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Aug. 7, 2025 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr
46:49
Russia Hoaxers Must Face Justice, Interview with The Federalist's Sean Davis | TRIGGERED Ep.265
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Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Trigger.
Today we'll be back with Sean Davis over at the Federalist, who is the tip of the spear in exposing all of the corruption inside the deep state.
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Guys, joining me now, founder of the Federalist, Sean Davis.
Sean, great to have you back, man.
How you doing?
I'm doing great.
Great to be here.
Thank you for having me.
Well, obviously a lot's gone on since we last spoke, but Sean, you know, given the declassified documents from DNI Tulsi Gabbard, which show that the Obama administration officially, you know, basically, or even certainly officials within, manufactured intelligence.
What do you see as the most damning piece of all of that information revealed and why?
Yeah, I think the most damning piece of info came out in what Gabbard declassified, which was this House Intel oversight report on how the Intel Committee Community Assessment of 16 and 17 came out.
And if you'll recall, this was the document that claimed that Russia had interfered in the election because it wanted to steal the election from Hillary Clinton and wanted Trump to win.
We know that was false.
But there was a particular piece of information in there about some interactions that career intel experts had with John Brennan, who was the head of the CIA at the time.
And they were telling him, hey, this steel dossier thing that you're wanting to throw in the ICA, it's a bunch of garbage.
We don't know any of the sourcing.
The guy who put it together is sketchy.
None of it makes any sense.
We cannot put that in here.
And then Brennan looked at one of them who had objected to this and said, yes, but it rings true, doesn't it?
Put it in there.
That is such a damning piece of evidence that they were engaging in a conspiracy to defraud the country from the very beginning.
So, Sean, a presidential daily brief from December 2016 assessed that Russia was probably not trying to influence the election by using cyber means.
How significant is it that that information was seemingly suppressed or contradicted abruptly once Obama got involved?
I mean, we've all said, hey, it all starts with Obama.
Trump was the one saying, hey, Obama's spying on me.
People went outraged, but it seems like it's accurate.
I think that was a huge piece of information, and we didn't really know about that until the last week or so when Gabbard released it.
We learned that Obama and Trump, by the way, who had just been elected president, were going to be informed by this presidential daily brief that Russia's meddling activities, its cyber activities, hadn't done anything.
And had that been released, had that been shown to Obama and Trump, it would have blown up their entire Russia collusion hoax before they could even get it off the ground.
So that was a huge piece of information.
And I think it showed the guilt of mind that they had at the time to want to suppress that so that they could replace it with this completely bogus alternative intel explanation for what happened.
Yeah, I guess, and people really forget, but we should all remember, the House intelligence investigation, the Mueller investigation, the original FBI investigation, even the Senate Intel investigation all found no collusion.
Does this all really expose just how much of an overclassification problem our government has, that they can kind of get away with that, that all these things can say no, but one person can just override it and just put out a totally different narrative that's convenient to their politics?
Yeah, it's a huge problem.
And in fact, with this ICA, the one that we know at its core, said there wasn't any sort of Russian meddling for Trump or for Hillary, Brennan and Clapper, they actually hid a whole bunch of stuff in a super secret version of it.
They had the version that they gave to Congress and the public, which had been sanitized.
It did not include the steel dossier.
It didn't cite to it.
But then they had the secret version that they gave to top intel officials that they gave to Obama that they chose to leak from.
That thing had all the steel dossier nonsense in it.
So they go to Congress and they lie about it, knowing that they've covered their own lies by classifying and making secret what they were actually doing.
And again, it shows that this wasn't just a mistake that people made because they had bad assumptions or bad intel.
They were cooking the books from the beginning, and then they were doing everything they could to cover their tracks, which is just perfect evidence of a guilty mind and a desire to defraud and lie to the American public.
Yeah, I mean, John Brennan and others pushed the fake dossier.
In terms of actual criminality, what statutes are we looking at here for them?
I don't have the exact U.S. code numbers off the top of my head, but I think we're looking at a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. And I think it's Obama has some interesting choices to make.
