June 11, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:15:24
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| Folks, you got a ton coming up on today's show. | |
| California Governor Gavin Newsom, he is leading the resistance and he's making dramatic speeches about it. | |
| Plus, we discussed, should President Trump just let the city of L.A. burn? | |
| There's kind of a case for it. | |
| And Victor Orban stops by for part two of our interview. | |
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| Well, folks, Democrats believe that they have found their point of resistance and the new leader of the resistance will be the same as the kind of old leader of the resistance, Kendall Gavin Newsom, the governor of California. | |
| He has presided over a great fleeing from his state. | |
| Obviously, I'm one of the people who left his state. | |
| I'm a lifelong Angeleno. | |
| I lived in LA for literally my entire life. | |
| And then I took myself, my family, my parents, my company, and we all moved out of LA thanks to the governance of people like Gavin Newsom. | |
| But now Gavin Newsom believes that he has his road to 2028 paved for him. | |
| He believes that because obviously we have watched a spate of riots in Los Angeles. | |
| First, we were told by the media the riots didn't exist. | |
| As it turns out, the riots very much do exist, which we'll get to in a moment. | |
| But Gavin Newsom is using President Trump's unleashing of federal forces to essentially help protect ICE agents in doing their job as an excuse to claim that he is now standing up to authoritarianism in the United States of America. | |
| And so he delivered another one of his very overdramatic, ridiculous speeches last night. | |
| This was supposed to be the end of Independence Day, and he's Bill Pullman. | |
| Well, it didn't go great. | |
| He started off by having massive audio issues right at the top. | |
| Here's what that looked like. | |
| Well, you can see that he's talking and nothing is coming out, which actually is an improvement because when he talks and sound does come out, the sound is usually stupid. | |
| But here he was attempting to talk. | |
| It didn't work particularly well. | |
| But then, finally, he got to his point. | |
| And his point is that we must resist. | |
| We must resist the federal encroachments. | |
| Now, remember, what are the federal encroachments? | |
| ICE agents were sent to Los Angeles to do federal immigration raids, to pick up illegal immigrants and to deport them. | |
| That is what federal law says you are supposed to do. | |
| Now, we can get into the politics of who should be deported and why and how and where in a moment, but it is certainly within the purview of ICE to actually pick up illegal immigrants and then to process them for deportation. | |
| That is all well within the remit of the federal government. | |
| And then riots began, and the president was not willing to wait for Gavin Newsom to allow that to continue to fester. | |
| So instead, he activated the National Guard and sent them there in a support role for ICE. | |
| And he also activated some Marines in a support role for the National Guard. | |
| According to Gavin Newsom, all of this amounts to an extra-constitutional coup, the beginning of a monarchic America in which Hitlerian Donald Trump is unleashing federal forces in order to take full control of the American body politic. | |
| Here is Gavin Newsom almost tearing up. | |
| And again, this guy is not Olivier. | |
| Like, he is not a good actor. | |
| And so all of this comes off incredibly fake. | |
| This moment, we all need to stand up and be held to account a higher level of accountability. | |
| If you exercise your First Amendment rights, please, please do it peacefully. | |
| I know many of you are feeling deep anxiety, stress, and fear, but I want you to know that you are the antidote to that fear and that anxiety. | |
| What Donald Trump wants most is your fealty, your silence to be complicit in this moment. | |
| Do not give in to him. | |
| What he wants most is your fealty and your silence. | |
| I think what President Trump would like is for you to stop burning Waymos. | |
| And that's the thing that President Trump would like the most, actually. | |
| Now, a judge did rule yesterday that Gavin Newsom, he had attempted to stop via an injunctive relief lawsuit what President Trump is trying to do in Los Angeles. | |
| And the judge was like, nah, he has the legal ability to do this. | |
| You can't get in the way of that. | |
| But listen, what Gavin Newsom wants most of all is to run for president in 2028. | |
| And the media are helping him out. | |
| The Washington Post has an entire piece titled, Trump's actions echo authoritarian regimes. | |
| Newsom in interview. | |
| Wow. | |
| Wow. | |
| Well, according to the Washington Post, that's an American president in 2025 threatening a political opponent who happens to be a sitting governor. | |
| That's not with precedent in modern times. | |
| That's what we see around the globe in authoritarian regimes. | |
| That's because President Trump effectively joked about arresting Gavin Newsom because Tom Homan, his border czar, had said that if Gavin Newsom violates federal law, Then he will be subject to federal law, just like every other citizen. | |
| And again, this does not ring true, given the fact that Democrats tried to imprison President Trump multiple times over the course of the last two years. | |
| So what's good for the goose is good for the gander. | |
| If you are violating the law, then the law should apply to you. | |
| And again, there is no ongoing effort to jail Gavin Newsom, despite the fact that he is, in fact, a horrible governor. | |
| He has every right to be a horrible government. | |
| just can't violate federal law. | |
| According to the Washington Post, Newsom... | |
| Newsom has tried all methods. | |
| He was the face of the resistance in the first term and a welcoming greeter during Trump's initial visit to California in his second term. | |
| All the while, he continued suing Trump while keeping up a cordial back-channel relationship. | |
| On Monday, he sounded like he was the end with Trump, calling him unrestrained and unhinged. | |
| He said on Monday, Trump is a very different president than his first foray in office. | |
| You've seen that as to how it relates to how he has completely obliterated any oversight from Congress, how he seeks to obliterate oversight from the judicial branch by threatening impeachment of judges and running up to the edge as it relates to court orders. | |
| So again, this is all about Gavin Newsom running for president in 2028. | |
| And what he is hoping is that becoming the face of a resistance to Trump is going to jog him to victory in Democratic primaries. | |
| Now, meanwhile, it is hilarious because the Democrats keep claiming several things at once. | |
| There are no riots. | |
| Two, there are riots and they're good. | |
| Three, there are riots and they're bad, but President Trump should ignore them. | |
| All three of those things are being claimed at once. | |
| First, you heard members of the media suggesting there weren't any riots. | |
| It was just a little peaceful car burning. | |
| I mean, so a few cars got burned. | |
| So the Waymos had to flee. | |
| The elves had to leave Middle Earth. | |
| So really, is that such a big deal? | |
| Then you got to, well, there are riots, but they're good. | |
| It's part of the resistance, you see. | |
| You need the resistance. | |
| The resistance is positive. | |
| That is the position that has now been taken by the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass. | |
| So hilariously, last night she had to announce a curfew in downtown LA. | |
| So I have a question. | |
| If there was no unrest, why do you need a curfew? | |
| They kept saying there was no big deal in LA, so why are you declaring a curfew in downtown LA? | |
| I wanted to let the city know that I have declared a local emergency and issued a curfew for downtown Los Angeles to stop the vandalism, to stop the looting. | |
| Many businesses have now been affected by or vandalized. | |
| Last night there were 23 businesses that were looted and I think that if you drive through Downtown LA, the graffiti is everywhere and has caused significant damages to businesses and a number of properties. | |
| So my message to you is, if you do not live or work in downtown LA, avoid the area. | |
| Law enforcement will arrest individuals who break the curfew, and you will be prosecuted. | |
| I will consult with elected leaders and law enforcement officials tomorrow on the continuation of the curfew, but we certainly expect for it to last for several days. | |
| You look and look at the map, and you can see that the city of Los Angeles is a massive area, 502 square miles. | |
| The area of downtown where the curfew will take place is one square mile. | |
| I think it is important to point this out, not to minimize the vandalism and violence that has taken place there. | |
| It has been significant, but it is extremely important to know that what is happening in this one square mile is not affecting the cities. | |
| Peace. | |
