Episode 5290: What The War In Iran Means Globally; Taiwan's Opposition Leaders Meet With China
Natalie Winters analyzes the proposed "Dignity Act," which Rosemary Jenks argues grants amnesty to 10 million illegal aliens while waiving criminal records and undercutting American workers via FICA tax exemptions. The discussion shifts to Cleo Pascal's warnings on CCP infiltration in Taiwan, where Su Tseng-chang's meeting with Xi Jinping fuels internal KMT factionalism, alongside concerns over U.S. neglect of Freely Associated States veterans aiding Chinese influence. Brian Kennedy asserts President Trump's Iran strategy targets China's nuclear proxy but warns the ceasefire fails to remove Iranian capabilities or secure the Strait of Hormuz. Finally, Kane highlights exploding national debt with $1 trillion in annual interest payments and $6 billion daily borrowing, while Mike Lindell promotes his Minnesota gubernatorial campaign and My Pillow merchandise. [Automatically generated summary]
Here in the war room, it's Friday, April 10th, in the year of our Lord 2026.
Natalie Winters hosting today, filling in for Stephen K. Bannon.
But, you know, our enemies don't take any days off.
So we've got a packed show what they're waging here on the home front, abroad in the Middle East, at the Chinese Communist Party, in the Taiwan Straits.
We're going to get into all of it.
But I want to start with what is, I think, the frankly seminal issue of President Trump's campaign and really a bedrock issue of America First.
That is, of course, immigration and restricting it.
There should be no caveats on what mass deportations.
Me, and I know Rosemary Jenks gets that.
The wonderful work you've been doing over at the Immigration Accountability Project, I think, speaks for itself.
But we've seen a sort of resurgence.
It seems like every Congress, there's this new euphemistic spin on what is amnesty to depress the wages and livelihoods of American workers, you know, euphemized.
So we're going to give people their new favorite word, dignity.
And we're seeing it rearing its ugly head again.
It's just people being proxies for big business, right?
What's new?
But can you sort of walk us through first the sort of A front of this bill, the way that a lot of these Republicans, as well, I guess I'd say shocking, but I guess at this rate it's not, that that is the messaging behind it, how radical it is, and what you guys are doing to try to stop it.
So I call this bill, instead of the Dignity Act, the SAW Act for screw all American workers, because this bill hits every American worker, whether they're low wage, medium wage, or high wage.
It's got amnesty for at least 10 million illegal aliens to compete with low wage American workers.
It codifies OPT.
It doubles the employment based green card.
So it's hitting mid and high wage American workers and taking their jobs.
It allows foreign students that get STEM degrees in the United States to remain here permanently.
So, I mean, it doesn't matter where you are in the economy, this bill would dramatically affect you and decrease your wages and increase competition for jobs.
It's despicable.
And, you know, it's not just there are.
20 Democrat co sponsors and 19 Republican co sponsors, plus the lead sponsor, Maria Salazar.
But basically, all of the Democrats in the House support almost all of them anyway, support this bill.
And they're just metering the number of sponsors so that they can claim that it's completely bipartisan with 20 of each.
So, you know, every time they find a new dupe Republican to join their effort, they add on another Democrat.
It's just a scam.
And they're lying.
The sponsors of this bill are lying about it.
Saying that there's zero tolerance for criminal aliens in the amnesty.
That is not true.
They have waivers for all kinds of crimes, misdemeanors, drug smuggling, all sorts of things, including, by the way, unlawful voting.
So, you know, the thing that never happens, they're actually waiving the felony for unlawful voting to get amnesty.
We've done a lot of work here in the war room exposing the kind of, I think, foundational lies that led to the just complete and utter ballooning of the H 1B visa caps, right?
This idea, frankly, at its core, which I think is offensive that American workers can't cut it, but they're actually not importing the best of the brightest.
But I think this OPT program is something that doesn't get equal attention, even though I think its actual creation is almost more sinister because it really is replacing the brightest, the youngest, most STEM oriented Americans, particularly those just starting out their careers in the college and grad school levels.