I know a lot of people are calling for Obama to be arrested and to be charged, and I totally understand that.
You know, being a president is different than not being a president.
You are allowed to do certain things as president.
You can't do all the things.
You don't have total immunity.
So Obama kind of has to make this decision.
Do I want to go out there and be Colonel Jessup from a few good men and say, Yeah, you're darn right.
I ordered the code red.
Does he want to take responsibility for all of it and say, Yes, I was directing it from the beginning.
I was the one who's calling the shots come at me.
Or because he was the one who was ordering it, he could say, Look, I was assuming they were going to do the right thing.
When I told him to do a report, I assumed they meant that they had to tell me the truth.
And I was defrauded by these people.
I was a victim of this.
I wonder if that's a road he'll want to go down to completely eliminate or reduce the chance that he ends up getting charged with crimes for his role in the Russia collusion hoax.
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of interesting.
If it's one of those where it's an either-or, right?
You may not be able to get them all.
I actually, I don't know which is worse.
Which do you think?
Who would you rather see prosecuted?
The Brennans and the Clappers of the world or the Obamas?
Because I actually may lean towards the former if I had to choose.
Oh, it's not a hard question for me.
It's the Brenners and the Clappers and the Comeys.
Like, they were the guys going through doing the day-to-day mechanics of this.
They were the ones leaking to the press.
It was Comey who hatched this idea to go do a completely bogus briefing of Trump on January 6th, 2017, just so he could go and leak it.
He was the one who wanted to put Steele dossier in so he could go leak it.
I think these guys were the real crooks.
Now, I don't think Obama is some like doe-eyed, innocent babe in the woods.
I think that guy's a crook too.
But the ones I really think deserve to be in prison for what they did for years are Comey and Clapper and Brennan.
So, how do these declassified documents reshape the public's understanding of the intelligence community's role and potential politicization during that period?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
And I think to fully reshape the public's understanding of it, you have to have some sort of media cooperation in it.
The reason so many people think Russia stole the election for Trump is because the corrupt corporate media lied about it for years and years and years.
They published stuff that wasn't true.
They took anything that Adam Schiff said and they were happy to trumpet it, even if it were lies.
And then they suppressed stuff from people like me, from my organization, the Federalists.
And so, what you're seeing right now with all these massive blockbuster revelations is kind of the same thing.
You have the media pretending it doesn't exist, and then you have organizations like mine out there screaming to the hilltops, hey, you've got to pay attention to this stuff.
And so, I think it's important as we go forward to remember that the corrupt corporate media was a key co-conspirator in this attempt to defraud the country.
Clapper and Comey and Brennan couldn't have done it without the willing, deliberate participation of the media.
And at some point, I think the people in the media who were part of this, they need to be held to account as well.
So, how do you do that?
You know, what would the mechanisms be?
Because I agree with you.
I mean, you know, when my father first said the media is the enemy of the people, this was back when I was a, I too was a, you know, a doe-eyed kid, a babe in the woods.
I was like, well, it's, you know, they're certainly, you know, lopsided.
They're certainly not on our side.
They're certainly biased, but are they really?
But honestly, 10 years later, you look back and be like, oh, it's not even closed.
Of course, I mean, they're as bad, but they have the protections of, oh, we were just reporting what we were told.
You know, it could have been all nonsense.
And again, if they were told something else that was towards my father's end, they would have just not reported it.
But how would you actually go about doing that to create some sort of accountability within the media other than just their dismal viewership and ratings?
Right.
Well, I think you have to go back to the conspiracy angle.
And it's worth remembering the First Amendment is really, really important.
It's vital to having a free functioning republic.
You can't just have the government go crack down on reporters because they say things the government doesn't like.
But at the same time, it's not a total immunity card.
It's not a get out of jail free card.
You cannot, as a reporter, go and just blithely lie about someone in ways that destroy their reputation and then claim, oh, no, I'm not responsible.
This person told me that was true.
And, you know, so it's that guy.
