Zorhan Mamdani’s "voluntary" homelessness policies in New York—despite 18 freezing deaths—mirror Canada’s tragic school shooting, where affirming an 18-year-old male’s female identity led to his mother’s murder. Meanwhile, Trump’s economic growth (4.3% unemployment, Dow over 50,000) clashes with public perception, fueled by tariff chaos (Switzerland’s 39% hike) and AI uncertainty, while Senator Cornyn’s 99.2% Trump alignment risks Texas’ Senate seat turning blue due to Paxton’s scandals. Empathy without accountability and unstable policies both prove deadly—literally and politically. [Automatically generated summary]
Homeless people in New York freezing to death because of the insane quote-unquote empathy of Zorhan Mamdani Plus.
More insane empathy causing more death up in Canada, where apparently pretending that boys can be girls actually does not prevent people from doing terrible, terrible things.
And we get into the latest on the economy.
The economy is pretty good.
So why are people feeling so down on it?
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You know, there's a professor named Gad Sad.
Gad Sad coined a term called suicidal empathy.
And the basic idea is that you're so empathetic to somebody that it ends up harming you.
So a great example would be the way that the West has approached immigration from third world countries.
You feel bad for people, you open your borders, lots of people come in, and then they harm your civilization.
But it seems like we are now moving beyond even suicidal empathy into homicidal empathy, by which I mean that your empathy for someone actually gets them killed.
Great example of that happening today over in New York City.
So Zorhan Mamdani, who promised, as producer Sarah points out, the warmth of collectivism.
Remember this?
We're going to move beyond the grittiness of individuality and we're going to bask in the warm embrace, the warm bath that is collectivism.
It turns out people are freezing to death in New York City.
They are freezing to death on the streets of New York City, despite all of his photo ops shoveling the snow.
He was out shoveling.
By the way, I was just in New York City.
All the snow ain't getting shoveled.
All the trash ain't getting picked up.
But here was Mamdani doing his level best to look as though he cares about shoveling snow.
That's a lot of snow, my dude.
I don't think you are going to be able to do that by yourself.
And also, for a man who cannot bench press 135 pounds once, it's going to be a long day shoveling snow for Zorhan Mamdani.
I don't think the people of New York can count on his shoveling skills.
He's usually shoveling horsecrap.
Anyway, here he is.
Do you feel safer?
Do you feel better in New York?
Exactly.
This Pete Booty Judge riding the bike.
This is, wow, everything is safe for now.
People are not slipping.
People are not falling.
The snow has ceased.
All is well.
The serious side of this is that, as the New York Post points out, Zor Mamdani has embraced a hands-off policy with regard to homelessness.
This was the policy in California.
It remains the policy in places like Los Angeles.
This hands-off policy that basically is empathetic toward the homeless to the point where you're killing the homeless.
You say that they should be able to live out on the streets, that it is a form of cruelty and intolerance to involuntarily commit people who are usually drug addicted or schizophrenic, serious mental illnesses, people who can't take care of themselves.
Somehow, it is more empathetic to leave them out on the streets to get scabies or to die in the cold.
This seems to be the way that the left-wing brain is working in Mamdani land and also out in California and other liberal areas of the country.
18 people have died in the cold snap that has hit New York City.
Brian Stedden, who served as a senior advisor to Mayor Eric Adams' administration, told the New York Post: quote: When a person is in imminent danger, there's no debate.
Whatever ideological divides we have should not have any impact on these policies during a code blue.
Apparently, there was a mumbling homeless woman who braved sub-Antarctic temperatures on the front cover of the Post on Monday.
According to the Post, the unidentified woman was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, slippers, and two blankets as she clipped her nails, put lotion on her hands, and talked to herself while hunkered down on East 34th Street across from the New York University Langone Hospital as temperatures neared zero degrees early on Sunday.
She then refused repeated offers for help from EMS workers and cops who explained to the Post that they had to leave the shivering vagrants in the extremely dangerous bone-chilling weather because she could answer basic questions, which again is Mamdani shtick is that if you can answer basic questions like what day of the week is it and what is your name, then they will leave you out on the streets to freeze, assuming that you are totally fine.
Again, those are literally the kinds of questions that she was asked.
According to a firefighter, she knew the year 2026.
She knew where she was in New York.
She knew who the president is.
Since she has mental capacity, there's nothing we can do.
We can't force her to go inside.
We can't kidnap her.
He said, some people survive.
Some people don't.
EMS workers said their hands are tied.
Well, Zorhan Mamdani did a presser over the weekend in which she said, yeah, we did have to force some homeless people inside because they weren't wearing enough clothes.
Tonight, you've implored the people in the streets who don't want to feel more comfortable in the streets to come inside.
But what happens if they don't at this point?
I mean, you had said it, 20 minutes out in the cold could lead to a fatality.
