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July 14, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:07:13
The Biden Autopen Scandal Breaks WIDE OPEN
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All righty, folks, got a ton to get to today here on the show.
Everything from the real Biden scandal continues to roll out.
Why isn't it getting more attention?
Plus, the Epstein scandal, non-scandal, and why are some people unwilling, unwilling to say what they actually want to say about the Epstein supposed cover-up?
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All righty, so we're going to get to the latest on the Epstein scandal, the cover-up or non-cover-up in just a second.
First, the actual biggest scandal of the last 20 years is, of course, that Joe Biden was not sentient for the last several years of his presidency, and this is becoming more and more apparent every day.
Amazing story out of the New York Times where the headline absolutely does not match the content of the story as per a usual arrangement.
So the headline of the story in the New York Times, Biden says he made the clemency decisions that were recorded with auto pen.
Cool.
So everything was fine, right?
That he said that he was going to give clemency or pardons to people.
And then he just said to his people, fine, use the auto pen to sign it.
I'm busy today.
That is not what the story actually says.
What the story actually says is something different.
Okay, what does it say?
Well, apparently, according to the New York Times, the full picture of what Mr. Biden did on pardon and clemency decisions and how much he directed those decisions and the actions of his staff, including the use of the auto pen, may come down to tens of thousands of Biden White House emails that the National Archives has turned over as part of the investigation by the Trump White House and the Justice Department.
Those emails contain keywords like clemency, pardon, and commutation from November 2024 through January 2025, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Times has reviewed several dozen of those emails, which discussed each of the major grants of clemency that were recorded by an autopen near the end of Mr. Biden's term.
But the Times has not seen the full extent of the emails, so it is impossible to capture the totality of information they contain, or what else they might show about Mr. Biden's involvement in the pardon and clemency decisions.
But those that were reviewed by the Times show that the Biden White House had a process to establish that Mr. Biden had orally made decisions in meetings before the staff secretary, Stephanie Feldman, who managed use of the AutoPen, would have clemency records put through the signing device.
So here is the problem.
Later on in the article, buried always, paragraph 17, paragraph 18, paragraph 20.
As always, the actual story is buried here.
What is the actual story?
Apparently, President Trump had categories of clemency, and those categories of clemency did not spell out all the details.
And people would just fill in the details as to who should receive clemency and when.
Quote, at the end of his term, Mr. Biden reduced the sentences of nearly 4,000 federal convicts and preemptively pardoned politically prominent people he considered potentially targets of Mr. Trump for criminal investigations.
Mr. Biden said in Thursday's interview, he had his staff use an auto pen for the warrants because he had granted clemency to so many people.
The auto pen was used, in all, on 25 pardon and commutation warrants from last December to January.
Some of the individual warrants included large batches of names because they all fell into the same broad policy category, like reducing the sentences of nonviolent drug offenders who met standards that Mr. Biden established.
Over the next three months, Biden made four major sets of clemency actions that were recorded with an auto pen.
Three applied to broad categories of people.
And as it turns out, Mr. Biden, here's the key, has buried like three quarters of the way down in the story.
Mr. Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons that applied to large numbers of people.
He and aides confirmed.
Rather, after extensive discussion of different possible criteria, he signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for reduction in sentence.
Even after Mr. Biden made that decision, one former aide said, the Bureau of Prisons kept providing additional information about specific inmates, resulting in small changes to the list.
Rather than ask Mr. Biden to keep signing revised versions, his staff waited and then ran a final version through the auto pen, which they saw as a routine procedure, the aide said.
Hey, so that's amazing.
That is his aide admitting the quiet part out loud that Trump, that basically Biden said, here's a broad category of people, nonviolent drug offenders.
Go do something about it.
And then his people scurried around and came up with a list and the list kept changing.
And instead of informing the president of the United States who was on the list, what their specific crimes were, what their stories were, they just ran it through the auto pen based on a giant category.
That's crazy.
That's crazy.
When you give commutations of sentences, those are commutations to individuals.
If you want to pardon everybody in a broad clemency category, like for example, Jimmy Carter with draft dodgers, then you have to do that as a broad category.
Everybody who dodged the Vietnam War draft is now pardoned or their sentences would be commuted.
But that's not what Biden did.
What he did, he didn't pardon every single nonviolent drug offender in the land.
He pardoned specific drug offenders in the land.
Biden said in the interview that he discussed each of the high-profile individuals with AIDS.
Okay, well, he may have discussed the high-profile individuals with AIDS, but that's not what his AIDS are saying.
His aides are saying, you know, all those low-level people, like the nonviolent drug offenders you decided to, we just created a list and then we pardoned them ourselves, which is crazy.
And again, this speaks to how insane it is that for several years, we did not have a president of the United States, that somebody else was governing the country, that it was either Dr. Jill Biden, the greatest doctor in all the land, or Hunter Biden, the Coke fiend who committed a felony gun crime, or his advisors like Jake Sullivan.
And the fact that this has somehow slipped to like number 10 on the list of scandals that Americans care about is pretty wild.
It seems like this should be not only the number one scandal in the country right now, it should be like one of the top scandals of all time.
Like there's no question this is worse than Watergate.
Watergate, the question was whether the president had authorized a break-in at the Democratic national headquarters.
And by the way, that was in the aftermath of similar activity having been done by LBJ in prior elections against, for example, Barry Goldwater.
Here you're talking about whether the president of the United States, his health condition, was covered up by everyone around everyone in his cabinet, everybody in the media who knew about it, people who were dealing with him on a daily basis.
I mean, just last week, you had his personal doctor at the White House taking the fifth so he would not have to explain what Joe Biden's actual mental status was, which is absolutely insane.
So the Trump administration is looking into this.
According to the New York Times, the Trump administration's scrutiny of the use of the auto pen intensified last month when President Trump signed an order on June 4th directing his White House counsel and attorney general to investigate Biden's mental acuity and whether Joe Biden's aides had illegally used the device, the auto pen.
The executive branch investigation led to the Trump administration request for all emails about clemency issues from the Biden White House near the end of Mr. Biden's term.
Under National Archives procedures, Biden could have raised objections, but apparently he didn't.
Congress is going to be looking into this as well.
So here's the thing about a scandal and a conspiracy.
If you can name the scandal and the conspiracy, like the people who were actually involved in the conspiracy, then it is a plausible conspiracy.
It is certainly more than plausible that there were many people around Joe Biden who knew about his mental health condition.
We know this from not only the reporting of Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper, we know this from contemporaneous reporting.
We know this from the use of our own eyeballs because the question is, when did Joe Biden go senile?
And we all watched it happen in real time because he was speaking on camera and he was the president of the United States.
And it's because he effectively died on camera that he wasn't actually the end nominee for his own party after being formally nominated for the presidency again in 2024, right?
That's what a conspiracy looks like.
A specific group of people doing a specific thing for a specific purpose.
Alrighty, coming up, we'll get to everything Epstein-related.
The controversy continues.
