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June 6, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:14:23

TRUMP VS. MUSK: THE ULTIMATE BATTLE!

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	All righty, folks, a stacked show today.
	Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the battle royale is here.
	They're going after each other.
	Hammer and tongs will go through every detail, all the fallout.
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	Woo boy.
	I mean, really at it in the most severe way.
	And from an entertainment perspective, obviously, break out the popcorn because these two guys are very entertaining.
	But from a political perspective, not amazing for the Republican Party because the sort of tech bro blue-collar alliance represented by Elon Musk on the one hand and Donald Trump on the other.
	It was quite good for the Republican Party.
	I think it will outlast this particular tête-à-tête between the two men.
	But yesterday, all of this broke out into the open.
	So for weeks, this has been coming.
	Elon Musk left the administration just about a week ago.
	His 130 days at the administration expired.
	Basically, the rule is that you are allowed to serve inside an administration for something like 130 days as a special government employee.
	But when that expires, you need some sort of typical waiver.
	Where you need a congressional approval in order to keep serving, and Musk didn't receive that, and thus, he left last week.
	And when that happened, he started speaking out very openly about what he thought about the big, beautiful bill.
	The big, beautiful bill, in Musk's view, is chalk-filled with spending, there's a lot of pork, and you can see why Musk is angry about the bill, because he just gave up extraordinary amounts of time, effort, and stock valuation in order to go into the administration and pursue waste, fraud, and abuse.
	When he left, just about a week ago, I said that it was an actually heroic move.
	A rare heroic move in American public life is to give up your financial interests.
	Truly give them up.
	Now pretend to actually give them up in the sense that you take a massive financial hit and go into public service in order to reduce spending.
	And it turns out that Elon thought that he was going to be able to quickly and easily reduce spending.
	It turns out that's not exactly how government works.
	And so when he left, Doge, the Department of Governmental Efficiency that he had pioneered, was still on the road to cutting tens of billions of dollars, but certainly not.
	A trillion or two trillion dollars as Elon first thought he was going to be able to do when he entered government.
	And so he looks around and he says, listen, I just spent months and months and months of my life and hundreds of millions of my own dollars, if not billions of my own dollars, trying to get the federal government of the United States to live within its means.
	And now we have a bill that's coming out that actually somehow increases the national debt.
	Now, as I've been speaking about for days, because Musk has been very critical of the bill very openly on an ideological level, Musk is not wrong on a pragmatic level.
	The fact is that the Republicans in Congress are not going to restructure Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the massive drivers of our national debt.
	And so on a pragmatic level, President Trump is right.
	The big, beautiful bill is better than nothing because nothing means that all of the tax rates that are currently in place expire and you probably get a recession.
	And on an ideological level, obviously, my sympathies are with Elon Musk and were long before Elon Musk was a Republican.
	I've been advocating for a much smaller government, including restructuring of entitlement programs for literally my entire career, which now amounts to almost a quarter century in American politics.
	So this is nothing new to me, even if it's new to some of the other people who are now discussing this particular issue.
	Well, all this broke out into the open yesterday because Elon continued to rip into the big, beautiful bill, telling people on X, his social media service that he bought and then opened up, that it was time to kill the bill.
	And President Trump was doing a presser in the Oval.
	And he decided that he had had enough.
	It was time to fire back because Elon had basically suggested publicly that he didn't know what was in the bill until after the bill had already been passed in the House.
	And there are other people, including the Speaker of the House and the White House, who said, well, no, actually, some of that information was available and Elon didn't look at it.
	And now he's mad about stuff that he was already OK with.
	In any case, President Trump decided he had had enough.
	He was done with this.
	And he went after Elon Musk saying, you know, I don't know if we have a great relationship anymore.
	We used to.
	I don't know where it is now.
	Look, Elon and I had a great relationship.
	I don't know if we're well anymore.
	I was surprised because you were here.
	Everybody in this room practically was here as we had a wonderful sendoff.
	He said wonderful things about me.
	He couldn't have nicer.
	He said the best things.
	He's worn the hat.
	Trump was right about everything.
	And I am right about the great, big, beautiful bill.
	Okay, then Trump went on to say that he was quite disappointed.
	But I'm very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here.
	Better than you people.
	He knew everything about it.
	He had no problem with it.
	All of a sudden, he had a problem.
	And he only developed the problem when he found out that we're going to have to cut the EV mandate.
	And he hasn't said bad about me personally, but I'm sure that'll be next.
	But I'm very disappointed in Elon.
	So this simultaneously pissed off Elon.
	So Elon has a giant social media service.
	Trump has his own social media service, Truth Social.
	So these two men were fighting with each other, both via video, the way that Trump was right there.
	And also, Elon was watching this in real time and commenting and saying, that's not true.
	I didn't know what was in the bill.
	He's talking about the EV mandate, but I'd been advocating for the end of an EV mandate years ago.
	Believe me, we're going to get to much more on all the fallout from the Musk-Trump flame fight.
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	Meanwhile, President Trump was suggesting again and again that Elon was upset because of the removal of the EV mandate from the electric vehicle mandate from the big, beautiful bill.
	Well, I'll see you next time.
	And, you know, they're having a hard time, the electric vehicles.
	And they want us to pay billions of dollars in subsidy.
	And, you know, Elon knew this from the beginning.
	And then President Trump finally signed off by saying that Elon appears to now have Trump's arrangement syndrome.
	I'll tell you, he's not the first.
	People leave my administration and they love us.
	And then at some point they miss it so badly and some of them embrace it and some of them actually become hostile.
	I don't know what it is.
	It's sort of Trump derangement syndrome, I guess they call it.
	But we have it with others, too.
	They leave, and they wake up in the morning, and the glamour's gone.
	The whole world is different, and they become hostile.
	Okay, so Elon was watching this press conference happen in the Oval in real time.
	And at this point, Elon signed into chat.
	So he tweeted out, at 12.19 p.m., whatever, Keep the EV solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil and gas subsidies are touched, very unfair, but ditch the mountain of disgusting pork in the bill.
	In the entire history of civilization, there's never been legislation that is both big and beautiful.
	Everyone knows this.
	Either you get a big and ugly bill or a slim and beautiful bill.
	Slim and beautiful is the way.
	And then Elon really went off.
	He said, without me, Trump would have lost the election.
	Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.
	That was a response to President Trump saying, In the press conference, that he didn't need Elon to win Pennsylvania.
	And again, you can see this argument either way.
	Certainly, President Trump won Pennsylvania pretty solidly.
	There's a case to be made that he would have won Pennsylvania without Elon Musk.
	But was Elon's imprimatur involved in Trump's victory?
	No question.
	Elon was very important to the 2024 race.
	And then Elon tweeted, such ingratitude.
	About an hour later, he tweeted, is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?
	Okay, the idea being that he's left the Republican Party now, he had left the Democratic Party, do we need a new party?
	Now, I know this question comes up a lot.
	Actually, I'm asked this question a lot.
	And the answer is no, we don't actually need another party because the reality is that just because you're dissatisfied with vanilla and you're dissatisfied with chocolate doesn't mean everybody's going to like strawberry.
	Everybody has these ideas about what a third party will amount to, but there are many third parties in American public life.
	That 80% is just an 80% that is dissatisfied with both of the parties, not an 80% that is desperate for a third kind of mashup party.
	In any case, President Trump then responded, quote, the easiest way to save money in our budget, billions and billions.
	So Trump responds on Truth Social, his own competing social media service, by saying that he is going to remove subsidies from, say, SpaceX, for example, which, by the way, is kind of a bad idea because SpaceX actually happens to be one of the only efficient parts of the American federal spending plan.
