The Ben Shapiro Show - The Internet’s Cleavage Over Sydney Sweeney’s Commercial

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July 29, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:03:06

The Internet’s Cleavage Over Sydney Sweeney’s Commercial

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	All righty, folks, tons coming up on today's show.
	All the updates on this terrible shooting in New York City, plus massive controversy, internet cleavage over Sidney Sweeney's cleavage, among other things.
	And we'll bring you all the foreign policy and economics updates.
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	So yesterday afternoon, horrific shooting in Midtown Manhattan.
	According to the Associated Press, a man stalked through a Manhattan office tower, firing a rifle, killing four people, including a New York City police officer, wounding a fifth person before shooting himself.
	That shooting took place at a skyscraper that is home to both the headquarters of the NFL as well as Blackstone.
	It appears that the shooter was attempting to target the NFL headquarters, got off at the wrong floor, and just started shooting people.
	The gunman was identified as a person with a documented mental health history.
	We don't use the names of mass shooters on the program because we don't wish to give them the sort of glory and attention that they so desperately seek.
	The motive was supposedly unknown, although there was apparently a note on the body that suggested that this person, who apparently had a history when he was in high school, being a pretty good football player, he said he had CTE.
	The short note was scribbled according to CNN over three pages and found by investigators after the shooting.
	It apparently expressed grievances with the NFL and suggested that he suffered from some sort of brain damage and had mental illness.
	And that is why he was doing all of this.
	Surveillance videos showed the man exiting a double park BMW just before 6.30 p.m., carrying an M4 rifle and then marching across a public plaza into the building.
	He started firing.
	Apparently, he killed a police officer who was off duty working a corporate security detail and then also hit a woman who tried to take cover as he sprayed the lobby with gunfire.
	He then went to an elevator bank, shot a guard at the security desk, and then shot another man in the lobby, then went all the way up to the 33rd floor offices of the company that owned the building.
	Now, again, that's probably not on purpose.
	Probably what happened is that someone summoned the elevator because when you go into these big office buildings in New York, you usually have to have a key card to get into the level that you are seeking to go to.
	Probably this person just got into the elevator, went up to wherever it was going, got off and started shooting people.
	He shot and killed one person on that floor, and then he shot and killed himself.
	The officer killed was a man named Didarul Islam, an immigrant from Bangladesh who had served as a police officer in New York City for three and a half years.
	Mayor Eric Adams said that officials are still unraveling what took place.
	There is a rifle case, revolver, magazines, and ammo in the car, and as well as medication that belonged apparently to the shooter.
	The vehicle traveled all the way across the country.
	It went through Colorado, then Nebraska and Iowa, and then went through New Jersey on Monday and drove into York City thereafter.
	So, what is there to say about this?
	Well, I mean, obviously, the media continued to get this sort of stuff wrong in early reporting, and this is why it is worthwhile to wait for a little bit before you make a judgment as to the motivations or the identity of the shooter.
	Here is CNN in real time getting it wrong, suggesting this person was quote unquote possibly white.
	He clearly was not.
	This person was obviously a person of color.
	Here is CNN getting it wrong.
	All right.
	So, Brian, stay with us.
	The deputy, former deputy director of the FBI, Andy McCabe, is with us as well.
	And Andy, I just want to ask you, you talk about a 40-floor, a 44-story building, as Brian is reporting.
	And what John Miller just said, there were a few things that really stood out there.
	Among them that they did get, they do know what he looks like, sunglasses, mustache, male, possibly white.
	Okay, so again, getting that completely wrong.
	Now, some people are suggesting that that is because of animus for white people by CNN.
	Certainly a possibility.
	CNN is always quick to jump to a particular racial narrative.
	And because this was not a white person shooting up an office building, presumably it will be out of the news within about five minutes.
	With that said, CNN tends to get things wrong, just as most networks tend to get things wrong in the early minutes of any reportage.
	The bigger point here about the city of New York is that you really should not be electing a mayor of the city who hates the cops, regardless of the motivation of the shooter.
	And we can talk about the NFL and CTE and the damage that is done to brains by the repeated concussions that football players suffer.
	But the real story here is that if you're a resident of New York City, forget about CTE and the motivations of the shooter.
	Why would you elect as mayor a person who obviously does not like the police?
	Flashback, November 7th, 2020, Zoran Mamdani, now the frontrunner for New York mayor, quote, nature is healing.
	He tweeted that in response to a person writing, I just saw a cop crying in his car, L-M-A-O.
	Nature is healing, says Zoran Mamdani.
	And there's a person who obviously has animus for the police department.
	He's also somebody who believes in defunding the police, and now he's attempting to walk that back as he runs for New York mayor.
	If New York decides they wish to embrace a person who hates the cops, who wish to undermine the cops, who wishes to destroy the ability of the cops to police the city, you will end up with more violence, period, of all sorts, people being thrown in front of subways, people engaging in mass shootings, people engaging in stabbings.
	Now, all of that will go up because the cops are indeed the barrier between chaos and normalcy in the city of New York.
	So if you're in New York City this morning and you're thinking of voting for the socialist idiot who is Zarn Mamzani, you might want to think twice because honestly, every incidence of violence just underscores that you need a virile and powerful police department in order to ensure safety in a major city like New York.
	All righty, folks, coming up, a commercial features Sydney Sweeney and everybody goes crazy because of Nazism or something.
	We'll get to all of it first.
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	Okay, meanwhile, in significantly lighter cultural news, the big controversy of the day, believe it or not, surrounds Sidney Sweeney's chest.
	Now, I know Sidney Sweeney, very famous actress.
	She's on Euphoria.
	She's been doing a number of movies lately, but she's mostly famous because she, when she's on TV, when she's, when she's doing SNL, she shows a lot of cleavage.
	That is mostly what she is famous for.
	Listen, she's a very attractive woman, of course, of course.
	She is doing a new American Eagle ad.
	And this apparently is just setting heads aflame.
	So here is the American Eagle ad that has generated enormous amounts of controversy on the left.
	And it has something to say about where we stand socially as a country on both left and right.
	It's kind of fascinating.
	It cross cuts some political boundaries.
	Here is the American Eagle ad.
	Jeans are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.
	My genes are blue.
	Sidney's tweenie has her keynotes.
	Okay, so for those who can't see, that's just a picture of her buttoning her genes seductively as she talks about genes using a homonym.
	It's kind of a silly homonym.
	She has great genes, like G-E-N-E-S, as in like her genetic predispositions and characteristics.
	And then her genes are blue, J-E-A-N-S, right?
	Her genes are blue.
	Okay, so that is the pun.
	I mean, no biggie.
	The real story here is that Sidney Sweeney is doing sexy commercials.
