The U.S. is withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, torching the sole foreign policy achievement of Barack Obama and relegating Mr. Obama’s entire legacy to the dustbin of history. Then, Antipope Rihanna shows up in a bedazzled cassock and mitre to last night’s Met Gala, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” We’ll discuss the danger this poses to the culture.
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President Trump announced today that the United States is withdrawing from the Iranian nuclear deal, torching the sole foreign policy achievement of Barack Obama and relegating Mr.
Obama's entire legacy to the dustbin of history.
Oh, oh, oh, that is so...
Mmm!
Oh, those are salty.
Those are good.
Those taste just...
Is that a hint of...
Oh, that would be John Kerry.
That's a taste of John Kerry's tears.
We will analyze this excellent move.
Then, more good news out of the federal government.
Shockingly, showing up on time and under budget.
Finally, anti-Pope Rihanna shows up in a bedazzled cassock and mitre to last night's Met Gala.
Heavenly bodies, fashion, and the Catholic imagination.
We will discuss the danger this poses to the culture.
But not the danger that Iran poses, because we scrapped the nuclear deal.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
What a day.
What a day.
There is so much to...
I can't even...
I'm spilling my covfefe all over the place.
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The Iran deal is over.
Here is President Trump's announcement.
My fellow Americans, today I want to update the world on our efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
The Iranian regime is the leading state sponsor of terror.
It exports dangerous missiles, fuels conflicts across the Middle East, And supports terrorist proxies and militias, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda.
Over the years, Iran and its proxies have bombed American embassies and military installations, murdered hundreds of American service members, and kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured American citizens.
The Iranian regime has funded its long reign of chaos and terror by plundering the wealth of its own people.
He goes on.
We'll get to more of that later.
But I know John Kerry, he's trying so hard.
He just wants to weigh in.
He's been calling the Iranians.
He's been calling his former co-workers and allies abroad.
Okay, that's fine.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry, what is your comment on this deal?
Can you kiss a pretty girl, Peppy Boy, Peppy Boy?
Can you kiss a pretty girl, Jarmy Peppy?
Oh, that's silly!
I am the broken heart of love.
I am the disillusioned.
I am wished to enlist in the foreign legions so I may forget.
Take me!
Désolé, désolé, Jean-Carrie!
C'est de la merde!
Qu'est-ce qu'on peut faire?
Qu'est-ce qu'on peut dire, Jean-Carrie?
It is so, so good.
I'm going to need ten more of these today.
I need ten more Leftist Tears tumblers, Colton, please.
So, Drew is out today.
Ben's show was early before this news broke.
Drew is out.
I'm sure he's very upset.
In his honor, I think we have to play the Klaven Happiness montage in Drew's absence.
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with health care and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
It's a clavin-less week, but it turned out to be a pretty good clavin-less week, so in your absence.
You know, I never listen to Pod Save America because I value the cognitive faculties that I have, but today I'm probably going to have to make an exception because it's all those old Obama pod bros.
It's all the, like, 16-year-olds that used to work in the Obama White House and destroyed our country.
They're the ones who do Pod Save America, and Oh man, I'm going to just bring my tumblers to the iPod today and just pour them right into.
I'm going to have to obviously bring in a MAGA hat for Ben tomorrow.
I haven't broken that one out for him in a while, but going to have to bring it in.
Maybe I'll just buy him his own.
I'll just pass him out to everyone here at the Daily Wire.
This is so, so good.
I might sprout a John Bolton mustache just to celebrate.
I might will it in just all the covfefe forces in me to pop out a John Bolton mustache.
The Iran deal was terrible.
It was terrible.
Don't believe what the lefties tell you on Twitter today.
It was terrible practically, and it was terrible symbolically.
It was terrible practically because it paved the way for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
And it was just so weak.
We just gave them a bunch of money.
That's basically what the deal...
I'll explain the intricacies of the deal in a little bit.
It was also terrible symbolically because it was the United States just bending over to Iran after we said for years and years, you're not going to get a bomb.
You can't do this.
Don't do this.
We'll have a red line.
And then we just bent over and gave them all this money and bowed down.
So, yes, here, take whatever you want.
It's okay.
Just don't build a bomb for the next 15 minutes and then you can build a bomb.
That's not what we get now.
What Donald Trump said today, President Trump, in his announcement, is that the United States no longer makes empty threats.
Ah, what a relief.
What a relief.
The entire Obama age was, you better not do this.
You better not.
Although I'm going to write you a strongly worded letter.
I'm going to say boo-boo.
Can we all just admit, finally, that Donald Trump is a way, way better president than basically anybody thought he would be?