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Okay, so now we move over to the Epstein scandal, which continues to burn up the headlines, particularly in the world of the internet.
So President Trump is getting very frustrated with this.
He's getting very frustrated because the DOJ and the FBI came to a conclusion.
We read you the entire letter last week.
The DOJ and FBI came to a conclusion.
The conclusion was, one, there is no actual Epstein list, meaning a list of third parties to whom Jeffrey Epstein and Ghelaine Maxwell were trafficking underage girls.
That list does not exist.
Okay, that was the conclusion of the DOJ and the FBI.
Two, Jeffrey Epstein did, in fact, commit suicide.
Conclusion of the DOJ and the FBI.
Three, he was not, in fact, an intelligence agent blackmailing people.
There's no evidence of that, according to the DOJ and the FBI.
Those are the conclusions of the DOJ and the FBI.
Those are the conclusions.
And as I said last week, maybe they're lying.
I mean, possible, sure.
Maybe there's other evidence out there.
I have not seen it.
I don't know any more than Tucker Carlson or Steve Bannon or anyone else.
And I don't know any less than Tucker Carlson or Steve Bannon or anyone else.
But I do know who knows more than I do.
And those are the people at the DOJ and the FBI who actually looked at the evidence.
And as I said last week, either you have to call them liars who are engaged in the most massive cover-up of a child sex trafficking ring of all time, or Pam Bondi is a screw-up.
Those are the two choices.
There's not really a third choice.
So President Trump is getting frustrated with all of this because he says, listen, they looked at the evidence.
The evidence came out.
Why are we still on this?
And listen, I think the reason we're still on this is because Pam Bondi, the attorney general, screwed this up.
I think Pam Bondi, the AG, when she came out earlier this year and she did an interview where she seemed to suggest the Epstein list was on her desk.
And to be fair to her, if you watch the entire interview, she makes the case that she's talking about all the Epstein documents are on her desk and she's looking at them.
Okay, fine.
But the other thing that she did, of course, was she went out there and claimed there were tens of thousands of hours of tape.
There are, by the way, but they are child pornography.
The reason the FBI is not releasing them is because those tapes do not include underage people with third parties on Epstein Island.
That is not what the tapes are.
I also have sources in the federal government who are covering this stuff and have seen the documents.
Those tapes are just child porn.
That's all.
That's what they are.
That's why the FBI is not releasing them.
As far as the Epstein list, what I have been told by my sources is that there is no Epstein list, that basically there's a black book of Jeffrey Epstein contacts.
And the vast majority of those contacts are already out there Publicly, that's why you know names like Prince Andrew or Alan Dershowitz or some of the names that have been mentioned here.
Those contacts, there is no evidence according to the DOJ and the FBI.
Again, that's public.
There's no evidence that any of those third parties were having girls trafficked to them.
That is not evidence that was made clear, certainly, to the DOJ or the FBI.
Okay, that is, so Pam Bondi then made the sin, the cardinal error of bringing a bunch of social media influencers in there in the White House to meet with President Trump.
And she walks in with a bunch of binders with material that had already been publicly released and said, this is round one of the release.
And she handed them the binders and they all walked out.
You remember this.
It was really foolish.
They all walked out holding up the binders as though they'd been giving Nobel Peace Prize or something.
And it turns out there was nothing in the binders, which was humiliating to the influencers and incredibly dumb on the part of the attorney general.
And then as a cover-up of her own incompetence on that, she proceeded to send a letter to Cash Patel at the FBI suggesting that he had not turned over documents that he had in his possession to her.
Again, there's no evidence that that is the case.
And so that's why there is currently a fight between Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, and Pam Bondi, the Attorney General of the United States.
But the bottom line is this.
There are two possible theories here.
Theory number one, Pam Bondi oversold what she had and she didn't have any evidence of the things that she was maintaining and she screwed up the public release.
And two, the entire administration, including Donald Trump, JD Vance, Cash Patel, Pam Bondi, Dan Bongino, and everyone else in the administration is actively covering up a sex ring.
Those are the two, those are the two possible theories.
I'm going to go with the Pam Bondi screwed everything up theory.
Why?
Well, because I know the people.
I know Cash Patel.
I know Dan Bongino.
I know the president.
I do not think that they are lying to you about a cover-up of a child rape ring.
And as I'll make clear in a moment, I think that the people who are making the accusations that's happening should have the actual balls to say that that's what they're accusing Donald Trump of.
Some people are.
And you know what?
More power to them because at least they're saying the thing that they're saying clearly.
Then there are a bunch of cowards out there who are making those sorts of accusations.
Oh, there's a cover-up.
Oh, it's the CIA.
Oh, it's Mossad.
Oh, it's MISX.
Oh, it's the Saudis.
And this administration is actively engaging in a cover-up, but they won't say who.
Okay, well, if you say you have a conspiracy theory, spell it out.
Who?
Who's the guy?
Is Donald Trump actively covering up sex crimes?
If you're going to say that, just say it.
Otherwise, you are a coward.
You are a coward.
Say the thing you want to say.
Have the courage of your convictions.
In any case, President Trump is irritated with all of this because he's like, you know, we have actual important things going on in the country.
And listen, I think it's important that the American people have answers to questions like, was there an Epstein list considering what Pam Bondi said?
And if she says there's no Epstein list, she should answer questions about that, right?
She's the one who said it.
I didn't say it.
She said it or kind of said it.
How about the thousands of hours of tapes?
She said it.
I didn't say it.
She should answer questions about that.
I've been calling from day one for a press conference involving the AG or Cash Patel or whomever, go out there and explain your conclusions, right?
I mean, that would be full transparency.
And as far as the release of documentation, as far as the release of tapes, there are processes and procedures that are in place for a reason at the FBI and DOJ with regard to what they release in criminal investigations.
So for example, the FBI is not going to post tens of thousands of hours of child pornography that Jeffrey Epstein downloaded onto his computer so he could goon.
Okay, that's not a thing that they are going to do.
They are also not going to release a gigantic list of names who are not implicated in sex crimes.
And that's why their names were redacted.
Because how would you like it if you had been at a party with Jeffrey Epstein once?
Or let's say you had been friends with Jeffrey Epstein, but you didn't know of his sexual proclivities with young girls.
And you went to his island on his private plane, or he just flew on his private plane and didn't go to his island.
And now everyone thinks you're a pedophile, right?
That's why the FBI doesn't typically release names in investigations unless there's evidence the person is engaged in a crime.
That's why.
So they can't release everything.
And if they want to release that stuff, they can go to a judge and they can ask for that stuff to be released.
The judge will probably say no because it's a violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, presumably, of the people who are at issue here.
In any case, President Trump put out a statement.
He said, what's going on with my boys?
And in some cases, gals?
They are all going after Attorney General Pambondi, who is doing a fantastic job.
We're on one team at MAGA, and I don't like what's happening.
We have a perfect administration, the talk of the world, and selfish people are trying to hurt it.
All over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein, for years.
It's Epstein over and over again.