Could you sort of expand a little bit on that program?
So the Optional Practical Training Program, OPT, was created under the W. Bush administration by executive fiat.
There's no statutory authorization for this program.
It was created by the president.
And then it was expanded by President Obama so that if you are graduating with a STEM degree as a foreign student, you get three years to stay in the United States.
And taxpayers subsidize the employers of these foreign graduate students since they don't have to pay FICA taxes.
So basically, the employer gets a discount to hire a foreign graduate instead of an American graduate.
It's an unbelievable program.
And most people don't know it exists, unless, of course, you're one of the victims of it.
The Americans who graduate from college with a STEM degree, they've done everything they're supposed to do, everything we tell them to do.
And yet they can't get a job because the employers are subsidized to hire foreign graduates.
And this is the pipeline that leads to H 1Bs.
So people come here as a foreign student and then they get OPT and they find an employer and then that employer sponsors them for an H 1B.
And that job is essentially permanently removed from American ability to get it.
So it's a terrible program.
It needs to be ended.
It should have been ended a long time ago.
And it is time to completely and utterly end OPT.
Nobody here on a foreign student visa should get an employment authorization.
If any administration, I think, wants to show that they're putting American workers first.
I mean, frankly, there's a laundry list, a very extensive grab bag of, you know, weird three letter programs that you could probably cancel if that were to show that.
And I think OPT should be top of the list.
But I want to link this to, I think, what is a pretty alarming story that I'm sure a lot of the war impasse has read about, which is that the birth rate is hitting yet, you know, new year, new low.
Obviously, the, you know, Lawler and Maria Salazar and established Republicans of the world would say, well, this is why we need.
Mass immigration.
This is why we need to make birthright citizenship even more in La Sefayette.
If you're within a 50 kilometer radius of the United States, you can be a citizen.
But it sort of seems like addressing the root cause, which is that young American families can't get jobs, don't feel the economic security that they have to actually have children, is sort of being exacerbated by these policies.
Can you speak a little bit to sort of linking that crisis with the immigration crisis?
I mean, the more we import foreigners, and by the way, we're importing them at the rate of over a million per year.
As legal permanent residents.
Then we have well over a million temporary foreign workers.
And then we have illegal immigration, which is, you know, 16 million minimum in this country.
And all of those people need a house to live in.
They all need services, whether it's criminal justice services or, you know, welfare services or public education is a huge one.
And so they're competing with Americans for resources and they're taking the supply of infrastructure like housing.
So, you know, if you're a young person and you can't afford to buy a house and the rent is out of control, it's tough to make that decision to have a family.
But, you know, the immigration is not going to solve a birth rate problem because, first of all, we're importing poor people.
So, you know, the vast majority of immigrants who come here, especially lawful permanent residents, are family based immigrants and they're largely undereducated and poor.
You can't You know, fix the social security system or the economy with low wage workers.
You know, we need an educated workforce.
We've got AI coming in that's going to be more competition for American workers.
So we need to focus on getting Americans, you know, good paying jobs where they can actually support a family and make the decision to have one so that they see some hope in their future.
And speaking of that, I think an even more radical idea is birthright citizenship.
I think what the Trump administration has been trying to do on ending that is certainly moving in the right direction.
I kind of view it as like the worst derivation of DEI.
It's not even fake marginalization.
It's just like if you are somehow in the United States and giving birth, you get the most precious thing on this planet, which is citizenship here in the United States.
It's preposterous.
But I know there's been a lot going on, a lot of everybody from the ACLU, all the horrible, evil left wing NGOs trying to do everything they can to obstruct this, whether it's Protesters or countersuits, lawsuits.
Where do we stand on that front?
And what do you think the feasibility is of the Trump administration actually being able to end that?
So I was actually at the Supreme Court when they had arguments a week and a half ago or so.
And it was, I mean, it seems so obvious to me.
I'm clearly biased, but the Solicitor General did a great job in those arguments.