| Okay, so again, she's making several of these arguments at once. | |
| One, the riots are happening and they're bad. | |
| Two, don't worry, the LAPD is taking care of it. | |
| By the way, the LAPD has been told to stand down, basically. | |
| I know this from people in the LAPD. | |
| The LAPD for years has been told to allow this sort of stuff to happen. | |
| LAPD officers, when they join up, they want to stop crime and they've been told actively by the politicians in the city not to stop crime, not to get in the way of the crime. | |
| And then when things go wrong, then all of a sudden it's like, well, the cops will handle it. | |
| It's one of the major problems with the city of Los Angeles, which is, by the statistics, one of the least staffed police forces in America. | |
| Just on a population to police force level, incredibly understaffed police force, and they are told not to do. | |
| Karen Bass admitted that the entire city is covered in graffiti, so much so that she's concerned that they may not be able to actually have the World Cup in L.A. because of the levels of damage that have occurred. | |
| Especially of the graffiti that is just blanketing a number of blocks has been extensive. | |
| We are one year away from the World Cup. | |
| This is about beautifying our city and bringing our city together. | |
| And so I am calling on business leaders, community leaders, faith leaders to come together downtown in the next few days to talk about how we are going to clean up the city. | |
| Obviously, city workers are already out there removing the graffiti, but this is so extensive it's going to take community-wide involvement. | |
| We had launched a program called Shine LA a couple of months ago in preparation for the World Cup, We need people from all over the city to come to downtown and to help with this effort. | |
| So things are going amazingly well in LA. | |
| Hilariously. | |
| I keep saying hilariously because it actually is kind of funny. | |
| Like in a dark way, it is very, very funny. | |
| That the worst Democrats run a place, and then the more it requires federal intervention, the more the person who ran the place is deemed a hero by the media. | |
| So if you're a horrible mayor of L.A. and you help run the place into the ground, so much so that federal troops have to be called in to help stop rioting, and then you yell at the president, this makes you a hero. | |
| The headline from the New York Times, quote, Karen Bass is getting a second chance to lead her city through a crisis. | |
| Ms. Bass struggled amid criticism of her initial response to the L.A. fires in January. | |
| The opposition over President Trump's immigration raids have offered her an opportunity. | |
| You see, she's run the city like complete crap, but she now has an opportunity to be a resistance hero because she gets to yell at President Trump. | |
| And as we all know, that is the most important thing, is yelling at President Trump. | |
| And every Democrat knows this, which is why they have universally decided that the problem in California is not extraordinarily high rates of illegal immigration. | |
| It is not the massive draw on public services represented. | |
| By illegal immigrants. | |
| It is not lack of law and order. | |
| It is not understaffing of the police department. | |
| It is not riots in downtown or blanketing of the entire county in graffiti. | |
| It is none of those things. | |
| The problem, of course, is President Trump. | |
| Why? | |
| Because that's how you get the clicks if you are in the Democratic Party. | |
| Coming up on the show, we'll get to my reasons why I think that maybe President Trump should just let L.A. burn first. | |
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| Senator Adam Schiff, who made his career saying false things about President Trump. | |
| Senator Schiff used to be Congressman Schiff and he spent And it's this deliberate kind of provocation. | |
| That is only escalating the situation. | |
| But the president doesn't care about making it worse. | |
| He's more than happy to see violent protests. | |
| It gives him something to talk about, something other than his big ugly bill that's going to blow a hole in the deficit and take away people's health care. | |
| So for him, this is a wonderful distraction. | |
| It's a wonderful distraction for him. | |
| So again, the problem isn't with governance in California, which has created this morass. | |
| The problem is President Trump reacting to the morass. | |
| The California Attorney General, Rob Bonta, who presides over a state that actively attempts to impede federal law enforcement in doing its job. | |
| We'll get to that in a moment. | |
| He says this is all manufactured controversy. | |
| Why is anyone even worried? | |
| What's the big deal? | |
| Yeah, you know, this is a manufactured crisis and artificial controversy, and that's what the president wants. | |
| Unfortunately, he wants the confusion. | |
| He wants the chaos. | |
| It seems that he wants things to explode because that will give him the excuse that he wants to try to seize more power, which is his MO. | |
| Besides having a very complicated relationship with the truth and being a hypocrite, he is on an ongoing mission to seize more power that is not his. | |
| Yes, it is definitely seizing more power to defend ice installations in Los Angeles. | |
| You can sense it. | |
| You go to LA right now, I'm sure that it absolutely feels like Red Dawn. | |
| It's just the invading forces of the federal government. | |
| Can I just point out that the population of Los Angeles is 3.8 million people? | |
| That is just the city. | |
| It's 3.8 million people. | |
| The president has deployed 2,000 National Guard members to LA. | |
| I'm just going to point out 2,000 National Guard members, 4 million people living Yeah, I'm sorry, it doesn't sound like a full-scale invasion to me. | |
| Weird. | |
| So, how prevalent is illegal immigration in California? | |
| I asked our sponsors over at Perplexity. | |
| How many illegal immigrants live in LA, in LA County, in California? | |
| And what percentage of the total Hispanic population of California is illegal immigrant population? | |
| And here's what Perplexity says. | |
| LA City is home to nearly 900,000 undocumented immigrants based on a 2020 study by USC. | |
| LA County, Which encompasses the city and the surrounding areas, has between 810 and 830,000 undocumented immigrants. | |
| California statewide has somewhere between 1.8 million and 2.6 million illegal immigrants. | |
| And apparently, according to Perplexity, nearly 30% of all Latinos in California are either undocumented themselves or live with somebody who is undocumented. | |
| The way that USC actually determined that, I asked again Perplexity for the answer. | |
| is what they call the residual method. | |
| Apparently, that involves calculating the total foreign-born population in the area, subtracting the number of foreign-born individuals who are legal permanent residents, refugees, or have other legal authorization to live or work in the United States. | |
| And then the difference, a residual, is an estimate of the illegal immigrant population. | |
| Anyway, the LA County Board of Supervisors member, Lindsay Horvath, also says that the real problem here is, again, not failure to enforce the law. | |
| The real problem is the enforcement of the law. | |
| If you enforce the law, clearly that's provocative. | |
| The best way to avoid provoking people is to let them run wild in the city of Los Angeles and to allow illegal immigration to just be a thing. | |
| Thank you. | |
| That is what is happening. | |
| What is escalating this situation is the increased presence, and it's happening around the federal building, and it's intended to intimidate, it's intended to be a scare tactic, and it's intended to escalate instead of calm down what's happening on our streets. | |
| Again, the problem is Trump. | |
| Representative Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the House, she says the same thing. | |
| She actually downplayed much of what was going on in the street. | |
| She said, you know what? | |
| It could be anarchism or it could just be youthful exuberance. | |
| It could just be the exuberance. | |
| Here she was. | |
| When there is a gathering, a large gathering of people, the anarchists see it as an opportunity and they move in. | |
| So always have to be careful whether you see a burned car or a broken window or whatever it is. | |
| It may be the exuberance of the moment, but it may be the anarchist setting in. | |
| So it could be a few things, just the exuberance. | |
| Just exuberance, you know, when you just get, you and your friends, you know, something good happens. | |
| Somebody graduates from college, and, you know, you just get exuberant. | |
| And so you set some Waymos on fire. | |
| You call the Waymo, you grab a Molotov cocktail, and you set it on fire. | |
| Because why the hell not? | |
| That's what exuberance is all about. | |
| Or it could be anarchism. | |
| But maybe it's exuberance, says Nancy Pelosi. | |
| Representative Maxine Waters, who again has had very little problem with violence in the city of Los Angeles, says, listen, there's no problem here. | |
