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April 4, 2025 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:42:03
20250404_trump-vs-judges-clooney-vs-msnbc-and-legacy-media-
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Judges Stop Trump 00:02:33
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and happy Friday.
Yay, we made it.
Later today, Mike Solana is back with me in studio.
I'm really looking forward to that.
I really liked him the last time.
But we begin today with our Legal Eagles, our top legal team on Law Affair 2.0.
The biggest obstacles to Trump's second term agenda have not come from Congress or the media.
They have come from the courts.
Judges slapping down injunction after injunction after injunction.
These are nationwide injunctions that stop the Trump agenda in its tracks.
They have blocked Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship.
That one, that can be forgiven.
That's a big one, okay?
But they have been out of control on virtually every one of his executive orders.
They've paused the ban on trans individuals in the military, saying, I guess they're the commander-in-chief now.
Trump's not.
They have halted his deportations of Venezuelan gang members under the Alien Enemies Act.
Those cases have raised fascinating legal and political questions.
And there are so many others that they have said.
They've tried to stop him on his DEI agenda, on his on his gender agenda, on cleaning up our federal employee ranks and firing deadweight.
I mean, you name it, they've stopped it.
And this appears to be how we're going to be living for the next four years.
The only question is whether the Supreme Court's going to start doing its job and sending a message to the lower courts that no one elected them to do anything.
Literally nobody elected federal district court judges.
They're not the president.
And they have a role.
Absolutely.
They have a role in when there's overreach.
But in certain lanes, they actually don't.
Courts are not allowed to decide, quote, political questions.
Political questions from the dawn of time have been left to the other branches because those political branches are directly answerable to us.
So if they screw up a political question, we will fire their asses.
But we cannot fire federal district court judges.
They have lifetime tenure.
And so that's just part of why it's been so controversial what they've been doing to stop Trump.
I mean, the whole Trump second presidency in its crib.
Constitutional Limits on Power 00:14:17
Joining me now to debate, Dave Ehrenberg, former state attorney general, state attorney, I should say, for Palm Beach County, Florida, and now managing partner of Dave Ehrenberg Law, as well as a frequent contributor to the Legal AF YouTube channel.
And Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article 3 project.
He lives his life saying legal AF.
That's just, that's his like core motto.
You can see Dave on MSNBC.
You can see Mike on Fox, but this is the only place you will see them together.
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Angel.com slash megan guys, welcome back.
Thank you guys.
Okay um, i'm so happy to see you.
So we've got to kick it off with the Trend to Arragua deportations and yesterday there was this hearing on um in the court of judge Bosberg, which is in the Dc Federal district court and he's trying to decide whether the Trump administration committed contempt of court because a month ago, after Trump put three plane loads of suspected Venezuelan gang members on planes,
at least one plane of which had already been ordered to be removed by a federal district judge and said, get out of here, you're going to El Salvador the Aclu ran into court, said judge Bosberg judge Bosberg, please stop it, it's unconstitutional.
And he said, you know what it might be.
Stop those planes.
And said to the Trump administration, if those planes are in the air, you turn them around right now, I don't care if they've left U.s airspace, tell them to turn their asses around, get those illegals back to America.
And with respect to two of those planes, they had already left and they did not comply with an order to turn the flights around.
And with respect to the third plane, it had not yet left but it did not have any illegals on it who were being deported under the controversial law that was in front of judge Bosberg, which is the Alien Enemies Act.
So the Trump administration didn't feel like they had to do anything on that plane because they were like, these people have been ordered removed.
We're not using the Alien Enemies Act.
You really have no jurisdiction to say anything about those illegals judge.
So this judge is pissed off about the fact that we didn't turn those planes around and bring them back and he might hold the Trump administration in contempt.
But before we even get to that, Mike Davis, this judge did issue an injunction a month ago saying, and no more deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.
You turn those planes around and no more using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan gang members.
Period until i've decided whether there's really an invasion or an a predatory incursion, which is what's required under the Alien Enemies Act for the president to be able to deport them in the way he has.
I will decide.
And and the Trump administration said, no, you won't.
You will not because the jurisprudence interpreting this act has said there is no judicial review of that call and things didn't change in the past 250 years.
You you didn't find new exec executive authorities.
As a district court judge, you will not determine whether there's been a predatory incursion.
That's Trump's call period and and there's been legal precedent to that effect.
And judge Bosberg said, uh, I will decide.
Screw you, I don't accept this.
It went up to the DC Circuit Court OF Appeals.
They ruled two to one for now To support Judge Boesberg and his restraining order against the Trump deportations.
And Trump went to the Supreme Court to say, reverse that restraining order.
This is an outrage.