	And then, Trump, just a few minutes later, put out a statement.
	Elon was wearing thin.
	I asked him to leave.
	I took away his EV mandate that forced everyone to buy electric cars that nobody else wanted, that he knew for months I was going to do, and he just went crazy.
	So there is Trump accusing Musk of essentially being corrupt because Musk was there just for the EV mandate, and then Trump decided he didn't like him and that he was tired of him, and he threw him out.
	And then somebody tweeted at Musk, this would both end the International Space Station and simultaneously provide no way to safely de-orbit it.
	And Elon tweeted back, this just gets better and better.
	Crying laughing emojis.
	Go ahead.
	Make my day.
	And then he finally drops the biggest bomb of the exchange, 2.49 p.m.
	Quote, time to drop the really big bomb.
	Donald Trump is in the Epstein files.
	That is the real reason they have not been made public.
	Have a nice day, Donald J. Trump.
	Okay, now, the reality is, is Donald Trump in any really nefarious way in the Epstein files?
	Highly doubtful.
	Democrats.
	Had a look at the Epstein files.
	They, of course, were in power during the entirety of the last four years.
	Do we really believe that if they had access to information that Donald Trump was stupping minors on Epstein Island, that never would have leaked into the public?
	We got his IRS records.
	I really, really doubt that.
	With that said, Elon, of course, had access to the Epstein files via Doge.
	And so you have to take it with a little bit of seriousness.
	Although, again, I take it with a gigantic grain of salt.
	However, it is Elon going really, really low there.
	And meanwhile, President Trump is going low by claiming that Elon is corrupt and was only doing all of this so he could secure his EV mandate.
	And when that got taken away, he went crazy.
	Trump, a few minutes later, tried to ramp it down a little bit.
	He said, I don't mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago.
	This is one of the greatest bills ever presented to Congress.
	It's a record cut in expenses, $1.6 trillion, and the biggest tax cut ever given.
	If this bill doesn't pass, there will be a 68% tax increase and things far worse than that.
	I didn't create this mess.
	I'm just here to fix it.
	This puts our country on a path to greatness.
	Make America great again.
	Now, by the way, this is the response Trump probably should have used the entire time.
	When we get into who's to blame for all this, the answer is everyone, as we'll get to in a moment.
	Everyone is to blame for all of this.
	However, this is the attitude that Trump should be taking and should have taken the entire time, which is, okay, Elon's over in the corner ranting about the big, beautiful bill.
	That's his prerogative.
	But we like the big, beautiful bill.
	The Republicans in Congress are going to pass the big, beautiful bill.
	If it doesn't pass, we have an economic downturn, end of story, and move on with your life.
	I mean, that's exactly what Speaker Johnson's been doing.
	That's what President Trump put out on Truth Social yesterday.
	Well, at the same exact time that Trump was doing that on Truth Social, on the competing social service X. Again, this is just from a comedic perspective, very high comedy.
	From a country perspective, I think all of this is going to blow over.
	I actually do.
	But Elon then tweeted out in response to another tweet from a person named Ian Miles Chong.
	That tweet said, President versus Elon.
	Who wins?
	My money's on Elon.
	Trump should be impeached and J.D. Vance should replace him.
	And Musk tweeted back, yes.
	So that obviously creates splits inside the Trump administration.
	And I mentioned before, there's sort of this tech bro blue-collar alliance that has happened inside the Trump administration and in the Trump movement.
	J.D. Vance sort of has one foot in each camp.
	J.D. Vance, of course, spent an awful lot of time in Silicon Valley.
	He has many allies in these sort of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen.
	Elon Musk category, David Sachs, right?
	All those people are very fond of J.D. Vance.
	And J.D. Vance, the vice president of the United States, also, of course, has a foot in the blue-collar group because he is from white Appalachia, and he has made a big deal, properly so, over his rise from impoverished circumstances in his youth.
	And so, of any figure who sort of straddles that divide, it's J.D. Vance.
	This is a very bad thing for J.D. Vance that Elon is saying that he wants to oust Trump in favor of J.D. Vance.
	And J.D. Vance last night came out with a tweet saying that his loyalty is entirely to President Trump, which, of course, it would have to be.
	He's the vice president of the United States.
	What's he going to say?
	That his loyalty is to Elon Musk?
	I mean, there's no other choice for him.
	Coming up, we'll go through all of President Trump's polling data.
	What's happening in the polls?
	We'll go through that with John Bickley of Morning Wire in a moment.
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	Meanwhile, Elon tweeted out, the Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year.
	Okay, so all of this is nuclear.
	All of this melts down, sort of the combined movement.
	Now, will there be a detente?
	I think it's likely there will be a detente.
	In fact, Elon had made some signs of that even late last night.
	Somebody with like 100 followers tweeted at him, you probably shouldn't kill Dragon X. So he had said in response to Trump saying he'll remove the subsidies that he was going to...
	Well, if the United States were to stop using SpaceX, stop quote-unquote subsidizing SpaceX, one of the most efficient parts of the government, what would happen?
	I asked our sponsors at Perplexity what actually SpaceX does for NASA and what would happen to America's space program if SpaceX were going to stop providing services.
	And what I found out from Perplexity, SpaceX's Dragon capsule is currently the only SpaceX conducts regular cargo resupply missions to the ISS.
	SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets handle two-thirds of all NASA launches, including science payloads, satellites, and interplanetary missions.
	SpaceX is developing the Starship vehicle, which NASA has selected as the lunar lander for its Artemis program, which is about returning astronauts to the moon.
	And if SpaceX stopped providing services, I mean, first of all, nobody could get to the ISS.
	Second of all, all the other stuff would become way more expensive.
	Alternatives such as the United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin are either more expensive or not yet capable of matching SpaceX's launch cadence and reliability.
	Instead, NASA might actually have to contract with like the Russian Soyuz rockets.
	So yeah, it would be a problem if this relationship broke up, at least on the material side.
	You had investors like Bill Ackman saying that both sides should go weapons down.
	And Politico reported this morning, signs of a truce are emerging in the increasingly bitter clash between two of the world's most powerful men.
	President Trump projected an air of nonchalance in an interview Thursday with Politico.
	Separately, White House aides, after working to persuade the president to temper his public criticism of Musk to avoid escalation, scheduled a call on Friday with the billionaire CEO of Tesla to broker a piece.
	Trump told Politico in a brief telephone call when asked about the public breakup with Elon.
	He said, it's okay.
	It's going very well.
	Never done better.
	The numbers are through the roof.
	The highest polls I've ever had.
	And I have to go.
	And we'll discuss with John Bickley, the host of Morning Wire.
	And editor-in-chief of Daily Wire.
	We will discuss with John in just a few moments what those numbers look like.
	And Trump isn't wrong about that.
	His poll numbers actually look quite solid at this very moment.
	However, Jonathan Karl then reported this morning, quote, in a phone conversation, Donald Trump told me Elon Musk is, quote, the man who has lost his mind.
	Trump did not, however, seem angry or even concerned about the feud.
	As for reports, there is going to be a Trump-Musk call scheduled for today.
	Trump told me he is not particularly interested in talking to Musk, although he says Musk wants to talk to him.
	So we'll have to see how this entire thing works.
	I don't.
	Do I think that this is a debate that is going to wreck the Republican Party?
	I do not.
	But it is worth analyzing the causes of this particular debate.
	So, the causes.
	First of all, the political.
	So again, as I've said for several weeks at this point, the political debate between Elon and Trump is very simple.