I thought it was very clear that at least one of the justices has no concept of.
Much of anything, but certainly didn't understand the meaning of the word jurisdiction and that there's a difference between territorial jurisdiction and political jurisdiction.
And it is absolutely clear from what the authors of the 14th Amendment wrote and said in debate that they intended subject to the jurisdiction thereof to mean political jurisdiction.
In other words, allegiance, allegiance to the United States and not allegiance to any foreign power.
And it is preposterous to argue that illegal aliens or temporary visitors, whether they're tourists or foreign students or whatever, have any allegiance to the United States of America, to our government.
You have to be a lawful permanent resident, essentially, which is what was decided by the Supreme Court in Won Kim Arp when they said that the parents were legally domiciled and so therefore their child was an American at birth.
So, you know.
If the justices look at what the actual language of the 14th Amendment meant at the time it was written, and that is very clear, that meaning is very clear in the congressional record, then I think they have to get rid of birthright citizenship.
Now, what I think they may try to do, certainly Justice Kavanaugh made it very clear that he was looking for a way out of having to decide the constitutional question, and whether that means they toss it to Congress.
To define subject to the jurisdiction thereof or some other way, I think that's a very strong possibility.
And the Congress has had a bill called the Birthright Citizenship Act that has been introduced every Congress for at least 20 years.
And Congress should pass it.
They should have passed it years ago.
They haven't because, of course, it's Congress.
And so they don't do much.
But they certainly could pass that and define subject to the jurisdiction in the law.
That would have actually lent weight to the Solicitor General's arguments in the Supreme Court.
I think the only thing capable of getting House Republicans to do anything is the phone calls from the War Room posse, which we are all very grateful for.
And I know you guys have been really putting your shoulder behind the wheel on yet another thing that I guess congressional Republicans have not just created the problem, Failed in fixing, certainly aided and abetted.
That's mass deportation.
You obviously have the mass deportation coalition.
Can you give the audience a quick update on what you guys got going on there?
Yeah, so we released the playbook for the Mass Deportation Coalition on April 1st.
It's available online.
It's at the mass deportation coalition.org, I think it is, or mass deportations.com, either way.
And it lays out our recommendations for the Trump administration to get the deportation numbers up to a million this year so that they can ramp up even more after that in coming years.
We believe that since the president promised the largest mass deportation campaign in American history, That we want to help him deliver that.
It's absolutely critical.
After four years of the Biden invasion, we have to get these illegal aliens out of our country.
We do not want to give them amnesty.
Thank you, Maria Salazar.
We want them out of our country.
And so there are relatively easy, straightforward ways to do this, including things like the no match letters from the Social Security Administration or the IRS, which would be better for enforcement purposes.
Worksite enforcement is absolutely critical.
We have to do worksite enforcement, and we have not seen that ramping up yet.
It seems like President Trump is very familiar with the, uh, the war room show clock, timing that perfectly with, with what would have been our break, making my job easy.
Uh, we have Cleo Pascal.
We also got Brian and Kennedy, who I want to have on to give us some updates on what President Trump was just, was just talking about.
But before we get to all things Iran, Cleo, I want to bring you on the show.
You're always at the tip of the spear doing very interesting work in Chinese Communist Party infiltration and, uh, shenanigans across the globe often and, uh, you know, conveniently placed strategically located.
Ports and other very interesting military significance locations.
I'd love to get some updates on that, but also your thoughts on the meeting we saw go down between Taiwanese opposition leader and Xi Jinping, certainly an escalation.
A lot of talks about unification, the future of Taiwan, how that kind of all meshes in with what you've been working on.
So she's the president of the KMT, which, as you mentioned, is the opposition party.
And it's a party that's been known to be quite close to China.
for a very long time.
And what it's doing is it's creating fractionalization, not just within the KMT, because there are some sections of the KMT that would like to remain free of such overarching Chinese control and be put in re-education camps when the Chinese come across the street and all that sort of thing.
But it also creates fractionalization within the population itself.