So are you not using it as a last resort at this point to bring them inside and voluntary, remove them, even if it's just a few hours, doesn't lead to a placement?
So involuntary transport continues to be used in the same manner it was as the prior administration.
And thus far, we have seen clinical determinations of a number of New Yorkers who have been deemed to be a danger to themselves or to others.
And sometimes that designation comes from an assessment that a New Yorker is not adequately clothed given the weather that they are living through in that moment.
And that is going to continue to be part of the assessments that outreach workers are making over the course of tomorrow, the next day.
Okay, so again, the last resort policy under Momdani says that you can only be forced indoors if you are deemed a danger to yourself or others.
But the problem, of course, is that if you're a Zorhan Mamdani and you have spent your entire career ripping down cops and treating people as though they are committing a human rights violation by pushing people indoors, people might be a little hesitant to actually take responsibility for calling somebody a danger to themselves or others.
Down in Baltimore, Mayor Brandon Scott, according to the New York Post, late last month called the cold a life or death issue and ordered the PD to take people off the streets, even if they were refusing services.
He said that direction order came from me because we can't allow folks to be out in this kind of weather.
And the fact that this has somehow become a matter of public controversy is totally insane, obviously.
Zorhan Mamdani apparently has so much sympathy for people.
I'm just going to put it out there.
If you are out on the streets sleeping on the sidewalk, that is not a housing problem in the middle of a cold snap.
That is a crazy problem if other options are given to you.
No sane and rational person, definitionally, who is not a danger to themselves is sleeping out on the street in zero degree weather.
That is not a thing that sane and rational people do unless they are Arctic explorers of some type.
And again, this comes down to Momdani's bizarro world empathy that legitimately gets people killed.
This sort of policy, when you apply it to crime, it leads to more criminals on the streets.
When you apply it to homelessness, it leads to more homeless on the streets.
The empathy that you have for the purported victim of America's evil, racist, abusive system leads to the very people you are supposedly trying to help sometimes dying.
Mamdani, by the way, had not actually budged on his plans, his last resort policy, as of last weekend.
On February 6th, for example, the New York Post reported that Zimdani was still refusing to clear homeless camps and forcibly remove people from the streets, despite a rising death toll and a fresh snap of deadly deep freeze.
Instead, he implored people to come inside, as you heard.
Well, I mean, imploring people to come inside ain't enough.
Again, if people are refusing to come inside in the middle of zero-degree weather, living on the streets, that is not going to be solved by you imploring them.
By the way, during last year's campaign, Mamdani, according to the City Journal, had promised to end a program initiated by his predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, that deploys clinicians backed by police officers to assess people's ability to care for themselves and, if necessary, to transport them involuntarily to a hospital for psychiatric treatment.
So that was a proactive move by Adams to determine whether somebody ought to be on the streets or not.
And Mamdani wanted to kill that because I guess the presumption is that unless they are in the throes of some sort of crime, they should never have an engagement with law enforcement.
He has disavowed dismantling homeless encampments.
The message that's being sent is basically, you have a right to live on the streets.
The message that is sent to public service workers, cops, and mental health professionals is that you're going to be called on the carpet if you make the mistake of bringing somebody in.
It's nuts and it's bad and it's stupid.
And again, it's indicative of a deeper brain rot that has set in on large parts of the left.
That empathy amounts to humoring people in their delusions, even at danger to them.
A lot of ugliness going on on planet Earth in New York and Canada, but there's still some nice things happening.
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So it has now been confirmed that the school shooter in British Columbia, Canada was, in fact, a boy who believed he was a girl, a transgender girl.
The media, of course, covered this up.
They knew this right away.
The media and the cops knew this right away.
We reported it as a quasi-rumor yesterday because it was basically being uncovered by places like Juneau News, but everyone knew this from the very beginning.
I mean, how could you not know it from the very beginning?
If the cops come upon a dead body and the dead body is dressed in a dress and has a penis, it is pretty clear what is going on.
But the cops covered that up yesterday.
They said that they were not going to provide details and, in fact, referred to the person as a gun person.
And the media did the same.
ABC News, quote, the person who carried out a school massacre is an 18-year-old woman with mental health issues, but she did not give a motive for one of the worst mass shootings in Canada's history.
I'm sorry, you can't blame this one on the ladies, folks.
This was a man who had a mental health problem and pretended he was a woman.
And you, quote unquote, respecting the pronouns is part of the problem.
You are leading more people to engage in the delusion that their problems can be solved by quote unquote switching sexes.
And if society refuses to accept them, it's society's fault.
And now you are a victim of erasure, which means that if somebody tries to erase you, you must preemptively erase them.
It is a permission structure, actually, for violence and for mental degradation.