Can we all finally admit that?
I bet right now the last anti-Trump conservative is somewhere in the oak-paneled study of the Weekly Standard or somewhere, and he's saying, yeah, sure, sure, but does Trump read Baudelaire?
He is doing so well.
Now, you might be wondering, how can Donald Trump just scrap the Iran deal?
Doesn't he have to go through Congress or the Senate or, I don't know, anybody?
Doesn't he have to ask this person or that person?
No.
No, he doesn't.
He can just scrap it.
And do you know why he can scrap it?
Because it's not a treaty.
Now, why isn't it a treaty?
I thought it was a treaty.
Doesn't it sound like a treaty?
It's an international agreement between the United States and another country on pretty important matters, matters of national security.
There are other would-be signatories to this non-treaty treaty.
But there's a beautiful irony here.
There is a beautiful irony.
This gets to the Obama rule.
The current Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, then a congressman from Kansas in 2015 when the Iran deal was inked or not quite inked, he hated the Iran deal and he was one of its biggest critics.
The State Department wrote to Pompeo, the current Secretary of State, in 2015, and said, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that's the Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is not a treaty or an executive agreement and is not a signed document.
So what is it?
It's not a treaty, it's not an executive agreement, it's not a signed document.
The reason for that is that it could never get through the Senate, Barack Obama couldn't build consensus even within his own party.
He certainly couldn't get an international treaty like that where we just surrender and say Iran build a nuke in 15 minutes.
He certainly couldn't get that signed.
So they did everything they could to avoid having any oversight from the people, any oversight from our elected representatives on the Iran deal.
Now, we should have seen this coming a little while ago.
Some people did see it coming.
When Donald Trump named Pompeo to be Secretary of State, that was a signal from the White House that this would happen.
He was a major Iran deal critic.
Apparently, his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, was a little more open to the Iran deal.
He wasn't as harsh a critic of it.
So when that shift happened, when you brought in Ambassador John Bolton to be the national security advisor, one of the great critics of the Iran deal, and of Iran generally, as the threat to the world order, when you brought him in, you had to think, hmm, I bet this deal isn't very long for this world.
But the Iran deal, because it's not a treaty, because treaties need to be ratified by the Senate, the Iran deal can just be scrapped because Donald Trump says so, and Pompeo says so, and John Bolton says so, and every reasonable American says so.
This is the Obama rule.
This is what makes it that much sweeter.
This is what makes the irony so nice, is not only do we get rid of this stupid, terrible policy that further imperils the world order and destroys American credibility abroad— Not only do we scrap that, but we add insult to injury with Barack Obama because the Obama rule is that which can be enacted with a pen and a phone can be repealed with a pen and a phone.
This was what Obama would brag about.
He would brag about how he was a king, how he was a dictator.
He would say, I don't need to go through Congress.
If Congress doesn't want to enact my policies, I've got a pen and a phone.
I'll sign executive orders and I'll just make them instituted by my godless, headless, unaccountable bureaucracies and the bureaucratic agencies.
Okay, you can do that.
I ain't gonna have legs.
And now there is no more Obama legacy.
What's left?
What is left of the Obama legacy after the Iran deal is gutted?
Obamacare has been gutted.
It hasn't been officially repealed.
But the individual mandate, the sticking point of Obamacare, the government saying you have to pay this penalty or tax or a tax when it's not a penalty or blah, blah, blah.
You gotta pay us.
You gotta buy a product from a private company.
That's gone.
Trump snuck that into the tax reform plan.
So that's gone.
Obamacare's gutted.
The death spiral has been accelerated.
The Clean Power Plan, a signature Obama EPA achievement, gutted.
The Iran deal, gutted.
Supreme Court balance, totally preserved.
Antonin Scalia died, unfortunately.
But we got this new guy in his place who's an originalist on the court.
The balance of the court would have totally been in disarray had Donald Trump not won the presidency.
would have preserved a lot of Obama-era policies and priorities.
That didn't happen.
The transgender military experiment that existed for 15 minutes, you know, that didn't exist for most of Barack Obama's presidency, and then he decided to poke a finger in the eye of Americans because he believes that the only thing that matters in the United States are the handful of people who suffer from gender confusion, and we need to tailor and then he decided to poke a finger in the eye of Americans because he believes that the only thing that matters That's over.
Offshore Arctic oil drilling, offshore drilling and Arctic oil drilling, that's back on.
Government regulation of the internet and the so-called net neutrality, that's over.
How about the Paris Climate Wannabe Treaty?
Another fake treaty that Barack Obama knew he couldn't get through, so he had to sort of anti-constitutionally sign this agreement.