So it's the kind of entropic warfare of the political warfare realm that we've been seeing before.
It's not helpful.
Which is what the Chinese are going for.
And it's combined with closing of airspaces that we're seeing in other locations and a continuation of military exercises and building up of their capacities.
They are not slowing down.
So it's among the spectrum that goes from political warfare all the way through to kinetic.
It's a strike right into the heart of the political infrastructure within Taiwan.
I'm curious your, your broader thoughts as to how what is going down in the Middle East is affecting the calculus in Beijing.
I know there was a lot of focus on sort of shakeup at the CMC, having younger, maybe more, you know, wolf warrior style leaders in there, potentially making something more aggressive likely to happen or just sort of, you know, agreeing with anything that Xi Jinping wanted, a distraction from maybe a dismal economy at home, right?
A lot of permutations, but that's sort of a big variable to now toss into this.
What's your general assessment of, you know, the United States's Significantly expanded involvement, not just from a defense industrial base, munitions, artillery, weapons perspective, but also just seems like maybe a reorientation of focusing on that region a little bit more.
How do you think that affects Xi's calculus in Taiwan?
It's a very complex scenario because you can find indicators for things that would help the U.S. position and things that would hurt the U.S. position.
So, in terms of things that would help the U.S. position, the Chinese Communist Party likes things to be predictable, and President Trump is anything but Predictable.
So, unless they feel like they've got a control over the political situation, which would mean that the U.S. wouldn't enter into conflict with Taiwan to begin with, or the kinetic situation, which is the U.S. can't, munitions are depleted or whatever, that enter into a situation in Taiwan, then it makes it harder for China to move.
Also, the U.S. is in the process of strangling some key fuel supply lines into China.
So, not only out of the Middle East, but also the Venezuela move was incredibly important.
For that.
So, those are things that might help delay a Chinese decision to go across the strait.
But another is, you know, if they think that the American population isn't going to push for anything else, if they think they have the sort of tools available to them in places like Guam, for example, to be able to cut off a U.S. response and buy some time so that the media narrative warfare campaign can take root and make it an almost fait accompli, then you've got something that would.
That would benefit China.
And also remember that the Chinese are there's talk about having to bring massive amounts across the street, how difficult that would be.
They can fly in on commercial flights large amounts of what's required.
And also the Chinese organized crime elements in key ports within Taiwan are basically controlling the ports.
So who knows what's coming into the ports anyway.
So when you're looking at assessing Chinese capabilities already in Taiwan, It's not only essential to look at that fifth column element, but also the role of Chinese organized crime in undermining Taiwan's ability to respond.
And again, the key, I think, is going to be delaying, making things go dark, creating confusion, making it harder for the U.S. political response to trigger a kinetic response that would force the Chinese to dislodge.
But that's once the decision to try to invade Taiwan is taken.
And that decision, hopefully, has been complicated.
By President Trump's forceful actions and unpredictability from a Chinese Communist Party calculations perspective.
From CNMI to Guam to Diego Garcia to all of these sort of, you know, not niche in the geopolitical sense, but niche in the traditional Western media sense, places that you've spent a lot of time.
And I think there's an extremely high and outsized ROI on, you know, investing there and securing those areas and rooting out PRC infiltration.
What would you tell the Trump administration are those little kind of, you know, edge case situations, which maybe don't catch a bunch of media headlines, but that the result or return that they would get from really deploying, whether it's resources or Political capital or just attention to these areas, they could really shore up some security and ensuring that the PRC is less likely to do something more in the kinetic spectrum in Taiwan.
There's one thing that's, uh, that's very critical at the moment.
So we've talked about the three U.S. freely associated states Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, and Marshall Islands.
So these are the, this area of the Central Pacific between, uh, Hawaii and Guam and the Philippines.
These three islands have a unique relationship with the United States.
They, um, can serve in the military at you at very high rates.
They, and they do, um, they can freely work and live in the U.S.
The U.S., um, has the responsibility to, Protect them.
It has strategic denial.