Nonetheless, you have an entire left-wing thought structure that has been established that says to people who are suffering from gender confusion and body dysmorphia, it tells them that we are so empathetic to you that we're going to pretend along with you.
And if we pretend along with you, that won't have any harm.
Well, it turns out it has massive harm.
Here are the Canadian police yesterday playing along with the gun man, was a man.
In fact, you're the first media to ask the question.
unidentified
I will say this: we identify the suspect as they chose to be identified in public and in social media.
I can say that Jesse was born as a biological male who, approximately the information that I have approximately 60 years ago, began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly.
And then the cops said they would, quote-unquote, respect the pronouns.
Okay, first of all, human beings are not magical butterflies where they go into the gender cocoon and come out a different gendered butterfly.
That is ridiculous, is ridiculous and it is delusional and it is bad.
And yes, it has damage connected to it.
As I've said before, there is a permission structure that is deeply embedded in the entire argument of the trans identity movement, which is that if people refuse to acknowledge your version of fake reality, then they are a threat to you and they must be removed.
That is inherent in the entire ideology because it is rooted in the idea that society is harming you and is genocidally denying you what you are in your deepest recesses of self if they don't go along with the nonsense that you're spewing.
The shooter launched a horrifying attack, according to the New York Post, at a private residence in a remote community before continuing the carnage at a high school where authorities said he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
This person was known to authorities.
Police had visited the family home several times over the years over concerns about mental health.
But the beauty of this insane thought structure is that if you go there and you say, okay, this person has depression, suicidality, we can't connect it to, you know, the fact that the man is saying that he's a woman.
We have to pretend these are two completely separate issues.
In fact, we have to humor one part of the delusion while trying to clamp down on the depression and suicidal ideation that result.
Good luck with that.
Firearms had been seized from the home, according to the New York Post, but the lawful owner successfully petitioned to have them returned.
Six people were discovered dead inside the school.
Roughly 25 others were wounded during the chaotic shooting.
We have details about the family.
Again, you want to talk about suicidal and homicidal empathy.
A great example here is mom.
So, the mom of this person, who described herself apparently as a conservative leaning libertarian, in July 2024, unleashed a profanity-fueled rant on Instagram, yelling at people who refused to acknowledge boys becoming girls.
Quote, as a conservative-leaning libertarian who lives in the North and loves living in a small town, I really hope the hate I see online is just bored old people and not true hatred.
And then she urged people to evolve and do better and educate yourself before spewing BS online.
I normally don't say anything, and I normally don't go on bleep book to see the keyboard warriors.
And I know I can't control everything or shield my kids from everything, but please, for the love of F, can you get your bleep together so we don't have to bring our kids up in a world full of hatred?
Do you have any idea how many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate?
Please stop the BS.
She was one of the people murdered by her own son.
So it turns out that the empathy materialized in treatment of her son as a quote-unquote daughter.
It did not in any way, obviously, alleviate the mental pain and suffering that this person was undergoing.
And she ended up the victim of her own empathy.
This is not how sane and rational societies behave.
This is bad adulting.
It is bad adulting, whether you are the mayor of New York or whether you are the mom of a person suffering from a mental illness.
It is bad adulting to pretend that empathy is manifested in treating people who have delusions or mental illness as though they are acting perfectly normally and they ought to be given every quote-unquote right to sleep on the streets in the freezing cold, or they have a right from the rest of the world to be told that they are, in fact, a member of the opposite sex.
It ends really, really, really badly.
Meanwhile, in general news here in the United States, the economic reports continue to be very healthy coming out of the Trump administration.
There's a lot of dyspepsia, as I've mentioned before, a lot of heartburn over the state of the economy.
January's numbers, the jobs numbers, were quite good.
The reality is that it's happening kind of differently in different sectors.
So if you look at the losers and winners in terms of change in payrolls, 2024, 2025, according to the Wall Street Journal, the big winners in terms of payroll have been healthcare, leisure, and hospitality.
Government has actually increased.
Trump has cut it a little bit, but it increased pretty significantly in 2024, obviously.
So the areas of the market that have really been growing hand over fist are the healthcare areas of the market, which is not a gigantic shock.
Number one, because Americans are using more and more healthcare, but also because healthcare does require hands-on actual treatment of people.
You're going to need more nurses, you need more doctors.
This is an area where there's high demand and where AI can supplement, but it cannot replace.
And so you're going to see that increase, I would assume.
However, all other private jobs sectors combined have actually shrunk, according to the Wall Street Journal, which is why I think people are a little worried.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the past year was lackluster for many white-collar workers.
The financial activities sector, which includes banking and insurance in January, had about 25,000 fewer jobs than a year earlier.
Employment in the field has been basically unchanged since 2024.
Professional and business services sector fared worse, driven by a large decline in employment at temporary staffing agencies.