These courts don't have review over me, not on this.
The high court hasn't issued any ruling.
They have asked for briefing on the case, and briefing has come in.
The Trump administration appealed.
The ACLU filed its responsive appellate brief.
And now the Trump administration just filed its reply.
So it's fully briefed, and we're awaiting a call by the Supreme Court on the underlying substantive case.
And then there's the second matter of whether they should be held in contempt.
That was a five-minute recitation of a very complex legal case.
I hope I got it right.
Mike Davis, why do you say the Trump administration is right?
President Trump campaigned on the fact that he's going to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.
He's going to secure our border and he's going to get these illegal immigrants, particularly this vicious terrorist gang, Trende Aragua, along with MS-13, the hell out of our country.
And President Trump is doing the unthinkable.
He's actually doing what he promised American voters he would do, and he's doing it fast, right?
And President Trump won a broad electoral mandate.
He won 312 electoral votes, all seven swing states.
He won the popular vote.
He kept the House.
He won a comfortable majority in the Senate.
And he's exercising core Article II power under our Constitution.
He's not stealing Congress's legislative power under Article I. He's not stealing the Supreme Court's judicial power under Article III.
He is enforcing our laws.
He's repelling an invasion of our country, which he has the absolute constitutional, right, constitutional duty to do under Article II of our Constitution, separate from any statute, separate from any case law, separate from any regulation.
He's doing what the Constitution requires.
And these judges are exercising jurisdiction.
They do not have this.
Judge Boesberg, I think it was four Saturdays ago when he was not even the emergency docket judge, opened up his courtroom.
He exposed an ongoing military law enforcement and intel operation.
He endangered American lives and the lives of our allies.
We saw the security blueprint in El Salvador.
We saw the massive number of soldiers, intel officers, law enforcement ready to take the most dangerous terrorist in the Western hemisphere.
This judge ordered planes to turn around.
Did he know the fuel levels?
Did he know what the security footprint was back in America?
He did not have the power to do this.
He doesn't have the power to have this case, period, but let alone to sabotage an ongoing military operation and expose it and endanger American and allied lives.
This is why I'm calling for his impeachment.
And I don't say that lightly.
Dave?
Well, going to be back with you, Megan and my friend Mike.
You know, Mike heads a group called Article 3 Project.
You can see it on his wallpaper as opposed to my background, which is of a St. Bernard by this part called Intellectual Heft.
But, you know, as Mike would know, Article 3, which is the judiciary, does not define the judicial power.
And so the Constitution does not limit the remedial powers of the federal courts.
And so you have Congress that could step in and put in regulations and limits.
But here, the judge is doing what a judge is supposed to do, and that is checks and balances, Marlbury versus Madison, judicial review.
And the judge here is saying that you can't use the Alien Enemies Act to deport these folks without more due process because, hold on, we're not at war with Venezuela.
There's not been a congressional act of war.
And so we're going to put a hold on this.
And the Trump administration has tried to play games with it by saying, well, we are complying with your written order, but not your verbal order.
Also, when you came out with your order, the planes were already in international airspace.
You don't have jurisdiction.
You know, they're playing games with it.
And ultimately, it's going to be the Supreme Court that makes a decision here because the law is what the Supreme Court says it is.
So far, everything is actually going according to plan.
You know, I have to tell my folks on the left to say, hey, calm down.
This is not a coup.
This is actually the proper way to deal with this where the administration appeals these matters all the way up to the Supreme Court.
And they have not said they're defying Judge Bosberg's order.
They're saying that Judge Bozberg's order doesn't apply because it was at international airspace.
So as of now, I've tried to warn you.
And they're saying they didn't apply and that he didn't have the authority to issue them.
Both.
They're arguing both, but they are complying.
They are proceeding as though he did have the authority.
Exactly.
That's why I'm trying to say that to the folks who are saying this is a coup.
No, no, actually, because they are saying that they are complying or if he doesn't have the power, that actually is a legitimate argument they can take up to the Supreme Court as opposed to, no, you do not have the authority to issue a ruling and we're going to ignore whatever ruling you come up with anyways.
That's different.
Okay, but Dave, how is it that the federal district courts are allowed, in the argument of the ACLU, to decide whether there's been an incursion, a predatory incursion by a foreign government?
How are they better positioned to determine that than the commander-in-chief and the sitting president of the United States?
Well, they're entitled to interpret the Alien Enemies Act.
And here, the judge is saying there's not been a declaration of war.
And so this act does not apply, does not give the executive branch the authority to make.
You're not answering exactly.
No, no, no.
Let me stop you there because there's three different ways that you can get Alien Enemies Act to apply.