It's what allows the U.S. to safely get across the center of the Pacific in order to be able to get to the first or second island chain and to get to the Americans in Guam and the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands.
Over 100,000 Americans died during World War II to create this very unique relationship.
And these are the locations of battles like the Battle of Peleliu in Palau, for example.
Right now, I mentioned that they serve in the U.S. military at very high rates.
There's such an integrated Part of U.S. defense that not only have they allowed the U.S. to use their land to defend the U.S., including the Americans in Guam and CNMI, but also in Hawaii and the mainland, but they've used their bodies.
They've physically served in the U.S. military, they've died for the U.S.
And part of the agreement is that they're supposed to get VA services when they go back.
So if they have PTSD, for example, they should be able to get their drugs for PTSD.
Again, they're so integrated that the U.S. Postal Service is domestic U.S. mail in Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, and Marshall Islands.
So it shouldn't be complicated.
And as part of the renewal of the agreements, Compacts of Free Association, this was promised to them.
And there's funding allocated for it.
But for some completely inconceivable reason, kind of lower level people in Veterans Affairs are blocking it.
And the result is that it's such a breach of trust because you have these people.
go from, for example, the Marshall Islands.
They serve in Afghanistan.
They serve in Iraq.
They come back home in need of help.
And the U.S. has breached its contract.
And from a political warfare perspective, apart from anything else, this is a gift to the Chinese who say, look, they take your boys and girls and they send them back broken.
The U.S. doesn't care about you.
And at the same time, the Chinese are also sending medical teams into the area.
So they've got a team of at least half a dozen doctors working out of the Main hospital in Pontepec in the Federated States of Micronesia, and they are the ones serving the veterans.
So they're getting whatever information a doctor can legitimately ask for from a service member.
Where did you serve?
What are your injuries?
How can you get your care?
And why aren't you getting your care from the U.S.?
Why are we the ones giving you the care?
So, this honorable treatment of the men and women from the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, and Marshall Islands that the U.S. government promised them and is not delivering to them is.
It's low cost.
It's already, the money's already allocated.
Um, and if it's not done, it is, um, very damaging to the U.S. position across the region and is a huge opening for the sort of Chinese, uh, entry into the medical systems that can result in expanded social credit control, including denial of care to the sort of people who would otherwise be standing up to the Chinese.
We've got a few minutes before we're going to jump to break, but I don't want to spare any of the time that we have with our next guest, Brian Kennedy, who joins us now, formerly of Claremont, of all things.
You guys have really been putting out some, I think, wonderful resources, making the case for the Iran war.
You know, there's some people who have differing opinions, but I think it's important to have robust discussions about it.
And I think what Claremont and certain magazines have been putting out really is some wonderful materials.
I'd love to get your thoughts on the ceasefire.
If it actually is one, what you think the future of it looks like.
And I don't know if you were able to see President Trump's recent comments just right there in the gaggle talking about the Strait of Hormuz, obviously inextricably linked to the ceasefire.
Look, I take the president at his word that we've achieved many of our objectives, that the ceasefire is something that we hopefully can negotiate around and come to some kind of conclusion on this.
I take the president seriously when he says they can't have nuclear weapons.
Now, a lot of people don't believe they have nuclear weapons, that they didn't want nuclear weapons.
They say they wanted nuclear weapons, and the president believed them.
He has believed them for many, many years.
And so, if he believes that we have reduced their ability to build nuclear weapons, then it's time for us to leave.
Whether or not the strait can be opened soon to our satisfaction is something here that's going to need to be negotiated.
And I believe that given the team we have over there, hopefully we're going to be able to achieve that.
But we don't know whether the ceasefire will hold.
We don't really know whether the people who are that we're negotiating with actually have the authority to be negotiating.
We certainly hope they do.
But this is a country in Iran that's at war with us.
And so there will be parts, as I think the war room has done a brilliant job of articulating, there'll be people over there who will still continue to fight the war.
And they may not agree with whatever terms we come up with here tomorrow.
And so we're going to have to see.
But one hopes that the war ends.