	All right.
	I mean, this has been a hallmark of advertising for, you know, at this point, hundreds of years, probably.
	You go all the way back to the mid-19th century, and you can find print ads that I'm sure were suggestive at the very least.
	Here's another ad that she did with a Mustang.
	Sidney Sweeney has for Keynes.
	Okay, so she shuts the hood on one Mustang, get a tight shot of her rear, and then she gets into another Mustang.
	You know, this is sort of supposed to be classic Americana.
	Okay, and when we say classic Americana, we mean that it's a cheesecake shot.
	So this has resulted in people going absolutely insane, like totally crazy.
	And I think first, it's important to note that people who are characterizing American Eagle as some sort of bizarre right-wing company are missing the boat.
	American Eagle is not a right-wing company.
	American Eagle is a jeans company that follows whatever it thinks are the prevailing trends of the time.
	So here, for example, is an ad that they cut in 2019.
	Okay.
	You can see in this ad, it is a bunch of people who are variously abled, who are of various body types.
	In any case, American Eagle is not a right-wing company is the point here.
	So the real question is, what is the zeitgeist?
	And this is being read in fascinating ways by the left and by the right.
	So the left is breaking down into sort of three categories over the Sydney Sweeney ad.
	And again, it is amazing that we are now having a controversy over what would have been in about 2005, a perfectly normal ad on your television.
	We'll get to the right in a second, because I'm old enough to remember when the right would have objected to such an ad.
	And some of us who are traditionally minded still object to the overt sexualization of women in advertising, as well as the sort of sexualization that is being done to our culture, right?
	Some of us are old enough to remember when Paris Hilton was grinding on cars for a Carls Jr. commercial back in 2005 and objecting to that as being too raunchy and problematic.
	And we say problematic, I don't mean like problematic in a left-wing sense, mean morally problematic to put scantily clad, attractive women in advertising specifically to get people to buy product.
	That poses a moral problem for the right.
	For the left, the left has gone completely insane.
	And so they've broken down into sort of two categories, both of them objecting to the ad.
	One is the sort of feminist line that this is the oversight.
	This is made for the male gaze.
	It's all about the male gaze.
	Now, can we get over this nonsense?
	The male gaze.
	You know what men like to look at?
	Pretty women.
	Get used to it.
	That is the way of the world.
	It is the progeneration of the species.
	That is the basis of literally all human reproduction is quote unquote, the male gaze.
	That is the beginning of all of it.
	That does not mean that men should ogle women.
	But if we are going to pretend that beauty does not exist and that men don't appreciate it, then you are just ignoring the realities of life.
	Okay.
	But this is one aspect of the left.
	They're very angry that, quote unquote, the male gaze exists, which is really, really silly.
	But that is really not the angle that they are taking most of all.
	What they're really taking most of all is the angle That there is something peculiarly Nazi about all of this.
	There's a piece in the Washington Post titled How American Eagle Sidney Sweeney Good Jeans ad Went Wrong.
	Well, it's hard to say that it went wrong when it is the most talked about ad of the last five years.
	For American Eagle, it's a very good ad.
	According to a conversation between fashion critic of the Washington Post, Rachel Toshjian and style memo newsletter writer Shane O'Neill, according to that particular discussion, the biggest problem with the ad is the genetic component.
	Quote, the most provocative part of the campaign is when she's talking about offspring and genes.
	That's a message about mutable identity there.
	And that could be extended into a vision of America as a place where you're not bound by who you are at birth, but they went the full opposite of that.
	To be honest, I think the ad campaign didn't exactly know what it wanted to be.
	I think what's getting people talking is how regressive the ads seem, says Tosh Jinn.
	The line about her having great genes.
	Several people are suggesting in the comments on Instagram and TikTok, this is a pro-eugenics ad.
	Whether or not that's the case, it is part of a wave of imagery of influencer pop stars and musicians that feel tethers to the value of another time.
	Do you mean, again, this is where you're going to see a right-wing backlash building?
	The values of another time would be men think attractive women are attractive because attractive women are attractive.
	Good-looking people are better looking than not good-looking people.
	Like, if that's tethered to the values of another time, that would be tethered to the values of all time.
	There's nothing new there.
	If that were not the case, I promise you sales of Ozembek would be significantly lower.
	So would sales of makeup.
	Okay, but the left is now trying to turn this into a sort of take on Volkish German Nazi-esque imagery.
	There is in this piece a reference to this idea.
	One of the writers, the newsletter writer for the Washington Post says, the first thing I thought of when I heard the tagline, Sidney Sweeney has great jeans, was the DHS Instagram account, which posted a subtly racist painting a few weeks ago and an explicitly racist painting last week.
	The latter depicted a gigantic blonde, buxom woman chasing away Native people to make way for white settlers.
	When this is the imagery being promoted by our government, a pun about jeans hits differently.
	And then the Washington Post style critic wrote, we're being fed a lot of images of thinness, whiteness, and unapologetic wealth porn.
	Well, with this cover, influencers like Alex Earle and Sabrina Carpenter's album cover.
	So again, they continue to promote the idea that there's something terribly evil and eugenic about the Sydney Sweeney ad.
	And here's a bunch of crazy ladies on TikTok saying the same thing.
	Those Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ads are weird.
	Like fascist weird.
	Like Nazi propaganda weird.
	Would we be surprised that a company whose name is literally American Eagle is making fascist propaganda like this?
	Probably not, but it's still really shocking.
	Like a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white woman is talking about her good genes.
	Like that is Nazi propaganda.
	Saying anybody has good genes is eugenics.
	Blonde haired, blue-eyed, Nazi.
	This pro-Americana talking about pure Americans, Americans having good genes.
	This is Nazi that people, especially Jews, have been warning about for a very long time.
	Oh, it's not that big of a deal.
	Jeans is just a play on jeans.
	Shut the f ⁇ up.
	This is Nazi.
	Sydney Sweeney's Jeans ad is giving ethnic steak propaganda.
	It is giving dystopian.
	It is giving 1940s Germany.
	And they could have had her set anything.
	She could have just said, I'm hot, drink my bathwater, here are my jeans.
	But instead, they had her say, jeans are passed down from parents to children.
	I have good jeans.
	My jeans are blue.
	Why?
	Yeah, no, that was like the most thinly veiled propaganda I think that I've ever seen.
	American Eagle, who is in charge of your marketing department?
	Joseph Goebbels?
	A strawberry blonde, blue-eyed woman marketing, having great jeans.
	Would you do this with a model of color?
	Think about it.
	Would you?
	I mean, they probably will.
	My guess is that their next dad will be a model of color saying the exact same thing.
	It'll be a beautiful black woman saying the exact same thing.
	Probably.