He's the problem.
At some point, you have a responsibility, and courts understand this.
You have a responsibility to do basic fact-checking.
So I think if they were part of an active and willing conspiracy to defraud the people, I'm not sure that they have all that much protection in the same way that if you were to go out and decide, oh, I'm going to destroy this person and I'm just going to have a bunch of people feed them lies and then I'll have my hands clean.
That's not really how it works.
So do you think that's criminal or do you think that's more penal financially?
Meaning, you saw what the news agencies, the various sort of three-letter big three news agencies did.
They changed the trans script of the Kamala Harris interviews to try to make it seem like she wasn't an imbecile.
They did those things.
My father's been winning those cases and settling for tens of millions of dollars because they essentially tried to steal an election.
Again, this is obviously significantly worse.
So do you think that's mostly financial or do you think there's actually statutory criminality involved?
I think there's probably some criminal exposure there.
Let's take the leak about the Flynn call with Kisley Act, this thing that they used to kickstart their Logan Act tribunal, which was totally absurd and bogus.
That transcript, that call, which we know they lied about, by the way, David Ignatius lied about it.
That was a classified, the call was classified.
So its mere existence was classified.
The contents of the call were classified.
The transcript was classified.
That was all leaked.
And if you're a reporter, it is one thing to passively receive information.
It's another thing if you are actively searching and trying to get classified information.
You're not allowed to do that.
Again, that's a conspiracy there.
If you're trying to get someone to break the law by giving you things you know you're not supposed to have, I think that is an angle that's worth exploring given the amount of classified info that was leaked and also lied about and deceptively reported.
Yeah, so from the federalist perspective, what role did that mainstream media play in amplifying the Russia collusion narrative?
I mean, they'll never learn their lesson, but at least their influence and credibility is shot to some extent, isn't it?
It is.
It's definitely worse than it was, but they're not powerless.
I mean, I think we probably delude ourselves on the right when we tell ourselves, oh, they're totally discredited.
What they do doesn't matter.
No, what they do really does matter.
They have a massive, massive soapbox.
If you look at just ABC and NBC and CBS, these guys have control of the public airwaves.
The broadcast power is massive.
And so I look at the media as they were really the doctor who injected the poison into patient zero.
They took what someone had gave them in this completely bad serum and they injected it into the bloodstream of the public.
I think CNN was probably guiltier than anyone.
But this entire conspiracy, this entire collusion hoax could not have been possible without the willing cooperation of a corrupt media.
So how do you think history will cover the Russia hoax in time?
Will they ever get it right?
Will they ever be even remotely intellectually honest about everything that went on?
Not if they can help it.
I look at a lot of the stuff with AI and I see that AI is being trained on Wikipedia and the New York Times and Reddit and CNN.
And I tend to think, you know, in 20 or 30 years, who's going to be writing our history books?
Is it people who lived through the history or is it going to be an algorithm that some blue-haired lefty freak wrote to make sure that only good left-wing sources are used to write the history books?
I mean, just yesterday, I was looking through the Wikipedia entry on the steel dossier, and it still claims that it was never used in the ICA.
I mean, we have black and white documentary, quote-for-quote, proof that it was in, and yet Wikipedia is lying about it.
And Wikipedia is a major source of all these AI engines.
So I'm kind of bearish on how history will cover this because I know how desperate the left is to control the narrative.
Because when you can control the narrative, you can control the history and You can control what people believe about something forever.
Yeah, no, I mean, that strikes me as a big one.
You sort of see the two big sort of tech races going on right now are crypto and AI.
I'd say crypto probably leans, frankly, probably leans mostly libertarian, but definitely probably leans a little bit right.
The left's fine with the conventional systems because it's never failed them.
But AI definitely leans very heavy left.
And I imagine given the advances we're seeing, given the deep fakes, given the way it is, if we don't sort of get involved in the AI race from the right or at least a center position, we're going to be propagandized without even knowing it.
We'll just assume some of this stuff is true because they're not going to attack it as ridiculously as CNN will publish everything that Adam Schiff says and therefore it must be the gospel.