What about that?
Oh, we're out of that one too.
What's left?
What is left?
It's the end of the Obama legacy.
It is as if the man were not president.
It's over.
It's over today.
Mark it on your calendars, folks.
It's done.
John Kerry, now, Barack Obama's Secretary of State, one of the most boring men in the world, when he's not spending time just standing on his yacht calling to Teresa Hines and saying, Monkey, bring me my Mai Tai, monkey.
When he's not doing that, when he's not just being Thurston Howell III on Gilligan's Island, he has been working overtime to try to save this deal.
He's been calling foreign leaders, he's been calling the leaders of Iran, all the people he used to work with overseas when he was Secretary of State.
He met with the Iranian Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, to try to save this deal.
I know you're confused.
You would say, wait a second, why is he doing this when he's not the Secretary of State?
And not only that, he doesn't hold any position in our government.
Oh, because he's a big jerk who thinks too highly of himself and really wants to salvage any even slight vestige of a legacy for him.
Or for Barack Obama or for Hillary Clinton, but they can't because it's over.
Ha ha ha, ha ha ha.
So he's meeting with these people and he's meeting with adversaries of the United States and he's negotiating behind the back of the U.S. government.
Not only is this sort of uncouth, not only is this a little bit gauche and disrespectful of your current administration and your current government, it's illegal.
It is illegal in the Logan Act.
We'll get to that in a second.
Of course, in typical Trumpian form, the president responded via Twitter.
Donald Trump wrote, quote, The United States does not need John Kerry's possibly illegal shadow diplomacy on the very badly negotiated Iran deal.
He was the one that created this mess in the first place.
And it reminds you of, like, a little kid.
This is what John Kerry and the Obama people are doing now.
There is a little kid, and he was playing around where he shouldn't have been, and he broke the cookie jar, and he smashed the vase or whatever, and he's trying to clean it up really quick before you notice.
He's trying, oh, they won't notice if I do it, except we did notice.
Your legacy is terrible.
You've been at a net negative for the country.
Sorry, try again.
You can't try again.
It's over.
You had a bad career.
You did bad.
You failed at your job.
And now Donald Trump is cleaning up your mess and doing it very well.
So what he did here, what John Kerry is clearly doing is violating the Logan Act.
The Logan Act was passed in 1799.
It criminalizes unauthorized persons from negotiating with foreign governments that have a dispute with the United States.
Makes sense.
There's a reason that this law was passed very early on in our nation's history, almost immediately, is you can't possibly have that, can you?
You can't have a government negotiating deals and then have the opposition party.
You can't have the Republican administration governing the country and the world because the United States is the leader of the free world.
And then behind their backs, you have Democrats saying, hey, don't listen to them.
Yeah, we're going to kick them out in a few years and then you deal with us.
So don't listen to them.
That would destroy the United States.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Wise man said that.
And then other wise men quoted that.
You can't possibly have that, so it's an important law.
This is what they booked Mike Flynn on.
This is how they got former Trump National Security Advisor for also about 15 minutes, Mike Flynn.
They got him on the Logan Act because the incoming National Security Advisor talked with his counterparts overseas during the transition.
A perfectly normal practice.
They decided to go after him on the Logan Act and try to get him on this.
What John Kerry is doing right now, up until two hours ago, is way, way worse than anything Mike Flynn did with regard to the Logan Act.
The trouble here, of course, is that no one has ever been convicted of violating the Logan Act since it was passed in 1799.
So, partisans always use this as a threat.
I've done it, too.
It's a good little thing to point out because it is a good law, so you actually do need to watch out for it, but no one's actually going to get prosecuted for it.
The law started because President Adams, John Adams...
Didn't like France very much, which is a good American tradition.
So a Jefferson loyalist, George Logan of Philadelphia, went to Paris in 1798 to get around the Federalist administration.
You had the Federalist Adams, you had the Anti-Federalists led by Jefferson, and the Anti-Federalists sent some people to Paris and said, don't negotiate with the Federalists.
That's not good.
I totally understand why that law was passed.
As a matter of politics, we probably don't want to prosecute people for it.
It would just get pretty messy if you have your political opponents talking with people overseas and you start throwing your political opponents in jail.
It just doesn't look good, even if they deserve it.
Even if they're Hillary Clinton, frankly.
It's not a great look to throw your political opponents in jail, no matter how criminal they are and how much they deserve it.
So, I suppose it's a good thing we don't prosecute people for this.
But, important to keep in mind, because John Kerry is violating this.
It is an important law.
It is really horrible, what he's doing.
It's very disrespectful.