	Elon is on the side of idealism and Trump is on the side of pragmatism.
	Elon is saying, we need to cut.
	The national debt's a major crisis.
	It's going to sink the country.
	He's correct about that.
	Trump is saying, that may be true, but I do not actually have the political support to do the thing you want me to do.
	And Elon came into government really thinking that he could run it like a business.
	Elon came into government thinking that he could do the Steve Jobs thing, where he could go to an elevator.
	The elevator would open.
	A government employee would be on the elevator.
	He would ask that person what they did.
	And if they couldn't answer properly, he could just fire them.
	And it turns out the government...
	There are regulations that apply.
	There are union rules.
	There are judges who oversee a lot of these sorts of things.
	There are pieces of legislation that have to be complied with.
	It is just not that easy to redo government.
	It isn't.
	It's not like a business.
	You can't just come in and clean it out top to bottom.
	It's one of the great misnomers of American politics that you can do that.
	You can treat government as though it's a tech company.
	It doesn't work that way.
	And Elon, I think, ran up headlong against that.
	That is also true when it comes to the big, beautiful bill.
	So I agree with Elon.
	We should not only go back to 2019 spending levels, we should totally restructure our entitlement programs.
	We should.
	That is a thing that should be done.
	Is there support in Congress to do that right now?
	No.
	Is there support in the Senate to do that right now?
	No.
	Is there even support among the broader American populace to do that right now?
	The answer, unfortunately, is no.
	And that's a real problem.
	So President Trump is coming down on the pragmatic side.
	And that debate, again, that's nothing new in American politics.
	Ideologues versus It's a conversation I'm constantly having with members of Congress, senators and yes presidents.
	The conversation about what is pragmatically available and what is the thing you should shoot for?
	Because you're never going to get 100% of the pie.
	Can you get 65 or 70% of the pie?
	And is that better than zero?
	Okay, then there is the question of business.
	So you heard President Trump over there going after Elon, suggesting the reason that Elon is mad.
	It's about the EV subsidies.
	Now, a while back, Elon was openly calling for an end to EV subsidies.
	And by a while, I mean like July of last year.
	He said, take away the subsidies.
	It will only help Tesla.
	He said, remove subsidies from all industries.
	So, while that's true, it is also true that Tesla's solar power unit put out its post on X late last month, quote, abruptly ending the energy tax credits would threaten America's energy independence and the reliability of our grid.
	So, and then Musk put out a tweet at the time saying there's no change to the tax incentives on oil and gas just for EV solar.
	So why are you benefiting one portion of industry at the expense of another portion of industry?
	And that latter point is actually a good point.
	The reality is that the government is just a giant grab bag of cash.
	And so various industries lobby for a piece of that cash.
	And so you can't be surprised when the EV industry wants cash and the oil and gas industry wants cash.
	They all want tax subsidies.
	That's not anything new.
	This is a great reason why government should be limited, specifically so that you don't have that giant grab bag of cash that everybody is trying to stick their hands into the middle of.
	But on a business level, obviously, what President Trump is doing with regard to the big, beautiful bill and EV subsidies and all the rest, that has an impact on Musk's business.
	That's true.
	Musk says, fine, do it, but cut everything else also.
	And then there's the personal.
	And this is, I think, the straw that actually broke the camel's back that nobody's actually talking about.
	From people who know both men and who know the administration, what I have heard is that the straw that broke the camel's back on all of this was the decision last week by President Trump to withdraw the nomination of tech billionaire Jared Isaacman, a longtime associate of Elon Musk, to lead NASA.
	So, President Trump put out a statement on his social media site, quote, after a thorough review of prior associations, I am hereby withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman to head NASA.
	I will soon announce a new nominee who will be mission aligned and put America first.
	Apparently, this really angered Musk.
	And he put out a post saying, it is rare to find someone so competent and good-hearted.
	Now, I gotta say, I'm on my side of this.
	I understand that Jared Isaacman is a Democratic donor.
	Can he run NASA properly?
	There are a bunch of people in Doge world, in tech worlds, who are new to the Trump administration, who are very, very competent and ought to be in their positions because of competence.
	He gave money to Democrats, repeatedly.
	That doesn't mean he's a bad Republican.
	That means he changed his opinion.
	It means he decided that he was no longer going to give money to those people.
	So the idea that Jared Isaacman had to sort of be ousted as the NASA head because of his prior associations, I think you have to chalk that one up to.
	The Office of Personnel Management, run by Sergio Gore, OPM, has become sort of a gigantic loyalty test, personal loyalty test for President Trump.
	And the problem with that is that Trump doesn't know any of these people who are applying for jobs.
	He doesn't know Isaacman from Adam.
	He doesn't know any of these people.
	And so that means that there's a lot of wiggle room for people at OPM to basically get in the president's ear and tell him that certain people are loyal and certain people are not loyal.
	But the reality is people who are trying to apply for jobs in the Trump administration.
	Are generally very loyal to President Trump.
	That doesn't mean everybody.
	There are certainly some egregious outliers.
	But using loyalty as sort of the way of weeding people out of the Trump administration.
	If that were the case, J.D. Vance would not be vice president right now.
	J.D. Vance has said things way harsher than I ever have about President Trump.
	He's the current vice president.
	There are a lot of allies of the president who have said incredibly harsh things about the president.
	One of the things about President Trump is that he has been able to bring many of those people into the fold.
	Many of them.
	In the commentariat, in his administration, some of his harshest critics are now people like his Secretary of State.
	Donald Trump has always been able to do that.
	So this bizarre idea that somebody like Isaacman had to be outed for lack of loyalty, it seems to me that loyalty is now being used as a club by some actors inside the administration who are more ideological and somewhat revenge-minded in the way that they view the staffing of the administration.
	And so firing Isaacman is what actually set this thing off, from what I understand.
	Because Musk said, listen, Isaacman knows this arena.
	He will be a good NASA administrator.
	And there's no one in America, literally no one, who knows the space industry better than the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk.
	So I trust Elon on that.
	If Elon says that Isaacman would have been a good NASA pick, I trust Elon on that way more than I trust anybody at OPM who isn't going to know anything about space, about NASA, about what's actually necessary for the job.
	Apparently, on a personal level, that's what set it off.
	Okay, if that's the spark, That sort of petty stupidity?
	That's dumb.
	And really, somebody should be called on the carpet for it if that's what set off the spark for that.
	However, with that said, what came next is perfectly predictable.
	Elon Musk is not an ego-free human.
	President Trump is not an ego-free human.
	Both of these men are incredibly large personalities.
	Both of them are incredibly sensitive to slights.
	They don't like being insulted.
	And so the idea, they were then going to take access to one another and that it was going to be very entertaining for everybody watching.
	That was sort of the way it was going to go.
	Now, does this mean a broader crack-up?
	In sort of the Republican Party?
	The answer there is no, because the people who are elected are in fact aligned with President Trump's priorities, as we'll get to in a moment.
	But there are some people who are going to try to take advantage of this split.
	There are some people who are going to try to worm their way into the administration by suggesting that because they didn't personally like Musk and now Musk is attacking Trump, they should be given more power.
	One of those people, longtime Musk critic, Steve Bannon.
	So Steve Bannon, you'll remember, is the former chief of staff to the president during his first term.
	Then President Trump.
	Decided he didn't like Bannon and fired him, calling him sloppy Steve in one of the more entertaining moments of Trump 1.0.
	Well, now, Musk is calling Bannon, who's been a longtime critic of Musk, because Bannon is much more sort of protectionist and nativist in his orientation toward American politics.
	He's calling for Elon Musk to be deported.
