.
Yeah, Ben, that is exactly right.
And I always get nervous when I hear the phrase, Unilaterally set prices because that's government setting prices rather than the market setting prices.
And as you know, well, the market is the best mechanism for setting prices.
But you're right.
The Europeans artificially push down American prices because they don't want to pay their full share for pharmaceutical products.
And that does leave American consumers fitting the bill.
Imposing price controls here doesn't solve the problem.
What we should do is, yes, encourage the European countries to.
Pay their fair share.
But also we should do FDA regulatory reform so it doesn't cost over $3 billion to do a new drug.
We also need to do tort reform.
The trial lawyers extort hundreds of billions of dollars from these pharmaceutical companies and that gets priced into the products.
So there's a lot of other factors here besides just what President Trump is talking about.
Dr. Troy, one of the things that I'm worried about is when you look at Make America Healthy Again, which has a lot of great things attached to it, the idea that we should look at our food supply or that we should be more careful about our own nutrition, one of the problems with Maha is its sort of orientation against pharma in general, this idea that big pharma is the enemy, and therefore actually trial lawsuits are good, that it is an active good to basically sue pharma all the time or make it more difficult to bring drugs to market, not make it easier to bring drugs.
I think people don't understand as a general rule, why are pharmaceuticals so expensive in general?
Non-generics.
Generics in the United States are actually cheaper than they are anywhere else in the world.
But non-generics in the United States, brand new drugs that are produced, are extremely expensive.
Can you explain the process for why it is so darned expensive for a new treatment to be provided to the market?
Yeah, it's a really great question.
And there's a lot of really great points you made, including the fact that generics are indeed cheaper here.
It is incredibly expensive to bring products to market.
The FDA has very rigorous testing, but also a huge skepticism towards the pharma industry, which makes it hard to get products through.
The trial lawyers then sue the pants off these companies.
And this is part of a 30-plus year war that I talk about in Commentary magazine, where the trial lawyers and Hollywood and the Democratic Party, and now unfortunately the Republican Party, are constantly demonizing big pharma, imposing new restrictions on them.
doing no lawsuits on them, making them the bad guys in all the movies.
And that makes them unpopular.
It makes their products more expensive.
And it also makes it less likely that young, smart Americans are going to go into the pharmaceutical industry.
I think one of the things people need to keep in mind is that it costs billions of dollars to successfully bring a drug to market.
That is not counting the hundreds of billions of dollars that are spent on drugs that never make it to market.
A huge percentage of R&D is done on...
Pharmaceutical products and drugs and biotech that will never make it all the way into a patient because there's so many things that are tried and you have to follow every pathway when you're doing that in order to determine whether the thing is even going to be effective or not.
You have to go through multiple rounds of trials.
You have to get through four phases from the FDA in order to get actual FDA approval.
Most drugs fail out at phase one or phase two.
And it's basically a winnowing process, which is why so few drugs actually...
How many drugs actually make it to market?
The best year we've ever had was the FDA approving about 50 products in one year.
Usually it's closer to about 30 products in a year.
And just think about all the companies and all the potential products and all the potential sicknesses and illnesses that can be treated.
So it's very hard.
It is a huge winnowing process.
And also this gets into your expertise, Ben, about Hollywood and the culture.
It creates this blockbuster effect.
Where you don't want to do a single or a double.
Every drug has to be a home run in order to justify the massive costs.
So that's why every drug they put out is the equivalent of a Marvel movie.
And if you do have a small disease called an orphan disease, the drug companies barely even bother to make products for those types of illnesses.
And the other thing that people ought to keep in mind is that the original price of these pharmaceuticals when they're brought onto market is really, really high.
But the whole point is that over time, as they move toward generic status, The price decreases.
There's competition because the price is so high to undercut the people who did the R&D by bringing in competitive drugs that might be changed in a way that doesn't infringe on the patent.
And then how long is the patent period for brand new drugs in the United States?
I think it's about 15 years, but that counts once you declare the patent and it doesn't count all the FDA testing.
So there's a whole bunch of things that are happening while your patent clock is ticking.
And once that clock ticks down, then, as you say, the generic is out there on the market and undercutting you on price.
And I'm for generics.
I think we should have generics after the patent window expires.
But it does make it put a lot of pressure on the pharmaceutical companies to get as much to recoup their investment in the period in which they have the patent still in effect.
Thank you.
So we're speaking with Dr. Tevi Troy, Senior Fellow at Bipartisan Policy Center and the former Deputy Secretary of Health.
How effective is President Trump's EO actually going to be?
Presumably, it would take some congressional action to actually effectuate something like this.
Can Medicaid, just because the president says so, start using MFN status?
And also, what will be the result for patients?
Because I would assume that many pharma companies, if they are forced to deliver these drugs at below market prices to Medicaid, are just going to stop delivering the drugs in the same way that many doctors no longer take Medicaid if the reimbursement rates are too low.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
We are going to see less innovation, fewer products making it to market, maybe fewer markets, or maybe fewer products being available in America.
That's what happened in Europe.
Europe, because of their price controls, yes, there are lower prices, but they have fewer products available and they have a much less robust biotechnology sector.
So there are advantages to our more free market way of pricing, even though the prices are higher here.
I do fear that President Trump's executive order is more just a statement.
Well, that is Dr. Tevi Troy.
You can check out his brand new book, The Power and the Money, The Epic Clashes Between American Titans of Industry and Commanders-in-Chief.
That's available right now.
Dr. Troy, I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
Meanwhile, in the other big news, again, it's amazing this is news, but Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson from Axios have a brand new book called Original Sin.
I plan on having Jake on the show to talk about it.
This book reveals everything that we all knew.
And so I understand the upset and the dyspepsia and the heartburn and all the rest, the indigestion.