It's very anti-American.
But, hey, we're talking about John Kerry.
We're talking about John Kerry, who just speaks in French on his yacht to little monkey.
You know, monkey, hello.
Bring me my Tom Collins!
So, not just John Kerry is upset about this.
Barack Obama's flax, the people who were 14 years old when they worked in the White House, now they're 16 years old.
They're also very, very sad.
This one came out, I believe, from Ben Rhodes.
Quote, Beyond the potentially catastrophic consequences with Iran, Trump's decision is devastating to US credibility globally.
After this, why would anyone trust an international agreement that the US negotiates?
You jerks.
That's what he tweeted out.
He was like a failed novelist.
This guy, he was in a master's program for fiction writing, and for some reason he came to determine foreign policy for the United States under Barack Obama.
I think he drove a van one time for the Obama campaign, so he was promoted to this major presidential advisor.
Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding?
You're going to talk to me, Ben Rhodes, about the credibility of the United States?
You're going to talk to me, Obama administration officials, about international credibility of the United States?
The Obama administration, the president himself, not just a flack, not just one of you, the president himself said, we have a red line, we're drawing a red line in Syria, and there will be dire consequences if Syria crosses that red line.
And guess what Syria did?
They said, well, Barack Obama, you look like kind of a wimp, so we're going to cross it.
What are you going to do?
And Obama said, I'm going to write you a strongly worded letter.
That's what I'm going to do.
Pathetic.
Absolutely pathetic.
Are you kidding me?
People who allow the international community, people who allow our foreign adversaries, little tin pot dictators in the We're good to go.
We're not going to allow...
And look, there are other crazier regimes, like North Korea is a kind of crazier regime, but as a threat to the world order, as a persistent, constant threat to the world order, nobody touches Iran.
And we're going to let the...
Okay, you can have a nuclear weapon, but hey, we'll only give you a nuclear weapon if we can give you a ton of money, too.
That was the deal, basically.
Finally, we're restoring credibility.
And by the way, Mr.
Rhodes, what about...
What international agreement are you talking about?
Why would they get into an international agreement with the United States?
I thought this wasn't an international agreement.
I thought this wasn't a binding agreement.
I thought this wasn't a treaty.
I thought this wasn't an executive agreement.
It's just a thing, right?
Because that's the way the Obama administration sold it because their actions were patently anti-constitutional.
You can't have it both ways.
You cannot have it both ways.
It can't be a binding treaty that the United States committed itself to When it's convenient for the Obama people.
And then, oh, just a thing that nobody actually had to sign because we don't want to go through the Senate.
On the other hand, you can't have it both ways.
Another Obama flack, Dan Pfeiffer, tweeted, quote...
Pulling out of the Iran deal will make all the Trumpists feel good, but what is the plan now to contain the Iranian nuclear threat, huh?
It doesn't seem like anyone in the White House has even thought past today's event.
This is another one of the Obama Podbros.
He's one of the people on Pod Save America.
That I've been saving my brain from by not listening to, but I'm going to have to listen today because it's going to be the biggest wine fest ever.
It's going to be the biggest wine fest since November 8th, 2016.
But to Mr.
Pfeiffer's suggestion that nobody in the White House has thought about how to prevent the Iranian bomb after the Iran deal is scrapped, pretty sure someone has.
If memory serves correctly, the national security advisor to President Trump, John Bolton, published, while the Iran deal was being finalized, while all people of good sense were protesting this stupid deal, he published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, To Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran.
Seems like someone's thought of it.
Doesn't sound like a bad idea either.
And by the way, that was the headline that was written.
It's a good piece.
It's a more nuanced piece, just like all things with John Bolton.
The headline always sounds crazy and then you actually read anything about it and you realize this is an extremely nuanced thinker who knows much more than you do about these topics that people spout off on.
But to stop Iran's bomb, bomb Iran is an important statement because it doesn't mean that we're going to launch a massive war with Iran.
It doesn't mean that we're going to invade Iran.
It doesn't even quite mean that we're going to bomb Iran necessarily.
What it means is that we're not going to appease Iran and we're going to have the credible threat of violence against them if they continue to threaten the world order.
And this is to ensure world peace.
Simple-minded people, pacifist-type people, they say, oh, if you threaten violence, that threatens the world order.
Not true.
When you have strength, when you come to adversaries from a position of strength, you can have peace.
The Reagan years were, his critics said they were bellicose.
He was saber-rattling.
He was threatening war.
He was a madman.
They were some of the most peaceful years in recent history.
The Reagan administration, both terms.
Peace, when you come to an adversary and you say, I'm not going to fight.