No one wants this war.
And I can say at Claremont, there are people who, regardless of the wisdom of doing it now, certainly want the president to win.
But there are also critics of what the president's done here.
And I think we can have and should have a robust debate about those things.
And I think we are.
And I think War Room has been at the forefront of that.
Brian, if you can hang with us through the break, I've got a lot more questions for you.
As you could imagine, War Room Plus, you've got to make sure you're checking out birchgold.comslash Bannon or texting Bannon to 989898.
I think we could probably fill maybe two times the amount of War Room shows a day.
Don't Give Steve that idea, but with content about how unstable and wild the world is.
And you guys know gold has always been a hedge against that.
So check out birchgold.comslash Bannett.
More Brian Kennedy right after this short break.
Welcome back to the War Room.
Quite, I guess, prophetically named.
We still got Brian Kennedy, chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger China.
Brian, I just sort of want to toss it to you in the broadest sense.
I'm sure you heard my discussion with Cleo, how this affects the PRC calculus.
Obviously, there's a lot of developments going on, not just in the Taiwan streets, but in mainland China with the meeting between opposition leader and Xi Jinping.
I'm curious how you think the sort of various outcomes of what we're seeing going on in Iran kind of affect the PRC back home, obviously, with reporting being that they were kind of quite instrumental in helping the ceasefire even be agreed to.
But how you think this just sort of affects the broader geopolitical situation?
First of all, I think the PRC wanted that ceasefire because they want their oil contracts to be fulfilled from.
Iran, and they certainly don't want or could afford to have the global economy go into some kind of free fall if things got worse over there.
So they weren't doing this to look out for anybody but themselves.
Look, I've always looked at this problem with Iran partly in terms of China, or maybe even mostly in terms of China.
China has used Iran as a proxy against the United States for many years.
The reason the Chinese Uh, want that proxy is because they're able to use it for influence throughout the Middle East.
So, Iran's nuclear program, which is ostensibly the reason we're there, has been developed for over you know two decades with the help of communist China.
Much of that development of those nuclear weapons programs occurred in North Korea using Chinese and Russian scientists.
So, China certainly sees Iran as one of their proxies.
Venezuela was also one of their proxies.
Cuba is also one of their proxies.
I think much of what President Trump has done here is to eliminate the ability of China's proxies to harm the United States.
And so Venezuela, in my judgment, was about China.
Cuba, if we should go down that road, will be about China.
And certainly Iran, quite substantially, is due to China and their support of Iran's nuclear weapons program.
I think what President Trump has done here is signal to communist China that's not going to take place.
That we're going to do what's in our interest.
We're not going to be in endless wars.
We're not going to have an American empire that seeks to go everywhere, you know, all over the world.
But we are going to stop you, Communist China, from using your influence to harm the interests of the United States and, more importantly, the security of the United States.
So I see this as targeted as much at China as it is Iran.
And in that sense, I take quite seriously what President Trump has articulated, as I say, about their nuclear weapons.
And I'm concerned today about what communist China could do to resupply Iran during these two weeks.
The president has articulated that there'll be 50% tariffs on anybody who looks to be helping Iran during this period of time.
But we're in a delicate spot here.
And this is not going to be easy.
I don't think it's going to be quick.
I hope it is quick.
But, you know, there's a long way to go here before we see an end to this war in terms that are suitable to the United States.
Yeah, I mean, from start to finish, from cradle to grave, basically all of the domestic drone manufacturing done in Iran is aided and abetted.
It's buttressed by Chinese technology manufacturing.
And I understand what you're saying on the China front.
And I think there's no disputing that these countries have acted as proxies.
But I think to me, to help square that logic chain, I think it's incumbent that the administration really seriously then address our defense industrial base, right?
And the shortages that we're now seeing as a result of what is going on in this conflict, not just by the rearrangement.
Of forces, but by the deployment of interceptors and missiles that we're seeing, we now have really critically low levels of.