| Nobody got shot. | |
| Nobody got killed. | |
| So what's the big deal if a bunch of businesses get set on fire or looted or whatever? | |
| Who cares? | |
| Whatever. | |
| And even those who were out of step with what we are advocating, peaceful protest. | |
| Did not create any violence. | |
| Nobody was shot. | |
| Nobody was killed. | |
| Get it in your head. | |
| And so when martial law is called, what are you going to say? | |
| I missed the point. | |
| Don't miss the point, you all. | |
| Don't think that somehow because they called out the National Guard, there was violence. | |
| There was no violence. | |
| No violence. | |
| All the video that you've been seeing of cars burning and people driving around the wreckage with Mexican flags, all of that is no violence, obviously. | |
| Clearly. | |
| Meanwhile, Representative Norma Torres of California, she says the big thing here is that ICE has to retreat. | |
| ICE has to be thrown out of the city. | |
| They have not had a warrant. | |
| They are not asking for specific names. | |
| They are simply going after people because of the way they look. | |
| And this must stop. | |
| The president must call back. | |
| These ICE agents, they must retreat in order for the locals to be given the opportunity to restore order because that is what we are demanding right now. | |
| Representative Judy Chu of California. | |
| Again, the constant Democratic drumbeat here is that the problem is not violation of law. | |
| The problem is enforcement of law. | |
| Law enforcement is the problem. | |
| Violation of law is the norm. | |
| His representative, Judy Chu, saying that President Trump is doing something unprecedented and dangerous and authoritarian. | |
| The protests were inevitable. | |
| And now because the protests are happening, Trump sent in the National Guard without the governor's approval. | |
| On top of that, he's sending in the Marines and threatening to arrest a sitting governor. | |
| This is unprecedented, dangerous, and authoritarian. | |
| And then finally, we reach the culmination of this particular line of argument. | |
| You have the Congressional Black Caucus Chair Yvette Clark, Representative from New York, saying what you know Democrats have wanted all along, all along since 2016. | |
| They want to impeach him. | |
| Do these things rise to the level of impeachment? | |
| Are these impeachable events? | |
| Well, you know, I do. | |
| I believe it is. | |
| I definitely believe it is. | |
| But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. | |
| Again, impeachment. | |
| This is where they are going. | |
| And now, you can expect that over the course of the next few days, there will be protests spreading nationwide. | |
| According to NBC News, activists gathered in New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, and elsewhere, rebuking the Trump administration's tough stance against migrants and its aggressive roundup efforts. | |
| And it's the same group of people. | |
| It's people waving Mexican flags and also wearing keffias and Palestinian flags and all the rest of it. | |
| It is all the scavengers getting together to yell at the system. | |
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| And the Trump administration, for its part, is saying, listen, we are going to enforce the law. | |
| And if you yell at us, Well, you can yell at us. | |
| That's your right. | |
| But if you start throwing bricks at us, you are going to get arrested. | |
| Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, was testifying before Congress yesterday. | |
| He said, listen, ICE has the right to perform an operation in California. | |
| It is a federal body. | |
| It has the ability to enforce federal law. | |
| So in Los Angeles, we believe that ICE, which is a federal law enforcement agency, has the right to safely conduct operations in any state and any jurisdiction in the country. | |
| especially after 21 million illegals have crossed our border under the previous administration. | |
| So, again, I think that is a fairly commonsensical idea is that ICE has the capacity to do. | |
| So right now, the question is, who's grabbing that middle of the American popular imagination? | |
| Is it the Republicans who say, listen, ICE gets to deport illegal immigrants? | |
| And if you start burning cars, then we're going to send the National Guard. | |
| Or is it the Democrats are like, ah, a few burning cars here and there. | |
| What's the big deal? | |
| ICE needs to be forcibly removed from the body politic. | |
| Who do you think wins that debate? | |
| President Trump, of course, is going hard on this. | |
| He is suggesting that the people who are rioting are paid insurrectionists. | |
| Some of them certainly are. | |
| And he said, listen, if I have to invoke the Insurrection Act, which is not done as of yet, the Insurrection Act would essentially allow federal troops to engage in civilian law efforts as opposed to support roles. | |
| He says if I have to do it, I will. | |
| We have some bad people. | |
| We have people that look in your face and they spit right in your face. | |
| They're animals. | |
| And these are paid insurrectionists. | |
| These are paid troublemakers. | |
| They're agitators. | |
| They're paid. | |
| Do you think somebody walks up to a curb and starts hammering pieces out, has all the equipment necessary, and starts handing it out to people to use as a weapon? | |
| These are paid. | |
| Insurrectionists or agitators or troublemakers. | |
| You can call it whatever you want. | |
| Invoke the Insurrection Act to deal with the situation in California. | |
| If there's an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it. | |
| We'll see. | |
| But I can tell you, last night was terrible. | |
| This is something Senator Tom Cotton has been calling for for a while. | |
| We had him on as a guest just a couple of days ago about all of this. | |
| He has a piece in the Wall Street Journal reiterating the point he made back in 2020 during the BLM riots. | |
| He says, as always, local police are the first line of defense. | |
| But when the police can't restore order or aren't allowed to by Democratic mayors, the National Guard must be called out. | |
| We reached this point in Los Angeles where the police chief has said that the disgusting violence has overwhelmed his forces, adding, quote, there's no limit to what they're doing to our officers, and we've seen violence at a level that disgusts every good person. | |
| Mr. Newsom, says Senator Cotton, incompetent and ideological all at once, refused to mobilize the National Guard, leaving Mr. Trump little choice, but to federalize the California Guard to protect federal law enforcement agents and restore order. | |
| He has unquestioned legal authority to do so, plus many precedents. | |
| In my own state, a Democratic governor mobilized the Arkansas Guard to obstruct the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. | |
| Finally, if the Guard alone can't restore order and protect federal officers and property, And there is a legal basis to do all of this. | |
| President Trump makes the point that if the federal government did not get involved, L.A. would continue to burn. | |
| Here he was yesterday, the president. | |
| If we didn't get involved, right now, Los Angeles would be burning, just like it was burning a number of months ago with all the houses that were lost. | |
| Los Angeles right now would be on fire. | |
| And we have it in great shape. | |
| We're not playing around. | |
| Now, we should take a look at what the polling says about this. | |
| Democrats seem to believe that this is a winning issue for them. | |
| And this is why Gavin Newsom is attempting to turn himself It was a brand new Insider Advantage poll from yesterday. | |
| Do you approve President Trump's National Guard deployment? | |
| Yes. | |
| 59%. | |
| No. | |
| 39%. | |
| That is a plus 20. You very rarely get a plus 20 on a controversial issue in the United States. | |
| But what that suggests is this is not a particularly controversial issue. | |
| That actually, the American people are very much fine with sending in the National Guard to restore order. | |
| We are done with riots in this country. | |
| We do not like them. | |
| We do not want them. | |
| And we are not going to stand by and watch while they are performed. | |
| Now, what's amazing about all this, truly, what's amazing about all of this is that the Democratic Party, they theoretically don't have to play it this way. | |
| Let's assume for a second that you are a strategist for the Democrats. | |
| I know, I know. | |
| But let's assume. | |
| Let's assume you're a strategist for the failing and flailing Democratic Party. | |
| And you had the information that Stephen Miller and the Trump administration were sending ICE agents out to simply raid local parking lots at the Home Depot. | |
| You have a few choices what to do. | |
| One is, you can wink and nod at rioters, which is what Democrats are doing right now while blaming President Trump. | |