	And presumably, he feels this is his way back into the Trump administration, which he desperately would love to be a part of.
	As Stuart Stevens talked back in January, I don't know why we haven't had a full investigation.
	Look, if you're going to deport illegal aliens, you've got to deport illegal aliens.
	The good go with the goose and the gander.
	They've got to go back to this, as Stuart Stevens talked about, and go through everything about his immigration status.
	I happen to believe, given the facts that I've been shown, that he's an illegal alien.
	An illegal alien's got to be deported.
	I'm just going to point out at this point that Steve Bannon, who I know personally, I don't disagree with Steve on everything, but Steve has a very strong habit of stapling himself to whomever is the most powerful person in the room.
	Donald Trump happens to be that person, obviously, and so he has for a very long time been trying to kind of push his way back into the administration.
	He feels like this is his moment since he has for a long time predicted the falling out between Musk and Trump.
	The idea that Musk is going to be deported.
	So a man who's responsible for tens of thousands of American jobs and some of the most successful companies in American history.
	We're going to deport him.
	Based on what?
	That's absurd.
	He then called for the expropriation of SpaceX.
	It's this sort of stuff that I don't think resonates for most Americans.
	The idea that Elon Musk disagrees with President Trump on policy and they're having a Twitter battle and thus SpaceX should be forcibly removed from its founder.
	The act that President Trump should be taking immediately, I think, when he threatens to take one of the big programs out of SpaceX, President Trump tonight should sign an executive order calling for the Defense to Production Act to be called in SpaceX and seize SpaceX tonight before midnight.
	Seize SpaceX.
	And you can see how happy Bannon is about this.
	I mean, he is loving every single moment.
	The other person who's loving every single moment of this is, of course, AOC.
	So, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, she of the bartending, the stupidity, and the rather negative associations with people who love terrorism, she's very happy.
	Oh man, the girls are fighting, aren't they?
	You know, I would say that this was something that was a long time coming, where we've been seeing that these two huge egos were not long for being together in this world as friends.
	And so I think this breakup we've been seeing a long time coming, but we'll see what the impacts are of it legislatively.
	you Thank you.
	Meanwhile, in business terms, Tesla took a massive one-day market cap decline, which again, I think is really silly.
	Like the underlying math on Tesla has not changed.
	It hasn't.
	Tesla happens to be an amazing company.
	I think for a long time that it's overvalued.
	Its PE ratio is wild.
	And that's because Tesla is effectively an AI company that makes cars, not a car company with some AI.
	With that said, the idea that the market cap of the company should shed like $237.2 billion over the last five sessions because of fights between Musk and Trump is an absurdity.
	That's ridiculous.
	If any company is that reliant on the largest of the federal government, it's already overvalued.
	I do not think now is like an amazing time to sell Tesla, for example.
	Meanwhile, President Trump's own stock in his media company also took a hit.
	There was an 8% decline in the Trump Media and Technology Group, allegedly costing the president $200 million.
	Now, again, I think it is worth noting at this point, that's not how the stock market works.
	Whenever you read a story about how Elon lost $100 billion yesterday, he didn't lose any money.
	He didn't cash out his stock.
	He's not an idiot.
	That's not how it works.
	That's like saying that every time the real estate market goes down, you lost money.
	No, you didn't unless you sold your house into it.
	That is actually not how stock works.
	It is not how asset ownership works.
	President Trump's meme coin also declined some 10%, potentially costing him nearly $900 million.
	Again, I'm not a big fan of these meme coins in the first place.
	However, the fact that these two are tethered together economically is sort of fascinating.
	As far as the space program.
	There could be serious problems if, in fact, the federal government did go after SpaceX because SpaceX is the major provider of an enormous amount of the country's space technology.
	If SpaceX's government contracts were actually canceled, it would eliminate America's ability to launch astronauts to space from American soil.
	This is according to Space.com.
	SpaceX's crew and cargo Dragon spacecraft variants have changed the landscape of NASA operations aboard the ISS and ushered in a new era of U.S. spaceflight.
	So, of course, Musk has already backed off of that.
	Of course.
	It could also create some serious problems for the Pentagon if there were to be a break in the relationship.
	The Pentagon is reliant on many SpaceX programs.
	Again, I don't think any of this is going to materialize.
	I think all of this is a bit of a spat.
	It means that Elon is going to get less involved with the Republican Party going forward and it means that President Trump is going to be less reliant on Elon publicly.
	All of that is true.
	And it means that many of the debates that were had kind of behind closed doors about things ranging.
	From free trade to immigration to foreign policy are now going to be had out in the open.
	I don't think that's a terrible thing, by the way.
	I think it is worthwhile for people to have clarity in these conversations about who exactly stands where.
	This sort of bizarre notion that ideological vagary is somehow good for the Republican Party I think is bad.
	I don't think it is.
	I think we ought to have these debates.
	I think we ought to know where people stand.
	With that said, what is the ultimate impact of this?
	Some fraying of the seams, but certainly not the collapse.
	Of the Republican coalition, more broadly speaking.
	Because the Republican coalition is, in fact, going to pass the big, beautiful bill.
	In a moment, we'll get to the polling numbers for President Trump.
	Shockingly good.
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	Well, as I mentioned a little bit early on in the show, President Trump has been touting his poll numbers, and you know he does that whether the polls are good or whether the polls are bad, but the polls appear to actually be pretty good for President Trump.
	Joining us online to discuss is John Bickley, executive editor and co-host of Morning Wire, available on video now wherever you get your podcast.
	John, great to see you.
	Hey, great to see you.
	Yes, we are available on video on YouTube.
	Like and subscribe.
	I'll get that in before I forget to do it at the end.
	Hey, yes, things are looking good for Republicans.
	This is actually interesting.
	All anybody can think about, all I can think about right now, Trump versus Elon, this huge breakup.
	But actually, stepping back a little bit, it actually highlights the strength of the Republicans.
	And what I mean by that is, this is fascinating.
	It is all-consuming.
	Everybody's watching this thing.
	It's supposedly a bad moment, and there's some elements that are potentially bad.
	And I'm glad to hear your perspective.
	I have the same perspective.
	I think this is not going to be that big of a deal in the end.
	I hope not.
	I hope it has no real-world ramifications for NASA, for example.
	I think there is actually reconciliation possible in the future.
	But no matter what, these two guys, these are two of the biggest personalities in history.
	In history.
	And they're both on the right side.
	And they both come from the left.
	And even this breakup, the arguments are conservative arguments that they're arguing over.
	One of them is, like you've said, a pragmatic political perspective from Trump.
	Hey, what can we actually accomplish right now in this moment?
	What are the wins for conservatives that we can actually get?
	Which is a great, valid, it's exactly what he should focus on.
	And then you also have the ideological element, which is a conservative argument from Elon Musk, which also, like you said, we all agree with.
	It's not possible right now.
	Maybe it has a little bit of a sort of rose-colored glasses perspective, but we should be having this debate.
	This is a great debate.
	This moment is actually not bad for Republicans, I would argue.
	It's actually highlighting just how more interesting, how more dynamic, and how actually we have room for debate in our party.
	It's actually fascinating.
	And you mentioned AOC.
	AOC's thrilled about this.
	AOC, from the polling.
	Is the thought leader of the Democratic Party?
	So to talk about the polling aspect, that's the person who gets the highest marks out of Democrats.
	But I talked to Brent Buchanan from Signal Polling, and he said, look, even her, the highest you get in terms of Democrat voters saying, hey, who do you think's the leader?
	She gets the highest marks at about 20%, only about 20%.