Act of war, invasion, or predatory incursion.
Trump seems to be citing the latter two.
They don't seem to be arguing that we're necessarily at war with Venezuela, but for sure he's saying if you look at his declaration, it says invasion and predatory incursion.
So there's no question that you can have those other things without Congress.
Oh, and the executive branch has the ability to interpret that statute as it wants, just like the judiciary can say, no, no, no, you've gone too far.
Article 3 gives the power of the judiciary to look at matters like this and say, no, this is our check.
This is our balance.
They're not allowed to decide political questions, Dave.
How is it not a political question whether we've suffered a predatory invasion from Venezuela?
You know who decides that, Megan?
It's the U.S. Supreme Court.
And it is telling us that.
They never questioned our declaration of war after 9-11.
They didn't question our declaration of war with respect to Iraq or Afghanistan.
The courts have typically been reluctant to go anywhere near that kind of political declaration because they understand when you're talking about political questions, the president is at the apex of his powers and the courts to say they're at their neader, they have nothing.
They have none.
Only Congress has the power to declare war.
The executive branch does not have.
But this is something different.
Well, remember, the Alien Enemies Act says declaration of war, or as you correctly said, there has to be an invasion or a threatened invasion.
And the president doesn't have the unlimited, unchecked power to interpret that act to say, I'm going to decide there's an invasion.
Because if you give the president that kind of power, then Katie bar the door.
There is no limit to executive power now.
We are Katie bar the door.
Let me read to you from Ledecki versus Watkins, 1948, interpreting the Alien Enemies Act.
Okay.
They say accordingly, we hold that the full responsibility for the just exercise of this great power under the Alien Enemies Act and the declarations may validly be left where the Congress has constitutionally placed it on the president of the United States.
The founders, in their wisdom, made him not only the commander-in-chief, but also the guiding organ in the conduct of our foreign affairs.
He who was entrusted with such vast powers in relation to the outside world was also entrusted by Congress almost throughout the whole life of the nation with the disposition of alien enemies during a state of war.
Such a page of history is worth more than a volume of rhetoric.
And they go on to say, all systems of government, this is quoting from an earlier case, suppose they are to be administered by men of common sense and common honesty.
In our country, as all ultimately depends on the voice of the people, they have it in their power.
And it is to be presumed they generally will choose men of this description.
But if they will not, the case, to be sure, is without remedy.
If they choose fools, they're talking about as leaders, they will have foolish laws.
If they choose knaves, they will have knavish ones.
But this can never be the case until they are generally fools or knaves themselves, which thank God is not likely ever to become the character of the American people.
The whole thing is about how, if we effed up in picking the wrong leader, politics is the remedy, not courts.
Megan, there are several laws at play here.
It's the Alien Enemies Act, which we've already discussed, and then there are the conventions against torture.
The ACLU is resting a lot also on the fact that this prison where they're sending these folks to violate federal law on torture.
I don't think that's their best argument, quite frankly.
I think the Alien Enemies Act is a better argument.
But because of these outstanding questions, the judge has a right to weigh in and to make that decision and impose an injunction.
And then it goes to the Circuit Court of Appeals, which it did, judicial review, two-to-one decision.
They said the judge did not act improperly.
Supreme Court Review Looms 00:15:09
And now it goes to U.S. Supreme Court.
So to me, this is happening the way it should be happening.
And the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has not jumped in already tells you that this is not an easy question where the president has to do with the pressure.
It tells me John Roberts is missing a hefty pair.
I'm sorry, but that's what it tells me.
You tell me, Mike, John Roberts could have said by himself.
He had the power to say, no, that temporary injunction that was just upheld by the Court of Appeals is lifted.
No, you're not doing that.
And there could have been a slapdown, but now he wants to bring it to the whole court.
Okay, fine, we'll do that.
But the Supreme Court should ASAP issue an order slapping down the district judge and the Court of Appeals for not understanding the difference between a legal question and a political one.
Yeah, we're in very dangerous territory when you can have a district court judge in America sabotage an ongoing military operation, order the president to turn around planes, bring back 200 of the worst terrorists of the Western hemisphere back to America without knowing if we have the security capability in place like they did in El Salvador.
This is very dangerous when judges wade in to these commander-in-chief powers of the president.
So I would say this to the Chief Justice John Roberts, and I would say this to Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
They failed to do their job when Judge Auli on the D.C. District Court ordered the president, ordered the president to issue $2 billion in checks in foreign aid without the president being able to do a national security review to make sure that we're not funding, for example, Hamas terrorists under the guise of Gazin humanitarian relief, right?
So all that did was embolden these activist judges.