Why are we giving publicity to files written by Obama, crooked Hillary, Comey Brennan, and the losers and criminals of the Biden administration who conned the world with the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax, 51 intelligence agents, the laptop from hell, and more?
They created the Epstein files, just like they created the fake Hillary Clinton, Christopher Steele dossier they used on me.
And now my so-called friends are playing right into their hands.
Why didn't these radical left lunatics release the Epstein files?
Okay, the case that he's making here is that the Biden administration was talking a lot about the Epstein files, or at least that was there's reporting on it.
And then they were in charge for four years.
Why didn't they release any of that?
They could have.
So why exactly did not they release any of that?
He says, if there was anything in there that could have hurt the MAGA movement, why didn't they use it?
This is a real question that President Trump is asking.
It's correct.
If Donald Trump, right, there are a bunch of people on the left now implicating Trump and saying, well, the reason that nothing's been released is because he's in the fight.
As I said last week, what do you think the chances are that Joe Biden and Merrick Garland and the rest of Team Biden would not have released information on Donald Trump with young girls if they had it?
Those chances are less than zero.
They do not exist.
Okay, so President Trump continues.
They haven't even given up on the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. files.
No matter how much success we have had, securing the border, deporting criminals, fixing the economy, energy dominance, a safer world where Iran will not have nuclear weapons, it's never enough for some people.
We're about to achieve more in six months than any other administration has achieved in over 100 years.
And we have so much more to do.
We are saving our country and making America great again, which will continue to be our complete priority.
The left is imploding.
Cash Patel and the FBI must be focused on investigating voter fraud, political corruption, Act Blue, the rigged and stolen election of 2020, and arresting thugs and criminals instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old radical left-inspired documents on Jeffrey Epstein.
Let Pambondi do her job.
She's great.
The 2020 election was rigged and stolen.
They tried to do the same in 2024.
That's what she is Looking into as a G and much more.
One year ago, our country was dead.
Now it's the hottest country anywhere in the world.
Let's keep it that way and not waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Okay, so a bunch of people are saying that's dismissive of people's concerns.
I get it.
I do.
Okay.
Also, if you're President Trump and you're looking at what is, by most accounts, the most successful month of a presidency in modern memory, you're talking about a president who this month passed the one big beautiful bill maintaining tax rates and cutting the future growth curve of Medicaid, for example, a president who pursued the single most successful foreign policy strike of my lifetime, zero Americans killed, zero Americans wounded, end of the Iranian nuclear program.
You're talking about a president who solved a conflict in Africa, a president who, as we'll discuss in a moment, is re-engaging in the fight to prevent Putin from taking over Ukraine.
A president who is winning on immigration.
And you're concerned with Jeffrey Epstein.
When the investigation is done, you can understand Trump's frustration as well.
So I understand why people are saying, don't be dismissive of people's concerns.
You're the people who actually spun up a lot of those concerns for years.
I get it.
I totally get that.
And as I've said, AG Bondi really does have a public responsibility to come out and do a presser and answer all the questions she does because she's the one who pushed out the line that there was a list or maybe not a list.
There were tapes, there were a thousand victims and all the rest.
Like explain yours.
I get that.
That is not the same thing as the questions that some are asking today.
Right.
So when Elon Musk, for example, says that we should release the files as promised, when he says, just release the files as promised.
Okay, first of all, they should explain why they're not.
Right.
Like I agree with that.
As I've said, I think there are probably good reasons why they are not releasing the file, like legal reasons.
They're not allowed by a judge, presumably.
And they can clarify that.
Clarification would be good here.
Transparency would be good.
I agree with the transparency call.
That is not what a lot of people are asking today.
Artie, coming up, members of the administration, and also, by the way, members of the Israeli government denying that Epstein had anything to do with intelligence.
You can believe them or not believe them, but at least say who you're calling a liar.
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So Cash Patel torched the conspiracy theories, the head of the FBI.
The conspiracy theories just aren't true, never have been.
It's an honor to serve the president of the United States, President Trump, and I'll continue to do so for as long as he calls on me.
Now, again, this has turned into a bit of a fight between Dan Bongino and Pam Bondi.
Dan, my understanding is, wants the Attorney General to admit that she blew the rollout of this thing and oversold it.
And she apparently does not want to admit to that.
That is my understanding of the situation right now.
And so it's turned into sort of this internal firefight.
With that said, none of that is the questions that are being asked by both the left and then the horseshoe theory right here.
And again, I'm going to give credit to the people who are actively just saying the thing out loud, because again, at least they have the courage of their convictions.
So Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez on the left, she says, wow, who would have thought that electing a rapist would complicate the release of the Epstein files?
So first of all, that's a lie about President Trump.
He's not a rapist.
But second of all, when she says that that would have complicated what she's claiming is that President Trump is in fact implicated in the Epstein files.
Rocana, Democratic congressman from California, he says, why are the Epstein files still hidden?
Who are the rich and powerful being protected?
On Tuesday, I'm introducing an amendment to force a vote demanding the full Epstein files be released to the public.
The speaker must call a vote and put every Congress member on record.
Now, again, this is a really cynical piece of politicking by Roe, for sure, because as I recall, he was in Congress during the Biden administration and the president of the United States was of his party and all of them, all the same materials were available to Democrats during that time.
And he didn't do this, right?
So the implication from Democrats is that Trump is engaged in a cover-up.
But I do want to give a special shout out for courage, truly, really, to Dave Smith, the pseudo-comedian turned political commentator.
He put out a tweet, quote, in the last month, Donald Trump has launched a war of aggression on behalf of a foreign government, exploded the debt, announced that he's continuing the Biden policy of arming Ukraine and covered up a giant child rape operation.
Take credit to Dave Smith for actually saying what he believes.
Truly, at least he's being honest.
At least he's being Honest, and there he was at TPUSA.
And I do have to ask the question here as to why TPUSA decided to spend the weekend promoting the theory that President Trump is engaged in a child rape cover-up.
That's a weird thing for TPUSA to do.
I know that Charlie Kirk obviously was a major force in getting President Trump elected.
He's an ally of the president.
Handing over the stage to multiple people claiming that the president of the United States is engaged in a child rape cover-up is definitely a weird move, definitely a strange move.
In any case, here was Dave Smith just saying that from the stage of TPUSA.
Listen, guys, I'm a free American.
I supported Donald Trump in this last election.
Yes, he did just actively cover up a giant child rapist ring, and I'm going to criticize him for that.
Okay.
And I'm sorry after all these years of us right-wingers saying, protect the children.
Come on, that's bad for your soul if you don't.
You speak up about that.
It's horrible what he's doing.
Okay, so first of all, as we've talked about, and I'm sure we'll talk about it again, the evidence of the child sex trafficking beyond Jeffrey Epstein and Ghelaine Maxwell, his girlfriends, who third parties, that is all based, as we discussed last week, on the testimony of an incredibly unreliable witness in Virginia Geufrey, who is so unreliable prosecutors would not even use her in the Ghelaine Maxwell prosecution.