And I think that in some cases, the way that the Pentagon is approaching, kind of fixing or trying to up those numbers is just by giving massive amounts of money to the same military industrial complex giants, these defense primes that got us here in the first place.
And I don't think, I mean, in my opinion, that we've seen enough movement to deter the Chinese from, I think, viewing America as being in a place that is, from a defense industrial based perspective.
Adequately supplied to effectively deter China.
Obviously, this conflict is going on in real time, so that's something that has to play out.
It takes years to make just one submarine.
But I'm curious how you sort of view that problem as factoring into the lens of the China issue, but also the ability or the prospect of boots on the ground and how you think that would affect the calculus.
Let me go with your first point about the industrial capacity of the United States to produce these weapons.
Or our own defensive munitions.
We're not going quickly enough.
If we have defense industries today that are not working around the clock the way they did in World War II to produce these munitions, then we're making a mistake.
And the Defense Department or the Department of War is going to have to fix that immediately.
My guess is there are various parts of our military industrial complex, the way you describe it, that are working around the clock to make sure we're protected.
And we need to be.
And we need to be protected by.
You know, not merely munitions that we can use to inflict damage upon our enemies wherever they may be, but we also need defensive systems.
As I've argued, even though I'm a supporter of President Trump and supporter of his actions here, I've made the argument that if we had a national missile defense that could protect the United States, then we wouldn't be over there right now doing this.
And the president has a Golden Dome initiative that he is pursuing, but we're not pursuing it quickly enough.
Back to your question of the military industrial complex.
If we had that defensive system in place, this whole question of Iranian nuclear weapons would have been a moot point and we wouldn't have been over there.
And so let's consider that for a moment.
We don't want to go to war all over the world, but the mere fact that we don't have a national missile defense to protect us from Iranian Chinese, Russian or you know other other potential rogue actors who have nuclear weapons that may they may have gotten from the communist Chinese, should be something we're deeply concerned about.
Boots on the ground, I don't think that's a viable option.
We don't have enough boots and there's a lot of ground to cover.
So I don't see us going in there with boots on the ground.
I don't think that's been the president's plan.
Of course, there are a number of contingencies here, but let's take the president at his word that he wants to reduce their capacity to produce nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles that could potentially harm both the United States and whether people want to hear this or not, Israel.
By the way, I have a new piece out in The Federalist where I've articulated President Trump's views about this over the last 25 years, including in 2024 when he ran for president.
Even though he doesn't believe in new wars, he does have a particular view about Iran that he takes very seriously.
And he has said it 20 years ago in one of his books that I describe.
He said, Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, period.
He also said that Israel.
Again, I know much of the audience may not be supportive of Israel, but President Trump said of Israel in 2020, I guess it was 2020 exactly, he said they're an unsinkable aircraft carrier for American interests.
Meaning it wasn't about being friends with Israel.
It wasn't about, you know, he mentions nothing about our Judeo Christian heritage, whatever we mean by that.
He means strictly in strategic terms, Israel was useful for the United States.
And so we're going to do what's in our power vis a vis Iran to protect the United States first and foremost, but in a secondary way, Israel.
And again, it wasn't had any kind of friendship.
This is 2020.
So he rejects this notion that AIPAC had any influence on him back in 2020, right?
He wasn't even considering political office in 2020, but he wasn't an active candidate.
He thought strategically, and again, we can disagree about these views.
But this is what President Trump thought.
And his actions today are in pursuit of what he understands as a strategic imperative for the United States, which is to defend our interests in the Middle East and to defend, first and foremost, the American homeland.
So I think this whole calculus has to be about what does President Trump believe about this?
What has he said about this?
What does he run for office on?
2015, before he ran for president, he articulated the exact same view.
And in 2024, he said again, they could not have nuclear weapons.
And so for all the Tucker Carlson's and Alex Jones who say they've been betrayed by President Trump, they weren't listening to what he was saying.
He said even in 2024, they couldn't have nuclear weapons.
In the same paragraphs where he was describing no new wars, he was also saying they couldn't have nuclear weapons.