| Number two is, you could compile lists of the people who are being arraigned, who are being brought up for deportation, and you could find the most sympathetic cases, and then you could say that the Trump administration is exceeding its mandate, that when it comes to immigration, There are more popular aspects of immigration enforcement and less popular aspects of immigration enforcement. | |
| Very popular. | |
| Shut the southern border, right? | |
| The Democrats can't even say that. | |
| Trump has done that successfully. | |
| They should just say that. | |
| If you're strategizing for the Democrats, what you would say is, good for President Trump for shutting the southern border. | |
| You cannot allow free flow of migration across America's southern border. | |
| Unvetted. | |
| Unhindered. | |
| You can't do that. | |
| It's wrong, and President Trump is right to stop that. | |
| When it comes to deportation of people in the United States, we have to first target. | |
| Criminal illegal immigrants, not just random grandma at the flea market. | |
| That's the case the Democrats should be making, and they would have some polling data to at least support that, right? | |
| They could trot out some sympathetic stories about innocent people who are illegal immigrants, and sure, they technically can be deported, but at the same time, do you really want ICE agents all over the United States deporting 20 million people? | |
| What the polling suggests on this is that the American people are a little more divided on this. | |
| Still to come on the show, why I think that perhaps President Trump should just let LA burn, if that's what they're asking for. | |
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| Pew polling back from March, late March, suggests 16% say none. | |
| So Democrats have taken the none position, which is a 16% position, which is insane. | |
| Where they really should be, if they were smart, but they are not, is in the some category, which is where 51% of Americans are. | |
| And how does that break down? | |
| Well, 97% of Americans believe that if you commit a violent crime, you should be deported. | |
| 52% believe that if you commit a non-violent crime, you should be deported. | |
| 44% believe that if you arrived in the last four years, you should be deported. | |
| But only 15% of that 51% believe that if you have a job, you should be deported. | |
| That if your parents of children born in the United States, that if you came here and your kid's now an American citizen, you should be deported. | |
| Only 9% believe that people who came as children should be deported. | |
| Right. | |
| So if you're a smart Democrat, what you would do is find the categories of people who most And you would focus in on the Trump administration deporting those people. | |
| By the way, the Trump administration knows this, which is why they constantly couch their immigration efforts as targeting criminal illegal immigration. | |
| But Democrats are apparently too stupid and too doctrinaire for any of that. | |
| Okay, now, what should be done here long term? | |
| That's really the question. | |
| Because these riots may well continue. | |
| Los Angeles may continue to burn. | |
| And here is my perspective on this issue. | |
| Democrats have made clear they do not want federal law enforcement in there. | |
| They don't want federal law enforcement there to help ICE effectuate its arrests. | |
| They do not want federal law enforcement involved in any real way and even protecting property in the city of Los Angeles. | |
| They want the federal government completely out. | |
| The voters of California have made this clear because they keep electing Democrats over and over and over again. | |
| And so my... | |
| If they want it, if they want it to burn, let them have it. | |
| Let them do the thing. | |
| Because what that will mean is a continued out-migration of people who pay taxes. | |
| A continued out-migration of people who own businesses. | |
| A continued movement from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas. | |
| A continued movement from LA to Florida and Tennessee. | |
| A continued movement. | |
| And what should be done about illegal immigration? | |
| Well, the states that actually don't want illegal immigrants to live there will work hand in glove with the Trump administration to deport as many people as possible. | |
| And that will push illegal immigrants to leave red states and then move to blue states. | |
| It turns out that one of the single most effective political tactics of my lifetime. | |
| Was Republican governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas saying that if Joe Biden was going to leave the border open, they were just going to give bus tickets to illegal immigrants to blue areas like Chicago and New York. | |
| Because it demonstrated that when blue states come down to it, they don't want illegal immigrants there either. | |
| But make Democrats live by their own standards. | |
| Make Democrats eat the cost. | |
| If they want it this way, then let them have it. | |
| Let them do it. | |
| President Trump's already done his job in shutting the southern border. | |
| And he should continue to do his job. | |
| In deporting criminal illegal immigrants or victimizing American citizens. | |
| When it comes to states that have decided that they wish to bankrupt themselves on the back of illegal immigration, maybe President Trump should just let them do it. | |
| And here are five reasons why. | |
| Number one, they voted for this, okay? | |
| California voted for this. | |
| California SB 54 stops state and local law enforcement from assisting federal law enforcement. | |
| It includes banning cops from asking about immigration status, holding illegal immigrants for the feds after they've been arrested. | |
| And sharing non-public personal information with ICE. | |
| The Trust Act in California, which again is law, requires local law enforcement ask for judicial warrants before even complying with ICE detainer requests. | |
| So you have a in jail and that person's an illegal immigrant and ICE puts out a detainer request. | |
| If you don't have a judicial warrant, then California will not allow you to comply with the detainer request. | |
| California has proposed bills to prevent employers from even allowing ICE access to workplaces. | |
| In violation of federal law, by the way, Or employee records without a court order. | |
| Landlords are not allowed to ask about immigration status in California. | |
| California provides driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. | |
| Medi-Cal, which is essentially Medicaid for California citizens, but also for illegal immigrants. | |
| California earned income tax credits. | |
| So you get like actual checks from the government in California as an illegal immigrant. | |
| If you have kids, free public education for kids and in-state tuition for college. | |
| LA has its own sanctuary city ordinances. | |
| That prohibit the use of any city resources whatsoever for federal immigration enforcement or cooperation with ICE. | |
| The city of Los Angeles treats schools, hospitals, and courthouses as quote-unquote safe spaces to prohibit immigration enforcement. | |
| They voted for this. | |
| This is what they want, so let them have it. | |
| H.L. Mencken once suggested about democracy, that democracy is the theory that the people should get what they want good and hard. | |
| That is not wrong. | |
| California should just be California. | |
| And there are a bunch of reasons for this, including, by the way, the fact that, generally speaking, states should be allowed to be states. | |
| Truly, the federal government controls immigration policy at the border. | |
| And President Trump is doing that. | |
| And the federal government does have an obligation to deport criminal illegal immigrants. | |
| You can say they have a broader obligation to deport all illegal immigrants, but that's never really been a realistic possibility here. | |
| And everybody who watches, to deport 20 million illegal immigrants is going to cost you by the best. | |
| Is that going to be something that any administration is going to undertake? | |
| I highly doubt it. | |
| And you know this, because President Trump wasn't unleashing tens of thousands of ICE agents in California. | |
| He was unleashing, like, small coteries of 100 ICE agents in California to go pick up some people. | |
| That's what the immigration raids were. | |
| The federal government should, of course, try to enforce federal law, but it's not up to the federal government to make states run properly. | |
| And in fact, When the federal government under Joe Biden was attempting to get states to stop enforcing immigration law, that was bad too. | |
| The sword cuts both ways. | |
| So my view is that the federal government should allow California to be California. | |
| And if they wish to be a failing state, let them. | |
| And the federal government should allow Florida to be Florida and Texas to be Texas and allow successful states to continue to succeed. | |
| And the population movement, people will vote with their feet. | |
| So that is reason number two. | |
| Reason number one, California voted for this. | |
| Reason number two, federalism. | |