But at least Dave Smith is saying the thing, right?
He is accusing the president of the United States of a child rape cover-up.
That is what he's accusing the president of the United States of, just like members of the left.
And then there's Tucker Carlson.
So Tucker took the stage at TPUSA, and essentially he made the same claim, but he didn't have the courage of his convictions because he's not willing to say what he's saying.
Again, there are only two possibilities here.
Either Pam Bondi screwed up the rollout of this particular case and she oversold what was there and then she had to walk it back, but she won't publicly walk it back.
Or the president of the United States, the vice president of the United States, the head of the FBI, the deputy director of the FBI and the head of the DOJ are all complicit in a child's rape cover-up.
Those are the only two choices.
There is no third choice.
Well, here is Tucker Carlson saying what Dave Smith is saying, but without the courage of his convictions to just say Trump is the one doing the covering it up.
And I would love for him to say it publicly.
Seriously, he knows the president.
He's friendly with the president.
He's obviously incredibly friendly with the vice president of the United States, for whom his son is press secretary.
So anytime he wants, he could call up the administration and seek clarification on whether they are in fact covering up child rape.
And I would love to know whether he has done that, since he is very close with those people.
But here is Tucker making the accusation without having balls to actually say it.
But the fact that the U.S. government, the one that I voted for, refused to take my question seriously and instead said case closed, shut up conspiracy theorist, was too much for me.
And I don't think the rest of us should be satisfied with that.
Okay, so ask the president.
So ask him.
Seriously, you got his phone number.
We know the president talks to Tucker.
We know that J.D. Vance frequently talks to Tucker.
Ask the question.
Seriously.
Do it.
One of the things you'll notice about Tucker, he's very good at sort of speculating about problems without offering any solutions or trying to solve them.
So if he really believes when he says the U.S. government is covering up the conspiracy, who is the U.S. government at this point?
Who's the U.S. government?
Really?
Who is it?
Name the people.
When we're talking about Joe Biden, we can name the people.
Jill, Hunter, Jake Sullivan, his domestic policy advisors.
We can name the individuals, not some sort of broad category of the U.S. government.
If he wants to accuse Donald Trump of being complicit in a child rape gang cover-up, then he should just say his name.
He should just do it.
And why won't he?
I think we all know the answers.
Why won't he?
Here is Tucker then asserting that it was actually Mossad.
Again, without evidence, not a shock.
Of course, this is where Tucker was going.
This has become the hot speculation on the internet is without evidence, you say that Mossad was running Jeffrey Epstein.
When I say without evidence, I mean without evidence.
Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli prime minister, said, quote, as a former Israeli prime minister, with the Mossad having reported directly to me, I say to you with 100% certainty, the accusation that Jeffrey Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false.
This accusation is a lie being peddled by prominent online personalities such as Tuckler Carlson, pretending they know things they don't.
And in fact, I followed up with the former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, and what he told me is that Mossad has not been active in the United States since the, or against the United States, since the Jonathan Pollard scandal of 1987, when a U.S. Army contractor, he's actually working for the Navy, revealed classified information to the Israeli government.
He was prosecuted by the United States government and ended up in prison for almost 30 years.
And so Israel since then has not spied on the United States with Mossad.
But in any case, even if you don't believe Natalie Bennett, that's fine.
The United States government says this isn't true.
Okay, Dan Bongino and Cash Matello and J.D. Vance and the president of the United States say this is not true.
But Tucker is going to throw it out there as though he knows something.
And so all I would ask is, okay, if you're so certain, show me the evidence.
I'm asking him the same thing that I'm asking Pam Bondi.
Show me the evidence or lack thereof.
Right?
That's how you answer questions.
If you're going to ask a question, you have to demand an answer to that question.
Otherwise, you're not asking a question.
You're positing a theory without any evidence and calling it a question because you stick a question mark at the end of it.
Did you rape your dog?
Did you rape your family dog?
And then no matter what anyone says, well, you probably did.
You know what?
I know you did.
I know 100% you did.
That's not just asking questions.
That would be positing a theory, a specious and terrible theory without evidence.
Here is Tucker doing just that.
And moreover, it's extremely obvious to anyone who watches that this guy had direct connections to a foreign government.
Now, no one's allowed to say that their foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that that's naughty.
There is nothing wrong with saying that.
There is nothing hateful about saying that.
There's nothing anti-Semitic about saying that.
There's nothing even anti-Israel about saying that.
Okay, well, I mean, if you have evidence, that's true.
If you have no evidence and you're just throwing that out there, then it starts to look at the very least non-journalistic and not truth-bearing.
He continued to double Down on this, of course.
And again, remember: in the end, this is not really about Mossad.
In the end, what this is really about for Tucker Carlson is who's covering it up?
It wasn't Israel that was prosecuting Jeffrey Epstein.
Jeffrey Epstein is an American citizen.
It was the United States government that was prosecuting Jeffrey Epstein.
So, again, if Tucker would just like to say that the Trump administration is actively covering up a sex grooming ring, a child sex trafficking ring on behalf of a foreign government, why doesn't he say President Trump's name or J.D. Vance's name or Cash Patel's name or Dan Bongino's name or Pam Bonnie's name?
He knows all those names.
He knows all those people.
Here he was with Charlie Kirk on stage.
The real scandal here is who he was working for and where the money came from.
That's the actual scandal.
And no one will say anything about it because the answer.
Was it American intelligence?
No.
Was it Saudi intelligence?
Was it British intelligence?
It was Israeli intelligence.
And everyone's embarrassed to say that because you're like, you're not allowed to say that or something because you're a hater, but you're not a hater at all.
Not a hater at all when you just throw out theories without any evidence whatsoever.
And by the way, again, avoiding the chief point, which is let's assume that Tucker's right.
Let's assume that it was Mossad.
Okay, that means the United States government is complicit on behalf of Mossad in a child rape scandal.
Who is the United States government?
Donald J. Trump.
So, Tucker, just say it.
Just say it.
Weird, you won't.
Strange.
Almost cowardly, actually.
And then you double down again with another TPUSA personality named Alex Clark.
Do you agree with Candace Owens that the reason we are not going to see the client list is because Israel is implicated?
Israel is implicated.
I just was going to say that.
I mean, the former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, lived at Epstein's townhouse on and off for years.
And so absolutely.
Okay, so the fact that Ehud Barak, who is a complete scuzzbag, Ehud Barak is terrible.
He's awful.
The fact that he was involved with Epstein no more implicates Mossad than the fact that a huge number of prominent people in the United States were involved with Epstein implicates the CIA or President Trump.
President Trump knew Jeffrey Epstein.
So if you want to make that claim, just make it.
But I noticed again, you're not.
This, of course, culminated in Tucker suggesting that I don't even want to ask the questions.
Again, I'm fine with whatever questions you want to ask as long as you demand actual evidence for the answers.
If you ask a question and then any evidence provided is dismissed in favor of your favorite pet theory, you're not seeking answers.