I mean, they will very subtly manipulate people to believing whatever it is that they will with whatever trigger points over time.
They'll do it so subtly you won't even know it's happening.
And that will be how history is written.
How do we combat that?
Yeah, I think we actually have to change on the right how we view media.
So I think conservatives and a lot of the wealthy people who help fund races and campaigns, they tend to look at politics as an every other year kind of thing, an even year kind of thing.
I want to fund good candidates.
We'll get them into office.
That's what's important.
What the left has understood and one way they've been able to dominate culture is they understand it's a long game and you have to really invest in infrastructure.
And so they don't just have CNN or MSNBC or the New York Times.
They have scores and scores of left-wing outlets.
They have media matters.
They have fake local papers in every state.
They understand the stakes that if you can control the information, you can control the outcome.
And I wish our side would really understand the importance of investing in media.
It's the same thing, if you're a military, is investing in air superiority.
And we all know that you're not winning on the ground unless you can control the air.
Well, the left controls the air.
And so I think if we want to engage in this, if you want to win the AI war, it's not enough just to be engaged in the AI aspect itself.
You have to be engaged in determining and creating the things that you want AI to feed on.
And I just don't think the right has done a good job of that.
So obviously, yo, you're one of the guys doing that.
The Federalist is great.
You guys have been awesome on that.
I think Breitbart does a good job of that.
But after that, it falls off really quickly.
How do you encourage that?
A lot of people look at media today.
It's not the easiest business to make a buck in.
There's probably easier ways.
If you're on our side of the equation, there's sort of the natural censorship complex and the constant attacks.
How do we actually do that?
How do you create enough sort of counterculture zeitgeist to be able to combat some of this stuff to make sure that both sides are actually heard in the long run?
Especially, again, once you have the AI engine sort of amplifying one side far more than the other.
Yeah.
So DC buzzword for that would be like you need a belt and suspenders approach.
You need to just throw everything at it.
The right should be building up podcasts and print and broadcast and cable news and online and do all of it.
I think of more of a shotgun approach.
I joke when I shoot that I believe in accuracy through volume.
That's, I think, what we actually need on the right is we need people throwing everything at it and see what works.
It's almost like a venture capital approach to philanthropy because I do think it has to be viewed as a political philanthropic goal.
You need to throw everything you can at it and just see what works over time as opposed to thinking, oh, I've done this one thing with this one outlet.
I'm good.
We have to throw everything at the wall because the future of civilization is at stake here.
Yeah, no, it really is.
And it's scary.
You know, obviously, there are AI engines that aren't going to be as biased as others.
What do you see as the ones that are actually sort of being intellectually honest?
I mean, some of the big players that I've invested in XAI, we're supporting that.
I sort of like what Elon's done for free speech on all of these things.
And I think that's important.
There's others that are bigger that have a head start.
And there's a notion that once you sort of get that air superiority in AI, no different than America versus China, we have to build a power plant so that we can compete because once you lose that race, you get to a point where there's no coming back.
It sort of feels like that way within the AI engines in the United States.
What are some of the other ones that you see that viewers, you're going to be using AI?
You're going to have to use it.
But you may want to throw your money behind the ones that are at least intellectually honest, not the ones that are, they may even be fine today, but you know are going to be slowly shifting that narrative over.
Are you familiar enough with that to give people an idea?
Because again, I think if they're going to subscribe to some, they should probably subscribe to the ones that at least are going to be intellectually honest and not tell you that the founding fathers were trans women of color.
Yeah, it's a great point.
I'm definitely not an AI expert, certainly not a crypto expert.
I can only speak to my experience.
I tend to use Grok, which is the ex-Twitter AI.
And it's interesting.
For years and years and years, I used Google.
And I look back to like the early 2000s, mid-2000s as the golden era of Google.
You could find anything on the internet.
It didn't matter how obscure within like five minutes, you could find it.
Now I can't find stuff that I wrote on the site I publish with exact headlines and quotes on the first 10 pages of Google.