Meanwhile, manufacturing payrolls since January 2024 have dropped by almost 300,000.
The manufacturing sector, again, is being replaced by technology.
It is not going to come back simply as a result of tariff policy.
When it comes to construction payrolls, those have been going up in non-residential areas.
That would be AI data centers, for example.
Heavy construction, civil engineering, that is up.
Residential has been down.
That is because actually the rents are dropping.
The unemployment rate has remained essentially stable.
So this is why people are feeling a disconnect.
The economy continues to soar in terms of the stock market, but it is largely accreting to certain sectors of the job market.
And while wages are generally rising, there's not a lot of turnover in the job market.
People are basically keeping their jobs.
They're not leaving their jobs and opening up new jobs or any of the rest.
Now, President Trump seems to believe that some of this can be solved by injections of liquidity.
This is the reason why he is pushing very hard for lower interest rates from the Federal Reserve.
So he essentially would like for us to have a weaker dollar so that our deficit is not as large.
That essentially is the deal that he is attempting to make.
Now, it'll be interesting to see, again, what Kevin Warsh, as the new selected Fed chair, does once confirm, because he tends to agree with President Trump about lowering those interest rates, but simultaneously, he wants to sell off a bunch of assets owned by the Fed, which is somewhat deflationary because it draws money back into the Federal Reserve.
The case being met by Scott Besson is that the goal here is to put the jobs into the private sector economy.
And that is one of the things that's happening.
You have seen very significant private sector job growth, although, again, it is largely located in the healthcare sector overall over the course of the last year or so.
Now, one of the beautiful things about being a socialist, like say a Bernie Sanders, is that you can always rip on the state of the capitalist economy and pretend that you have a solution, even if your solution basically involves collectivizing all of the economy.
It must be wonderful to be Bernie Sanders.
He has the intellect of a seven-year-old, truly.
He stands around and he rails against things that he thinks are unfair cosmically about the universe without any real solutions to offer other than the government will solve it if you give us enough money.
And, you know, somehow people resonate to this, I suppose.
You wonder whether Trump is completely crazy and delusional or just a pathological liar.
But the idea that anybody would believe that this is a great economy when 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, when the cost of the health care is going up, people can't afford housing.
People can't afford their basic groceries.
Childcare system is dysfunctional.
People can't afford to go to college.
And if this is the greatest economy in the history of the world, God help us.
Well, I mean, what would he say was the greatest economy in the history of the world?
Truly, like I want a comp.
He never has asked for that comp.
It's always, you know, all the shortcomings that everyone feels.
And of course, everyone feels it in their pocketbook.
Everyone feels that costs are too high.
There has never been a point across my entire life, and I've earned many different amounts of money in a given year, where I've said, you know what?
Things are really, really affordable until your income goes up dramatically.
If you walk around to any middle-class person, you say, are things wildly affordable right now?
The answer is no, because you're middle class.
I mean, that's the way that it works.
And realistically speaking, when you talk about self-reported figures of people feeling like they live paycheck to paycheck, it doesn't necessarily mean they are living paycheck to paycheck, number one.
But number two, the reality is that virtually for as long as we have data, a huge percentage of Americans have said that they live paycheck to paycheck.
When it comes to hardship figures, you know, actual data, the number tends to drop.
The Bank of America Institute, for example, found in 2024 that about 25% of households were living paycheck to paycheck.
The Federal Reserve estimates that it's 37 to 40% of people who are living paycheck.
Again, these are not wonderful.
There could be better numbers, you would assume.
But Bernie Sanders sort of claiming that the economy is somehow down in the dumps when you have a 4.3% unemployment rate, Dow Jones industrial average over 50,000, and rising wages, like real rising wages under President Trump, and the inflation rate down at 2.5%, 3%.
It's a pretty good economy, historically speaking.
So if the economic numbers are so solid, then why are people feeling so bad about them?
And they are feeling bad about them.
I mean, that just is the reality.
According to Axios, one year in, President Trump has squandered a bunch of political advantages.
Apparently, a new Harvard Caps poll shows that 51% of registered voters say Trump is doing a worse job than Biden.
According to Rasmussen, 48% of likely voters say Biden did a better job compared with 40% who chose Trump.
According to YouGov, 46% of U.S. adults say Trump is doing a worse job than Biden, compared with 40% who's saying that he's doing better, and another seven who say he's doing about the same.
Those are not resounding numbers for President Trump, obviously, when it comes to issues including immigration and on economy.
He has lost some serious steam.
His net approval on the economy is at minus 18, which is 26 points lower than it was at this point in his first term.
And young voters have moved away from Trump in large numbers.
YouGov polls show that Trump is at negative 42 among 18 to 29 year olds.
That is a 51-point swing from his plus nine at the start of the presidency.
So what exactly is going on?