I don't want to fight.
Please don't make me fight.
That creates chaos.
You have peace through strength, and you have chaos and war through appeasement.
Appeasing Iran threatens the world order.
And it threatens the world order in a very specific way.
I'm not just speaking in ethereal terms.
We've kept a lid on nuclear weapons for a very long time.
We've been using nuclear weapons since the 1940s, and we've been trying to develop them for a long time, and we used them in the Second World War.
We've been able to keep a lid on nukes since then.
And I would stand to reason, if the United States has nuclear weapons, if the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons, pretty soon everybody would have nuclear weapons.
That's what people expected.
But that's not what happened.
Right now, the countries that possess nuclear weapons are the United States, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Israel, Pakistan.
Now, other countries have actually denuclearized.
They've had nukes and then they've gotten rid of them.
South Africa, the former Soviet republics like Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine.
They've actually denuclearized and we've kept nukes away from the other countries.
We've just said, you're not going to do it.
We're going to keep a hold on it for as long as we can.
We've done a very good job for six, seven decades.
Iran threatens all of this.
Because if we permit Iran, the greatest threat to the world order, it's always got one foot in the world order, one foot funding terrorism abroad.
If we allow them to have a nuclear weapon, every other country is going to demand this.
Every other country around the world is going to demand these things.
Despite what the Obama bros and the pod bros and John Kerry thinks, this is great news.
So very quickly, what did the Iran deal do?
Well, it was sold to us as reducing Iran's ability to produce plutonium and uranium, two components used in nuclear weapons.
Didn't do that.
There's also a sunset clause that would ease the restrictions over time.
So at best, even if Iran was a straight player, it would delay the program slightly.
But we know from the recent presentation in Israel, it didn't even really do that.
The Iranians are liars.
They lied to us.
They did have a secret program.
Nobody can trust them, especially on this issue.
So in return, that's what we get is basically nothing in return.
Maybe at best, a slight delay in the nuclear bomb for Iran at best.
In return, we gave them a ton of money.
We lifted massive sanctions from them.
We unfroze between 50 and 150 billion dollars of Iranian assets in banks throughout the US and overseas.
And then, to top it all off, we sent an airplane carrying 1.7 billion dollars in cash.
Euros, Swiss francs, other currencies.
We just flew it to Iran and just gave them cash.
That was our negotiation.
We pretend that Iran doesn't have a nuclear program, that they're trustworthy enough to be trusted, to work with here.
Even though we know definitively that they've been lying to us about the nuclear program they already have, we at best slightly delay the bomb.
In return, we give them gazillions of dollars.
That took two years to negotiate.
That took two years to say, hey, would you like a bomb and a lot of money?
You're going to need to give us more money.
Mmm, okay.
Basically, that was a negotiation.
By the way, Donald Trump tried to fix this deal.
He didn't initially scrap it altogether or seem determined to scrap it altogether.
The New York Times reports Trump negotiated, but the talks collapsed when Trump insisted on sharp limits on Iran's nuclear production continuing after the sunset clause in 2030.
Under the Obama deal, within 12 years, Iran gets a bomb.
Trump said, no way.
The talks broke down.
So, Trump has told the Allies, we're going to reinstate all the sanctions, we're going to impose economic penalties.
He told France first.
I think this is significant.
Donald Trump told his new BFF, his best friend forever French president, BFFF, Emmanuel Macron, it told him first.
This is significant because France is typically the most dovish country.
You know, they call this as the flag of the French army, is what they say.
The white handkerchief.
Macron has been skittish about the U.S. withdrawing from the deal.
And so Trump, he's a good people person.
He gets him on board.
Mainstream media is furious.
The AP reports, Breaking!
Trump to withdraw from landmark nuclear accord with Iran.
Dealing blow to U.S. allies.
CNN reports, He's withdrawing from the nuclear deal, further isolating himself from the world.
Then CNN reports, OPEC official ditching Iran deal would harm the global economy.
OPEC is Iran, by the way.
OPEC is the organization of petroleum exporting countries that includes Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, just like some of the worst places on planet Earth.
And so basically the headline could read, Iran warns, ditching Iran deal is bad.
Outbreaking, wow.
So, and by the way, Trump is sending a message with the timing of this announcement.
Today is victory in Europe day.
Today is, you might have forgotten the excitement.
The New York Times headline in 1945 today, the war in Europe has ended, surrender is unconditional.
VE will be proclaimed today, our troops on Okinawa gain.
Now critics always say, oh it's just a coincidence, you're reading too much into Trump.
Oh you just got lucky, it just happened to be, it's just an accident, just a coincidence.