So I've actually started using Grok almost as my like Google substitute.
And it's a little clunky, but I've had pretty good luck with it.
But even then, it still makes mistakes because with AI, it's garbage in, garbage out.
With a large language model, it only knows what it's been fed.
And so I think it's as important to have the AI engine be good as it is to have the AI engine with a good diet of good, solid information.
Yeah, I just Grok and perplexity, you know, sort of as those, but you're right.
I mean, and the Google analogy is sort of a perfect one, right?
It started off fairly innocent and it was an effective tool, but no different than where I see some of these engines perhaps going.
Google was probably the worst offender in the spread of misinformation, disinformation, censorship, subversion, certainly over the last decade.
So it was around before it started off well, but then it was manipulated to be basically a left-wing narrative push.
AI seems to be the next generation of that, isn't it?
Oh, absolutely.
And you think about the things you used to have to do.
You wanted to learn something.
You maybe wanted to put together a plan for something.
And you'd go to Google and you would do your research and it would take a long time.
You'd hit 50 or 100 different sites.
You'd kind of have to like collate the information in your head.
AI, in a world where AI is neutral and really only synthesizes information as opposed to trying to tell you what to think.
I mean, that drastically reduces the amount of time and effort and resources it takes there.
It's a potentially earth-shattering, earth-changing tool, but only if it's used to actually give you good information as opposed to being used to indoctrinate you or hide the truth from you or prevent you from knowing things that AI or its engineers think are icky that you shouldn't know.
Yeah, exactly.
Because it's amazing.
I mean, like I said, until sort of AI became a big thing in the last couple of years, Google was sort of who I rallied against the hardest.
Cause again, you're right.
You could find anything you wanted when it came out.
And it wasn't always the cleanest, wasn't always this, but it then went so crazy, you know, you couldn't find anything.
If I looked up myself, it'd be like, you know, 97 pages of CNN, nothing of Fox.
And it was like, man, it was like, you know, maybe the information's out there, but unless you had unlimited time, unlimited capacity, you're never going to get far enough to where you're showing, you know, where you're seeing even the other perspective even remotely.
Yeah.
And it's crazy.
It's part of it.
I saw some story from Google during their antitrust suit where they were deliberately making the engine worse because you had to spend more time on it.
And if you spent more time on it, they could sell you more ads.
But I've gone on there recently and you get page after page of just current news results from its selected friends from like the last week.
Well, when I'm Googling stuff, I'm generally not looking for stuff that was in the news last week.
I'm trying to find something that's 10 or 15 years old.
I'm trying to find a particular document.
And so it's not even so much that it's biased, although it is.
It's that it's just bad.
It's just a bad tool.
It's like a screwdriver where somehow the shape on the head has been stripped out and all you're doing is frustrating yourself and wasting your time every time you use it.
It's maddening.
You know, it's pretty crazy.
Sean, I'd love to get your take on some of the stuff over the last weekend.
We saw the trade deal get done with the EU.
We saw the GDP numbers, 3% growth and 2% inflation.
I mean, what a reversal from the prior administration.
And yet, all the haters still out there saying, oh, it's failing.
I mean, they're still running the opposite of narrative of what the actual facts from the government.
Meaning, these are not, I wouldn't say these are MAGA bureaucrats.
These are the agencies that run numbers and crunch and are probably still very politically motivated towards the other side.
Do you see people feeling that and seeing through it?
Or are they going to still be biased by what's out there at this point?
I think people are seeing through it, but I'm reminded of what happened in Trump's first administration when he passed those first tax cuts.
There was a monster tax cut.
It was great for the economy.
It saved everyone a ton of money that they weren't shipping to a corrupt government.
And yet the media spent a year doing a campaign of calling them tax increases.
And I don't remember who it was.
It was some dummy left-wing journal who a year later found this poll and was saying, you know, isn't it crazy?
This poll says a majority of people think their taxes were raised by Trump.
Isn't that funny?