And so I think we should all take that in mind, that there is something important going on here in what we've done.
The president gets nothing.
Out of going after Iran politically.
This is a political loser for him.
So he's risking politically much of his support around the country by doing what he's doing.
And we can say, well, Israel is dragging him into the war.
But I also would say President Trump sees the Iranian threat in ways that many of his supporters did not fully appreciate.
And what we're seeing today is him carrying that out and trying to do so in a way that doesn't destroy the global economy and certainly doesn't destroy the U.S. economy.
But I think support for what he's doing is much more broad than we're giving him credit for.
I put that piece up on my X and Getter and Truth Social.
On X, it's Brian T. Kennedy.
On Getter and Truth Social, it's Brian T. Kennedy.
And by the way, let me plug a new show, if I can, on Real America's Voice, which is coming out on Sunday.
There's a new show called Get Real.
Uh, hosted by my old friend David DeRocher, and it's a part of the Real Clear Politics family that is going to be shown here on Real America's Voice.
And there's a special show Sunday on China that some members of the Committee on the Present Danger China are part of, discussing China myself and Steve Mosher and others.
So I would highly recommend that to the audience, and that's on Sunday at four o'clock.
Now, our next guest, Kane of Citizen Free Press, I'm sure everyone's probably favorite site here, will really only come on war rooms to talk about one thing.
So now I guess I sort of like when there's news about how the national debt is exploding, only because it means we get to get some expertise from Kane.
Kane, there's a new study from the CBO talking about how it's not just that the national debt is absurd, but basically all of our projections about them are wrong too.
And typically on the under side, always lower, they always seem to be more expensive than all the government experts tell us they're going to be.
Can you walk us through real quick?
I'm going to hold you through the break.
But what exactly the latest is in National Debt Land?
And if you're already on the right plan, they will tell you and give you peace of mind.
That's 845 War Room.
Give them a call.
While you're at it, maybe check out virtual.comslash War Room or text Band into 989898.
Give Philip Patrick and the team a call.
You know, they have a bunch of resources, always got good deals.
Going on to make sure you're checking out virtual.com/slash Bannon.
You're back in the war room.
We still got Kane with us.
Kane, I'm sorry I had to interrupt you.
I'm going to let you pick up where you left off, giving us all the updates on where we stand on the ballooning is still an understatement, but all things national debt.
We should probably just sum it all up in a minute and we should skip over it.
The story, though, that you put up that's in the stack that if people want to see it is that.
People need to be reminded that interest, just the interest on the national debt, has really exploded as interest rates have gone up, right?
So, five years ago, we were paying $300 billion a year in interest, and now we're paying over a trillion.
And that trillion is a little bit more than the defense budget, or it's right around the size of the defense budget, and it's bigger than Social Security or Medicare.
So, it's this huge number, right?
And so, it works out it's $3 billion a day.
And even worse, so that's the interest part.
What do we actually borrow every day is another.
$3 billion.
So we're borrowing, the U.S. government borrows $6 billion every day.
So you multiply six times 365 days in a year.
That's how you get a $2 trillion deficit every year.
And as you and I have talked, people should actually know, Natalie and I talk about the national debt in our private, personal phone calls.
As you and I have talked, we're bringing in $5.5 trillion in tax revenue every year, and we're spending $7.5 trillion.
So that's how you get a $2 trillion deficit.
And we certainly wish the government would pay a little bit more attention to it.
We love Scott Besant and we love President Trump, and we know he cares about the national debt.
Like, there's no doubt about it.
But, you know, the case I've been making, and I'll throw it back to you the case I've been making is just that this is a time, you know, Trump has a certain type of popularity with the base where we would support him.
I would like to see a real effort in these next three years to address the long term spending problems that are causing the national debt.
To you know, to grow this way, so that's the case.
I always try to make, and people will notice in the stack that I think if there's one issue that I really, really care about, it's debt and deficit issues.
And so, I'm trying to you know, and I'm now convincing you to be have the same neuroses that I have.
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