	No one else gets anything better.
	There are no leaders.
	What is it, Gavin Newsom?
	No way.
	And the truth is, the Democrats right now are in disarray.
	I asked Brent, you know, from your polling, is it hyperbole to say that they are in a death spiral?
	They continue to be in a death spiral, the Democratic Party.
	He said it's not hyperbole.
	He said this is the worst moment they've had in decades in terms of polling.
	They have lost 15 percent.
	Actually, they lost 19 percent.
	Of their support from independents.
	They're underwater by 15 points with independents.
	They are losing not young white males.
	They're losing all young males.
	All of them.
	20 point swings for Hispanics and among black young males.
	This is devastating.
	We saw this happening leading up to the election and a lot of people looking at the actual election results and saying this was the trend.
	And the question was, would it continue?
	It has totally continued.
	And the other thing I think is a lot of questions, too, is like the tariffs, how much the tariffs had an impact on the polling for Trump and Republicans.
	And actually, there was definitely a downturn for Trump immediately after Liberation Day.
	A lot of questioning.
	He got to about a seven-point gap in terms of approval rating.
	He's back now to about a two-point gap, which, as you and I know, watching polling, Particularly with bold presidents who unleash very bold policies.
	This is great.
	He's actually in the black in multiple polls in the last week.
	So, Republicans, I'm not trying to spin to be overly optimistic for Republicans here.
	I think this is the reality.
	Republicans are still in an amazing position.
	What have you seen?
	I mean, I think that's exactly right.
	But I think that what's fascinating about it is more the incompetence of the Democrats than the competence of the Republicans.
	Obviously, the Republicans are fighting with each other over everything under the sun, ranging from foreign policy to domestic policy to social policy.
	But the Democrats seem to have no capacity to make any attack at all.
	They don't seem to have a consolidating point.
	Even their attacks are sort of backwards in the way that they're approaching them.
	So to take an example, Democrats have been attacking President Trump for being so-called taco, right?
	Trump always chickens out.
	The idea being that he does tariffs and then he removes the tariffs or he makes a threat and then he doesn't perform the threat.
	But that is an argument that actually does not benefit them because they don't want Trump to be doing those things.
	So if President Trump does a tariff and then he removes it, most Americans say, OK, well, he tried a thing and it didn't work and he stopped doing the thing.
	And Democrats see that as, well, he's a chicken, but he's chicken to a more popular position that Americans actually like.
	I mean, that is a feature, not a bug, is that President Trump And so even the Democratic attacks that are now the most popular, these sort of meme attacks the Democrats are launching, are not calibrated to actually gain popularity with the American people.
	They're looking for a thing to attack President Trump on.
	The reality is the economy is not collapsing, has not collapsed.
	And because of that, they actually don't have anything to run on.
	They can't run on social policy.
	On foreign policy, they may not like what President Trump is doing, but it actually doesn't differ radically in many ways from what Joe Biden was doing.
	For example, Ukraine and Russia.
	The arms have actually continued to flow to Ukraine.
	And I think the American people are giving President Trump credit for at least attempting to get to some sort of off-ramp between Ukraine and Russia, even if that off-ramp is not achievable given current circumstances.
	So again, I'm looking at the Democratic Party.
	Every time you look at the Republican Party, you say, wow, there's a lot of disarray.
	But then you look at the Democratic Party and you go, this place is just a disaster area.
	It's like that dog drinking tea while the room is on fire meme for the Democratic leadership.
	Right.
	Have you seen David Brooks' op-ed for the New York Times?
	I looked at it.
	I read as much as I could stomach.
	But he had an interesting line.
	He said, look, the way you save the Democratic Party is an entire worldview shift.
	This is his solution that he presents.
	It's an entire worldview shifting leader.
	They actually have to abandon their worldview is the way I interpret what he wrote.
	It is a problem.
	And it is a major problem, as you pointed out so well over and over again.
	I mean, Trump is a real world.
	He lives in the real world.
	He governs from real consequences.
	So he sees immediately if he has consequences for his actions that he does not like, he pivots.
	Who doesn't agree with this?
	Who doesn't agree with common sense, practical legislation, executive orders, all these things?
	Who doesn't agree with that?
	We just came out of a presidency that was completely run by ideologues that put their head in the sand and did not look at the results of any of their policies for four years.
	And even though within months, it was unbelievable.
	I remember back in 2021, absolutely floored by the flood of immigrants instantly under Biden.
	Instantly.
	It's not like it took years to figure out, oh man, maybe we made a mistake.
	It was instant.
	Dug in and never changed.
	And now you've got a guy that pivots.
	Now you could say, look, he's oscillating.
	He's backtracking.
	Or maybe he's responding in real time to real challenges.
	And I think that's the majority of people want that.
	That's John Bickley, executive editor, co-host of Morning Wire.
	Again, available on video wherever you get your podcasts, including on YouTube.
	John, appreciate the time.
	Thanks, man.
	Well, what does all of this mean in terms of practical fallout?
	Again, it appears that the Republicans are going to pass the big, beautiful bill.
	President Trump himself yesterday was making the case for passing the bill without delay.
	Here he was.
	So I want to thank you for your support, and now let's get the bill passed.
	We want to get it passed through Congress without delay.
	And again, in the debate between President Trump and Elon Musk in Congress, the congressional Republicans are, of course, backing President Trump because he is the political leader.
	Elon Musk may provide money and funding for congressional races down ballot.
	But the reality is that most of these congressional Republicans recognize that if they were to fuck the president, that would be significantly more of a political problem for them.
	As The Wall Street Journal reports, in the battle between the Republican titans, most GOP lawmakers sided with Trump.
	Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee said Musk is going off the deep end with his call for Trump's impeachment and suggested Musk is losing his sway with the MAGA crowd.
	Many Republicans have defended the GOP mega bill.
	He hasn't moved to vote, said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Elon Musk.
	And that, of course, is not possible.
	Many Republicans are coming out of the woodwork to defend President Trump from the Musk accusation that he's in the Epstein files and all the rest.
	Representative Kevin Hearn of Oklahoma told Axios, quote, we're getting people calling our offices 100% in support of President Trump.
	Every tweet that goes out, people are more in lockstep behind President Trump and Musk is losing favor.
	So this is not a shock.
	The Republicans know quite well that the big, beautiful bill.
	is maybe the only thing that stands between the country and a serious recession.
	Because the reality is that the tariff war that President Trump has declared is actually not particularly wonderful for the economy.
	The prices are starting to rise.
	We've not seen the full impact of the price increases yet.
	But, again, uncertainty means that people are holding out their money.
	It means investors are waiting on the sidelines.
	They don't know where to put their money.
	As the Washington Post reports, months of trade policy whiplash and ensuing rounds of legal challenges have created uncertainty at every stage of the supply chain, according to interviews with half a dozen business leaders.
	It's draining resources and creating logistical headaches for wholesalers, distributors and retailers during the most critical business period.
	June is the busiest month of time of the year for freight, partly because companies are moving much of their inventory for back to school and holiday shopping.
	So businesses are freaking out a little bit.
	If there were to be a failure of the Big Beautiful, if tax rates were to rise in the middle of all of this, it would be a full-scale disaster area.
	And again, part of the problem here is that the trade Perspective of the Trump administration remains utterly incoherent.
	You have some members of the administration, like Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, who President Trump should listen to, who's making the case that in trade negotiations, what matters is that both sides go weapons down.
	The goal is to actually get to zero.
	Reciprocal tariffs.
	And then you have people like Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, who is hot on the idea that tariffs themselves are a wondrous, wondrous thing.