	It's all a catfish.
	By the way, I love that that last guy in the TikTok video, if you can't see, he's wearing an Adidas shirt.
	We should note at this point that Adidas was founded by two brothers with significant ties to the actual Nazis.
	So, you know, this is crazy.
	This is crazy.
	I'm sorry.
	A play on words, genes and jeans is not meant to be a reference to the Nazis.
	And also, when people look at Sidney Sweeney, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings here.
	Her eye color and hair color are the third and fourth things people are looking at when they look at Sidney Sweeney.
	Okay, let's just be real about that.
	When she says she has good genes, people are not thinking about her eye color.
	That's silly.
	Nonetheless, the left is pushing forward with this nonsense.
	Advertising expert Robin Landa, a professor at Michael Graves College at Keene University, told Newsweek, quote, the campaign's punt isn't just tone deaf.
	It's historically loaded.
	Landa said the phrase good genes was once central to American eugenics ideology, which promoted white genetic superiority and enabled the forced sterilization of marginalized groups.
	Yeah, that's what's going to happen here.
	This is going to lead to forced sterilization.
	That's probably where this is going.
	By the way, for all the talk about the failure of the ad, American Eagle stock has surged 4% since the ad was released.
	You know why?
	Because earned media is in fact, we wouldn't be talking about American Eagle on this program if the left hadn't gone totally insane over an innocuously stupid ad.
	And now to the response from the right.
	And this is kind of fascinating.
	So the right has split on this ad.
	Not in the sense they agree with the left, of course.
	That's silly.
	But it demonstrates the difference between anti-left and traditional right, which are not the same thing.
	President Trump's coalition, for what it's worth, is an anti-left coalition.
	It includes a bunch of people who are not in any way, shape, or form conservative, but they don't like the insanity of the left.
	And then there are the traditionally conservative.
	And the reactions to the ad differ between the two groups.
	All righty, folks, coming up.
	The right split reaction on Sidney Sweeney.
	Yes, there's a cleavage over Sidney Sweeney.
	I know it's a pun.
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	So you're seeing a lot of people in the online space who are anti-left, who look at the insane reaction of the left to this, calling it Nazi propaganda, suggesting that it is all about the male gays and the evils of the male gays tethered to another time and all this crap.
	And you see a bunch of people on the right who are like, this ad is great.
	It's making America great again.
	This ad is bringing back what makes America awesome.
	This is a reversion to the heterosexual norm and all the rest.
	Okay, now, let's be clear.
	The left can be perfectly insane, stupid, and wrong.
	And also, this ad is effectively no different from when Brooks Shields back in the 1980s was saying, nobody gets between me and Mike Calvins.
	This ad can both be a rejection of the sort of post-gender insanity pushed by the left.
	And also, it can just be a piece of very softcore pornography.
	I say very softcore because, of course, it's not pornography quite, but it is certainly more in that arena than it is in the arena of art.
	Clearly, it is attempting to use sex to sell genes.
	That is literally the purpose of the commercial.
	And so being a moral traditionalist, I do not actually believe that commercials like this are amazing for America.
	I think it's good to expose the left for being totally insane.
	And I think it is worthwhile noting that the left is totally crazy.
	But if you're a traditionally moral person, if you're somebody who's a church goer, a synagogue goer, for example, and you look at this ad, you're saying, okay, what this looks like is a way to get a bunch of young people to buy jeans by showing Sidney Sweeney's button and breasts, basically.
	Is that like good for, is that good for culture?
	Is that good for male-female relations?
	Is the over-sexualization of our society, has that been a generally good thing or is that a generally bad thing?
	And so what you see is the reactionary nature of the anti-left, which is correct in slapping down the left, but then goes too far by suggesting that what we need, what America needs is more TNA.
	That TNA is the only solution to what ails us.
	Okay, well, actually, no, two things can be true at once.
	One, the left is totally insane.
	And there's nothing Nazi-esque about a jeans pun.
	And by the way, it is not Nazi for Sydney's we need to be a star.
	That is not a Nazi thing.
	We live in an era in which Zendaya is in every movie that has been made for the past 10 years.
	So I don't think that we are in danger of like a whites-only Hollywood here or a whites-only advertising industry.
	So the anti-left is right to mock the left for being totally insipid and insane.
	But the right is also split between people who don't actually hold any sort of traditional values and people who do hold those traditional values.
	And they exist in a sort of uneasy coalition.
	It'll be fascinating to see how that coalition works moving forward.
	By the way, you're going to start to see this coalition fray, just politically speaking, once it's in power, because then there are divisions over how to actually handle policy.
	And you're seeing that happen actually in real time, right?
	You are seeing many of these so-called podcast bros who endorsed President Trump mainly out of ire at the left for being totally crazy are starting to revert to type.
	And now they're very critical of President Trump's actual conservative policies.
	Among these people would be, say, Andrew Schultz, the podcast bro who sort of endorsed Trump out of ire at the left and then turned around and talked about how the only honest people in America are the actual Democratic socialists of America.
	I think you'll see some of this from Joe Rogan, who is never on the right.
	It's always been amusing to me, like I'm friends with Joe.
	It's always been amusing to me when the left says the left needs its own Joe Rogan.
	It's like, guys, Joe Rogan would have voted for Bernie Sanders were he on the ballot.
	Like let's be clear.
	Joe Rogan is not of the right.
	And so what you will see is as President Trump pursues conservative policies on everything from tax to foreign policy, that a lot of these podcast bros will be angry at President Trump because they're not actually conservative.
	A lot of the Manosphere guys are not actually conservative.
	They are more in line with the TNA is good for America, as opposed to the traditionally conservative position, which is modesty is good for America.
	Traditional male-female relationships are good for America and the left is insane.
	And so as we move forward in time, what you will see is a split inside the right over this issue.
	There is no split on the left, really.
	It's hard to find anybody on the left who's defending this ad today because they've all lost their minds.
	And so as long as the left is completely crazy, any splits on the right are going to look mild by comparison.
	But it's important to note that there is, in fact, a split on the right between the people who just don't like the left and the people who actually do hold traditional conservative values on a wide variety of issues.
	And you should keep your eye on that because a lot of those people who are basically joining the right-wing coalition as a response to the left will start infusing that right-wing coalition with left-wing values if given half a chance.
	It won't be the crazed full version left-wing values, but many of the left-wing values will migrate over to the right because of the nature of the coalition that has been created against the left right here.
	Okay, meanwhile, in other news, going to be a lot of big economic announcements this week, ranging from announcements about the interest rates, those are probably going to stay stable, to a bunch of earnings announcements that are supposed to come out over the course of this week.
	The biggest announcement, economically, of course, is President Trump and the EU coming together over the weekend to create a trade deal.