| Reason number three. | |
| People do not learn their lesson until they reap the reward of their voting. | |
| If Californians continue to do this, they will reap the reward. | |
| They will. | |
| And eventually, maybe they wake up. | |
| Because it turns out that until the American people get it good and hard, sometimes they stick their hand in the stove and then it burns and they remove their hand. | |
| Californians have been sticking their hand in the stove for three decades at this point. | |
| At a certain point, they might want to wake up, but things are going to have to get pretty bad in order for them to do that. | |
| And you know what? | |
| Don't inhibit the badness from happening. | |
| Let it happen. | |
| Let it go. | |
| And as for illegal immigration itself, if other states decide to crack down on illegal immigration and work with the federal government to stop illegal immigration, more illegal immigrants will go to California. | |
| California, by the way, is already somewhere between 7% and 10% of its population is illegal immigrants. | |
| At least 2.6 million illegal immigrants live there, as per the LA Times. | |
| That is currently 7% of the entire state population of California. | |
| It's probably significantly higher than that. | |
| The Los Angeles area alone probably has upward of a million illegal immigrants. | |
| If they want it, let them have it. | |
| And by the way, we'll save the American federal taxpayers some money. | |
| Because it turns out it's kind of expensive to deploy the National Guard. | |
| The projected cost of the current protest handling by the National Guard and the Marines is supposedly somewhere in the neighborhood of $134 million. | |
| I don't feel like paying taxes. | |
| So that people in LA can yell at the National Guard for enforcing the law. | |
| If they voted for that, listen, I lived in that state for years and I paid millions of dollars in taxes to the California state government for this kind of crappy law enforcement response, which is not the fault of the cops. | |
| It is the fault of the politicos. | |
| So why should I pay for that now that I'm in Florida? | |
| I don't see a reason why. | |
| Politically speaking, the only way that people learn their lesson is to feel the pain of the bad policies they have chosen. | |
| And that is why I think there's a solid case to be made that in the long term, President Trump should just let California be California. | |
| And let Gavin Newsom own it. | |
| Let Gavin Newsom own his state that is collapsing due to the cost of things like illegal immigration and massive social programming, huge debt, driving business out of the state with elevated taxes, lack of law enforcement. | |
| You want to turn your state into Detroit, my man? | |
| All you. | |
| All you. | |
| And well, there are some people across the world who actually do not want to turn their countries into Los Angeles. | |
| One of those people is the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban. | |
| About a week and a half ago, I sat down with the Prime Minister in Budapest. | |
| We played part one of that interview yesterday. | |
| Here is part two of our interview with Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. | |
| So, and back to your domestic policy here. | |
| You have a lot of fans on the conservative side of the aisle in the United States, Try to restore a sense of strong Hungarian nationalism. | |
| How do you define Hungarian nationalism? | |
| What should the proper role of government be in promoting Hungarian culture? | |
| There's sort of a libertarian view in the United States that says government shouldn't be involved in social policy. | |
| You should basically leave that up to everybody else, but the government's not involved in the promotion of virtue or family. | |
| What's your view on that? | |
| How do you govern in that way? | |
| National independence in Hungary's sovereignty has been about two things always. | |
| If you look at the map, you will see that we are at the crossroads of war parts. | |
| Hungary is a country that... | |
| It was the Germans, the Russians, the Ottomans, the Turks. | |
| So we continuously had to defend ourselves and maintain our sovereignty. | |
| For that you need an army, you need military alliances, and you need good foreign policy. | |
| Foreign policy that is trying to work in every direction to create foreign policy. | |
| So sovereignty for us is about rationalism, national feelings and sentiments. | |
| It's the Hungarian state. | |
| It's the sovereignty of the Hungarian state being maintained even opposed to Brussels. | |
| But sovereignty? | |
| It's not exclusivity. | |
| You don't need it to be publicly owned, but it needs to be national. | |
| In the banking system, you need very strong Hungarian ownership. | |
| In the energy sector, especially in the strategic elements, the pipelines, We are not communists. | |
| We don't expropriate anything from others. | |
| We are not jealous of profits, but we discussed with everybody. | |
| We said a certain... | |
| We have achieved that. | |
| And I can say that nowadays the structure of the Hungarian economy serves the purpose of national sovereignty while it's based on private ownership, where it's embedded into the international commerce and trade, while we welcome foreign investors. | |
| So we are part, if you wish, of the Western and also the Eastern economic world. | |
| The question for nations to prevail Do you actually need the government to set objectives? | |
| I would like, if it didn't have to set objectives, that the nation itself would be able to guarantee long-term existence. | |
| But unfortunately, that's not the situation. | |
| First and foremost, we are in problems with the demography. | |
| We are a country of 10 million people, and we have less children born than people dying. | |
| And we don't want migration. | |
| But if this carries on, we are going to be in dire straits. | |
| First economically, then in social system, and then ultimately the whole, I think, we will just fall below the critical size where we are able to fend for ourselves, defend ourselves. | |
| It's not only because family is good. | |
| It's the best thing in the world. | |
| I have five children and grandchildren. | |
| That's not the only reason you need to support families, but also because that's the future of the nation. | |
| So you need to have, and we created a taxation system. | |
| We created labor rules. | |
| We create child support systems which can make families feel safe. | |
| Whether you want to have children, the state cannot decide how many children you need to We can help you make a good decision. | |
| We can help you decide for life. | |
| Same thing for culture compared to America or even most of the Western European countries. | |
| culture, sports, religion. | |
| I think in institutions that they operate, schools, hospitals operated by the churches, Hungary spends So there is an economic nationalism also. | |
| No, economic patriotism, I'm sorry. | |
| And you mentioned a couple of things there with regard to pronatalism policy that are really interesting. | |
| One is obviously the tax structures and incentives you've created for families to have more kids. | |
| It appears that that had a spiking effect initially in people having more kids, usually families with a lot of kids having one more or two more kids. | |
| And then that seems to have evened out. | |
| The real thing that... | |
| And you see here Israel as an actually great example. | |
| It's the only westernized country that actually is reproducing above replacement rates in the middle of wars, in the middle of conflict, specifically because of a feeling of patriotism. | |
| You see people who are very secular in Israel having three or four kids. | |
| And so your focus on church and your focus on patriotism here. | |
| That focus, it seems to me, is gonna be the one that is more likely to produce families that are having more children. | |
| Israel is a great mystery for all of us. | |
| Of course, we are looking for positive examples. | |
| They are really making a good effort of it, and we don't understand how they are doing it. | |
| We are in a much easier situation, and we're still unable to replicate them. | |
| So I will continue to study also how Israeli politics is actually impacting families, something we could actually just learn, tricks from them. | |
| I have been for decades a good friend of Prime Minister Netanyahu, even when he was a finance minister. | |
| When the Prime Minister and I was in opposition, we had professional collaboration, how we could actually link economic efficiency with family support. | |
| What concerns us, what we are doing is we are linking work, labour with the family through the taxation system. | |
| In 2010, in this country, 61% of people were employed, which was an extremely low amount. | |
| And we went to 81-82% now. | |
| That's good, the employment. | |
| But at the same time, we also want young people to have children. | |
| And if we want them to work and have children at the same time, that means it's through the taxation system that we can best support them. | |