	And apparently this is breaking out into the open in the middle of meetings with other countries.
	Apparently, there is a negotiation happening in Japan, and members of the Trump team started arguing with each other in front of the Japanese about the goal of the trade negotiations.
	Quote, the presence of three top U.S. negotiators with differing stances on trade, this is according to Nikkei.com, is adding a layer of complexity to tariff talks with Japan.
	Open disagreements, competition, confusion among Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and U.S. Trade Representative.
	Jamie Greer, have made it hard for the Japanese side to judge the Trump administration's intentions, according to sources close to the negotiations.
	One source said, quote, at one point, the three cabinet officials put the talks with the Japanese side on hold and began debating right in front of them.
	Well, that's not great, Bob.
	The responsibilities of Besant, Letnick, and Greer overlap each other, complicating the tariff talks.
	Besant is also responsible for negotiating with China, South Korea, and other countries, making scheduling a meeting with him difficult.
	In addition to lack of unity between Besant, Lutnik, and Greer, Tokyo is also concerned about insufficient coordination between cabinet officials and working-level staff.
	So, again, is that going to be great for the economy?
	It certainly could be a major problem for the economy, especially given the fact that U.S. job growth continues to slow.
	The United States added, according to the Wall Street Journal, 139,000 jobs in May.
	That is above a gain of 125,000 jobs expected, but at the same time, There was a major revision down in terms of the jobs in the last couple of months.
	So it all balances out to an economy that seems to be at the very least slowing fairly significantly.
	Now, does that mean that the economy is in serious trouble?
	Again, it doesn't mean the economy is in serious trouble.
	It just means that nobody knows what the hell is going on.
	That is the rule of the day on Wall Street.
	No one knows where this is going.
	No one knows what the hell is going on.
	That is why the most...
	And meanwhile, President Trump is indicating openness to scaling back salt relief in the GOP tax bill in the Senate.
	He is suggesting to Senate Republicans he is open to a lower limit on tax deductions for state and local taxes than the version included in the House passed version.
	Now remember, the way this works is that the House passes a bill.
	The Senate passes its own version of the bill, and then the two sides negotiate over a combined bill that can pass both houses.
	So everything that President Trump takes with one hand, he has to give with the other.
	It's a very difficult negotiation.
	Pretending otherwise is foolhardy.
	With that said, do I think the big, beautiful bill ends up over the finish line?
	I would be shocked if it doesn't.
	Meanwhile, in very positive news, the Supreme Court has now ruled in favor of the idea that you don't actually have to be a member of a minority in order to be discriminated against, which, of course, is obviously true.
	You can certainly be a white, straight male and be discriminated against, or in this particular case, a white, straight female.
	According to the New York Times, the Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously ruled, unanimously, and our right-wing decision is unanimous.
	It includes far leftists like Sonia Sotomayor and Tanji Brown-Jackson.
	They unanimously ruled in favor of a straight woman who twice lost position to gay workers, saying an appeals court had been wrong to require her to meet a heightened burden in seeking to prove workplace discrimination because she was a member of a majority group.
	That decision came two years after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in higher education and amid the Trump administration's fierce efforts to root out programs that quote-unquote promote diversity.
	Of course, that's the New York Times coverage, as you could expect.
	Now, Ketanji Brown Jackson actually wrote for the court.
	So again, this is not a right-wing decision, despite the best attempts of the New York Times to turn it into one.
	The standard for proving workplace discrimination under the law, said Ketanji Brown Jackson, quote, does not vary based on whether or not the plaintiff is a member of a majority group.
	The case was originally brought By a person named Marlene Ames, who had worked for the Ohio Department of Youth Services, which oversees part of the state's juvenile corrections system.
	After a decade there, in 2014, she became administrator of a program addressing prison rape, and five years later, she applied for a promotion.
	Her supervisors turned her down.
	They eventually gave the position to a gay woman who'd been in the department for a shorter time and lacked a college degree, unlike the plaintiff.
	Not long after that, the supervisors removed her from her existing job, telling her they had concerns about her leadership and offering her a demotion that came with a substantial pay cut.
	She was then replaced by a gay man with less seniority.
	So she claimed that she basically was discriminated against because she was straight.
	Now, put aside the underlying facts of the case, the question here for the Supreme Court was whether she had to, like the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals suggested, whether she had to prove that she was a member of minority or face a sort of heightened standard because she's not a member of a minority group.
	The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit In the trial court, she said the two supervisors took negative employment actions against her restraint.
	On appeal, she said a gay supervisor had also played a role.
	Now, again, the underlying facts of the case are less relevant than the actual ruling, which says that, yes, of course, you can be discriminated against if you're a white straight person, for example.
	If you're a member of a majority group, you can be discriminated against.
	That is not a shock in any way, shape, or form.
	And good for the Supreme Court for ruling correctly on all of that.
	Meanwhile, over at the White House, it's Pride Month, but this White House is celebrating Pride Month a little bit differently.
	Joining us online to discuss, Mary Margaret Olehan, our White House Daily Wire correspondent.
	Mary Margaret, thanks so much for joining the show.
	Really appreciate it.
	Thanks, Ben.
	So great to see you again.
	So let's talk about Pride Month in Washington, D.C. It's different than prior Pride Months.
	Of course, June is the...
	No, it's not.
	In fact, it is June here in Washington, D.C., where you'll typically see some very serious Pride Month celebrations.
	But like you were saying, Ben, it's a little bit different this year.
	In past years, under the Biden administration, we saw a big Pride Month celebration on the White House lawn.
	There were lots of pro-transgender activists and people who identified as transgender themselves who got in some hot water for taking topless photos and videos that ended up getting them banned from the White House lawns.
	It said during a press briefing earlier this week that there will be no proclamation of any kind, whether it's about Pride Month or some other kind of celebration, during June.
	And we broke an exclusive earlier this week where the Department of Education told us that instead of celebrating Pride Month, they're celebrating Title IX month.
	So they're going to be attempting to celebrate and promote the victories of the Trump administration so far as it pertains to protecting women's sports and spaces.
	And as part of that effort, So the first one, Ben, is Colorado, where I actually reported a couple years ago that there was a family who was shocked and horrified to find that their little daughter, who was 11, got assigned to share a bed with a boy who identifies as a girl on an overnight school trip without being told.
	So the only reason this little girl didn't end up spending the night in the same bed as this trans-identifying male was because she was, you know, a very resilient young lady and got out of bed and called her mom and said, I don't think this is right.
	The other case that the Department of Education is investigating deals with the University of Wyoming where a man who identifies as a woman entered a sorority, lived in a sorority house, and allegedly was ogling the girls in their towels as they went to and from the showers.
	So two big, very high-profile cases that the Department of Education is investigating.
	And there's also a whole bunch of other stuff going on at the agencies.
	For example, the FBI announced on Monday that they're looking for tips into any doctors or hospitals that are pushing transgender procedures on children or performing these procedures on children.
	And Ben, we reported yesterday that the FBI has received almost 100 tips since they posted that call for tips on Monday.
	And we were told that this is a big priority for the FBI and for Kash Patel.
	They're very focused on protecting children, whether that's related to the border or it's related to protecting them from irreversible transgender surgeries.
	So I could talk about this all day.
	I don't think is a coincidence.
	You're reporting that Representative Mary Miller of Illinois has now introduced a resolution in Congress to declare June as Family Month rather than Pride Month.
	Why don't you talk about that?
	Yes, so I was joking earlier this week.
	This is what my conservative friends around here would call a very based resolution.