And he thought it was really cute.
And he thought he was.
It was like 90-something percent of Americans, right?
They always do that.
Only big corporations are getting it.
Only the billionaires are getting it.
But the reality is the most, the people who got the most, you know, let's call it marginal benefit were actually working class Americans.
And something like 93% or something like that, people benefited from these things.
And yet you wouldn't know it.
You'd think that only the billionaires got anything out of it.
And everyone else was settled with the savings that the billionaires got.
Right.
Yeah.
So the media definitely still has the power to lie and shape opinion.
But deep down, when it comes to the economy, people know when it's good and when it's bad.
They just do.
You can feel it.
You can see it.
You see it in the housing prices.
You see it in whether commercial real estate is moving or not.
And everyone I talk to right now, and this is reflected in the data, says, yeah, things are starting to move.
Things are starting to move.
And I think the last thing right now that is waiting, that's kind of holding us back are interest rates.
That's what's stopping any real movement in commercial and residential real estate now is, you know, on the commercial side, no one wants to pay 6.5% on a commercial real estate loan.
They're kind of one.
You can't.
Yeah, yeah.
You can't afford it.
And so properties are sitting in it.
The same thing is happening in residential real estate.
So although the economy is improving, people have more money.
The last thing that needs to change are interest rates.
And once those are brought down, I think this economy is going to fly.
Yeah.
So talk about that a little bit.
It was a week ago or so, Fed Chairman Powell basically left interest rates unchanged.
But right before the election, when it could possibly influence the election and sort of bolster the economy, he cut interest rates.
But inflation at the time was rampant.
So inflation is sort of the corollary to interest rates.
If inflation is going out of control, you raise rates, lower inflation.
Inflation's lower, but they haven't lowered rates commensurately.
Now you're leaving them the same, not doing anything.
I mean, at this point, there could be no mistaking, frankly, that it's political.
You even had two of the people on the Federal Reserve Board vote against Powell.
I mean, those guys almost always vote unanimously one way or the other, but always together.
How politicized has that gotten?
And what does that mean to the American people?
Because it seems like hundreds of billions of dollars and frankly, standard of living is going to be affected by trying to play this game, screw with Trump, don't let the economy get going.
I guess maybe they'll move after midterms when they can try to weaponize it and try to get control of the House or the Senate or whatever it may be.
How political is it at this point?
Oh, I think at least from Powell, just talking about him personally, I think it's absolutely political.
You had the guy cutting rates like crazy, even though inflation was a lot higher.
And you have to be careful about cutting rates when there's inflation because it can lead to more and more of it.
We don't really have much right now.
Import prices are actually down year over year, in spite of those awful tariffs that we were warned about.
Import Prices are down, inflation is way down, and yet you have Powell just saying, no, we can't cut rates.
I think what's happening right now is there's a concerted effort given how close the margins are in the House.
I think a lot of people in government who are left-wingers, I think the media, I think they're just trying to get to next November and hope that they can get maybe a one-seat margin.
Then they can grind everything to a halt again.
They can impeach Trump again, and then they'll ride that wave to a presidential victory in 28.
I think it is entirely political sabotage.
Now, we could get into the whole issue of whether like central banking and fiat currency is even the right thing to do.
I obviously don't think it is, but the genie's probably out of the bottle on that globally.
Like, this is what you end up with when you have a central banking system running your global monetary supply: is you have people who are political actors making political decisions, not making good financial economic decisions for the people they're supposed to be helping.
Yeah, I mean, does any of that change?
I mean, listen, I think probably anyone in the comment section right now is probably shouting and screaming, end the Fed.
You know, it may not be realistic, but do things like crypto and these things give you a little bit of that hedge against the inflationary powers that those create, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, what are your thoughts on that as it relates to the future?
And, you know, I'm not talking CBDCs, you know, central bank digital currencies, because I think those would be weaponized perhaps worse than anything we could imagine.
And my father was very clear about not having that, certainly not in the crypto bill, you know, et cetera.