| So we are putting a lot of money into family support through the tax system. | |
| If you have two or three children, majority part of your revenue, you're not paying tax on it. | |
| There's a big problem. | |
| Polarization is of course strong in Hungary. | |
| Divorces are also... | |
| So there is this reticence among mothers to have children. | |
| I divorce. | |
| The husband leaves me. | |
| How will I survive? | |
| So there is a special focus on supporting mothers. | |
| So a mother who has given birth to three children, and from January onwards, two children, they are tax-free until the end of their life in Hungary. | |
| So if you have two children and you're a woman, if you are single or you are married, you will not pay personal income tax in order to support, because we believe the mother is the key of the family. | |
| We have to help them, support them. | |
| Things like that. | |
| That's what we're trying. | |
| There's a long, long period of maternity leave that you have in Hungary. | |
| A lot of things which might luxury to some American ears, but it's important in Hungary for younger people. | |
| It's difficult to dare to have children. | |
| So there's another problem here, of course. | |
| My mother gave birth to me when she was 20. My children, my grandchildren, are born closer to the age of 30 for my children. | |
| And more and more women are deciding to have children after the age of 30. So these are new phenomena. | |
| On which the family policy has to reflect. | |
| This has to be reflected there. | |
| How to support them, how to support them later on. | |
| It's a very, very intricate system. | |
| Mothers, family support measures are a very intricate system that helps to support or tries to support in every phase of life. | |
| On my conviction, the future of Hungarians lies in the future of families. | |
| Family is the most important building block. | |
| After that comes the nation and then the Lord. | |
| And if these three together, everything works fine. | |
| One of the words we've mentioned a couple of times, which has become a dirty word among secularists, is Christianity and the strong Christian identity of Hungary. | |
| And one of the reasons for that is a sort of weird belief that's taken hold in the West, that the more Christian a country is, somehow, the less tolerant it is. | |
| And obviously, Budapest proves that that's not true. | |
| Can you talk about what Christianity means to the Hungarian identity? | |
| How you've fostered cooperation between government and religion in the country? | |
| Christianity and nation and the relation between the two is very, very special and not very easy to digest for an American. | |
| In Hungarian history, we have had many occasions when it was only Christianity and Church that helped the national identity to prevail. | |
| So, if you are a believer or not, everybody in Hungary agrees that without Christianity, there would be no Hungarian state, no Hungary. | |
| And this is something stipulated in the Constitution or the Constitution recognizes the force of It is a historic experience. | |
| It's nothing we should argue for philosophically. | |
| It's a learning. | |
| It's something we learned over a thousand years. | |
| It's important. | |
| If we lose this, we lose something important. | |
| We'll be weakened. | |
| So we are trying to preserve Christianity. | |
| Of course, this cannot be done under duress. | |
| You cannot force people to be religious or to be Christians. | |
| It's up to the church. | |
| The government cannot spread the gospel. | |
| It's up to the church and it's up to the priest. | |
| Sometimes they do a good job of it, sometimes not. | |
| In the whole of Europe, things are not quite in order. | |
| But in the whole of Europe, Hungary is one single country where church-run institutions. | |
| Their number of church-run institutions is increasing. | |
| More than 20% of all schools are run by churches. | |
| More than 80% of all children's institutions are operated by churches. | |
| Some of our hospitals are run by churches, and I myself, with a self-declared, publicly declared policy, I'm helping churches to take over as many public institutions if those who work there, who are actually employed there, are not against this, because the church runs schools better than the state can. | |
| The church runs a hospital better than the state can. | |
| It is just a history. | |
| It's a historic fact. | |
| So Christianity, beyond the belief and faith, is also rendering public service, social service that everybody needs. | |
| So in Hungary you can be a Jew, you can be a Pravoslav, you can be a Catholic, you can be a Calvinist, but still it's a community of faith that you belong to and in itself belonging to a community of faith is a positive thing. | |
| It's good for the nation, it's good for Hungary, it's good for your children, it's good for the future. | |
| These faith communities, their strength reinforces the whole country. | |
| So the government believes that although there is no interference into church affairs, like church cannot interfere into state, it is secularized. | |
| We want a strong Hungary. | |
| The stronger the faith communities of faith, the stronger Hungary. | |
| For Westerners, Europeans believe this is feudalism. | |
| I don't believe this. | |
| I think this is normal. | |
| So, to turn to the United States, you obviously have a very warm relationship with President Trump. | |
| You had a warm relationship with him during his first term. | |
| You have a good relationship with him during his second term. | |
| What would you like to see the United States do in terms of its foreign policy in order to strengthen and support allies like Hungary, build up those alliances around the world? | |
| As you know, there's sort of an open debate, even on the right in the United States, between, as you say, a more isolationist foreign policy and a more hawkish and interventionist foreign policy. | |
| Where do countries like Hungary see the United States as the most important in the world. | |
| There are traditional issues in foreign policy, security, military force, GDP, investment, trade, etc. | |
| These are important. | |
| But now, in the Western world, behind all this, there is an even more important struggle going on, what I called a struggle for the soul of the West. | |
| Leftist progressives or rightist conservative traditional Christian. | |
| That's the battle. | |
| For a long, long time, almost for 30 years in the West, it was the conviction that this battle for the soul of freedom. | |
| Secular leftist progressives have won this battle. | |
| We are just retreating. | |
| We are retreating and in defense. | |
| And then in 2010, we get a two-third majority during the elections in Hungary. | |
| We amend the constitution and we create the foundations of a conservative, Christian, rightist, traditionalist. | |
| Pro-community, new political order, economic order. | |
| But we were alone with this. | |
| And the reason I supported Trump in 2015 already, President Trump, that he wins the 2016 elections, because I felt that if somebody is not coming in America who is going to come to our assistance, we will lose the fight for the soul. | |
| We will drown in the Volk Ocean. | |
| The future of our children will be taken out of our hands. | |
| Global financial networks will operate the country and not the elected leaders. | |
| So we need somebody great, courageous and strong. | |
| And that's why I supported him in 2016. | |
| It didn't count too much. | |
| It was a small country's support. | |
| But I believed every voice helps. | |
| So I stood by him openly. | |
| And that is what I believe now. | |
| His victory last year was the greatest thing that could have happened with the West. | |
| Because his victory sends the signal that this is a battle that can be fought and perhaps won. | |
| It's not over yet. | |
| Not even in America. | |
| It's not over yet. | |
| It's actually a battle in progress. | |
| It is perhaps worth fighting. | |
| Perhaps it's a winnable one. | |
| So his person is not the solution to our problems. | |
| He's not our savior. | |
| He's not going to redeem us. | |
| He is fighting for his cause back there, and we are fighting for our cause here. | |
| We know each other, we are aware of each other, and we help one another. | |
| That's the deepest structures of politics. | |
| Beyond that, you have trade and commerce and investment and security. | |
| But there is this struggle, battle for the soul of the West. | |
| We are allies of one another. | |
| Americans there, Europeans here. | |
| We are building like-minded European leaders, well, a network of like-minded leaders. | |
| That is the family of the patriots. | |
| That's what we created in the European Parliament after the European elections last year. | |
| So his victory in the U.S. was the greatest encouragement. | |
| There is hope. | |
| You should not give up your dreams. | |
| It is not true that you're on the wrong side of history. | |
| Migration is bad. | |
| If you fight against it, you are good. | |
| Gender is bad. | |
| If you fight against it, you are on the good side. | |
| The family is good. | |
| Gender is bad. | |