	If you read the language of the resolution, it talks a lot about traditional family, the importance of the family unit, the importance of celebrating traditional values, and how that's going to ultimately promote society at the end of the day.
	So Representative Mary Miller introduced this earlier this week.
	She had a whole bunch of Republican colleagues sign on.
	I don't think we saw any Democrats signing on to it.
	It's not exactly the verbiage that you're saying.
	We're hearing from the left these days.
	But, you know, I'm just seeing in my own reporting and from the response that this story got that there's a lot of people that really like the idea of celebrating the traditional family, celebrating traditional virtue during this month rather than, you know, some of the antics and the really loud celebrations that we've seen in the past.
	But of course, then, at the same time, you know, you're seeing all this from the right.
	This is still Pride Month in D.C. Tomorrow, on Saturday, we'll see a huge, massive Pride parade.
	I think most of the streets will be blocked.
	You'll see a lot of people coming in from out of town.
	I'm sure that you will have thoughts on that and what we see go down, so stay tuned because there's more coming on that front.
	I'm sure we'll get to see a lot of things that are not child-friendly in that parade.
	So that's very exciting.
	Mary Margaret, I would be remiss if I did not ask you what the attitude is around the White House considering the blow-up between Elon Musk and President Trump that began yesterday has carried into today.
	What's the general attitude over there?
	So obviously this is the biggest news of the week, maybe of the last six months.
	I would say in the attitude of many of the White House reporters who have been kind of waiting for this sort of thing to happen.
	You know, Elon and Trump's relationship has often been considered a little bit tenuous in the last couple weeks.
	And now that things have blown wide open, especially with Elon's Epstein allegations yesterday, what I'm hearing from my White House sources is that they consider this to be a very overly strong reaction to Elon's dissatisfaction with the one big beautiful bill.
	What I'm being told.
	It's possible there's going to be a call scheduled with Trump and Elon later today.
	We're still waiting for more on that front.
	We're hearing that it may happen, but that Trump is not super excited about it.
	And you know, there's been so much back and forth between the two of them, very public back and forth, that it's not likely to be completely patched up anytime soon.
	But what I was told by some of my White House sources is that, A, President Trump actually kicked Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club.
	That's been widely reported for many years.
	He's also already known to have socially interacted with Epstein, but there's no evidence that he did any wrongdoing associated with the late sex offender who died in a New York City jail.
	And the FBI has told us recently that he committed suicide, so he did kill himself.
	And we're supposed to see videos proving that fact very soon.
	So we're all kind of waiting with bated breath around here to see how this Elon-Trump feud pans out.
	Hoping that this call has some news in it.
	I'm in the White House press pool today, so if there's any open Oval events, I will be in them.
	So hopefully I'll be able to ask the president about that.
	And I'm excited to question him about what's going on in the future of this Trump-Elon relationship.
	Well, that's Mary Margaret Olihan, our Daily Wire White House correspondent.
	Mary Margaret, I know you're busy, so I'll let you get back to it.
	Really appreciate the time.
	Thank you, Ben.
	Meanwhile, among all the hubbub about the right wing and the Republican Party and Elon versus Trump and all this, we should mention, as my friend John Bickley mentioned earlier, Democrats are in total disarray and they don't know which way is up at this point.
	James Carville, who I've suggested is sometimes voice of reason inside the Democratic Party, rejecting the wokeness.
	They are off the rails, really, truly off the rails.
	So James Carville was on a show yesterday in which he suggested that That Jews were not sufficiently supporting the Democratic Party because basically they love money, which is an unbelievable allegation by James Carville.
	The reason that many Jews turned away from the Democratic Party is because the Democratic Party is filled with people like AOC and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
	It is a party that suggests wrongly that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, which is a false, nonsensical claim.
	It is a party that has stood by rabid anti-Semites inside of its own party.
	And here's James Carville ripping into the Jews.
	Go try and raise money from really wealthy Jewish fundraisers.
	And he said, look, James, I'm a Democrat, but I can't be a party because of what happened at Columbia.
	What the f*** did the Democrats have to do with what happened at Columbia, by the way?
	Well, I can't do that, but I can be for a party that everybody endorses the alternative for Deutschland.
	Read.
	The modern incarnation of national socialism, if you will.
	And I just find these kind of people, I literally, my instinct is, and they tell me that.
	They look me right in the eye.
	No, you just want your tax cut.
	That's ridiculous.
	I mean, ridiculous.
	And yes, indeed, anti-Semitic.
	The idea that Jews are supporting the Republican Party above the Democratic Party because they wanted the tax cut belies the fact that many Jews moved from Democrat to Republican in this last election cycle.
	The Republicans have been offering tax cuts as long as I've been alive.
	I've been a Republican as long as I've been in politics.
	So I have not shifted at all.
	But there was a marked shift in the Jewish vote, particularly in swing states like Pennsylvania, not because of tax policy.
	Because the Democrats embraced full-scale a bunch of anti-Semitic garbage.
	Yes, because of Columbia University.
	Chuck Schumer calling up the president, Manoush Shafiq, of Columbia University and telling her to ignore Republicans on the congressional committees asking about widespread anti-Semitism on her campus.
	Yes, because your Democratic Party has not only looked the other way but promoted some of the worst Jew haters in your own party.
	Yes, because they've made room for terrorist groups across the map.
	Slow walking aid to Israel in the middle of an existential war.
	Yeah, because of that.
	James Carville.
	Really, truly disgusting stuff there from James Carville.
	Speaking of problems with actual anti-Semitism in the world, there was an event that David Friedman, the former Trump ambassador to Israel, was supposed to speak at over the course of the next few days.
	It was supposed to take place, apparently, in Texas.
	An American jihadist forced a shutdown of the event.
	according to a press release from the group involved.
	One of the largest pro-Israel gatherings planned for 2025 has been indefinitely postponed after escalating terror threats left organizers without a viable venue just days before the event.
	The Israel summit, scheduled to be held June 9th through 11th in the Dallas area, with more than 1,000 attendees from across the United States and via livestream, has become the latest casualty of growing hostility toward public support for Israel in the United States.
	Organizers were forced to relocate the event once already after the original Dallas venue was no longer feasible due to heightened threat levels and an overwhelming security burden estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
	And then a second venue was also threatened by pro-Hamas jihadist groups.
	We should probably stop importing those sorts of folks into the United States.
	That is the point that President Trump has quite correctly made.
	Now, meanwhile, President Trump hosted Frederick Murs, who is the new chancellor of Germany, at the White House yesterday.
	Today, of course, marks D-Day, one of the signal moments in world history and in American history where America finalized the process of saving the world from the Nazi scourge.
	President Trump had a bit of a strange moment with Frederick Murs talking about D-Day.
	It was a little odd.
	Here's the president.
	This is D-Day anniversary when the Americans once ended a war in Europe.
	And I think this is in your hand in specific, in ours.
	That was not a pleasant day for you?
	No, that was not a pleasant day.
	Well, in the long run, Mr. President, this was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship.
	That's true.
	Not a pleasant day for you.
	I mean, Frederick Merz isn't like a Nazi.
	That's a little awkward.
	By the way, I should mention here, James Carville.
	Calls out alternative for Deutschland, AFD, in Germany and says they're a neo-Nazi party.
	That's not true.
	Okay, it's not true.
	I know Alice Fidel.
	She's the leader of the AFD.
	It is not a true statement.
	But, you know, again, people don't know either their history or their current politics too often.
	Meanwhile, during the same presser with Frederick Murs, President Trump commented on Ukraine.
	And again, his comments on Ukraine are a bit strange at this point.
	As I've said before, Vladimir Zelensky is ready to do what President Trump wants.