Okay.
Yeah, sure.
So either Donald Trump knows what he's doing, or he's a complete idiot buffoon who just happens to be the luckiest person in the history of the world.
The entire Trump foreign policy promise from the beginning of the campaign has been, we don't win anymore.
We need to win.
We need to win.
We need to have more wins like we had in World War II, the last time we had a major world-acknowledged win.
So he chooses the anniversary of the greatest U.S. foreign policy win to declare this nuclear deal over and to say we're going to have peace through strength.
Seems like a tough coincidence.
That's a hard argument to make.
The U.S. no longer makes empty threats.
We've got some more good news.
I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but we have really good news.
And I've got to give you my thoughts on the Met Gala last night.
Guys, look, you know what's going to happen.
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I'm going to just guzzle back some of these so I can make room for all the new ones that are pouring in.
So a little bit more of the John Kerry variety.
We'll be right back with excellent other political news.
It's too much today.
I can't.
How am I supposed to go through all of these leftist tears and I'm going to be drowning?
Okay.
Really, really good news coming up right now from the federal government.
Believe it or not, under Donald Trump, the federal government has had a month which was on time and under budget.
In April, the federal government had the best budget month in history.
The federal government took in $515 billion in taxes.
It only spent only $297 billion.
This is a $218 billion surplus.
It beats the old record that happened 17 years ago of $190 billion.
You always hear they talk about the great budget surpluses.
That's what they're talking about.
They're talking about 2001.
We just beat it.
We just beat it.
The surplus surprised CBO analysts.
The CBO analysts predicted lower receipts to the government.
And this, they said, is the result of a stronger-than-expected economic growth.
Listen to that language.
Surprised.
It surprised the analysts.
It's stronger than expected.
I don't think it's stronger than expected.
It's just stronger than you expected.
And these analysts, these experts keep telling us, well, we all expected this.
It's unexpected growth.
It's unexpected this.
No, no, no.
You are not expecting it because you're not seeing what's going on.
Because you're still living in fantasy land, 99% certainty Hillary Clinton's going to win the election.
Trump isn't going to appoint an originalist.
Trump isn't going to pull out a paraclimate accord.
Trump isn't going to rip up the Iranian nuclear deal.
Trump isn't going to lower taxes.
That's the world.
So everything is unexpected to you.
But it ain't unexpected if you're just mainlining covfefe every day, and that's what's going on here.
So on that, it's on time, it's under budget.
This reminds me of a favorite clip of mine of Donald Trump from 13 years ago.
I understand a residential luxury building is far more complex than an open floor office building to build.
It's much more.
You have many more bathrooms, you have many more kitchens, you have many more rooms.
It's more complex.
Office building is essentially open space with subdividers.
So I looked at it and I added up some of my costs.
And for Trump World Tower, across the street, built not long ago, I spent approximately $258 a foot.
It's the tallest residential building in the world.
$258.32 a foot.
I have 871,000 feet.
It costs $225 million to build.
So you hear this.
It goes on.
Trump keeps talking like this.
A lot of people are surprised when they see that clip because it's Donald Trump speaking with technical expertise on something.
We usually hear it because he's talking about so many things.
The Iran deal, tax reform, Obamacare, this, that, the other thing.
And so he speaks in these broad terms just like all presidents do.
They have to speak in broad terms because they can't nail down to the minute details on every single thing.
We know that building buildings is something on which Donald Trump has technical knowledge, technical expertise.
So he says, oh yeah, he was being called to testify before Congress.
I think Tom Coburn was interviewing him.
And he said the UN building renovations were going way over budget, taking way too long.
And Trump said, oh yeah, I'd pay $200 a square foot.
I'd do this.
Untangible things.
Donald Trump is great.
He really is expert when it comes to tangible things that you can put your hands around.
And that's why Donald Trump, even if he lacks precise, technical, wonkish knowledge of certain areas of public policy or economic policy or foreign policy or whatever...
On issues where there's a gut reaction, his gut seems to be in the right place.
On the Iran deal, the Iran deal actually isn't that complicated because it was such a terrible deal.
But maybe he doesn't know the minutia of this bank account had to be frozen and this because of blah, blah, blah, blah.
But he just could tell this is a bad deal.
We're giving Iran money.
We're allowing them to have a nuclear weapon over time.
Bad deal.
And then they can sort it out there.
Those tangible sort of things.
You say, oh yeah.
Do you think we should just give our adversaries the greatest threat to the world order on planet Earth?
Should we just give them a bunch of money and nuclear weapons?
No, it's a bad deal.
I don't know a lot about Iran.
Sounds like a bad deal.