But where do you think that goes that we could sort of create some of the independence that we need from these politicized actors?
Yeah, I do think it's possible.
And I think crypto is a valuable tool for kind of getting away from the model of central bank currency management.
But I will say, I'm not a smart guy on crypto.
I often feel way too dumb to fully understand it.
But the thing about the dollar is, and about hard currency, even if it's not backed by anything real, that's kind of been the basis of civilization for hundreds and thousands of years.
I think it's going to take a long time.
I think that's going to be a hard thing to get away from.
And so while I absolutely think crypto is an amazing tool for helping us to decouple from the tyranny of central banking, I don't see it as a deliverer or as something that's going to fix the problem in a year or 10 years or even 100 years.
But again, when it comes to this stuff, it's not my forte.
I'm not an expert on it.
So take everything I say with a gigantic grain of salt.
I am not an investment advisor.
Don't listen to anything that I said.
Sean, I'd love to get your take on some of the things.
My father's been sort of ending war after war after war.
I was with him last weekend in Scotland and he was taking calls, again, just in the background, not involved, but just there.
The prime minister of Thailand calls and the prime minister of Cambodia calls and he basically used America's economic might, threatening, hey, we're not just not going to do a trade deal with you guys and we'll put your economy in the crapper if you guys don't get together and figure it out.
And lo and behold, it happens.
You saw the same thing in Rwanda.
Does he ever get credit for those things?
Because it's like, I don't watch much conventional news anymore because, frankly, both sides, I think, are so screwed up that it doesn't really matter.
But you don't see anyone actually talking about it.
Before you just let them fight till they die, who cares?
Doesn't matter.
I mean, he's saving lives.
Does he ever get credit for that or not?
No, no, of course he doesn't because it would go against the narrative that's being fed to people.
I mean, he just had this massive South Korea trade deal as well.
I think something like $350 billion had got to buy from us.
It's a huge deal.
And it's interesting.
People, they see Donald Trump as a president and they remember him on The Apprentice.
It's kind of how he got to be this major global household name.
But the guy's medium, you know, Michelangelo used paint.
Donald Trump has been doing deals his whole career.
The guy clearly loves deals.
He loves making deals.
And it's one of those things that kind of gets forgotten in the day-to-day conversation because we get so lost in politics, this and talking points that the dude is a legendary deal maker.
It's kind of amazing.
And, you know, other people have hobbies.
I think his hobby is just like getting deals done.
I personally have 100%.
Well, and it was funny.
You're watching those things.
You see, I was there.
I was back when they were just sort of with the press and whatever it is in the background.
But I'm watching him do the trade deal with the EU, the largest trade deal ever accomplished.
And it's like, why was no one else doing these things before?
So, you know, they had tariffs on us.
We, you know, even, and honestly, mostly the conservatives, they've been bitching about free trade, free trade, free trade for years, but it was never free trade.
These people had tariffs on our goods.
You couldn't send American cars there.
It was cost perheaded.
And if just to level the playing field, why did no one ever do this before?
Why did no one even think to do it before or ever try?
I think it's a total lack of imagination that comes from spending your life in politics.
You just get so used to these dogmas and mantras you've heard, free trade this and free trade that.
In theory, I love free trade.
Sounds amazing.
We have no frictions.
There's no fees.
Everyone just kind of buys stuff at what it costs.
And, you know, in the long term, it works out great.
The idea that we have anything approximating free trade anywhere in the world right now is insane.
If you think we have free trade, that's nonsense.
I mean, an example I love to use is timber in Canada.
So we have hardly any milling capacity in this country anymore because Canada deliberately went about destroying our timber industry.
They dumped below-cost timber into the U.S., knowing that we couldn't harvest it and mill it at the same cost.
Over time, that leads to mills evaporating because they can't make it work.
And then ta-da, overnight, Canada has a monopoly on lumber and timber that they can then use to gouge us.
That's not free trade.
And you can replicate that.
You can find example after example in hundreds of countries doing the same thing to us.
And all it took was someone saying, you know what, this is a load of crap.