And now we see Judge Boesberg taking the judiciary to the brink by threatening to hold in contempt of court Trump administration officials for not abandoning a military operation and not endangering the lives of America and their allies and landing those damn planes, which is what they had to do in this circumstance.
And so Judge Bozberg is going to take us to the brink, and this could be stopped, and this could be stopped today if the Chief Justice John Roberts would do his damn job and get his judicial house in order and get these judicial saboteurs, these activist judges in line.
There was an amazing, amazing piece posted to National Review this week, co-authored by John Yoo and Robert J. Dellahunty, both of whom are very well-respected attorneys.
John Yoo was instrumental in the Trump administration.
My friend Grant Greenwald would really want me to tell you that his defense of some of the overreaches on torture and so on were inexcusable.
That is some people's view of John Yoo.
I think he's brilliant.
And in this co-authored piece on National Review, they lay it out so clearly.
I urge everybody to go and read it.
The title of it is Standby.
The court's overstep in the messy clash with Trump over Trenda Aragua.
And here is what they say in part.
Okay, I'm going to read from it.
The two-to-one decision by the Court of Appeals upholding Boesberg intrudes into the province of the elected branches of government over war and national security.
A federal court has never before overruled the decision of a president or Congress that the United States has suffered an attack or an invasion.
They go on to say, judicial review does not extend to every constitutional question.
The Supreme Court itself has long recognized that there are certain political questions which the Constitution itself has committed to the final decision of the president or Congress or which have no legal standards that the courts can apply.
That's the problem here.
There's no Judge Boesberg does not know better than Trump whether an invasion has happened.
He doesn't.
There are no legal standards for him to use in determining that.
That is a call by the chief executive, by the commander-in-chief, who is getting intelligence briefings, who has classified information coming to him on a daily basis of what the Venezuelans are doing.
And as we pointed out in another piece that we discussed earlier this week, which we mentioned by Bart Marquis, there is evidence that the Venezuelan government works with Trenda Aragua and has intentionally sent them here.
Quoting here from the piece, the Venezuelan, this is from a law enforcement high-level investigator who is actually on the ground, saying, quote, the Venezuelan regime has assumed operational control of Trenda Aragua, has trained 300 of them.
They've given them paramilitary training, training them to fire weapons and how to conduct sabotage.
They have given them all a four to six week course.
They put these 300 guys through that course, and then they were deploying them into the United States at 20 separate states in 20 separate states.
And by the way, the Alien Enemies Act, Dave, only requires that there be an attempted, an attempted predatory incursion.
We're there.
How do you say Judge Boesberg is better positioned with zero, zero presidential daily briefs, zero access to classified information that he gets from Tulsi Gabbard and all those around him who head up the Pentagon and the national intelligence branches to make a call on whether we're suffering from an attempted predatory incursion?
How is he better suited than the commander-in-chief?
Well, I'm thankful that there is a judge out there and judges in the appellate court who actually are trying to constrain the unlimited power of the executive branch, especially when you have these intelligence folks who apparently aren't so good at their jobs that there are people out there who were sent to this prison who are not gang members.
And so that's where the judge should be stepping in to at least to check the power of the federal government to make sure that they're compliant with law.
That's the right people.
Right.
But still, so but that, but just for the record, that's twice you've gotten out of bounds on alien enemies.
Once you've said they basically get a habeas review, which is a different thing, and secondly, you said that this may be torture, which is a different thing.
On the big, big question of whether Trump can use the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport suspected Venezuelan gang members, it's a win for President Trump.
And once that's a win for President Trump, we can nitpick about whether an individual guy gets a habeas review, etc.
But it's a huge win for the Trump administration, and it's very important one because what the leftist ACLU right now is trying to do is clip the wings of our sitting commander-in-chief.
Go ahead.
Well, I'm glad that he's targeting this dangerous gang, but I'm not glad that there are individuals who have been deported who are not members of the gang without any due process.
And so, I actually like the fact that there are judges out there who are trying to slow down this process to make sure they get it right.
And that Alien Enemies Act is not absolute, it doesn't give the president unlimited authority without any check.
There's still Marbury versus Madison judicial review, there are still Article III judges out there saying that, right?
But also, can I just say, I'm reading here again from the John Yu piece, okay?
Recognizing these limits to the judicial role is no dereliction of duty.
In Marbury versus Madison, the very case that first declared the power of judicial review, in that case, the court said, We say what the lies.
The courts are the ones who say what the law is.
Chief Justice John Marshall used his own discretion, quote, Okay, he says for his decisions, quote, he, the president, is accountable only to his country in his political character and to his own conscience, end quote.
His choices cannot be questioned in court because, quote, the subjects are political, end quote.