So you see this again and again.
And the mainstream media, they're furious.
They've turned up the attacks on Donald Trump over the past few months.
According to a new Media Research Center study, Gotta love the Media Research Center, Brent Bozell.
They do excellent work.
91% of Trump coverage on major networks has been negative.
Specifically of the evaluative comments, 90% negative.
39% of TV network news coverage of Donald Trump has focused on the scandals.
The porn star and the whatever other stuff they're going to gin up.
The fake dossier, whatever.
16%, an additional 16% of coverage was on the scandals of Trump administration officials.
So some guy buys an expensive table for his office.
That's major network news all night.
Only 45% of TV network coverage was devoted to actual issues, actual policy issues.
That is an insane number.
55% was just on frivolous scandal nonsense.
45%, the minority of time, was spent on actual policy issues.
Total, ginned-up, tawdry reality TV scandals.
That's the news.
That's the news for you.
I'm a banana.
Facts first.
Democracy dies.
I'm the facts, news, nonsense.
They're tabloid trash.
Incredibly, though, this is the incredible thing.
Trump's job approval rating actually rose over this period of time.
It rose from 37% in mid-December to 43% at the end of April.
And that's not just selectively picking polls that are nice to Donald Trump.
That is broadly reflected across all public polling.
Now, why is this?
Well, we've paid our taxes, so all that scaremongering nonsense about tax reform, that's over.
And why else?
Because we see the country's doing well.
You can just sense it.
You can just feel it.
You can see, oh, Johnny's not laid off.
Oh, okay, that's, oh, this is, oh, this is kind of nice.
Maybe my wages are increasing.
We know that wages are increasing.
Ooh, that's good.
That hasn't happened in a while.
Additionally, public perception of the direction of the country is at a 10-year high.
Even CNN admits this.
This is the greatest sign of the apocalypse.
Some people are saying, Donald Trump's a good president.
That's a sign of the apocalypse.
Maybe.
CNN is admitting the truth about a Republican.
That is truly the sign of the apocalypse.
57% of Americans, the majority of Americans, now say things are going well.
That's up from 49% in February.
That's a change in just a few months.
This is the largest proportion of people in America who say things are going well and the direction of the country is in the right place since January 2007.
Since the Bush administration.
Since the beginning of the last year of the Bush administration.
Since before the financial crisis.
Since before that awful nightmare of the Barack Obama administration.
This is the largest proportion of Americans who say the country is going in the right direction.
Which means that all of the Obama administration was the country going the wrong direction.
There's even a surge of approval among Democrats.
40% of Democrats now say the country is doing well.
40%.
That number was 25% in February.
That is a 37.5% surge in the number of Democrats who thought the country was doing well in February as I think so now, just a few months later.
Trump's daily approval rating from Rasmussen, the only polling firm that still does daily approval, is between 47% and 51%.
Excellent numbers.
CNN shows that those who approve of Donald Trump, this is a pretty interesting fact of this survey, those who approve of Donald Trump overwhelmingly cite policy for their positive view.
The majority of those who disapprove of Donald Trump cite his personality or his body language or his tweets or whatever.
The people who approve of Trump say, hey, look, all the things that matter, they're going great.
The people who still disapprove of Trump, for now, they cite ephemeral nonsense.
Another poll, Huffington Post and YouGov poll, shows that more than half of Hillary Clinton voters say the country was better 50 years ago, which makes them deplorable.
They are now the deplorables.
There is a sense, even among Hillary Clinton voters, that something in recent years is broken.
There's a sense that America used to be better and greater than it has been recently.
I choose that word importantly.
There is a sense that we need to make America great again.
That's among Hillary Clinton voters.
That is wonderful news.
Do we have any time?
Yes.
Because it's too much good news.
So we have to get a little bit of ridiculous and sad news in.
We just got to inject that just so that we're not going through the ceiling today.
I have to talk about this Met Gala last night, the Met Ball.
This happens every year to support the Costume Institute at the Met.
And it's very big.
Hollywood stars come.
They wear these crazy costumes designed by all these amazing designers.
They're usually quite beautiful.
This year's was titled, Heavenly Bodies.
Get it?
Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.
Now, I would have preferred Heavenly Bodies, Fashion, and the Catholic Logical Deduction of the Nature of Reality, but that is a minor semantic quibble.
It's neither here nor there.
This is the annual show, and usually they have these boring themes.
Recently they had China through the looking glass.
Now you probably can't do that because that's cultural appropriation.
You know, that's fine.
That's a little boring.
American Woman Fashioning a National Identity.
Kind of bland.
They've all been kind of bland recently.