	The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece titled How Trump Got the Upper Hand Over the EU on Tariffs.
	Quote, soon after he sat down to negotiate Sunday with European officials on a potential tariff agreement at one of his Scotland Gulf resorts, President Trump said he wanted assurances that Europe would follow through on its pledges to increase investment in the United States.
	Trump questioned how the U.S. could be certain European companies wouldn't shrug off their plans after a deal was agreed upon, according to people familiar with the matter.
	After EU leaders assured him the investment plans were real, Trump responded, prove it.
	EU officials then rattled off the names of companies they said were already prepared to invest with a trade deal in place.
	Planned investments of almost $200 billion would grow by even more, they told Trump.
	At the end of the talks, Trump said he would impose 15% baseline tariffs on the block, and he said the EU would now be investing $600 billion in the United States under the deal.
	Now, unclear exactly whether it's going to be $600 billion or something less.
	Bottom line is President Trump used tremendous leverage in order to get the EU to accept essentially zero tariff barriers on American goods coming into the European market and 15% tariffs on European goods coming into the American market.
	Basically, President Trump made the bet, a correct bet, that the EU is more interested in the United States being able to shop in Europe and Europe still being able to ship goods to the United States than they are in a big trade war with the United States, that we essentially have more leverage than they do.
	And not only that, the EU is recognizing that if they don't make some sort of economic deal with President Trump, that could have security implications as well, which is why they've also been increasing their GDP spend on defense.
	So the bloc, the European bloc, had been making threats, and then they shifted their approach.
	They presented U.S. trade officials, according to the Wall Street Journal, with a proposal that included plans to increase purchases of American energy products and an offer to lower tariffs for certain U.S. imports.
	And then President Trump threatened again.
	And then the EU negotiators upped the ante.
	So again, President Trump used leverage.
	Howard Luttnick, his commerce secretary, very triumphant yesterday going around on Fox explaining.
	If the European Union is going to pay 15% and they sell us $600 billion worth of goods, that's $90 billion for America.
	And they agreed for the first time ever to cut all their tariffs, cut their barriers, and let American businesses and farmers and ranchers and fishermen finally sell into the European Union.
	Massive market.
	This is huge for America.
	Okay, so it is yet to be seen how huge it will be for America, because again, the EU is now saying that they're not sure how much they're going to buy.
	They're always going to buy a lot of American energy, by the way, because as they shift away from Russian supply, they're going to need to buy American LNG.
	That part is true.
	As far as European investments in America, sure, they're going to try to build some stuff in America, presumably to avoid tariff barriers entering the United States, make their products more competitive.
	At the same time, American consumers are going to be paying higher prices on things they normally would have bought from Europe with the lower tariffs.
	Overall, the tariffs on Americans, which is what tariffs are there, attacks on Americans, because we're the ones who actually pay the bill when the prices go up.
	Those tariff rates are now at, on average, 15% across the board, which is the highest since the 1930s.
	And yet, the economy seems to be on relatively even footing right now.
	Bill Maher of HBO, he says, listen, I thought the tariffs were going to sink the economy.
	They haven't.
	Here's what he had to say.
	I don't know what his strategy is.
	But look, the stock market is at record highs.
	I know not everybody lives by the stock market, but I also drive around.
	I don't see a country in a depression at all.
	I see people out there just living their lives.
	And I would have thought, and I got to own it, that these tariffs were going to sink this economy by this time.
	And they didn't.
	Now, like Bill Maher, I also was extremely skeptical of the tariffs.
	And Bill Maher may be right that the tariffs are really not going to have a major impact at this point.
	I certainly hope Bill Maher is right.
	I hope the Trump administration is right.
	I hope that I was wrong when I talked about all the tariffs having a really significantly bad impact on the American economy.
	But there are a few possibilities to where we go from here.
	Some good, in which case I'm happy to be wrong, and some not so good.
	Okay, so he's right.
	And a lot of people are wondering what the hell is going on.
	CNN's Jeff Zelany, he says Trump has been reshaping the global trading order, which obviously is true.
	This is the biggest trade deal in President Trump's effort to effectively reshape the global trading order that has been one of his central priorities since taking office in January.
	He's been issuing many threats of tariffs, but they clearly have been working in terms of bringing other countries' allies and adversaries alike in some cases to the negotiating table.
	Okay, so the big question is many people, including me, are anti-tariff.
	As a general rule, tariffs are not good for economies.
	So why aren't we in a recession?
	Why haven't we had a sort of downturn?
	Gerard Baker has a really interesting piece over at the Wall Street Journal laying out the various possibilities.
	I don't know the answer to this.
	However, the one thing I will say about tariffs and tariff wars is we heard the same sorts of talk about modern monetary theory for a couple of years before inflation exploded.
	This is something retailed by Elizabeth Warren.
	It was retailed by the Obama administration back in the day.
	The idea that you could endlessly spend money and you'd never hit an inflationary cycle because people would essentially just keep buying our debt because the American dollar was still the best bet.
	And it turned out not to be true.
	It turns out that when you flood the market, you end up having predictable results in the economy.
	So what exactly is going on?
	Gerard Baker lays out three possible theories.
	He says, first, theory, it's too early to tell.
	Most of the tariffs announced haven't been in place for long.
	Strangely enough, the uncertainty from Mr. Trump's dizzying policy changes that was expected to have been especially destabilizing maybe help softening the blow.
	If importers aren't sure Whether announced duties will stay or change, they may be holding off on big price increases until they have clarity.
	And as we saw with the outcome of the U.S.-Japan deal last week, when the actual tariff levels come in lower than the worst fears, the psychological effect can be a positive.
	That odd feeling of contentment you get when you discover the $100 bill you thought you had dropped on the sidewalk was only a 20%.
	But still, for all the unclarity, the average tariff paid by importers has indeed risen sharply to more than 15%, up from less than 3% a year ago so far with limited adverse consequences.
	So possibility number one is that we just haven't had time.
	The President Trump is announcing these trade deals in real time, that the tariffs have applied for a couple of months, and you have to wait for people to really adjust to that.
	Then there's the second possibility, which is that the tariffs aren't actually big enough to create the sort of adverse effects that many economists thought that they would.
	The U.S. is a relatively closed economy, says Gerard Baker, with imports accounting for less than 15% of GDP.
	Perhaps the U.S. economy is simply resilient enough to withstand even bad policy, more capable of withstanding a moderate tariff shock.
	But, he says, this is incomplete.
	The average 15% tariff rate is now historically large, five times the level that prevailed previously, as close to the average rate of around 20% on all imports under smooth Holly.
	So there's the third possibility, what I would call the MMT possibility, which is that the conventional wisdom is just wrong.