You are positing a theory.
That's all.
Anybody who asks obvious questions like, hey, were you running a sexual blackmail scheme in my country?
Shut up, says Ben Shapiro.
You're an anti-Semite.
Well, no, I'm not.
Why is that not a fair question?
There's tons of evidence this is happening.
Like, are you joking?
You're not going to shout me down, by the way, at this point.
I spent four years being shouted down by the left for asking, I thought, pretty reasonable questions.
I have always felt very moderate.
I'm not a hater at all.
And I'm not going to become one.
And I don't think my questions are insane.
They may be stupid, but if they're stupid, then just speak slowly so I can understand as you answer them.
Okay.
Here it is, slowly.
If you are asking a question, but demanding no answer to that question, and any evidence that contradicts your pet theory is dismissed, you are not asking a question.
You are positing a theory of your own, but don't have the balls to say the thing you want to say, which is that Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States, is in fact covering up a child rape ring.
That's as slowly as I've ever talked on the show and slower than I will ever talk again.
That is the thing that I am saying.
And by the way, I've never called Tucker Carlson an anti-Semite.
I actually haven't.
Go back, look through the record.
It's never a thing that's happened.
He's throwing that out there as a red herring to the fact that he is saying things that he does not have the capacity to back up, period.
And this is all part, again, of a sort of broader demoralization effort that is happening on parts of the right.
President Trump is right about this.
When President Trump says there have been an enormous number of wins under his administration, that is true.
There are an enormous number of wins under President Trump's administration.
That's just a fact.
But there are a number of people, particularly Tucker, who make a living off of suggesting that there is nothing whatsoever that you can do to actually fix the country, fix your life, or make things better.
Well, meanwhile, President Trump continues to win actual victories, not cosmetic victories or appetizers, actual victories.
We'll get to that in a moment.
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So here's Tucker Carlson suggesting that President Trump's wins on Title IX, defending girls from boys in sports and shutting down the trans, the transing of the kids on a federal level.
Here's Tucker suggesting that that's totally meaningless and then moving on to a series of problems for again, which he will not name an actual solution because he's not interested in solutions.
He's interested only in running down the United States, most prominently, including even when President Trump is the president of the United States.
If you deny people what they actually want long enough and instead substitute things that you claim they should want, like bombing Iran, you know, I mean, I'm not, whatever, I'm not for Iran, where you spend all day telling me that it's so important that, you know, boys not playing girls' soccer teams or whatever.
I agree.
I hate the tranny stuff passionately.
I think you should keep the boys off girls' soccer teams, but I don't know.
It kind of feels like you're feeding me appetizers.
At some point, I want to look around and see a better country.
I want to see a country I recognize.
I don't want to see people sleeping on the sidewalk.
I don't see people ODing on drugs.
I want to know where those drugs coming from.
Why can't you stop it?
You've got the U.S. military.
Don't you have SEAL Team 6?
Like, what are they doing today?
Don't you have Delta Force?
You could give me another segment about how impressive the U.S. military is.
I believe you.
Why aren't they employed to make my country better?
Why are my cities disgusting?
I don't want to go there.
It smells like weed and halal food.
And you're lecturing me about how it's a great moral victory that I kicked the boys off the girl socketing.
Good.
I'm so glad.
But let's do the real stuff, like making New York livable.
Okay, so we can stop there.
What is the real stuff he's talking about?
Seriously, what is the real stuff?
And who's the president of the United States whose name he will not mention?
For some reason, he treats the president of the United States.
He sort of treats him as though he is Voldemort.
If you say his name, he will appear.
But all the things he's saying right here are condemning the president of the United States.
Let's just be very clear about this.
When he says that people are being distracted by bombing Iran, who's the one who bombed Iran?
The president of the United States.
When he says it's a distraction to get the boys out of the girls' sports, which is not a distraction, it is a major issue in the United States that we ended the trans threat to truth and reality.
When he says that, who did that?
That was Donald J. Trump.
And then he says he's feeding appetizers, but he wants a country, he says, where people aren't sleeping on the sidewalks, which, by the way, is typically a local and state issue where people aren't ODing on drugs.
And then he says, why can't you stop it?
You've got the U.S. military.
Don't you have SEAL Team 6?
I have a question.
Is Tucker in favor of using SEAL Team 6 to go after the Mexican drug cartels?
I kind of am.
So I would love to know if Tucker is in favor of an interventionist conflict in Mexico in order to take out the Mexican drug cartels.
Really?
Like, is he?
If so, he should probably spell it out.
But notice there's never a solution.
He doesn't even have anybody on to discuss these problems on his show.
He will never talk about how to solve the problems.
This is why I say it's about demoralization.
It's about making you feel about the country because there is never a solution emerging from Tucker Carlson.
I'll give this to Zoran Mamdani, who I think is one of the worst people in American political history.
His solutions are absolute trash garbage, but at least he's offering some.
Tucker goes out there and doesn't offer any solutions at all.
Instead, Tucker goes out there and posits that everything is wrong in the world.
Every victory is in fact an appetizer or a loss.
In fact, he says, elites are using Iran as a distraction while they steal our money.
Who?
I have a question.
Who bombed Iran?
Why don't you say his name?
Say it.
I dare you.
I triple dog dare you.
The president of the United States is the one who pulled the trigger on the Iran attack, the most successful single foreign policy move of my lifetime.
Tucker Carlson said it would lead to World War III, catastrophic loss of American life.
All of that was absolutely wrong and not just wrong, but yes, dumb because it was based in specious information.
But he won't say the president's name.
Here we go.
How about just a middle class life?
Can they like get married young as I did and like have four kids and you know, take a couple jobs, work hard and all that stuff?
But in the end, it's like, fine.
Can they do that?
Or is that like so remote a possibility that you need to tell me that Iran is the real threat?
Take my mind off the fact that you stole the money and screwed up my country beyond recognition.
Oh, stole all your money and screwed up.
Iran is, who is he talking about there?
The president of the United States is the one who authorized the strike on Iran.
Did he steal your money and screw up your country beyond recognition?
Who was it exactly?
He uses a lot of they language, I noticed, without specifying who it is that we are talking about here, Tucker Carlson.
And can we be real about the economics for a second?
The reason that the middle middle class has declined in the United States is because the upper middle class has grown by leaps and bounds.
That is the actual reality.
The share of adults who live in middle class households has changed.
The share of adults who live in upper income households has picked that up.
That is the reality of change in economics over time in the United States.
In the United States, in 1970, according to the Census Bureau, 43% of Americans were in the top 20% by income group.
42% were in the middle 40 by income group.
By 2013, 51% of Americans were in the top 20%.
37% were in the middle 40%.
And only 12% were in the bottom 40% in terms of income.
So, in other words, this idea that the middle class can't get ahead.
And when Tucker Carlson does this, I'm just standing up for the poor middle class routine.
I would just like to point out that Tucker Carlson grew up Silver Spoon.
Whenever he talks about, will his kids be able to grow up in America?
