White House Tells Congress To STOP Talking About Deportations ft. Elaad Eliahu
Tim Cast reports on the White House directing Congress to halt deportation discussions, driven by PR concerns after Minneapolis killings and dissatisfaction with Kristi Noem's self-promotion. While Markwayne Mullin replaces Noem, the administration debates strategies between roving patrols and jail raids to meet one million annual deportees. Simultaneously, VP Vance supports military strikes against Iran despite his past isolationism, though Secretary Hegseth avoids committing to a timeline to retain strategic leverage amidst rising gas prices and recent Iraqi casualties. [Automatically generated summary]
I am Tim Cast White House, wildly the DC correspondent here for Tim Cast.
I also cover stuff at the Pentagon and then here at the White House as well.
Earlier today, we actually had a press briefing from the Pentagon that I covered.
Secretary of War Hegseth has been holding two or three of these press briefings a week from the Pentagon, trying to update the American people on what's going on in Iran right through to the 13th day.
And then when I'm not there, I hang out here in the White House.
We're actually in the press room here.
This is where Caroline does her press briefings from.
The podium is behind me.
I think it's kind of cringe when people go stand up and take pictures on there, but that's what's happening most of the day when she's obviously not here.
President has a pretty light schedule today.
8 a.m., they call it executive time.
That's what he's been up to.
I think he was just watching the briefing from the Pentagon.
And then he's also participating in a greeting with the national rodeo winners finals.
So we're going to be expecting that sometime around three.
And then I'll be departing probably to Mar-a-Lago a little bit after that, five or six.
And then I feel like a lot of the journalism really happens outside of the White House and outside of the Pentagon.
And frankly, when people are leaking a lot of the times and doing a lot of this reporting, it's people with access to grind.
So, I mean, you are looking for the most disgruntled people in DC, and those are the most likely people to talk.
So that's mostly how it goes.
But we do have a lot of opportunities to question the president, administration officials here.
The president has been extremely accessible.
He's taking questions from journalists two, three, four times a week.
Caroline's having Secretary Levitt, Secretary 11th, that is, having briefings here at least once a week.
And it was actually just yesterday when the president, not yesterday, two days ago, the president went down a line of some 20, some odd reporters taking his questions before the departure to Kentucky and Ohio, where he was visiting different centers, having a rally.
Interestingly enough, he actually visited the district of Representative Thomas Massey, which is one of the president's obviously least favorite representatives.
It's interesting stuff, you know, because we get all these scoops coming out of the White House now, obviously.
Like you said, a lot of people have access to Grind.
But with the Iran war, now you have a large contingent of the MAGA media, I would say, certainly the right-wing media broadly, who is equally as interested in collecting scoops, who's equally, I guess, disgruntled, for lack of a better word.
We saw some reporting this morning that was getting passed around a few different outlets on the right that JD Vance was actually a bulwark against this war.
They were saying, well, he's been very upset.
And that kind of explains why he's been so quiet.
But then, you know, we had reporting earlier in the week that he was the one that actually said we should just go all in on the strikes rather than like targeted strikes.
So to me, that seems like that might be a scoop that was garnered or generated from the conservative media, if I had to guess.
On the vice president, I think he has a very delicate balancing act to do over here.
We know in the past before becoming the president's vice president, the president's VP nominee and eventually the VP, he was more of an isolationist voice among Republicans.
As he became closer to the president, I feel like he's been more concerned and more worried about signaling against that.
It's good that you asked this too, because in the press briefing earlier today, Hegseth actually was asked about whether or not, you know, the VP was a voice against striking or not.
And Secretary Hegseth really said that he was completely on board.
But at the same time, you have to think, what could you really expect?
The vice president isn't going to vocally be against the president at this time.
So I do think he has been noticeably absent, though.
Those who are overactive on Twitter, like me and you, we used to see the vice president dunk on people regularly on Twitter.
He used to be very active on the website.
I don't think he's tweeted something for the past couple of weeks, which is coincidentally roughly when the strike began.
We also had some breaking news of a fueler over Iraq.
There were two of them.
One was damaged and was able to safely land in Israel.
And the other that apparently wasn't attacked, but was having some issues was fell somewhere in Iraq.
And I believe there's four or five or six service members that were killed that General Kane and Secretary of War Hegseth announced this morning.
So the casualties are really starting to add up.
Secretary Hegseth was also asked directly how many casualties there were.
He didn't give a direct answer, but I think with these additional five or six from this most recent incident where we're in the mid-teens, as those add up, that's obviously applying more pressure to the administration.
We're also seeing gas prices spike.
And I've been seeing a lot of reporting that the president has his eyes close on that.
You know, if you're familiar with a lot of the President Trump rallies of the past, he loves talking about gas.
He loves talking about low gas prices.
And just two weeks ago, he was talking about how the national average was dipping under $3, which is great.
But he hasn't been talking about it much since now that I think the national average is hitting 360.
I think he's also a message that in the future, things will be even better and gas prices will go even lower.
But we'll see how long the American people could deal with this real bump at the pump.
Yeah, I mean, look, if it's a strategic move to get it down to 260, 250 right before the midterms, and it's a genius play.
But if we're still hovering around 320, 330 by the midterms, we're cooked.
I mean, it's simple stuff like that.
And obviously, that's the calculus that they're having to run right now at the White House.
You may have seen the conversations happening online lately.
Censorship is back and it is happening everywhere.
Platforms are controlling narratives and pushing the stuff that they want us to see.
We need to fight back.
And Rumble is the only company that has stood the test of time and deserves our support.