We probably shouldn't do this anymore.
We should just go in and renegotiate stuff so our people aren't getting screwed.
And that was seen as revolutionary.
So what does that tell you about the state of politics before Trump came along?
No, it's wild, right?
Because you see it, like, but you're talking about free trade, but it does not exist.
They're trying to tell you that it does.
It's like, well, how does it exist if we know the numbers?
Or they massage the numbers.
Meaning, what was the great one, I guess, for Wisconsin was hit hard with this one because of the Canadian dairy stuff.
No, there's no tariff on American dairy going into Canada because it's like 7% for the, literally, I think it was like 7% or something, relatively low, but still a tariff, but on the first carton of milk or whatever it is.
So it's like, you know, you send one case of milk over, that's 7%.
But every case after that, it was like 30%.
So it looked optically like, no, no, no, no, it's only 7%.
It's like, yeah, but who sends one case of milk over there?
It doesn't work that way.
So the reality was a 30% tariff.
You destroy American dairy workers.
You do this for the benefit of Canada.
And again, it's just shocking to me.
And I don't have a lot of respect for too many of the politicians out there.
But again, that it went on for so long that no one thought to call it out.
You know, there's a couple of guys that are smart enough to probably know the difference.
Why maintain that status quo?
Why not do anything?
Why does it take Trump after 50 years of being taking advantage of, destroying our middle class, shipping our, you know, our only export was frankly the American dream that we sent to every other country other than ourselves?
Again, I still just don't understand how it got that way.
And how do we prevent that from coming back after Trump and just going back to the status quo?
Well, yeah, it never got changed because a bunch of people who were in charge of everything were getting rich off of it.
A bunch of people got filthy, stinking rich, hollowing out the American class, offshoring their jobs, getting rid of our manufacturing capacity.
A lot of bankers and a lot of lawyers and a lot of people who work in those areas got filthy rich.
That's why nothing was ever done about it.
It's actually a major reason why groups you had like the chamber seem to hate Trump because he's going after the golden goose that they were using to fleece the American people.
So I think the thing that has to change is number one, people had to know that it could be changed.
We were kind of like set in this soft despotism of just assuming this was how things had to be for 50 years because that's how they always were.
And sometimes it's just the fact that seeing it doesn't have to be that way that helps people to understand that they can demand more.
So I think that's the most important thing.
Trump has made people realize, hey, all it takes is someone who actually cares about you to go and change these things.
You don't actually have to sit and take it anymore.
Yeah, it's amazing.
No one ever used sort of the potential of America's economic might.
They're like, why would they do this?
It's like, well, because if we stop buying from you, like your economy is over.
I mean, we are consumers.
We have wealth.
We have this.
We have that.
If we stop buying from you, like you're actually forced to come to the table and no one bothered to ever exercise that might.
It's like being a pro football player playing a Pee Wee football team and like shackling your legs together, shackling your arms together, and wondering how is it possible that we're not winning.
It's like, it's crazy to me.
Well, yeah, and I'll use Canada as an example again because there was so much rhetoric going back and forth between the U.S. and Canada.
And you had people saying, well, oh, this is, you can't drop stuff on Canada.
They're a major trading partner and we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot.
But when you actually looked at the balance of the trade, they are so much more dependent upon us.
The things that we buy from them are so much of a higher percentage of their total economy than anything we buy from them.
And yet, for some reason, we had convinced ourselves over years, oh, we can't do anything.
We can't do anything to offset all the massive subsidies they're illegally using to preference their products because that might hurt us a little.
And it was all nonsense from the beginning.
Yeah.
Well, Sean, I really appreciate it.
Thanks for coming back.
I'm sure we'll be talking again soon as more insanity ensues.
But guys, check out Sean Davis over on X and Truth and check out the Federalist, one of the guys doing great work.
And again, to get all that information out there, you know, another one of those guys you should follow and share so we combat the insanity that's out there.
So, Sean, thanks all, as always, for being here, man.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you, sir.
Be well.
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