	Perhaps economists have overlooked the countervailing forces at work with tariffs.
	The redistribution of the burden of duties between foreign exporters, U.S. importers, and consumers may be reordering the balance of benefit between domestic and foreign businesses and between companies and consumers.
	Federal tariff revenue up to $300 billion a year will produce gains for Americans.
	The relative advantage of doing business in the United States may be, as promised, start to be reflected in stronger inward investment flows.
	The strikingly one-sided deal Trump just thinks with the EU certainly suggests the sheer economic muscle of the U.S. has been previously underutilized in opening up markets overseas.
	Okay, so he's saying probably not the second that the tariffs shouldn't have any impact because they're too small.
	So that leaves you with really two possibilities.
	One is we don't know yet and it's going to be bad.
	And two is we got it wrong and it'll be fine.
	I don't know the answer to this question.
	I'm not sure that anybody knows the answer to this question.
	I would lean more toward the former because again, when you are trying to fix quote unquote trade deficits by essentially creating an import tax that hits Americans in their pocketbook, what you're doing is not only making Americans pay more for the products that they would normally buy, you are also preventing people in other countries, presumably, from seeing the benefit of their sales in the United States.
	You don't have a capital account surplus.
	A capital account surplus is where you have a bunch of people abroad who essentially owe you money, and then they have to use that money in American markets.
	So you're going to get less investment because less capital is flowing from the United States to other countries.
	When you have a trade deficit in terms of goods, very often that means a capital accounts, I think inherently it means a capital account surplus for other countries, right?
	They're sending you goods.
	You're sending them money.
	They have more money than they know what to do with.
	What do they do with the dollar?
	They then invest that back in the markets.
	So it is yet to be seen what the impact of this is.
	We're going to find out.
	We are certainly going to find out.
	For the moment, it's a big win for President Trump, at least politically, to be able to say that he forced the EU to pay their fair share, that he's forcing them to invest in the United States.
	And we'll have to see how all of this plays out.
	And when you combine that with the idea that there may already be a market bubble, again, I tend to be more skeptical than the average about the next couple of years in American economics.
	And I desperately hope that I am wrong because I hope the American economy soars.
	I think the consequences of a stagnant American economy or some sort of recession are devastatingly bad for the United States because the next thing that will happen is a reversion to left-wing orthodoxy on economic issues.
	And that means maybe President Deosi, which is a full-scale disaster area for the country.
	So I am praying that I am wrong and that actually traditional economics is wrong and that tariffs work out just fine.
	I tend to be more in the first camp, however, saying that let's wait.
	Let's see what the timing is.
	Now, if it turns out that the tariffs are having a bad impact, I think President Trump, again, he shifts and he moves.
	He's not wedded to any sort of real ideology.
	And so if the impact turns out to be bad, I think that he will move on that as well.
	But as the Wall Street Journal points out, stocks are doing crazy things again.
	The share price of online house flipper open door technologies has catapulted 377% in the past month, despite a stagnant U.S. housing market.
	One of the biggest stock gainers Tuesday was Kohl's, an apartment store that has been losing ground to competitors for some time.
	On Wednesday, the crowd favorites were GoPro and Krispy Kreme, with both the camera company and Donut Maker notching eye-popping gains over the week.
	Some investors say the action is the latest phase in what has turned into a near-euphoric rebound from April's tariff turmoil.
	There's been a stampede into risky assets like meme stocks, cryptocurrencies, and shares of smaller companies that have yet to turn a profit.
	To some, this resembles a bubble.
	And certainly you're seeing some signs of a bubble.
	One of the big tactics that many companies are using right now is they are taking all of their assets, their cash, for example, and they are turning those into crypto.
	And they are now seeing a multiple on their trades, which is kind of weird because you could just buy the underlying crypto if you want exposure to crypto.
	But people instead are buying companies that buy crypto, which is very strange.
	Speculative stocks are doing really well.
	Right now, crypto prices are up.
	All of this sort of suggests that there is indeed a bubble, but you know, maybe not.
	Again, I hope that I'm wrong.
	I hope that the fundamentals of the economy remain sound.
	I think one of the things that's happening here is a sort of emotional response to the idea, as Gerard Baker suggested, that we're going to get hit with $100 tariff and it's a $20 tariff, combined with the idea that maybe we weren't going to get a solidification of the Trump tax cuts and those got solidified.
	The one big, beautiful bill.
	All I can say is hold your breath because I don't know where this is going.
	I don't think anybody knows precisely where this is going.
	Well, in what is clearly salutary news, the Washington Post has been cleaning house.
	And now they've gotten rid of the Washington Post pseudo fact-checker, Glenn Kessler.
	Glenn Kessler is one of the scourges of the journalistic industry.
	He has never been a fact-checker.
	Glenn Kessler has instead been a propagandist on behalf of the left.
	He is now out.
	John Nolte has a really good piece on this over at Breitbart, pointing out that during the 2012 presidential election, President Obama's Republican appointment, Romney, ran a campaign ad, pointing out that Obama did not visit Israel during his first term.
	Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler called Romney a liar, despite the fact that actually Barack Obama did not visit Israel.
	And that is Kessler in a nutshell.
	He wrote yesterday, quote, after more than 27 years of the Washington Post, Including almost 15 as the fact-checker.
	I will be leaving July 31st, having taken a buyout.
	Much as I would have liked to keep scrutinizing politicians in Washington, especially in this era, the financial considerations were impossible to dismiss.
	And again, many times his fact-checking columns were just a disaster area.
	Nulty's favorite example.
	Under Kessler's management of the post-fact-checking column, when then-Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina stated with 100% accuracy she began her amazing business career as secretary, she was ridiculed as a liar with three out of four Pinocchios, even though the fact-check agreed she started out as a secretary.
	Kessler's audaciously dishonest defense of Hillary's criminal mishandling of Benghazi was legendary.
	It took him 532 days to admit that Hunter Biden's laptop from hell was the real deal.
	During the 2016 presidential election, Republicans were fact-checked two to one compared to Democrats.
	So again, Glenn Kessler is awful.
	And the fact that he is gone is a good thing for journalism and a good thing for fact as it currently stands.
	Meanwhile, in bad news, I got to say, there are many judges now that are just out of control, truly out of control.
	A federal judge named Indira Talwani, who I believe is an Obama appointee, has now issued an order to block the Trump administration from enforcing a policy that would prevent Planned Parenthood clinics from receiving federal Medicaid reimbursements if they offer abortion services, according to the New York Times.
	Now, again, this is not an action taken by a judge against the Trump administration.
	This is an action taken by a judge against a congressional bill that is not the same thing.
	She's not saying that Trump is exceeding his executive authority.