I will theorize that one of the things that is going on is that what people actually want at this point, it has been many years in American politics since we've had any level of quietude.
Truly, I said in 2024 that Trump's victory was the normie revolution.
It was people looking at Joe Biden and saying, none of this is actually normal.
You have a brain dead president who is promoting extraordinarily radical policies, and then he's replaced at the last minute by another befuddled politician who is only there because she was selected for certain pre-existing characteristics.
And then she is pledging more radicalism.
We don't need any of that.
What we need is sort of the normie middle, just like a normie policy president.
And the thing that's happened with President Trump is in many areas, he has delivered a normie policy.
And in some areas, and these are the areas where he is the most loud, he's delivered a very not normie policy.
So I think that, you know, regardless of how you think the tariffs have gone, and I think it's pretty obvious the tariffs have not done nearly the amount of damage to the American economy that I, for one, thought they might do.
And maybe that bleeds in, maybe it doesn't.
But so far, President Trump's tariff policy, while not fulfilling the promises that he suggested that it would make, I mean, it hasn't brought back manufacturing by leaps and bounds, for example.
His tariff policy hasn't created the economy, clearly.
But that is also the thing that he talks the most about.
He talks about it incessantly.
And it also happens to be the area of his economic program that is the most unpopular by the polls.
So when President Trump suggests that he is raising Switzerland's tariffs because, for example, he just doesn't like how they talk to him, that is not the sort of solid, normal, quiescent presidency that I think people are actually looking for.
They just want the good policy and they don't want the feeling of chaos.
I mean, this sort of vacillating, variable policy based on how he feels about a particular nation's leader at a particular time, that is not the sort of sort of solid, steady leadership that Americans are looking for in a time that's very chaotic.
We have a very chaotic time.
Again, a lot of the policy coming out of the administration is excellent, but if it's retailed as up and down and all around, people are going to feel a little bit unbalanced.
That is not the way that you retail this policy, which brings us to Pam Bondi.
So yesterday, the Attorney General of the United States, who I think has done truly a poor job as the Attorney General, I think that her victories have been limited and her losses have been many and myriad on PR level.
Most obviously with regard to the Epstein files and the rollout of the Jeffrey Epstein case, I said this from literally the day that they did this, at the rollout of the announcement, there would be no further prosecutions in the Epstein case and that there was no foreign intelligence intervention and that there's no evidence that he was trafficking minors to other people.
That you can't just put that out as a written statement on a random day and not explain that to the American people after all the rumors fostered by many in the administration.
You can't do that.
But you actually owe it to the American people to be transparent.
So what they did is they were very non-transparent at the beginning about their thought process.
And then over time, the pressure built.
And then they basically just vomited into the public view millions of documents, leading to the crowdsourcing of terrible ideas.
And all of that blew up onto the internet.
Some of the information that came out, I think, is fascinating and interesting.
We've talked about that with regard to, again, some of the people in the British government.
We talked about it with regards to Steve Bannon.
And there are a bunch of figures who are mentioned, and it's interesting.
But it also has meant the revealing, for example, of some of the alleged victims' names.
It has led to the revealing of people's names who are not actually accused of a crime.
And it has led to the crowdsourcing of pretty much every tip in there.
And a lot of those tips are trash, like truly trash.
So Pam Bondi appeared on The Hill yesterday.
She showed up in front of the House Judiciary Committee and Democrats went after her largely.
A few Republicans went after her as well.
And the reason that this is not good for the Trump administration is because, again, what you need, it's true for immigration policy as well.
You know what was really bad?
Christy Noam's rollout of our immigration policy.
Very, very bad.
Our immigration policy as a country under the president is to deport criminal, illegal immigrants and shut the border.
And Christy Noam was flying on down to El Salvador to tour detention facilities wearing a cowboy hat in tailored clothing.
We don't need that.
You need Tom Holman there calmly explaining how policy works.
When it comes to the economy, you don't need Howard Luttnick, the commerce secretary on TV talking about how we are going to solve the entire national debt with tariffs.
You need Scott Besson, a calm and collected presence to actually explain how the economy works to people.
And when it comes to the law and the effectuation of the law, you need a calm presence to explain how the law is being impartially implemented, equal justice before the law, and why you make the decisions you're making.
What you don't need is performative TV theatrics that are almost certainly designed to earn more kudos from the president who watches these sorts of hearings and looks for the clips.
And the more militant you are, particularly if you are praiseworthy of President Trump, the more President Trump likes that.
That might help President Trump and it might help his cabinet officials who are managing up with him, but it doesn't help the Trump administration as a whole, but the broader American public.
Now, again, not everything that Pam Bondi said is wrong.
I think some of the things she said were right.
But as per usual arrangements, many of the things that were right were obscured by the things that were wrong.