Well, I mean, his son is the press secretary for the vice president of the United States.
So I feel like his kids are going to be okay.
The running down of America while the party that he supposedly backs is in power doing things that conservatives like is pretty astonishing, actually.
Tucker would then go on to just mirror the language of Alexander Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Democratic socialists of America going after Bill Ackman, who he says was in league with Jeffrey Epstein now.
How do you know they're getting away with scams?
I'll tell you how, because they're useless and they're rich.
So how do you come to a place where some of the least impressive, most useless people who have no actual skills become billionaires?
How's that legitimate?
And by the way, if you ask this question, at least in Washington, it's like, oh, well, it sounds like you're a socialist.
Sounds like socialism.
Okay, I'm a socialist now.
All right.
I was a Qatari agent or a bigot.
Now I'm a socialist.
All right.
Leaving aside my committed socialism, can you answer the question?
How did Bill Ackman get $9 million billion dollars?
Bill Ackman, a pretty impressive guy?
I know Bill Ackman.
No.
Okay, so first of all, Tucker Carlson's judgment as to who's an impressive guy seems flawed considering that he believes Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Qatar, and the president of Iran seem to all be very impressive guys, at least in his estimation.
Tucker Carlson, when he says, I'm not a socialist, and he sort of just dismisses that out of hand.
Okay, that's fine.
I'm not calling you a socialist.
I'm just saying that the things you're saying line up Perfectly, perfectly with Alexander Ocasio-Cortez.
The way that Bill Ackman made his money is through investment.
In fact, Bill Ackman put out a long thread yesterday explaining precisely how he made his money.
By the way, I love when Tucker says things like, well, he has no actual skill set.
Let's be real about this.
Tucker's in the same business that I'm in.
Hey, Tucker has a skill set.
Tucker's skill set is that he's incredibly articulate, he's quite brilliant, and he knows precisely what he is doing in order to get an audience.
And that's a skill set, and he has monetized that skill set.
How many jobs has Tucker Carlson created?
I would wager to say significantly fewer than Bill Ackman in the United States.
Why?
Because Bill Ackman has created enormous amounts of economic activity through investment.
To prepare a long post yesterday, Bill Ackman did, responding to Tucker, quote, Tucker Carlson went on a rant yesterday, at TPUSA, and suggested that I was in Jeffrey Epstein's constellation of people who have been getting away with scams.
His evidence is that the most useless people have no actual skills becoming billionaires.
He referred to me as an example of one of the most useless billionaires in Jeffrey Epstein's constellation.
In order to address Tucker's defamatory statements, I thought it would be useful to share a few facts.
I never met Jeffrey Epstein, flew on his planes, went to any of his parties and or properties, or interacted with him ever.
When my wife was a professor at MIT, she received a $125,000 grant from Epstein prior to my knowing of her existence.
She met Epstein once for 45 minutes at the request of the head of the MIT Media Lab, made a presentation about her work, and later got a grant.
That was the last time she ever met or spoke to Jeffrey Epstein.
If this is why Tucker thinks I am in Jeffrey Epstein's constellation, it's clear he doesn't know anything about astronomy.
With respect to how I generated a net worth of more than $9 billion, I share the following.
I inherited good genes from wonderful parents who instilled good values in me.
I never received an allowance, so I worked odd jobs washing and waxing cars, digging ditches, lawn and tree care, et cetera, for pocket money beginning when I was about 10.
My parents gave me a huge head start by paying for my education, including college and business school.
I paid for my housing and expenses, and they paid for my tuition.
I worked through college selling advertising for the Let's Go Harvard Student Travel Guides.
I learned a lot about sales, working in the basement of a dorm, smiling and dialing small hostels, hotels, and car rental companies around the world selling ads to strangers.
After college, says Bill Ackman, I went to work for my dad's real estate mortgage brokerage company.
I received a $40,000 draw and generated more than $600,000 in commissions in 18 months, making me one of the largest, if not the largest producer during my short term there.
I received only 15% of the commissions I generated, which contributed to my choosing to pursue an alternative career as an investor and went to business school to learn more about investing.
When I graduated from business school, my parents gave me $100,000 in a settler trust.
My dad said I would never inherit anything more as he wanted me to make it on my own.
The funds never left the trust and I don't include them in my net worth.
My good economic fortune comes largely from compounding.
That is, investing over the long term and building a successful investment business.
And then he goes on to talk about how exactly he did this and how he launched Pershing Square due to backing from Joe Steinberg and the incoming of Lucadia National Corporation, which in 2013 merged with another company.
And he talks about how he met him and how he invests.
And he says, my net worth today comes from three principal assets.
One, my initial investment in the Pershing Square funds has increased 56 times since Pershing Square's inception due to compounding.
I also increased my investment in the Pershing Square funds over time by reinvesting incentive fees, net of taxes that I earned from our investors.
And in 2017, during a rough patch, I doubled down by borrowing $300 million and investing more.
My investment in the Pershing Square funds today is worth about $2.5 billion.
Two, the management company, which employs me and the rest of Pershing Square, has become a very profitable business over time.
I started Pershing Square with Diminimus Capital.
We sold a 10% interest in the business last year to strategic investors at a $9.5 billion pre-money valuation.
I own about half of Pershing Square Management Company, the value of which grows as we compound the value of the funds we manage.
My interest in Pershing Square Management Company is worth about $6.5 billion today.
He says, while Tucker may believe investment management is a useless activity, I expect our investors would say otherwise.
Pershing Square has generated one of the best investment track records of any investment firm over the last 21 and a half years, generating 2.9 times the return of the S ⁇ P 500 over the same period net of all fees and expenses.
We've been an active and engaged investor since we launched and have played a major role in turning around poorly managed, troubled, and or bankrupt companies with Canadian Pacific Chipotle and general growth being good examples of this activity.
Okay, so again, pretty amazing stuff.
You know, the fact that the Tucker seems so overwhelmingly unhappy with the United States as run by Donald J. Trump and his administration is pretty astonishing.
Of course, his animus doesn't stop there.
He also went after Fox News, suggesting that Fox News is anti-Christian, which, again, is a very, very wild contention that Fox News is anti-Christian.
Fox News literally will pray in the name of Jesus on the air.
But apparently, according to Tucker, they're anti-Christian.
Why?
Well, we'll let him tell another TP USA personality.
She thought they were really anti-Christian.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Do you agree?
Oh, of course.
Yeah, yeah.
Why do you say that?
It just makes them uncomfortable.
They're not comfortable with that at all.
If you said on Fox, which I don't think I ever did, I probably should have.
But like, hey, how are the Christians of the West Bank doing?
Like, how's Bethlehem doing?
Where Jesus was born?
The church in the Nativity.
It's got to be.
That's not the most sacred site in Christendom.
I'm not sure.
What is Jesus was born in Bethlehem?
It's the church of the Nativity.
Let's call the rector the church in the nativity and ask him what he thinks was Israeli occupation.