	She's saying Congress cannot cut off funding to Planned Parenthood on the state level via Medicaid, which is nuts.
	There is no legal basis for any of this.
	The lawsuit came in response to a provision introduced in the One Big Beautiful bill.
	That bill imposed a one-year ban on state Medicaid payments to any healthcare nonprofit that offers abortions and received more than $800,000 in Medicaid funding in 2023.
	Many clinics affiliated with Planned Parenthood faced a choice between altering their operations and retaining millions of dollars in funding or facing a potentially catastrophic loss of revenue.
	Judge Tawani found this was easily ascertainable that it was targeting Planned Parenthood.
	So what?
	Okay, literally so what?
	Okay, so the idea here is that federal tax dollars should not go to reimburse abortion care because dollars are fungible.
	If you send them to a clinic and then that clinic performs abortions, the dollars that would have been spent on abortions are now being spent elsewhere.
	Federal dollars coming in, free up dollars to be spent on abortion.
	That is what happens.
	Pretending that there's like a line item.
	And as long as the federal government isn't directly subsidizing abortion, if you sign a federal check to Planned Parenthood, that doesn't mean more abortions.
	That's absolutely silly.
	Federal law already prohibits the use of federal Medicaid funds for paying for abortions.
	Judge Tawani found the provision was designed to indirectly squeeze clinics into dropping such services using Medicaid payments as leverage.
	Well, no, actually, it's just saying you cannot perform abortions and receive federal taxpayer dollars.
	That's all.
	That's all.
	She also then claimed that this was, in fact, a violation of the First Amendment because Planned Parenthood's umbrella organization does political organizing.
	Okay, so this is insane.
	Again, this is insane.
	What?
	You know, if the Democratic Party comes into power and they fund a bunch of organizations that are basically just blue front groups, those must be funded for the rest of time.
	Otherwise, it's a violation of the First Amendment.
	This is crazy.
	Joining me on the line to discuss is Ilya Shapiro, Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute.
	He is also the author of books, including Supreme Disorder, as well as Lawless, The Miseducation of America's Elites.
	Ilya, thanks so much for taking the time.
	Good to be back with you, Ben.
	So why don't we discuss what exactly this federal judge is doing with regard to Planned Parenthood?
	What is the case and what is the judge ruling?
	So Congress passed a law.
	This is not an executive order.
	Congress passed a law defunding Planned Parenthood.
	And this judge is saying that that is unconstitutional for several reasons.
	First of all, that it's a bill of attainder, which is an odd argument.
	A bill of attainder is criminally prosecuting somebody, targeting someone for criminal prosecution without due process.
	Doesn't really apply to a defunding bill, but anyway, equal protection that Planned Parenthood is being denied somehow.
	It's equal treatment under the law.
	And a violation of the First Amendment because Planned Parenthood engages in advocacy and that advocacy is now being restricted.
	I mean, it is crazy, possibly the craziest district court order I've seen.
	Again, not against the Trump administration, against the government, against a duly enacted law in quite some time.
	I think this is going to be reversed pretty quickly.
	I mean, I'm kind of astonished by the ruling itself.
	I can't even see what the patina of law would be to justify these particular claims.
	I mean, the result of a claim that the judge is making like this is that literally any organization cannot be defunded because they all have free speech rights.
	They all have the ability to speak on things.
	And so you can't name a single organization funded by federal taxpayer dollars that could not make a First Amendment claim under the rubric created by this judge, could you?
	Absolutely.
	I mean, everyone engages in speech in some way.
	Everyone has a PR department.
	They issue press statements, what have you.
	Absolutely.
	And the Bill of Attainer thing is just so ridiculous.
	I mean, remember the TikTok bill that Congress passed in a bipartisan manner?
	That was explicitly, that wasn't just kind of defining terms so it would only apply to one or several organizations.
	That explicitly named these groups.
	And yet that kind of argument didn't fly at any level of the judiciary.
	So this is just the most lawless thing.
	And again, I can't emphasize enough.
	So many of the complaints, rightly so by the Trump administration of lawfare by district court judges, injunctions and all these things have been about executive orders.
	This is not that.
	This is a duly enacted law by Congress deciding its budgetary priorities.
	And here the judge is saying, well, for all these reasons, it's kind of a hand-waving exercise.
	That can't be.
	I mean, it's very hard to steel man this, to put it in the most solid terms.
	You're right.
	The judge is questioning Congress's policy judgments saying, well, Congress can be anti-abortion, but this actually doesn't help that goal because if you don't have Planned Parenthood, more people will get pregnant.
	Things like that because of contraception.
	Just weird policy arguments that aren't relevant to the legal decision.
	Yeah, Ilya, one of the things that probably should be done here is somebody should consider impeaching this judge.
	I mean, really, like this is such a bizarre sort of interpretation of law that is beyond anything that either you or I have seen from the judiciary.
	Again, there's not really even an attempt to read this into the law.
	It's a political op-ed that takes the form of a judicial opinion.
	I mean, when do opinions, if they do, ever rise to the level of this judge should just not be on the bench anymore?
	Well, we've been careful in our history not to impeach judges because we disagree with their opinions.
	In the early Republic, there wasn't even an attempt to impeach a Supreme Court justice, which ultimately failed in the Senate by one vote.
	So I'm cautious about the impeachment process, but just yesterday, there was a bar complaint filed, a judicial complaint filed by the Justice Department against a different judge, Jim Bozberg, of Jed Boseberg, of the DC District Court.
	The same sort of thing probably should be done here.
	And let those authorities, let the judicial conference do its work.
	Perhaps ultimately the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court will slap down the judge in certain ways.
	So there are certain steps that need to be taken before just going for impeachment right away.
	But I agree, this is just, this goes beyond a simple disagreement over the law, and it's pure judicial civil disobedience, if you will.
	Well, that's Ilya Shapiro, Sr.
	Fellow, Director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute.
	Go check out all of his work over at his account on X.com.
	Ilya, really appreciate the time.
	Good to talk to you.
	Meanwhile, on the foreign policy front, it is amazing, despite all of the criticism of President Trump on foreign policy, President Trump is coming around to the right solutions the vast majority of the time.
	This is why Harry Enton at CNN is pointing out that Republicans actually are trusted on foreign policy, which is kind of a rarity in this day and age.
	The bottom line is Democrats in the American voters' minds cannot hack it.
	What are we talking about?
	Party trust tomorrow in foreign policy.
	Well, the GOP holds an average six-point lead in the month of July.
	Look at this.
	Fox News came out last week.
	Plus three points for Republicans on foreign policy over the Democrats.
	You think that number is not high enough for you?
	How about the Wall Street Journal?