The Roman Catholic Church is not bland.
It is many things.
It is not bland.
Chesterton described it as a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar.
The aesthetics of the Catholic Church are the aesthetics of the West.
Some of these costumes last night, some of these gowns and costumes were really quite good.
Katy Perry's, I loved it.
It was seraphic.
She went as this giant angel.
Six foot tall wings, very beautiful.
It actually did reflect a Catholic aesthetic.
Rihanna took things a little literally.
Rihanna was one of the hosts of this.
The singer, Rihanna, you know, I'm sure we're all very familiar with her odes and, you know, quartets or whatever she writes.
She just showed up in a Pope hat.
Yeah.
So she just wore a miter, you know, and that's...
But I kind of liked it.
It sort of...
It didn't look...
Good, exactly.
But it was kind of fun, you know, and I don't know.
I get this, I kind of like Rihanna as a, you know, she works with Kanye.
I kind of like Kanye now.
She worked with Paul McCartney.
That's fun.
Doesn't seem to take herself super seriously.
Yeah, I kind of like her.
And so, but she, you know, she wears this popat as if to say like, did I do it right?
And you're like, well, probably could have done a little better, but that's okay.
Then it gets to Lena Waithe.
I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.
She's some actress that I've never heard of.
And she decided that her response to the Catholic Church, she's going to wear a rainbow flag cape, you know, because she's a lesbian, I guess, and that's her.
Yeah, now you could say that she was evoking Joseph's coat of many colors.
I don't know if that's quite what she was going for.
But either way, you know, she wears this rainbow flag cape, and she's basically saying, yeah, yeah, that'll show you Roman Curia, That'll show you, Church.
They kind of missed the point.
It's not a Catholic aesthetic.
So, okay, good.
Yeah, good point.
Hey, you got them.
Sure.
Broadly speaking, I like the idea of this.
Some Catholics were getting offended.
They said, you know, no, you shouldn't make a mockery of this.
I don't think it makes a mockery of the Catholic Church.
Or the Catholic aesthetic to wear clothing that's evocative of the Catholic imagination, as they call it.
I wanted some crusaders to show up wearing the big cross and the chain-link arm or whatever.
But the Catholic aesthetic is the aesthetic of the West.
The greatest art in history has been made by the Catholic faithful.
Dante, Michelangelo, Raphael...
People that have last names.
A lot of the art of the West is Catholic.
The majority of it.
Certainly all comes from the tradition of Catholicism.
The culture of Catholicism.
The part that's sad about this is that it's a costume.
The West now wears crucifixes, and people were wearing big crucifixes.
They wear them for costume rather than for worship.
And lest I be accused of being like the cultural appropriation people...
I'm actually making the exact opposite of their argument.
I'm not saying that, you know, my culture is not a costume.
I'm not saying that at all.
I'm happy that they're wearing Catholic aesthetic garb.
I'm happy that they're appropriating the Catholic culture.
I just wish they would appropriate the Catholic cult as well.
I wish they would go further in their appropriation, actually.
Because this gala wasn't medieval-themed.
It would be one thing if they said...
Fashion and the early church.
Fashion and the late medieval church.
Fashion and the Provencal bishops or whatever.
I don't know.
It was fashion in the Catholic imagination.
So it's not just wearing clothing from a different time period and saying, that's my costume.
All clothing that's out of fashion becomes costume.
When you wear it, I can wear the armor of a knight.
I'm not really wearing a costume.
That would always be a costume.
But now we're saying...
Catholic culture itself is a costume because we don't do it anymore.
And this is not good.
This is fundamentally disconnecting the culture from the cult.
You can't have a culture without a cult.
The culture is defined by what the people worship.
So this could threaten to transform modernity into a new dark age because everybody's got to serve somebody.
And that is being supplanted by something.
The culture that fashioned the West now wears That garb as a costume, that's not a good sign.
This poses a lot of threats.
That ain't going to happen today, because today we're fighting back.
This is a point, I'll try to bring in some clavin-ness here, because Drew's out all week.
He always says, you just have today.
If you have a good day, then have a good day tomorrow.
You fight for liberty today, you preserve liberty today, you preserve it tomorrow.
If you do that enough days, you have a good life.
All we can do is preserve liberty today, and we have done that.
The United States has done that today.
This is a very good day.
Cheers!
I hope you enjoy your John Kerry vintage 2018 salty, delicious leftist tears.
We've got a great show tomorrow.
We've got a really interesting topic.
We're going to take on...
Well, I won't spoil it.
You'll see it tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Go Fetting.
Go Fetting.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Semia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
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Edited by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