Just as a Christian, I think it's totally fair.
Whoa.
I mean, you'd be out of there.
Okay, so notice that the example that he uses as to Fox being anti-Christian is actually him being anti-Israel.
Okay, maybe the reason that Fox was not happy with Tucker if Tucker would have tried to do that is because what Tucker means by that is that he would have called up the Reverend Dr. Munther Isaac, who actually had on his show a few months back, I think last year, and allowed him to just spout nonsense about the Israeli occupation.
Okay, Dr. Munther Isaac, who was on Tucker's show and who didn't fact check for one single solitary second, operates within the Palestinian Authority and in coordination with the Palestinian Authority, the terrorist group that governs the West Bank that he's talking about, and that governs Bethlehem.
That particular person portrays Jesus as, quote, a Palestinian under occupation.
He refers to Israel as an apartheid state.
He holds a Christ at the Checkpoint conference, routinely featuring speakers who refer to Israel as illegitimate.
Okay, none of this has to do with Christianity.
He had nothing to say of substance about October 7th and said, quote, the biblical basis for Christian Zionism is as strong as the biblical basis for justifying, defending, and endorsing a genocide.
It is this simple about Christian Zionism?
Again, I'm using Munthar Isaac as the example of what Tucker is talking about since Tucker had him on his program.
At no point was it mentioned in that interview that Bethlehem was a majority Christian city in the early 20th century, and then, as Muslim Arabs crowded in, it was reduced to a small minority.
Nor is it mentioned in that interview that in April and May of 2002, during the second Intifada, Palestinian authority-linked terrorists, including Fatah terrorists, used the Church of the Nativity as a refuge after committing a full-scale terrorist attack and fired shots from it at Israeli troops.
At no point does Tucker talk about any of that.
He's never talked about the fact that Hamas imposed strict Sharia law in the Gaza Strip, reducing the Christian population to effectively near zero.
He's never mentioned the fact that land seizures by Muslims in Bethlehem are actually quite common and that in interpersonal disputes, the PA actually, well, supposedly being a secular law body, imposes Sharia law in many interpersonal disputes, delegitimizing Christians.
Again, maybe that's the idea that Fox News is anti-Christian is such an absurdity on its face.
But again, in the end, what is all of this about?
What is all this about?
Well, I don't know what the motive is.
I'm not going to attribute motives.
What I am going to say is it's demoralizing.
It's demoralizing.
Every Trump victory is apparently nothing.
Not only that, perhaps Trump is engaging in a sex ring cover-up, but he won't say it.
So here's my final point about the Epstein of it.
As I've said at this point, maybe a thousand times, Pam Bondi should do a full-scale press conference revealing everything she knew, everything she doesn't know, when she knew it, what the evidence is, and all the rest.
That's where transparency is good.
Baseless conspiracy theorizing based on no evidence said with great certainty is not in fact a question.
It is a theory you are positing.
And if you refuse to have that theory falsified in every way, it's not a theory anymore.
It's a religious belief.
Beyond that, if you're going to accuse the Trump administration of an active cover-up, of a child rape ring, you should just say it.
Honestly, if you're going to be, again, I will name Check Dave Smith because he was brave enough to just say it.
If Tucker believes the same thing as Dave Smith, he should just say it as well.
Otherwise, he's not telling the truth to his audience and he is hiding the ball.
And meanwhile, it turns out that the Trump administration continues to actually win like important victories, like actual real things happening, not appetizers, not demoralization, not ops.
So after the victory of the Big Beautiful bill in the House of Representatives and the Senate, Speaker Johnson said that Republicans have a responsibility of fixing every metric of public policy Democrats destroyed over the four years of the Biden-Harris administration.
He said this with Fox News anchor Maria Bartaromo.
He also contended members of his party are implementing a playbook designed to take advantage of the GOP controlling the House, Senate, and White House.
He said, the big, beautiful bill is the first big step.
We have multiple steps.
We have long planned at least two, possibly three reconciliation bills, one in the fall, one next spring, that would continue to allow us to do this on a partisan basis where we only need Republican votes and don't have to drag Democrats along.
And so he's looking forward to more bills coming out of the Congress.
Meanwhile, the State Department has been laying people off.
You want to talk about cutting into the deep state, laying people off the State Department is a huge part of this.
This, of course, led to a bunch of wokesters protesting at their own firing and pretending that they are great victims of the evil Trump purge.
And to those that have been riffed, to those that have been fired today, I just want to say I'm sorry.
And you have deserved better than this.
I think every single person, when you leave this building and you walk through those doors for the final time, you should do it with honor and dignity.
You should not do it out of humiliation and out of this type of weaponization of politics.
You deserve better.
People weeping openly in the streets.
Can we just be clear that the cuts here of about 1,300 people amount to less than 4% of the actual employee base at the State Department, which has in excess of 80,000 employees before this?
This is a good thing.
Cutting these gigantic government agencies down to size is a good thing.
That's not an appetizer.
It's a good thing.
Other good things.
The president of the United States, as I have said one million times at this point, lives in the world of reality.
Apparently, he is slated today to announce a new plan to arm Ukraine that is expected to include offensive weaponry, according to Axios.
So why is it important that the president is authorizing more Patriot missiles being sent to Ukraine?
I asked our friends and sponsors over at Perplexity, what is the Patriot missile defense system?
Is it offensive or defensive?
And here's what they say.
The Patriot missile system, MIM-104 Patriot, is a sophisticated, mobile, surface-to-air missile system developed by Raytheon and primarily used by the United States Army and several allied nations.
It is designed to detect, track, and intercept a variety of aerial threats, including tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, advanced aircraft, and drones and loitering munitions.
And typically, the Patriot battery consists of missiles, launchers, a radar set, an engagement control station, power generation units, and an antenna mast groove.
And essentially, what it does is it tracks incoming threats, and then it identifies targets, and then the launcher fires a missile, which is guided toward the target by radar and onboard systems.
This is really important for Ukraine right now because Russia has been sending extraordinarily large barrages of both cruise missiles and drones into populated centers in the west of Ukraine.
President Trump recognizes that Vladimir Putin has been basically stringing him along so that he can continue escalating his attacks on Ukraine.
And if you want Putin to come to the table, you have to engage in actual shipping of weaponry that is useful to Ukraine.
Senator Lindsey Graham pointed this out over the weekend.
Dick and I have got 85 co-sponsors in the United States Senate for congressional sanctions with a sledgehammer available to President Trump to go after Putin's economy and all those countries who prop up the Putin war machine.
And this congressional package that we're looking at would give President Trump the ability to impose 500 percent tariff on any country that helps Russia and props up Putin's war machine.
He can dial it up or down.
He can go to zero to 500.
He has maximum flexibility.
But we're going after the people who keep Putin in business and additional sanctions on Russia itself.
This is truly a sledgehammer available to President Trump to end this war.
Okay, so meanwhile, China is getting more and more aggressive.
Obviously, China continues to increase its presence in the Pacific.