	GOP plus eight points when they match congressional Democrats up against congressional Republicans.
	The bottom line is this.
	Despite everything that's going on in the world right now, Republicans are more trusted on Democrats when it comes to foreign policy and the world at large.
	By the way, there is a reason for that, and that is because Joe Biden ran an awful foreign policy.
	President Trump is coming around to the right solutions.
	Yesterday, he said he would give Russian President Vladimir Putin 10 or 12 days to reach a ceasefire with Ukraine or face more economic pressure from the United States.
	Here was President Trump pointing out that Putin has made no moves toward peace.
	I'm going to make a new deadline of about 10 or 12 days from today.
	There's no reason in waiting.
	There's no reason in waiting.
	It's 50 days.
	I want to be generous, but we just don't see any progress being made.
	Correct.
	Correct.
	Again, President Trump responding to reality.
	He said, quote, we thought we had settled numerous times.
	He was very disappointed, he said, with Putin, quote, and then President Putin goes out and starts launching rockets into some city, bodies lying all over the street.
	He said, you know, this has happened on too many occasions and I don't like it.
	He said he was not so interested in talking to Putin anymore.
	Now, again, this is correct.
	This is correct.
	President Trump is coming to the correct solutions.
	Meanwhile, President Trump announced that he had negotiated a ceasefire between Cambodia and Thailand.
	Here he was yesterday.
	You probably know, I won't go into it very much because I don't know the final numbers yet.
	I don't know.
	Numerous people were killed, and I was dealing with two countries that we get along with very well, very different countries from certain standpoints.
	They've been fighting for 500 years intermittently, and we solved that war.
	You probably saw it just came out over the wire, so we solved it through trade.
	I said, I don't want to trade with anybody that's killing each other.
	So we just got that one solved.
	Meanwhile, there's an enormous controversy, obviously, surrounding the distribution of food aid in Gaza.
	Understand that this is being created by Hamas and its allies over at the UN and its allies in the media.
	That does not mean that there's no starvation in Gaza.
	The media do a horrible job of coverage.
	They take all their information from the Gaza Ministry of Health.
	There are widely variant videos between Gaza markets, which seem to be filled with food, and then pictures of people who seem to be very hungry.
	Mati Friedman, who is a reporter from Israel, writes for the free press that, frankly, there's not really a great way of knowing exactly what's going on in Gaza.
	He said, in an attempt to understand the truth of the reports, I called several trusted colleagues, veteran Israeli journalists, intimately involved in covering events here and concerned both with the health of our society and that of innocent Palestinians.
	It was clear in speaking to them that our plight as journalists is only marginally better than that of the average citizen.
	The consensus was that there were nearly no trustworthy sources regarding reality in Gaza.
	Certainly not the Gaza Health Ministry, which answers to Hamas, or Palestinian reporters intimidated by Hamas, or the international organizations like the UN refugee agency UNRWA embroiled in various forms of collaboration with Hamas.
	The international press isn't the answer either.
	During my years as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press, I saw coverage altered by Hamas' threats to our staff, while this fact was concealed from readers.
	But neither can Israelis trust their own government, which has regularly misled the public about the wars of progress, about the shifting goals of the campaign, etc.
	So, again, you know, the sort of informational gap is quite real.
	It is difficult to tell what exactly is going on or not.
	There is one study that came out that suggests that the food prices in Gaza have skyrocketed, which, again, may be true.
	It is also difficult to tell whether that's true given the fact that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been shipping literally millions of meals into Gaza.
	Bottom line is this.
	Here's what we do know.
	What we do know is that Hamas, their top demand in the negotiations right now, their number one demand is a restoration of UN-driven food aid.
	Why?
	Because they are stealing it.
	They are stealing it, and then they are reselling it for money, or they are using it for their fighters.
	That is what Hamas is doing.
	The UN is complicit in that.
	The UN has openly announced they Will not bring food into the Gaza Strip under the auspices of the IDF.
	Why?
	Because if the IDF guards the UN while they hand out food, Hamas won't get it.
	And the UN wishes to help Hamas, which means the only actual solution to all of this is the GHF.
	We talked about this last week.
	The real solution to any hunger crisis in Gaza is to set up a humanitarian safe zone in the south of Gaza, run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, protected by the IDF and funded by other neighbors in the region, including the UAE, Saudi, Qatar, Bahrain, and all the rest.
	Jordan, Egypt, that would be the actual solution.
	I mean, listen, a better solution would be for Egypt to open up its well-fortified border where it will allow zero Palestinians in, even temporarily, to set up a sort of way station on the other side of the Gaza border in the largely unoccupied Sinai desert.
	And all these things are eminently doable.
	And then if you don't get down to Rafah within a certain period of time and be screened for terrorism, moving all the Gaza Hamas into jail or exile, if that doesn't happen, then the rest of the strip should be essentially declared a zone of uninhabitedness because the rest of the strip, again, is rife with Hamas using civilians as cover.
	So move all the civilians to, this is how counterinsurgency is typically done, by the way.
	Clear and hold is a typical counterinsurgency strategy.
	Moving everybody into a safe area where they are protected so they can receive aid from an organization not linked to Hamas would be the proper solution because the alternative is Hamas continues to run the food aid, continues to terrorize the population, continues to shoot anyone who gets in his way.
	The one thing that we know for a fact is that Hamas is stealing the food aid.
	Here is video from yesterday of Hamas stealing food aid because Israel relented under gigantic public scrutiny and allowed UN trucks to go in.
	What happened to those UN trucks?
	Well, Hamas took them.
	And you can see in this red circle, a Hamas fighter on top of the truck.
	And there he is pointing a gun at the Gazan civilians.
	Basically saying, this is our aid.
	You will not take this aid.
	And that is not the only video.
	We have another video of Hamas riding trucks stolen.
	You can see the Khmer's fighters on top of the A-Trogs.
	Literally firing their guns in triumph from the top of the trucks as those trucks are stacked with aid.
	So Hamas fighters are like all over these convoys.
	This is a gigantic media propaganda operation run by Hamas, mirrored by the United Nations and all of its allies to maintain Hamas's dominance of the Gaza Strip.
	That is what this is.
	Israel is allowing airdrops in.
	Israel has facilitated the entry of millions of meals in.
	And there's unprecedented wartime.
	This has never happened before.
	There's never been a situation in which one party attacks another party and the attacked party has a responsibility to feed the civilian population of the party that attacked.
	That has never happened before in wartime in any way of which I am aware.
	So again, could things be done better?
	Sure, but that involves an actual plan.
	That plan, I assume, will be some sort of safe harbor zone in the south of Gaza, run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, not run by the United Nations.
	President Trump, by the way, is suggesting something very similar.
	Here he was yesterday.