So there was a bit of good Bondi, bad Bondi going on yesterday.
So Pam Bondi was asked about the idea that Trump was covering things up with regard to the Epstein case.
And she said President Trump has been the most transparent president in history, vomiting out all this information into public.
Now, again, I don't know that he's the most transparent president in all of American history, although there's a case to be made that given the fact that his thoughts are constantly in the public view and he talks to the press all the time, that that's the case.
The manner that she says this stuff matters, however.
Remember when I said calm and cool and collected, making people feel a sense of steadiness?
That is not what is happening right there.
So even the content that she's delivering that I think is largely true is being delivered in a non-useful fashion, a non-utilitarian fashion.
Representative Jerry Nadler, who is, again, I've appeared in front of this committee.
I mean, I know a lot of the people on this committee.
Representative Jerry Nadler was going after her on Russia, and she went after him on the Russian collusion hoax.
And again, what she's saying here is not wrong.
It's just that the way she says it is so performative that it sort of undercuts the point she's making.
I don't disagree with the stuff she's saying, but the performative nature of it does not make the American people feel as though there is a professional in charge of the Justice Department.
So Eric Swalwell questioned her.
Eric Swalwell, man, that dude, the representative from California who wants to run for governor over there.
He asked her about political violence, and here was her response.
Okay, so again, this is actually like the high point of her testimony.
Then we got to the stuff that was really the problem.
So as I said before, when it came to the revelation of what exactly the DOJ was doing on Epstein, I know for a fact from people who were in the DOJ at the time, there needed to be, the DOJ, the FBI, there needed to be a full-scale explanation with full Q ⁇ A with the revelation of particular documents to demonstrate why the DOJ was doing what it was doing.
That's the thing that needed to happen.
So when you show up, you should at least be able to do that in sort of a calm, collected fashion.
This is again why I think that William Barr, who was AG under President Trump the first time, Bill Barr, was a very good AG.
I do not think the same of Pam Bondi.
I do not think she is good at her job.
So here is Pam Bondi.
This was the most awkward moment by far.
So she was asked about Epstein, and she promptly started doing a cable news spot about how no one should ever mention Epstein again.
They should only talk about the stock market, which, again, listen, I generally agree that the coverage of Epstein, given the evidence that we have, far exceeds the claims made about Epstein, far exceed the evidence that we have, and thus the coverage of Epstein far exceeds the actual evidentiary claims.
With that said, I'm not sure the attorney general's job is to go out there and be like, why are you even covering this?
Okay, so again, like, I think that she's actually right on this, and I think that Massey is wrong on this, but there's a good way to do this, and there's a bad way to do this.
And she was not doing this the good way.
Jamie Raskin, I think, is one of the most scruulous members of Congress, the Congressman from Maryland.
He went after Pam Bondi, but it turned into her just saying that she was a washed-up loser.
Like, who are you winning over?
Who's the audience for this?
The audience is the base.
I get it.
The audience is President Trump.
I get it.
But if, again, the thing that the Trump administration is seeking right now is a feeling of quiet, steady success, which is the thing that you need in a second term if you wish to have a successor who wins a third.
This is not the stuff that's going to get it done.
You can let her filibuster all day long, but not on our watch.
Oh, I did tell you because you saw what you did in the Senate.
I think this just goes to my general point here, folks.
Open congressional hearings are the dumbest thing in the world.
They're truly stupid.
Nothing happens of any value other than political gamesmanship, opportunism, and all the rest.
There was one headline that emerged from all of this, aside from the Attorney General's behavior, and that was apparently there was a photo of a black binder that Bondi had at the hearing showing the words Jayapal Pramilla search history with a list of documents whose numbers coincided with the number of Epstein files.
So what it looks like right there, what Jayapal is accusing her of, is having a burn book that held a printed search history of exactly what emails she searched.
I mean, obviously, not a great look.
I'm not sure exactly why the DOJ should be monitoring Congress people as they go through the Epstein files or the documents.
That doesn't seem like a smart thing to do.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to CNBC when asked if Bondi had a printout of the Congresswoman's search history, why she had it, or if the DOJ kept track of searches by other members of Congress.
But again, there's another area where the alleged cover-up or the purported cover-up or the dumb behavior of members of the administration is significantly worse than the thing that they are supposedly covering up.
They've revealed 3.5 million pages of documents into the public view, and they're still being accused of cover-ups because, again, of the poor botchery that is the PR rollout.
And that goes to the professionalism of some of the people in charge of particular agencies.
Yeah, I don't know exactly where the disconnect is coming from.
If you look, wages are outpacing inflation by about one to one and a half percentage points.
That's been true for a couple of years now.
The unemployment rate has basically stabilized.
Overall economic growth is very good.
I do think people at the very top are doing even better than people in the middle, but people in the middle are doing better than they were a year ago.