The United States is moving to counter that under the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
According to the Wall Street Journal, China's military is extending its reach deeper into the Pacific, sending ships and aircraft into new territory in a push that has spurred the United States to strengthen defenses and alliances in the region.
That, of course, is a good move by the Trump administration.
A lot of the trade war is directed at boxing China in, which is a worthwhile thing.
It also means that we should be pursuing closer relations with places like the Philippines, like Japan, like South Korea, all the countries that effectively ring China geographically.
Meanwhile, the president continues to do well with his economics, despite the sort of ballast of the tariff war that has continued under President Trump.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the economic fallout from President Trump's policies may prove less dire than feared.
Economists expect stronger growth and job creation, lower risk of recession, and cooler inflation than they did three months ago, according to the Wall Street Journal's quarterly survey of professional forecasters.
The reason the Journal's previous survey was conducted at the height of the president's threat to impose eye-watering tariffs on America's biggest trading partners.
He paused some of those tariffs shortly thereafter.
And this is right.
The president is still engaging in certain tariff activity that is likely to boost prices in those sectors.
So for example, he put a 50% tariff on copper imports.
Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Council of Economic Advisors, here was Kevin Hassett explaining.
The bottom line is that if there is a time of war, then we need to have the metals that we need to produce American weapons.
And copper is a key component in many American weapons.
And so as we look forward to the threats that America faces, the president decided that we have plenty of copper in the U.S., but not enough copper production.
And that's why he's taken this strong step.
Now, again, the reality is we get most of our copper at this point from Chile, so I'm not sure that this is a necessary step.
And will it provide, again, some ballast on the growth of the economy?
Sure.
But so far, markets have been shrugging this off, largely because after many of these big announcements are made, there is a move by the Trump administration to actually shave off the rough edges, which is what the markets are appreciating right now.
They're recognizing that in the end, the administration does not want to undercut its own economic position.
President Trump may have a predilection toward tariffs, a predilection I do not share, as I've made very clear on this program many times, actually.
But in the end, the policy that is emerging is not the original policy that is, in fact, articulated.
And meanwhile, on immigration, President Trump continues to win.
On immigration, President Trump has suggested that he has a new plan for migrant workers, but it is not, in fact, amnesty.
According to Axios, President Trump's immigration crackdown has put his administration between a MAGA rock and a special interest hardplace.
Trying to balance those competing interests, the Department of Labor has created the Office of Immigration policy.
It's designed to be a red tape-cutting one-stop shop to help employers get faster approval for temporary worker visas for non-citizen labor.
The Office of Immigration policy has no stats on how many employers it plans to work with.
Officials say it will have a customer-centered policy with employers.
Now, you can disagree with this policy, but a senior administration official says this is not amnesty.
It is not amnesty-like.
No one who is here illegally is being given a pathway to citizenship or residency.
So essentially, it is a bit of a work program.
You can agree with it or disagree with it.
I think there's a strong case actually both ways on this particular issue.
However, the one thing that is absolutely clear is that the resistance from the left is failing and failing dramatically politically.
I mean, when you have Mayor Karen Bass, one of the worst mayors in the country, calling on law enforcement to require that Border Patrol give over raid information in advance because the other day the Trump administration raided a marijuana farm employing underage illegal immigrant labor.
Like this is not going to fly politically for the Democrats.
So the executive directive that I will be signing in a few minutes is to help the city family, to help the city workforce, to help the city departments and all of the general managers essentially develop preparedness plans that have specific protocols and that help city workers know how to address immigration officials should they approach a city department.
And we are submitting a FOIA Freedom of Information Act requests regarding the dates and locations of all enforcement activities in Los Angeles.
I mean, unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
And this, of course, follows hard on the LA City Council member Imelda Padilla asking LAPD's chief to give immigrants a head up on ICE.
So basically she's now saying that she wants Border Patrol to give a head up to illegal immigrants on ICE raids.
I'm asking a creativity question here.
What can your department do to do more to warn us, to warn the business community that outside of our LA borders, coming in from Inglewood, coming in from Anilo Valley, I don't know, you can warn us so that we can warn our folks in the spirit of your loyalty to the city of Los Angeles?
So you're asking me to warn you about an enforcement action being taken by another agency before it happens?
Yeah.
Yeah, we can't do that.
Why not?
That would be obstruction to justice.
You may want to talk to the city attorney about that.
So again, this is the approach of the left.
Okay, if this is your approach on these issues, then may I suggest that things are not going particularly well for you, honestly, if you are the left at this point.
So, I mean, it is a lot of victories for the Trump administration, despite what those who would demoralize Trump supporters have to say about all of that.
Meanwhile, it is one year since the attempted assassination of the president of the United States in Butler, Pennsylvania.
President Trump gave an interview in which he says, listen, there's been an investigation.
I was satisfied by the briefing from Secret Service.
Here's what he had to say.
So they briefed me numerous times.
The FBI, the Secret Service, sort of everybody.
DOJ, Pamela's doing a fantastic, I think she's doing a fantastic job.
But they briefed me, and I'm satisfied with it.
I'm satisfied with it.
They should have had somebody in the building.
That was a mistake.
They should have had communications with the local police.
They weren't tied in.
And they should have been tied in.
So there were mistakes made, and that shouldn't have happened.
And that building was a prime building in terms of what they were trying to do.
But I was satisfied in terms of the bigger plot, the larger plot, I was satisfied.
Okay, so again, that's President Trump, I think, taking a pretty solid view of what happened.
This is why when people say, well, you know, he's covering up investigations, President Trump.
Okay, well, the investigation into his own assassination attempt.
He's saying, listen, they did a review.
I accept the review.
All right.
Senator Rand Paul has been on the warpath about all of this.
He says the Secret Service didn't want to assess blame when it came to all of this in the first place.
I think it was a cultural cover-up for the agency.
They did not want to assess blame.
They did not want to look internally, and they wanted to discount any of their actions that might have led to this.
This was a cover-your sort of moment, and I do believe that they did know.
There's no way that the director of Secret Service, that she did not know that these requests have been made.
And so, yes, it was a huge failure.
Okay, so he's right.
Of course, it was a huge failure.
Six Secret Service agents have now been placed on probationary leave.
And of course, the leadership of Secret Service has changed.
Worth noting here that, you know, despite all the talk about how Iran apparently has the best of intentions with regard to the United States, we've learned that from certain high-profile figures interviewing the president of Iran, an ally of the Iranian Supreme Leader over the weekend joked that Iran could assassinate President Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, because this is what you joke about, obviously.
Mohamed Javad Larojani, a regime figure and advisor to Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, said Trump can no longer sunbathe in Mar-a-Lago because while he's lying down, a micro-drone might target and strike him right in the navel.
He laughed as he made the remark on Iranian television on July 9th, talking about the magic of Iranian drone technology.
So yes, these are people who are our best of friends with President Trump, obviously.
All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.
Apparently, oh no, his account at X.com was hacked by somebody who doesn't like Jews very much.
I will say the result is hilarious.
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