	We do have to take care of the humanitarian needs what they used to call the Gaza Strip.
	You don't hear that line too much anymore.
	You don't hear the Gaza Strip.
	But it is the Gaza Strip, and it's amazing that it's not being handled a little bit differently.
	We're going to set up food centers, and we're going to do it in conjunction with some very good people, and we're going to supply funds.
	And we just took in trillions of dollars.
	We're getting a lot of money, and we're going to spend a little money on some food.
	Okay, so again, the idea would be, presumably, that that money should be funneled through an organization that is not simply handing it over to Hamas.
	And meanwhile, as you can see, President Trump is in Scotland with the Prime Minister of the UK, Kira Starmer.
	It is kind of amusing that President Trump made the Prime Minister of the UK, he didn't meet him in London, he had him come to his golf club, Turnbury, in Scotland.
	And there he proceeded to berate him about the mayor of London, the awful Sidiq Khan, whose apparently main concern in London is Islamophobia.
	Here is President Trump slamming Sidi Khan in front of Kira Starmer.
	Will you visit London during the state visit?
	I will.
	I'm not a fan of your mayor.
	Why not?
	I think he's done a terrible job.
	The mayor of London, but the nasty person.
	I think he's a friend of mine, Russia.
	Now, I think he's done a terrible job.
	But I would certainly visit London.
	He's like, tough.
	He's a front of yours.
	I don't care.
	President Trump hilariously started talking about American immigration policy, how he shut the border.
	And Kiera Starmer of Labor tried to jump in and hijack it.
	If you're stopping immigration and stopping the wrong people, my hats are off to you.
	You're doing not a good thing.
	You're doing a fantastic thing.
	So I know nothing about the votes.
	But if the votes are loaded up with bad people, and they usually are, because, you know, other countries don't send their best.
	They send people that they don't want.
	And they're not stupid people.
	And they send the people that they don't want.
	And I've heard that you've taken a much stronger stance on this.
	Yeah, we've done a lot of work to stop them coming.
	We just signed an agreement to return them.
	And we've returned 35,000, in fact, as the first year of this Liberal government of people who shouldn't be in this country.
	So we're very pleased that we're getting on with returning people who've got no right to be here.
	Again, I love the fact that President Trump has so shifted the conversation on immigration that Keir Starmer has had to jump on board.
	President Trump also went after the free speech problems in the UK.
	There have been widespread reports of people being arrested for simply making comments about radical Islamic immigration, for example.
	President Trump slammed that, and Keir Starmer then had to awkwardly stand there and try to defend Britain's crackdowns on free speech.
	Can you discuss the importance of free speech today?
	Well, free speech is very important.
	I don't know if you're referring to any place in particular.
	Perhaps they are.
	But we've had free speech for a very, very long time here.
	So we're very proud about that.
	No, that is not true.
	I'm not sure that Kierstarmer is very proud of free speech in Great Britain.
	Meanwhile, overall, as President Trump points out, his polls are up.
	He remains incredibly durable in his second term.
	He said this in response to questions about Jeffrey Epstein, which, again, is at this point an op.
	When I say that, I mean that advisedly.
	There are people who have honest questions about Jeffrey.
	I will say this a thousand times.
	There are honest questions about Jeffrey Epstein, about informational flow, honest questions about why members of the Trump administration, particularly the attorney general, retailed certain things that didn't end up materializing.
	Those are all open and honest and decent questions.
	They're open questions about where Jeffrey Epstein got his money and all the rest.
	All of that, those are fine questions.
	The people who are suggesting that President Trump is somehow engaging in a cover-up, not only of Jeffrey Epstein's pedophilia, but of some sort of blackmail sex ring targeting the most powerful and rich people on earth.
	And Trump is then covering that up for some nefarious purpose.
	Bad partisan op designed to actually undermine the president of the United States.
	And the people who are implying it without saying it should be asked really if that's what they believe.
	Here's President Trump saying his polls are up, which is true.
	You know, when you talk about files, I just keep going back.
	And other people, too, even the enemy says this thing is not correct because if we had it, we would have used it on the guy.
	It's a bad issue.
	They say it's a good issue for Trump.
	Do you know that my poll numbers are up four and a half points since this ridiculous Epstein stuff?
	My poll numbers have gone up four and a half points because people don't buy it.
	Okay, people don't buy it.
	President Trump also added that the reason he stopped associating with Epstein was because of hiring issues.
	For years, I wouldn't talk to Jeffrey Epstein.
	I wouldn't talk because he did something that was inappropriate.
	He hired help, and I said, don't ever do that again.
	He stole people that worked for me.
	I said, don't ever do that again.
	He did it again.
	And I threw him out of the place, persona non grata.
	I threw him out, and that was it.
	I'm glad I did, if you want to know the truth.
	President Trump also said he had never been to Epstein Island.
	People jumped all over his language in this particular clip.
	But again, like, come on, really?
	And by the way, I never went to the island, and Bill Clinton went there supposedly 28 times.
	I never went to the island, but Larry Summers, I hear, went there.
	He was the head of Harvard.
	And many other people that are very big people.
	Nobody ever talks about them.
	I never had the privilege of going to his island.
	And I did turn it down, but a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island.
	Yeah, again, people are jumping on the word privilege there.
	You can see that he sort of laughs when he says that.
	He is saying it ironically.
	He doesn't mean privilege like he wanted desperately to go to Jeffrey Epstein's island.
	Come on, guys.
	Like, really?
	What do you think he's covering up?
	Seriously, this is what I want to know from all the people who keep claiming that Trump is covering something up.
	What is the thing supposedly that he is covering up?
	Who is the they in all this?
	You know, earlier on in the program, I said that there is a gap that's emerging now between the anti-left and the actual traditional right in the Republican Party.
	And that gap is very much emerging over things like Epstein, where a lot of people who have bought into the idea that the systems are corrupt, which many of them are, or that they've been defaced, many of them have been, or that the institutions have been eaten from within, which is largely true.
	Many of those people are not interested in an actual restoration of many of those institutions.
	They're sort of in love with a narrative whereby everything in America is corrupt.
	No one can succeed.
	And that tends to horseshoe back around to the left.
	And that, indeed, is a problem.
	Name a particular issue, and we can talk about whether that issue is soluble or not.
	Name a particular issue or a particular bad guy.
	We can discuss whether that person is engaging in the thing you're saying they're engaging in.
	Use empty words like they without any antecedent or suggest a conspiracy without any actual conspirators or make an allegation without any actual content.
	Makes it very difficult to determine what is true and what is false, which again is why I think that some of that is the point designed to undermine President Trump.
	All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.
	We'll get to some actual impending problems, perhaps, for Republicans in the Senate.
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