So when you look at what President Trump has been talking about doing, a lot of it is sort of for show.
I mean, when he's talking about freezing credit card rates, which he can't do unilaterally from the White House, or when he's talking about barring corporations from buying single-family homes, none of this is actually going to change systemically the direction of the economy, just as tariffs were unable to change the directionality with regard to manufacturing jobs in the United States.
Some of the things that I think are weighing here are the general American nervousness about AI and also the fact that the president talks so extensively about some of the least popular things in his platform like tariffs.
Let's start with AI there.
There's a lot of worry about what AI is going to do to jobs markets.
Pretty much every college graduate that I know is worried about what the job market will look like when they get out.
I think there are a lot of white-collar people who are worried that AI is going to wipe out their job.
What do you think about where we are going with the jobs market and AI as productivity increases?
Every college student I talk to is either terrified about AI, thrilled about AI, or often some combination of the two.
So far, it doesn't appear to have taken a lot of jobs.
And so far, it doesn't appear to be showing up very much in productivity growth.
In fact, the main way it's showing up in the jobs numbers is the people being hired to build data centers to run these models.
But I do think that that's going to change in the coming years.
And just really big question that no one knows the answer to is to what degree does it complement people's skills and enable them to be better workers and paid more or substitute for those skills and lead them to be more dispensable and paid less.
Historically, technology was much more about complementing and raising wages.
I'd place a soft bet on that for AI too, but with a huge amount of uncertainty and a certain amount of dread about the downside here.
So to go back to sort of the second point that I was making with regard to tariffs, it seems to me that one of the problems is that President Trump actually himself expresses a fair bit of upset at various factors in the economy, up to and including his attacks on, for example, Jerome Powell and his open statements that he wants the interest rate lowered, which seems to, again, express that there's a lack of liquidity in the economy, which I really don't think is the case right now.
I don't think that the problem is liquidity.
I think the problem is, if there is a problem, is sort of uncertainty.
It seems like all of the investors that I know have been stacking their investments at the top end of the market.
The MAG7 have been growing by leaps and bounds.
The rest of the market is up, but certainly not by that same sort of margin.
What do you think the president could be doing differently in terms of PR, how he addresses these issues?
Yeah, look, I mean, we've said that the economy is getting better for most people.
The question, though, is, would it be doing even better but for President Trump?
And when it comes to the tariffs, I think that is certainly true.
Prices are probably about a half a point, maybe even a percent higher than they otherwise would be because of the tariffs.
Economic growth would be even better were it not for the tariffs.
And in some sense, I think the president understands this because when it comes to certain politically sensitive ideas, he's taken the tariffs off of it.
You know, things like coffee, he's taken the tariffs off.
He's tried to reduce them on other countries.
He's delayed some of the tariffs on furniture.
So tariffs are so good.
And if they're being paid by foreign countries, why would we be dropping them on certain sensitive consumer goods?
But we need to drop them on everything.
And then, as you said, they're not even achieving one of the goals they had, which is to add manufacturing jobs.
We've lost jobs almost every month since Liberation Day.
And, you know, in part, that's because we're raising the price of steel.
That being said, I plan to handle him the same way I've handled the Fed, which is respectfully to disagree when I disagree and explain what I disagree about.
In particular, his desire, as you just said, to dramatically shrink the balance sheet would mean selling off a lot of the bonds the Fed holds.
That would drive up mortgage interest rates.
I don't think we need dramatic interest rate cuts in our economy, but I don't think we need dramatic interest rate increases either.
My guess is in the seat, he'll end up being pragmatic.
And some of the ideas that make less sense, like that one, will end up being, you know, facing reality and being dramatically scaled back when you see what the data says.
But to me, that's going to be the most important test for Warshaw.
Two must more tests.
One is, is he independent?
And two, can he change his mind when the data changes?
I mean, his theory there is pretty interesting, which is basically that the United States government is overinvested in particular areas, like, for example, the mortgage market, and that it would be better if the private sector were to, we should shift essentially the air in the balloon over to the private sector and away from public investment in its own bonds.
What do you make of the actual generalized theory there?
Today's my birthday, and it has been the hardest year of my life.
And I wanted to share something that I learned with y'all.
When I was younger, I used to define myself as an actor, right?
Which was never really all that fulfilling.
And then I became a husband, and that was much better.
And then I became a father, and that was the ultimate.
I could define myself then as a loving, capable, strong, supportive husband, father, provider, steward of the land that we're so lucky to live on.
And for a long time, that felt like a really good definition to the question: who am I?
What am I?
And then this year, I had to look my own mortality in the eye.
I had to come nose to nose with death.
And all of those definitions that I cared so deeply about were stripped from me.
I was away for treatment.
So I could no longer be a husband that was helpful to my wife.