These issues, quote, respect the nation, not individual rights, and being entrusted to the executive, the decision of the executive is conclusive.
They too understood, Dave, that if it's a political question, it is not the courts that have the final say.
The unitary executive theory, where pretty much the president is the most powerful of the three branches of government.
And I get it, and John Roberts seems to agree with that.
That he was the one who authored the immunity ruling.
So it is telling that that same John Roberts is not moving to protect President Trump from judicial review because he knows what the lower courts know, and that is the executive branch's domination is not absolute here.
The executive branch does have power, but they are checked by the other two co-equal branches of government.
And this is the first time in history that Congress has stepped back and emasculated itself and given all of its power to the presidency, to the executive branch.
So I'm glad that there are judges out there who are at least doing their jobs to slow down.
I mean, it's the Congress of 1798 that did that, Dave.
He makes it sound like it's Mike Johnson, Mike Davis.
It was the Congress of 1798 that said we are choosing to give the executive these extraordinary powers and without judicial review.
And the Supreme Court, in interpreting that act, said there's no judicial review of this.
It's a political question that we are out of our lane if we try to take on.
Mike, let me get you to weigh in on it.
Let me just read you just another little snippet from the John U piece.
Again, well worth everyone's time.
He goes on to say, Courts have studiously avoided second-guessing the decisions of the elected branches of government.
Federal judges refused to rule on the legality of not just the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but every war in American history, even the Guantanamo Bay cases.
There they deferred to the decision of President George W. Bush, etc.
Now, he goes on to say the following: In the case by the DC Circuit that affirmed the temporary restraining order against Trump's deportation powers under alien enemies, he says the D.C. Circuit ignored the judiciary's traditional deference on questions of war.
Judge Karen Henderson's opinion, Karen, Karen, sorry, she displayed little modesty in rejecting the claim that Trenda Aragua's conduct qualified as an invasion.
Based on her review of the history of the 1798 Act, she concluded that an invasion, quote, required far more than an unwanted entry.
To constitute an invasion, there had to be hostilities.
She observes that, quote, in every instance in the Constitution, in laws and debates of the time, invasion is used in a military sense.
Same goes, she concludes, for predatory incursions.
You go on.
On this ground alone, the Supreme Court should grant emergency review of this case.
Federal judges do not have the capability, the understanding, or access to information to make sensitive decisions on whether a foreign actor represents a national security threat, nor can they judge the harms that could arise from action or inaction.
Courts are not designed to make policy decisions involving probabilities and risks, which are characteristic of war and national security.
Mike, I would say this: Judge Karen Henderson, lovely lady, but she's like this 80-year-old judge, Republican-appointed judge who hires all these liberal law clerks, all these liberal law clerks, not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer.
And it's time for Judge Henderson to step down, retire.
It was time eight years ago for Judge Henderson to step down and retire.
And this case is a perfect example.
She's just clearly wrong here, and she's dangerously wrong here.
When you have judges taking on the president's commander-in-chief role and trying to second-guess the president when he's trying to expel foreign terrorists who are working with enemy countries to sabotage America, that is his constitutional duty as commander-in-chief to get these terrorists the hell out of our country.
And any judge who thinks that they have the power to second-guess and get in the way should not be on the bench.
Okay, now let's talk about the individual rights.
I really feel it very strongly, contrary to what you say, Dave, contrary to the argument I had with Charles C.W. Cook on this podcast two weeks ago.
Trump has this power under the Alien Enemies Act, and it's really clear.
And I think these judges are way out over their skis.
And I actually do have hope that the Supreme Court's going to slap them and hard and remind them that they're unelected judges, that nobody elected them to do anything.
They're not commander-in-chief.
Judge Bozberg's had his fun playing mini commander.
He's not.
However, on the right to individual review, where one person says, wait, I'm not Trend de Aragua, that actually can be heard.
And the administration has conceded that.
They've conceded that.
And actually, if I went back and did a dive, my God helped me into other cases interpreting the Alien Enemy Act, including one that came down in 1813, gentlemen.
This is how I spent my morning.
This is how much I love you.
1813 cases I was looking at.
Where the court later clarified in a case called Lockington v. Smith that judicial review, they had said that judicial review into whether an individual is actually an alien enemy is okay.
Like that, that we will allow, not to whether the president had the power to declare it or use it, but individual circumstances.
Like I'm not Trend de Aragua.
Yes, you can have judicial review.
And then they went back in Lockington in 1813 and said that review need only be available subsequent to incarceration.
So Trump did no wrong.
He did no wrong putting them on a plane and shipping them off to this El Salvadorian prison.
But now, and this is why the administration is conceding it, they will have to give individual hearings where the person is claiming, I'm not Trenda Iraqua.