And many of us on the right have toward the existence of a book like this because we all knew.
Everybody knew in 2020 that Joe Biden was feeble mentally, that he was ailing already.
And so this idea that, oh my gosh, we were bamboozled.
Okay, but to be fair to the authors, to be fair, I'm doing my best here.
To be fair to the authors, I will say that there's a difference between generically knowing there's a problem with the President of the United States and the stories in this book, which are astonishingly bad.
Truly, truly bad.
Now, should the media have been more skeptical of the administration?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I would bet...
That Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson would admit as much, that they themselves should have been more skeptical of the White House's claims with regard to the health of the President of the United States.
Again, giving everybody the benefit of the doubt.
But the stories here are really, really amazing.
Apparently, according to the book, Biden's aides were so concerned by his perceived decline, they started scrambling for ideas.
Apparently, his spine was in particular decline.
He couldn't basically walk.
So, aides discussed the possibility of putting him in a wheelchair after the election.
They knew that they couldn't do it before the election.
They thought, maybe if he wins, we'll put him in a wheelchair.
And there are a bunch of other revelations in this new book, Original Sin.
First, Biden's top aides tried to hide him from their own staff.
They didn't want it getting out that Joe Biden was as bad as he was.
One person identified by Tapper and Thompson as a senior aide who quit the White House, according to Mediaite, told the authors, quote, we attempted to shield him from his own staff.
So many people didn't realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023.
three.
Now again, we all knew.
With that said, I still think that most people were at least a little shocked by the extent of the fact that his brain was gone in that debate with President Trump, which is why he had to drop out of the race.
The unnamed aide said, I love Joe Biden.
When it comes to decency, there are few in politics like him still.
It was a disservice to the country and to the family and to the party for his family and advisors to allow him to run again.
Now, the dirty secret behind all of this, obviously, is that the Democratic Party did not want, for any reason whatsoever, to leave Kamala Harris as the nominee.
That is the actual, real, buried story lead.
That's the buried lead here.
The reason that you prop up a dead person is because you know the person who's behind the dead person is even worse than the dead guy.
The reason you pop L-sit on that horse is because you ain't got nobody else out there.
And that is the dirty secret.
Everyone knew Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate and that she was a joke, which, of course, she ended up being.
David Plouffe was a top Kamala Harris campaign advisor.
He said, we got so screwed by Biden as a party.
He said the truncated campaign was an effing nightmare.
And he said, it's all Biden.
He totally effed us.
But that's not true.
If that campaign had lasted longer, it would have been worse for Kamala Harris, not better.
It was only the extreme brevity of the campaign that gave her a shot.
If the campaign had been two weeks long, she might be president.
Because in those first two weeks, you remember the vibes?
Remember the vibe shift?
You remember how brat Kamala Harris was?
And the question was, would she ever come down to earth?
And the answer was, absolutely.
Like a freaking stone, she came down to Earth.
At the beginning, it was like, oh, she's a hot air balloon.
And then it turns out there was no air in the balloon, and that wasn't her descending.
It was just her falling, plummeting like Wile E. Coyote.
Basically, her campaign was Wile E. Coyote over the edge of the cliff.
You know, before he looks down at the beginning, he's kind of like, and you're like, wow, maybe Wile E. Coyote can fly.
And then he looks down and...
That was her campaign.
And they all knew it, which is why they propped up the dead guy.
According to the book, Barack Obama had to rescue Joe Biden numerous times during that star-studded fundraiser.
This one is amazing.
Now, we all know this.
We played the tape.
We played the tape.
You remember, there was this star-studded fundraiser, June 15th, 2024.
That was the one where Biden froze on stage.
And then we were told it was a cheap fake.
That's what the White House said.
It was a cheap fake.
Joe Biden had to be guided offstage like Barack Obama was working for visiting angels.
And that's what it looked like in the video.
And the entire media pretended it was a cheap fake.
But apparently that wasn't the only time that night.
According to the book, at one point, in a small group of a few dozen top donors, Biden began speaking barely audibly and trailed off incoherently.
Obama had to jump in and preside.
At other moments during photos, Obama would hop in and finish sentences for him.
Another revelation from the book, and this one, I kind of love this one because it is both Joe Biden being senile and gone, and George Clooney being the arrogant jackass that he is.
Apparently, George Clooney attended an earlier June fundraiser.
And an assisting aide told Biden, you know George?
And Biden said, yeah, yeah.
Thank you for being here.
And Clooney said, hi, Mr. President.
And the president said, how are you?
And Clooney said, how was your trip?
And the president said, it was fine.
It seemed clear the president had not recognized Clooney.
It was not okay, recalled a Hollywood VIP who witnessed the moment.
That thing, the moment where you recognize someone you know, especially a famous person who's doing a fundraiser for you, it was delayed.
It was uncomfortable.
George Clooney, the aide clarified for the president.
Oh, yeah.
Hi, George, said Biden.
Clooney was shaken to the core.
The president had not recognized him.
So first of all, I love the arrogance of being like, he didn't recognize me.
I'm George Clooney.
I'm George.
I was on ER.
I haven't made a good movie in 20. I was on ER.
So I love that.
But also, yeah, Joe Biden was completely senile.
So yeah, everything you thought was true.
The scandal that the media brought upon itself by covering up Joe Biden's health, I'm not sure they're ever going to heal from it.
I think it completely destroyed the media.
Probably for all time, the legacy media.
Alrighty, coming up on the Ben Shapiro show, we'll get to MLB now declaring that Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe are off the ban list for the Hall of Fame.
We'll get to what I feel about that as a baseball fan.
Plus, David Hogg, they're going hog wild on him over at the DNC.
He might be ousted.
So he lasted about seven Scaramucci's.
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