I could no longer be a father who could pick up his kids and put them to bed and be there for them.
I could not be a provider because that wasn't working.
I couldn't even be a steward of the land because at times I was too weak to prune all the trees during the window that you're supposed to prune them.
And so I was faced with the question: if I am just a too skinny, weak guy alone in an apartment with cancer, what am I?
And I meditated and the answer came through: I am worthy of God's love simply because I exist.
And if I'm worthy of God's love, shouldn't I also be worthy of my own?
And the same is true for you.
And as I move through this healing portal toward recovery, I wanted to share that with you because I think that revelation that came to me was due in no small part to all the prayers and the love that have been directed toward me.
So I offer that to you, however, it sits in your consciousness, however it resonates, run with it.
And if the word God trips you up, I certainly don't know.
Obviously, he doesn't want you to take God out of that.
And I think that, you know, in the throes of true pain and suffering, you know, reliance on the understanding that in the end, you're beloved of God is really, really important.
Joining me on the line is Senator John Cornyn, the Republican senator from Texas.
And, you know, Texas has always been the one state we could depend on to remain red.
Democrats have been working for years to try to turn Texas blue without success.
But unfortunately, if the Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, is the nominee, it provides the opening they've been hoping and praying for for years.
And at the very least, if he were to win, which I think is in doubt, it would require hundreds of millions of dollars to try to salvage him.
He would not win by a substantial margin and would not be able to help with the down ballot races.
Conversely, in 2020, I won by 10 points.
And I think I could be a help to the president and his agenda for the last two years of his second term by helping carry some of these House seats.
And of course, the House majority is absolutely critical as well.
Well, look at a website, crookedken.com, which is updated regularly.
But I think a lot of his baggage is notorious.
It's well known in some circles, but not universally.
And I think his impeachment by the Republican House, his $6.6 million judgment against Texas taxpayers by whistleblowers who turned him into the FBI for interfering with a federal investigation of a donor.
And then, of course, he's become so reckless, he's even blown up his family.
And I just don't think he's a trustworthy individual.
This is a job not for performance artists, not for people who just want to be famous and get the most clicks on social media and raise money, but serious people who actually want to do important work.
So, meanwhile, the Senate, you know, obviously there's important business that needs to be taken up in the Senate that includes the Save America Act, which has now passed the House.
A lot of talk in the Senate about whether or not the Senate majority leader is going to force a talking filibuster on the Save Act.
First of all, why don't you tell people what the SAVE Act is?
Second, do you think that the Senate is going to force a talking filibuster as opposed to the sort of the usual arrangement where people can claim a filibuster without actually having to get up there and jabber for 25 hours?
Well, the Save America Act is basically voter ID, which is a very popular, bipartisan issue.
And it seems like it should be a no-brainer.
But these days, everything is contested by the resistance on the Democratic side.
And so I would say there's almost universal support in the Senate.
I know the House has now passed the bill.
The challenge, as you mentioned, is, and typically in the Senate, you need 60 votes in order to proceed.
And I think regardless of the outcome, I still think we need to vote on this bill and put people on the record.
And then that needs to become one of the components of our campaign in the 2026 midterms.
But the talking filibuster is an innovation.
It's something new.
I know people who are of a certain age remember Jimmy Stewart and Mr. Smith goes to Washington, but that hasn't been the rule for a long time now.
And it requires 60 votes in order to proceed.
The idea, of course, is that there needs to be some place in America where there is deliberation on important issues that affect 330-plus million Americans.
And that place is the Senate.
And so there's not the votes right now.
As I know the Majority Leader Thune has told President Trump, there's not the votes now to change that.
Okay, meanwhile, one of the other bills that you've been promoting is the ICE Protection Act, which would apparently increase penalties for people who are attempting to resist law enforcement.
Well, we are at the early stages, but of course, this debate is raging on and it's not new.
Democrats are the party of defund the police.
That hadn't worked out too well for them.
And then they wanted to abolish ICE.
And the two tragic incidents in Minneapolis where people interfered with law enforcement activities and lost their lives, those are obvious tragedies.
But the lesson is, I think, two lessons.
One is sanctuary cities are dangerous because ICE had no real alternative but to arrest these people with final orders of deportation, criminal aliens in the street, where typically those handoffs occur in a county jail where the local government respects a federal detainer.
And so you don't have that problem in places like Texas.
But finally, I think one of the lessons that we should all know is to cooperate with law enforcement.
Don't try to interfere with an ongoing law enforcement operation.
These folks are professionals.
They're doing the best they can under very difficult circumstances.
And I stand firmly with President Trump and those who believe that we need to enforce our immigration laws.
Well, I mean, I will note at this point that you do have a 99.2% record of voting with President Trump's policy proposals, despite all sort of protestations to the contrary.