	Vladimir Putin is not.
	This bizarre sort of moral equivalence between the two sides is not factually based, in my belief.
	Here is President Trump correctly saying he is not friends with Russia yesterday.
	I wish we could do the same thing with Ukraine and Russia.
	And at some point it'll happen.
	I believe that.
	And if it doesn't happen or if I see somebody's out of line, if Russia's out of line, we'll be, you'll be amazed how tough.
	Remember this.
	They like to say that I'm not friends with anybody.
	Okay, so again, he's right about that.
	With that said, obviously, you know, President Trump has taken a bit of an in-between position with regard to Russia and Ukraine that I think is unjustified by the current circumstances.
	Here is President Trump, for example, comparing the fight between Russia and Ukraine to a hockey fight between kids.
	Let's just be real about this.
	Ukraine is fighting an existential war against an opponent that wishes to completely ingest it according to its own policy.
	Top politicians.
	It's being said out loud by Demetri Medvedev and Vladimir Putin.
	So not quite the same thing as a hockey fight between kids.
	But sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy.
	They hate each other and they're fighting in a park.
	And you try and pull them apart.
	They don't want to be pulled.
	Sometimes you're better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.
	And I gave that analogy to So, again, saying that he wants to pull them apart is one thing.
	It is another thing to say, as President Trump did yesterday, that maybe he will put sanctions on both countries.
	Why would you put sanctions on the Ukrainians?
	They literally just signed a rare earth minerals deal with you.
	They keep coming to the table.
	They're offering a 30-day ceasefire right now.
	If the Ukrainians had the ability to do so, they would freeze the lines of combat in place right now in exchange for security guarantees from the West.
	That is the actual off-ramp here.
	Vladimir Putin doesn't want that off-ramp.
	Why would we possibly sanction Ukraine?
	Please, like, explain.
	When I see the moment when we're not gonna make a deal, when this thing won't stop, if that moment, yeah, it's in my brain, the deadline.
	When I see the moment where, It's not going to stop.
	And I'm sure you're going to do the same thing.
	It will be very, very tough.
	And it could be on both countries, to be honest.
	You know, it takes two to tango.
	Well, yes, but one of the parties is ready to tango.
	So again, I remain bemused by the approach that suggests that if you're going to go hands off, that that doesn't help Putin.
	It clearly does.
	I mean, just on a practical level, it clearly does.
	Meanwhile, all the talk about how the United States attacks on the Houthis resulted in some sort of success.
	It didn't result in a success.
	Okay, let's just be real about this.
	The only success with regard to the attacks on the Houthis were the Houthis pledged they would not attack American shipping.
	That was not the original goal of the attacks on the Houthis.
	The original goal of the attack on the Houthis was to stop them from harassing shipping in the Red Sea.
	That has not happened.
	According to the New York Times, the largest commercial shipping companies continue to avoid the Red Sea and Suez Canal, despite a recent ceasefire agreement between the United States and Houthis intended to make the trade lanes safer.
	Again, what the Houthis wanted out of that particular agreement was the Unfettered ability to continue to fire long-range missiles over Saudi territory and into Israel without America getting mad at them.
	That's really what that was about.
	And that was really at the behest of Iran and Qatar.
	The ceasefire, which began May 6th, ended a U.S. campaign that involved over 1,100 strikes against the Houthis in Yemen.
	Now, the reality is I'm not sure that the United States should be directly involved in attacks on the Houthis.
	I think that what we really should do is we should unshackle the Saudis to do exactly what they want to do with the Houthis.
	That seems to me a better plan.
	The Saudis were battling with the Houthis, somewhat successfully actually, up until the point Joe Biden decided that it was a violation of human rights and decided to allow the Houthis to basically set up their own mini-state inside Yemen.
	Richard Mead, editor of Lloyd's List, said if the intention was to restore freedom of navigation, which is what they said it is, then the results speak for themselves.
	The shipping industry has not gone back.
	Ship traffic through the Red Sea is down by around three-fifths since 2023.
	Fearing their vessels would be struck, big shipping companies avoided the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, taking a much longer route around the southern tip of Africa to travel between Asia and Europe.
	The Houthis have said they are still at war with Israel and will attack vessels bound for Israel.
	But shipping companies are worried that their vessels may be hit deliberately or mistakenly because the reality is that do the Houthis have some sort of magical intelligence suggesting which ships are bound for Ashdod as opposed to which ships are bound for ports in Madrid?
	So for a supposedly peaceful country that is desirous of good relations with the rest of the world, they don't seem to be particularly peaceful.
	China is helping them out.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran has ordered thousands of tons of ballistic missile ingredients from China.
	People familiar with the transaction said, seeking to rebuild its military prowess as it discussed the future of its nuclear program with the United States.
	Again, the goal for Iran is delay.
	That is Iran's goal in this entire negotiation with the United States.
	They have no intention of giving up their nuclear program.
	All they want is a delay to rebuild their ballistic missile stock, to rebuild their air defenses.
	That is their goal because they think that that will prevent some sort of Israeli strike on the nuclear facilities in Iran.
	And the longer the negotiations go on and the longer the Trump administration says the Israelis don't do anything while we're negotiating, the better it is for Iran.
	That is the simple calculus of the timeline right now.
	Iran wants to bolster regional allies and rebuild its arsenal while it pushes deeper into contentious talks with the Trump administration over its nuclear program.
	Iran continued to expand its stockpiles of uranium enriched to just below weapons grade and ruled out negotiation limits on its missile program.
	So, again, remember, they don't just want to develop the missiles in order to put conventional warheads on them.
	They want to put nuclear warheads at the end of those missiles, which would create an umbrella across the entire Middle East and actually even into Europe, considering the length of the missiles.
	The Chinese side continues to fund all of this because China, of course, is a big funder of pretty much all of the United States' enemies.
	This is why President Trump has correctly treated China as a geopolitical opponent.
	Now, it would be helpful if the national security infrastructure of the United States were not being taken over by Koch Institute allies.
	Amazing.
	When President Trump came into office, he said that the Koch brothers, their foreign policy, the very isolationist foreign policy, was not something he wanted associated with.
	With the administration, obviously people in his personnel office are not paying any attention.
	They continue to staff up a bunch of people underneath the secretary level in these various administration positions who are very sympathetic to an isolationist position on foreign policy.
	According to a publication called Jewish Insider, the Senate will soon consider the nomination of a guy named Justin Overbaugh to be Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
	He is the latest of several senior Pentagon nominees.
	who come from defense priorities, a Koch-backed think tank that has generally argued that the United States should scale back involvement in global conflicts, including in the Middle East.
	Apparently, at the State Department, people being staffed at the State Department are now more along the isolationist lines.
	Morgan Ortegas and Ron Hawk, who's been serving as Deputy Middle East Special Envoy under Steve Whitcoff, plans to now depart the office at the National Security Council.
	Top officials focused on Israel and the Middle East were pushed out last month as the National Security Council was restructured.
	So, again, it's strange to me that President Trump continues to apparently have a different agenda than many of the people being staffed under him.
	President Trump publicly has said all the same things he's been saying for 10 years.
	He's been saying for 10 years, the JCPOA, worst deal in history.
	Nuclear weapons cannot be held by Iran.
	Nuclear development cannot be done by Iran.
	That the United States has to enforce peace through strength.
	Again, these are consistent positions from President Trump, but many of the people being staffed by whoever is doing the staffing Are being staffed directly from people who effectively oppose much of the foreign policy of Trump 1.0.
	And that's something to keep our eyes on.
	Alrighty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.
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