And I don't exactly know how that happens.
I'm not sure.
I don't know.
I don't even know what the procedure for that would be, Dave.
Do you have any idea?
I don't know once they're in another country.
And I do think he did wrong in that they put them on the plane after the judge said, you can't do this anymore.
So they knew what the judge ruled.
And they were, like I said, they were playing games to...
But just to be clear, it appears they only did that with plane number three.
Planes number one and two were already airborne when the judge issued that ruling.
But the ruling of the...
They refused to turn the planes around.
That is true.
Right.
Correct.
Correct.
And just because you're in international airspace doesn't mean the judge's ruling doesn't apply to you.
Or else, wow, that'd be fun.
Every time there's a judge's ruling, you just send the people into international airspace and then torture them or whatever you need to do.
Right.
Also, no, you're right.
I don't know what the process is now.
This is uncharted territory now that they're in an El Salvador jail.
And I don't know.
But, you know, there is something that we haven't mentioned yet.
And it's the War Powers Act, which is of 1973, which does show that Congress has a say in all of this.
Now, what's unusual now is that Congress has decided to give up their rights.
It says, you know what, we're going to step back.
We're not going to have any power now, which is why I think the judges have stepped up more aggressively than Mike would have liked.
I mean, that's all very sweet, but they don't have the power, Mike.
Immigration Rights and Appeals 00:15:48
I mean, here's the issue.
Even if these terrorists are entitled to some sort of judicial review, it was not in the D.C. district court.
It was not with Judge Boesberg.
He wasn't even the emergency judge four Saturdays ago when he opened up his courtroom and he exposed this ongoing military operation when he endangered American and allied lives.
I mean, this was a very high stakes operation.
And separate from that, look at the foreign policy implications.
So this El Salvador president takes this high risk to take these terrorists and then he has the planes turn around.
What foreign leader would want to cut a deal with the president of the United States if they're going to be humiliated because an activist judge decides that they're going to be the commander in chief on Saturday and sabotage and abort the operation?
And you've undermined that leader in his country.
I mean, separate from the security issue, you're damaging the president's ability to conduct foreign affairs.
Here's what's really crazy.
As far as we can see, nobody, including the ACLU, is I raised this question repeatedly this week saying I'm looking into the legality of shipping them out.
I mean, not that.
I accept he has the power, as I've just argued for the past half hour plus.
But is it legal to put them in prison?
Like that, to me, is an interesting question.
Well, how do they wind up in prison without due process on criminal charges against them, you know, for being gang members for committing alleged crimes?
How do you, like, I get how you deport them.
You can ship them back to where they came from.
That's no problem.
You can ship them back to where they were born.
The law recognizes that.
I just don't know how you can ship them into a prison.
But here's the weird thing.
As far as I can tell, literally nobody's even arguing that that's an issue.
Like literally nobody, even the ACLU is not making that their argument, Dave.
They're saying, well, they're putting them into jails in which they could be tortured, but they're not saying they're putting them into jails.
Right.
Right.
I noticed that too, Megan.
They're holding their hat on the torture because that's an infamous prison where they have been put, but not on the fact that they're in a jail to begin with.
So that is something I must, ACLU must have found some sort of ambiguity in the law that would allow the administration to deport people into prisons.
But, you know, this is a notorious prison.
And I didn't like, I don't know what you guys thought, but I didn't really love the image of Christy Noam standing in front with her Rolex watch in front of those guys.
It gave me North Korea vibes.
I didn't like that the United States was putting out a I did not like it, and I did a big bid on it.
But, you know, people disagree.
I would say my audience is split.
I actually expected them to be totally against me and you, Dave, on that and say, you know, but actually they were about, I'd say 55% in our camp and 45% in defense of her.
And the reason they are, I think, Mike, is like cases like the one that just came down today out of South Carolina, where another illegal was out there driving a car without a driver's license, of course, ran a stop sign and killed some college student with his whole life in front of him.
You know, just run over and then abandon, hit and run in the middle of the night.
That's why.
That's why people don't give a shit.
You know, that's why it's like, as soon as I have my like, I don't know if it's just my human heartstrings that get pulled when I see the Christy Noam thing with the guys behind her like human props.
It just makes me uncomfortable.
Then they go out the window, you know, because like, look what these guys are doing to us.
They're killing our kids.
So what would the left do?
You know, it's like, that's one of the problems here, Mike, as we look at this.
It's like, what are the other solutions?
Trump is cleaning up a mess.
Look, for four years, the Biden Justice Department persecuted Trump supporters who trespassed into the Capitol.