| And I could just go on. | |
| And I think the hope is back. | |
| And that actually has lent us energy, has started processes. | |
| We created the family of patriots in the European Parliament. | |
| Hope is the most important and the victory of Donald Trump for the whole Western world. | |
| Christian conservative Westerners brought hope. | |
| That's why we trust and hope for his And while the liberal political network has been financed in the past from America substantially, it was American money spent here in Hungary financing our enemies from USAID. | |
| Well, the US president cut this off, published this, showed it for the world, how it works. | |
| And we found out everything is true. | |
| In Hungary, we like to say it's time to come up with new conteos because the old ones have all proven to be true. | |
| So it's a huge help that now this money has been cut off. | |
| That's what his victory means for us. | |
| So meanwhile, for you as a smaller country, having to navigate an increasingly multipolar world where it's not just the United States as global hegemon facing down the Soviet Union, you now have the United States, which is dominant in its arena of the world. | |
| China is a rising power. | |
| It's unclear whether China's growing power is going to be countered by a group of allies or whether they're just going to continue to expand their power. | |
| Russia obviously is an expansionist power in Ukraine. | |
| How do you navigate a complicated world? | |
| It used to be a little bit more of a simple world, and it seems like it's getting more complicated. | |
| Well, yes, but that's not a problem. | |
| I think the world was the simplest when I was young. | |
| You had the East and the West, but that was a horrible thing. | |
| I lived 26 years in that world. | |
| And you're young. | |
| You should never find out what it meant to live there. | |
| And the world is more complicated. | |
| It's not only East and West. | |
| You have Russians, Chinese, and Brics, and India, and the Brazilians, and America, and Brussels. | |
| It's much more complicated. | |
| But that's not a problem. | |
| The old world was much worse. | |
| But this is a challenge for us in a complicated environment. | |
| Hungary actually just needs to collect friends. | |
| And in this respect, there's a lot of potential in the American-Hungarian relations. | |
| I'll give you an example. | |
| Biden administration punished Hungary and Hungarians by basically stopping the double taxation agreement. | |
| We don't have a double taxation agreement. | |
| There's an administrative obstacle for Hungarians and Americans to collaborate well in the economy. | |
| And there's a new president, and it seems he still has more important things on his agenda than to actually reinstate normalcy. | |
| So there's no investment. | |
| Chinese are bringing a huge amount of investments here. | |
| We are calling the Americans. | |
| There's little American investment coming. | |
| Hungary was on the negative list during the Biden administration. | |
| So we need to revive that. | |
| We should also be allowed to go to invest in America in the visa system. | |
| The Biden administration punished us. | |
| They actually degraded us into a complicated system. | |
| So there's a lot of things still in the American-Hungarian relations that we can improve and we should improve. | |
| And I think America can create good relations with us. | |
| It's important for us and for America as well. | |
| The president has tried to motivate Europe to move away from China. | |
| what do you make of that move? | |
| Is that something that... | |
| How does Hungary see China as a future geopolitical competitor to the United States, current geopolitical competitor to the United States? | |
| Of course, the American perspective is different than ours. | |
| What the American president and the USA expects of us is, and rightly, is that we should be loyal members of NATO. | |
| That when it comes to security issues, NATO is the priority partner. | |
| Nothing can endanger that. | |
| Nothing can endanger the loyal cooperation of Hungary with NATO. | |
| No other relationship either with Russia or with the Chinese. | |
| That's legitimate. | |
| Economy is different though. | |
| Trade is different. | |
| Well, the Americans, of course, you are trading in huge volumes with the Chinese. | |
| Well, we want in. | |
| I mean, it's good for us. | |
| Don't try to convince us that we should not trade with the Chinese when you are trading with the Chinese. | |
| I mean, you should trade with us as well. | |
| Come with good offers, like the Chinese come with good offers. | |
| So I think we should separate here national security, military security from commerce trade, economy. | |
| Hungary is a country where the official policy is that from the West and the East, we will welcome investment. | |
| You have huge industrial bases in Hungary, where you have Western car makers. | |
| Right in the neighborhood of Eastern, Chinese, South Korean battery makers. | |
| And they are actually building the same car in the end. | |
| So in our strategy, we are an ideal meeting point for Westerners, Easterners, companies wanting to invest. | |
| Here they can cooperate well. | |
| This is a huge advantage that we don't want to relinquish. | |
| And so we are looking forward to welcome American capital. | |
| Prime Minister Orban, final question. | |
| If you could speak to the American people, we are right now, what would your message to them be, looking at what you've been able to accomplish over the course of the last decade and a half? | |
| I don't want to interfere into American politics. | |
| But I think... | |
| So, with the greatest respect, with all your humility, I ask Americans to support their president so that he can bring peace to the world and so that he can win the battle for the soul of the West, for the benefit of families, for nation and Christianity. | |
| He is the great hope of the West. | |
| So please help him. | |
| Prime Minister Urban, I really appreciate the time. | |
| It's truly an honor. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Well, meanwhile, new inflation report out. | |
| And basically, inflation is even with where it was last month, which is to say it is increasing year over year, but at a lower rate than it had been, say, six months ago. | |
| The question of inflation is not completely done yet. | |
| According to the Wall Street Journal, consumer prices picked up in May. | |
| A month when President Trump's trade war continued to ebb and flow and businesses sought to navigate shifting policies. | |
| That was in line with the 2.4% rise expected by economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal. | |
| Prices excluding food and energy categories and so-called core CPI rose 2.8% that's slightly below forecast for a 2.9% increase. | |
| The Federal Reserve is going to hold out. | |
| They are not going to increase or decrease the interest rates at this point. | |
| They're going to leave things steady because they have to wait to see how the tariff war sort of shakes up. | |
| At this point, meanwhile, the president has announced that he has come to a deal with the Chinese on trade. | |
| That trade deal, according to the president of the United States, allows China to supply rare earths and magnets. | |
| The United States would then allow Chinese students to continue to study in the United States. | |
| The fact that that's what China wants gives you a little bit of pause. | |
| I mean, why does the Chinese communist government really, really want so many Chinese students studying at American universities? | |
| A little bit, little bit questionable about that. | |
| President Trump said we are getting a total of 55% tariffs. | |
| China is getting 10%, meaning that China will have to pay 55% tariffs on the goods that it imports to the United States, and we will have to pay 10% on the goods that we import to China. | |
| The president posts that he and Xi would work together to open up China to U.S. trade. | |
| This would be a great win for both countries. | |
| Now, to be clear, That actual rate that was just negotiated is actually higher than the current rate. | |
| So you'll remember that they were at 125% on Chinese goods. | |
| Americans were at 125% on Chinese goods. | |
| And then President Trump lowered it to 30%. | |
| Well, now it's back up to 55%, presumably, longer term. | |
| That is going to create some level of price inflation. | |
| So that's a pretty hefty duty, obviously. | |
| So where exactly is this going to end up? | |
| Well, first of all, it's a framework. | |
| So it's unclear what the actual details are going to be. | |
| China is going to maintain a new export control system it set up in April for rare earths, which gives it the power to clamp down in the future if it wants to strike back against the Trump administration. | |
| So, again, still a lot of roiling in the trade markets. | |
| The stock market this morning didn't seem to jump on the news. | |
| Not a lot of sanguinity in the markets that things are going to work themselves out on the trade front. | |