On one side, Rumble is challenging big tech censorship.
But now on the other side, they have introduced something that will give us protection from the big banks shutting us off.
Banks could cancel our accounts and freeze our cards.
So that is why they have launched Rumble Wallet, a wallet that no one can cancel and a wallet that supporters can use to instantly tip creators like us here at Timcast without any middleman taking cuts.
With Rumble Wallet, you control your money.
Not a bank, not a government, not a tech company.
Not even Rumble can touch it.
It's yours, only yours, yours to protect your future and family.
You can buy and save digital assets like Bitcoin, Tether Gold, and the new USAT.
Tether's U.S. regulated stablecoin in one place.
Tether Gold is real gold on the blockchain with ownership of physical gold bars.
USAT keeps your money steady against inflation.
No banks needed.
It is not only a wallet to buy and save, but it also allows you to support your favorite creators by easily tipping them with the click of a button.
There will be no fees when you tip this channel or others, and this channel will instantly receive the tip.
Unlike other platforms where we have to wait for payouts, we hate that.
We hate waiting.
Support my show, this show, and any other show here at Timcast and any other creator by clicking the tip button on our Rumble channels.
It is wallet.rumble.com.
Again, download the Rumble Wallet today, open an account, and step away from the big banks for good.
Wallet.rumble.com or search Rumble wallet in the app store.
But what's interesting is we saw headlines again earlier this week.
Axios had a scoop that, you know, the White House had told Congress to just stop talking about mass deportations.
Another outlet had picked up a similar sort of headline.
Has there been any questions posited towards the administration regarding this?
Because I mean, obviously, this is kind of the issue for MAGA.
I think MAGA has the bandwidth to withstand any sort of deviation from the core messaging, like the Iran war.
I think everyone's like, still, as long as it delivers on domestic policy, it is what it is.
Deportation seems to be the one thing that I think people would really sour on the administration over if that were to be sort of tampered down a bit.
I think ever since we saw the killing of these two agitators in Minneapolis, Renee Goode and Alex Predi, I believe, was the second.
I think that's really iced the president because I think he's become more concerned about the PR of all of this.
We're obviously seeing that playing out with DHS Secretary, former DHS Secretary Christine Noam being swapped out.
I think people also believe that she was in the position in a very self-aggrandizing manner.
She spent something like 200 some odd million dollars on advertisements bolstering herself and not as much the DHS and ICE message.
There's also questions on whether or not Corin Lumandowski, who was also working with former Secretary Noam, was having some bad dealings or whatnot.
So there are serious questions around that.
And there's also reporting that the president's very frustrated with that.
But I think now that they are putting in Mark Wayne Mullen, former senator, I believe from Missouri, his confirmation will be coming up sometime next week.
I do think that shows a change in gear.
I think the president is struggling with the PR surrounding immigration.
I think there's a spectrum of how it works.
You know, Americans are very supportive of deporting illegal aliens who have gotten here in the past four years and have criminal records.
I think that's something in the high 70s or 80s.
But then once you go to, you know, people who have been here for 30 years, have no criminal record and have a family, less Americans are sympathetic to that.
And they were struggling for a while with the message of who's the priority and how are we going to go after them?
Are we going to have roving bands of different border patrol agents with Gregory Bravovino, who was also demoted, by the way?
Or are we going to go more of the Tom Homan route, which really likes to collaborate with different cities?
They like to get into the jails.
They like to do early and late early morning and late evening raids.
So it's just a different strategy.
But how that pans out in a number of illegal immigrants detained is what's really in flux.
You know, they're not looking to do large workplace raids anymore, as I understand.
And just the methods that Homan, who has a ton of experience, Porbazar Homan, has a ton of experience doing here.
Will that be able to get to the promise of 1 million deportees a year?
You know, I'm not sure.
And, you know, it's actually a very important question.
Maybe the next time I get an opportunity with Press Secretary Caroline or the president himself, how close are you to reaching the goal of 1 million illegal supporters a year?
So the administration is they've had varied responses to this.
And I think they're struggling with messages when it comes to this because one day the president says, oh, we're going to be ending this in a couple of days.
Other times they said four or five weeks.
Secretary of War Hegseth hasn't given the most clear outline.
He's just saying that our troops are being extremely successful in decimating the Iranian military, navy, and so on.
He's really up there bragging about our military successes, but they haven't really explained a clear timeline for when they want to wind this down.
Early on, they were saying four or five weeks.
We're currently a little less than two weeks in.
So we'll see how this will play out.
But I think the concern is they don't want to give a specific timeline and then have to do more time.
And then also if a timeline is given, you'd have to imagine that the Iranian regime is also starting to understand that timeline.
So if I know you're going to pull out in a month, then I only need to last another month.
So I think the president's not trying to give away all the strategic choices that they have.
They're also doing this in regards to keeping the boots on the ground option open.
Although I don't think they ultimately plan to.
I think they'd like to use that as leverage against the regime right now to have them at least think that's an option.
Just this one last thing on boots on the ground, too.
Boots on the ground is such a loaded and charged phrase.
When we say boots on the ground, as I understand, we come to think of large-scale operations a la Iraq and in a nation-building capacity or in Vietnam or something like that.
I believe we currently have some special operations forces on the ground.
You'd have to assume Israel had some sort of special operations people on the ground as well that we're not hearing about.
But I think we get a little bit too hung up on that phrase in particular.
And I mean, obviously the American people do have some concern over this, though, with the nation-building nightmares that we've been through in the past.
So there are a lot of options on the table, some better than others, but the president and his administration are trying to keep them all open.