And I didn't hear the left losing any sleep over Trump grandmas in the DC gulag.
But the second we have the most vicious terrorist in the Western hemisphere, Trende Aragua, along with MS-13 gang members who are sent to our country from Venezuela to sabotage our country.
They are kidnapping.
They are robbing.
They are raping.
They are torturing.
Look, Joe Biden let 15 million illegal immigrants into our country.
I used to be a lot more liberal when it comes to immigration, legal immigration.
I'm pretty anti-immigration right now, and I just have very little sympathy for any of these Trendearagua or MS-13 terrorists.
Let's keep going because there's other cases, too.
Can we spend a minute on this Judge Reyes, Mike Davis, who has decided the Trump administration is synonymous with animus.
Pete Hegseth, as the sec deaf, cannot say trans people cannot serve in the military because it's full of animus, meaning hatred, against trans people.
And she says, oh, I know, I know I'm going to be taking up an appeal, but I'm basically doing the right thing because I'm standing up for trans people and animus, animus, animus.
And you say?
This is insane.
What we're dealing with are people who have gender dysphoria.
They have severe mental illness.
And, you know, you can have compassion for people with gender dysphoria, but to have a judge force severely mentally ill people into our military undermines our troop readiness.
It undermines, once again, it undermines the president's commander-in-chief powers.
And, you know, this is not the same as letting black people into the military.
This is not even the same as letting gay people into the military.
You're dealing with a severe mental illness and you're putting them into our military.
It's not appropriate for these judges to do this.
And this is another instance, once again, where the chief justice needs to get his judicial house in order or Congress is going to do it for him.
This judge went on about how, oh, we've always had disadvantaged groups, marginalized persons who haven't been allowed to serve.
But, you know, that doesn't make it right to do that now against trans people.
She's the one who questioned Pete Hegseth's service.
She's like, oh, you know, I don't even know if he's really been in active combat.
Meanwhile, he served three tours of duty.
She's like, I'm going to defer to the Joint Chiefs Commander of the last administration instead of our current sec deaf and our current commander in chief.
What do you think of Judge Reyes, Dave?
I read the ruling, Megan, and here's the part that I thought was interesting is that the Secretary of Defense and the administration decided not to say transgender individuals cannot serve.
They didn't say that.
They said we are classifying gender dysmorphia as a medical condition like heart disease that keeps you out of the military.
You know, like flat feet, which I don't know if flat feet still keeps you out, but I definitely have it.
So here's the thing.
If you wanted to keep out transgender service members from the military, then say so.
But they didn't do that because I guess they thought they would be repudiated by the court.
So instead, they came up with a ruse.
And the ruse was really bad, saying, no, no, we're not against transgender individuals.
We just think that gender dysmorphia makes you unable to be a fit service member.
And yet there's a history of people who have served very capably who are transgender service members.
And so I think the argument that they did was a fake argument, a ruse, and the court saw through it.
So I don't have an issue with the court's ruling.
It will be taken up on appeal and ultimately it will get to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Will, what do you think of that one?
Is that one going to get reversed?
I'll start with you on it, Dave.
I think the way that the ruling came out where they said, if you want to ban transgender individuals, say so and make an argument for doing so, but you can't do it through this other method of just saying we're going to classify gender dysmorphia as a condition that makes you incapable of serving, like having terrible asthma or something.
So I think in that case, that argument will fail before the U.S. Supreme Court.
And I think Judge Reyes will ultimately be upheld.
Mike?
When you're dealing with transgender, you never know because my former boss, Neil Gorsuch, gets a little weird on these cases.
So who knows how he's going to rule that day?
But I think if you follow the law, the president as the commander-in-chief has the constitutional duty to make sure that our troops are ready to fight and win wars.
And when you put severely mentally ill people in the ranks, that undermines the president's commander-in-chief powers.
Back on the initial case we were discussing, Mike, do you think, because it certainly sounded from that hearing yesterday, that Judge Boesberg, who's trying to determine whether Trump is in contempt of court, the Trump admin, because of the planes not turning around mid-air, we reported on our AM update show this morning.
Margo Cleveland, who listened to the whole thing for the Federalists, was saying what he was, the way he was speaking was, it's not a question of whether, it's just a question of who exactly violated my order.
And that's all I'm really looking to find out.
And was getting very angry.
This is our reporting based on our readings of the various news reports.
He was getting very angry at the Department of Justice for not saying specifically who they told to stop the planes and who refused that instruction based on the judge's order.
And he kept taking his glasses off and throwing them on the table.
He was reportedly scowling and scoffing, says Julie Kelly, who was watching the whole thing.
So it certainly looks like he's going to hold the Trump administration in contempt of court.