| And that combined with the fact that the World Bank, It's now estimating that the U.S. growth rate is going to halve because of this uncertainty and tariff war. | |
| It's got investors a little bit on edge. | |
| According to the Wall Street Journal, economic growth in the United States might halve this year as a result of President Trump's tariff policies, while the global economy is set to suffer a more modest but still significant slowdown. | |
| They say that the U.S. economy will grow by just 1.4% in 2025. | |
| That's a sharp deceleration from 2.8% expansion in 2024, and it's a massive decrease from what they expected. | |
| In January, when President Trump was to take office, they were projecting a 2.3% increase in U.S. GDP. | |
| They've now lowered that to 1.4%. | |
| So, again, a lot of uncertainty in the markets. | |
| By the way, this is just one reason, uncertainty in the markets, that I bought myself some gold last month because I'm concerned about the long-term fiscal foundation of the United States. | |
| There are a bunch of good reasons that you want to own precious metals right now. | |
| High geopolitical instability. | |
| High inflation, high volatility. | |
| Just on the show, a couple of weeks ago, you'll remember I spoke with the former head of the IMF, Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard, who is not a liberal, about the likelihood of heading into a recession. | |
| You know, I still think that over the next few years, that possibility remains fairly high. | |
| Diversifying your savings with gold is just a smart move. | |
| Birch Gold Group, those are the people I buy gold from. | |
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| Meanwhile, in media news, Miranda Devine, excellent columnist over at the New York Post. | |
| She has a brand new podcast that is coming out called Pod Force One, in which she interviews the President of the United States once a month. | |
| She joined me a few days ago to talk about this. | |
| Here is what she had to say. | |
| Miranda, thanks so much for taking the time. | |
| Really appreciate it. | |
| Thanks for having me, Ben. | |
| So why don't we talk about what the new podcast is going to be about? | |
| What do you plan on asking the President of the United States? | |
| Yeah, it's called Pod Force One. | |
| Funnily enough, after a sort of Air Force One, because the prime interviewee is going to be Donald Trump. | |
| He's our first interviewee and he's promised that he'll come back, we hope, once a month, but at least as regularly as he's able to do so. | |
| And I think... | |
| You know, he's adept at the podcast format we saw during the election campaign. | |
| I've got to know him quite well. | |
| So my plan is to draw out more of the person behind who he is, because even though he's kind of an open book, there are a lot of aspects of his personality that I think are important. | |
| He really, I mean, everything from his musical talent, he really does have this uncanny, innate talent that he was spotted by his parents when they sent him for aptitude testing when he was a child and his father wasn't too happy about it. | |
| But the way Donald Trump describes it, he's a musical genius and he doesn't really find much outlet in that, except if you notice that he's always fiddling with an iPad when he's at home. | |
| His rallies were part of their great popularity from the very beginning was that he chooses all this kind of boomer music that gets everybody up and dancing and in a really good mood. | |
| You just look at the Village People song, who would have thought that YMCA would become his anthem? | |
| So that's just one aspect, I think. | |
| And, you know, also just trying to probe. | |
| What his kind of philosophy is behind his very kind of smorgasbord of different policies. | |
| You can't really pin him down as a classical, you know, Republican or Democrat or fiscal hawk or whatever it is. | |
| And I think that comes from not just being a dilettante, but from a deep personal belief system that was, you know, formed in this very liberal city of New York. | |
| Yeah, I think one of the things that you mentioned there is something that I've been pointing out on the show for a long time. | |
| I am a person who's been conservative since I was old enough to talk about politics. | |
| But President Trump is not ideological. | |
| He's much more pragmatic. | |
| He's somebody who comes from the business world, and particularly the New York real estate world, where you do what you have to do to get the thing built. | |
| And I think that that is essentially, if you had to boil down President Trump in a nutshell, that's who he is. | |
| So many of the critiques of President Trump are actually not the bug, they are the feature. | |
| He tries things if they don't work. | |
| He shifts away from those things. | |
| So he gets critiqued for being inconsistent. | |
| But inconsistency, as it was once said, is the hobgoblin of little minds sometimes when it comes to the sort of idea that you try policies. | |
| If they fail, you move away from those policies. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And you're so right. | |
| I mean, I think it sort of falls into your thesis in your new book about lions and scavengers. | |
| And Donald Trump is a lion. | |
| He was a lion in the New York real estate developer world, which is really a dog-eat-dog, lion-eat-lion environment. | |
| And I remember talking to him once about one of those early sort of Republican primary debates when he coined the nickname And I said, you know, did you formulate that beforehand or how did that come about? | |
| Because it was so incredibly effective. | |
| It just killed Jeb Bush's campaign dead. | |
| And he said, no, it just came to me on the stage because I'd just been back in New York. | |
| He'd had this very torrid breakfast with this Chinese businessman from China who he'd I said, did you? | |
| And he goes, yes. | |
| And this guy's across the boardroom table from him in Trump Tower. | |
| And the way Donald Trump describes it very colourfully is that, you know, he was so angry that the scrambled egg was spitting out of his mouth. | |
| And so he sort of managed that, you know, very aggressive encounter. | |
| And then he had to fly off to the debate. | |
| And he's standing up on stage with this cardigan-beclad Jeb Bush. | |
| And he just looked at him and thought, you know, the sort of stouches that I have to engage in in my business world are just so, you know, much more important and sort of difficult than what I'm doing here on this stage. | |
| So he just looked over at Jeb and thought, you know, you are so low energy and that insult. | |
| Just really struck to the core of who Jeb Bush was and the sort of feeling that the electorate had that there was something not quite right with him. | |
| And I think that's part of what Donald Trump's genius is. | |
| It's really the genius of the schoolyard bully who in an instant can take in the personality of somebody and find the sort of most vicious weapon to use to hurt them. | |
| You know, Miranda, we've talked about sort of the reality that President Trump will try a thing. | |
| If it fails, he'll move off the thing. | |
| The only downside of that is that it creates uncertainty. | |
| And that's obviously something that President Trump has to contend with. | |
| He has to contend with the fact that, for example, when it comes to trade policy, lack of certainty may keep our enemies on their toes, but it also may keep our friends on their toes, may keep business on its toes. | |
| When it comes to foreign policy, it's sort of unclear what's going to emerge. | |
| And that's why I think it's pretty important that you're going to be interviewing him regularly and checking back in with him because he's... | |
| It's not all inconsistency. | |
| It's not all vacillation. | |
| There are certain things that he's been saying consistently for his entire career that he truly does believe deep down. | |
| And you elucidating on that, I think, is really important. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Yes. | |
| I mean, tariffs is one of those things that I don't really know why he has such a bee in his bonnet about them, but he really loves them. | |
| And he's going against all sort of economic wisdom. | |
| You know, he's got some pretty heavy hitters in his economic cabinet, people, particularly I'm thinking of Treasury Secretary Scott Besant. | |
| And he's certainly not a tariff man, but he's, you know, worked out what it is that Donald Trump wants to do. | |
| And he's going about trying to implement it in the most successful way possible for America. | |
| Well, the podcast is going to be titled Pod Force One. | |
| Miranda Devine of the New York Post. | |
| Go read her stuff over there as well. | |
| Miranda, thanks so much for the time. | |
| Thanks, Ben. | |
| Already coming up, we are going to get to Simone Biles backing off of her attacks on Riley Gaines. | |
| Yes, the left has so thoroughly lost the trans issue that they've even lost it here. | |
| It's really an amazing, amazing cultural shift that's happening in real time. | |
| To hear that, however, you have to become a member. |
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