So if you assume he does that and then they appeal, and I guess the DC Circuit, maybe this panel or another could potentially uphold it.
What does that look like?
How do you what it what do they do?
Fine him?
Somebody going to jail for a few days?
Like, what does it even look like?
I would say this to DC Obama Judge Jeb Boesberg.
You should step back from the brink here because you are going to light on fire the federal judiciary's legitimacy.
And that's all the judiciary has is its legitimacy.
Once it loses its legitimacy with the American people, it loses everything.
It doesn't have an army.
It can't enforce its orders.
It has to do it through the executive branch.
And this is the one case.
And I've never done this before.
Not only have I called for Judge Bozberg's impeachment, this is the only time I have ever publicly advocated that you ignore an order of a courts because not only is this so illegal, what this judge did by trying to interfere and sabotage and undermine the president during a military operation, it's so dangerous what he did.
So it's highly illegal and highly dangerous.
He put American and allied lives in grave danger by exposing this operation.
He undermined the president's ability to conduct foreign affairs.
And I would say this, I was a law clerk before.
I don't think that the law clerks that Judge Bozberg hires are green berets.
They can't turn around planes and they're not going to be able to enforce this order.
So if he holds, if Judge Bozberg holds Trump officials in contempt, I think that the president, if it's criminal contempt, the president should pardon immediately.
And if it's civil contempt, I would say to Bozberg, piss off, go enforce your own order.
That's the danger here, Dave, is the Supreme Court, John Roberts in particular, very conscious of the fact that there's no police power by this, this high court.
And on a question as tenuous as this, right?
Like, as I said before, Trump at his apex and the courts at their lowest.
Do we think John Roberts would take the risk of saying, yeah, you have to stop deporting under the Alien Enemies Act?
And yeah, I affirm the contempt holding that Judge Bozberg is likely about to hand down.
I mean, it's very, very thin ice.
I think, Megan, that this Supreme Court is going to uphold Judge Bozberg.
I think they're tipping their hand by their inaction so far.
They could have acted and reversed that injunction already.
I do think the interpretation that this administration is making on the Alien Enemies Act is overbroad, but we'll see what the Supreme Court says.
And as far as the tipping of the hand, keep going.
And as far as the contempt, I actually agree with Mike on that.
I don't think Judge Bozberg wants to go down that road because if he does issue contempt against administration officials, it's up to the Marshal's Office to enforce it.
And the Marshal's Office is under the executive branch.
Now, there is something obscure in the law that says that if the Marshal's office doesn't want to do it, you can actually go to like local sheriffs.
But can you imagine that happening?
They'll go to the local sheriff to arrest the lawyers for DOJ.
No, that I think Judge Bozberg realizes that.
So I think any sanction will be something so minor, it won't cause much of a ripple.
Yeah, this is going to be it, Dave.
How long until we hear the left start to say, like, this is our chance to get Trump back in jail?
Judge Boseberg, he's going to do it.
Yeah, I don't think, I just don't understand how it could even work.
Can I ask you, Mike Davis, what, since the Trump administration is conceding that there's an individual habeas right, and all that means for the listening audience is you have the right to say, like, I've been detained wrongfully.
If they say, Megan Kelly, you committed a murder and you're in jail.
You know, you're being arrested here.
You have the right to say, I'm not Megan Kelly.
I'm Karen, whatever.
And so the Trump administration is admitting, is conceding, at least in the Boesberg case, that there is an individual habeas right for people to challenge being labeled Trenda Aragua under the Alien Enemies Act.
So how should that go down?
Because what's happening is we're shipping them off to this El Salvadorian prison, which is not great.
I mean, even our own State Department and others talk about what happens in these El Salvadorian prisons, and it's very unattractive.
I mean, they're housed like animals, like in like a pig sty with like 100 people in a cell and no mattresses.
And the cleanliness has got questions, at least reportedly.
Okay, so how does it happen?
And who offers them a hearing?
And like, you know, a lot of ink has been spilled this week on this Kilmar Obrego Garcia, this guy who was found by a lower judge and then a higher appellate court in the immigration system to have ties to MS-13.
But the media would just tell you he's a father.
He's a father of a little boy and he's married to an American citizen.
He got pulled out of obscurity and sent to this prison.
It's a lot more complicated than that.
But if this guy wants to have a hearing on whether he's really trend to Aragua, how does it happen?
It's a good question.
I mean, he could file a habeas petition in Texas where the planes took off.
Maybe we can come up with a good solution.
Maybe we can send Judge Bozberg and his law clerks down to that El Salvadorian prison and he could be the prison lawyer and he can handle all these amazing ideas.
And I think it'd be a good way we can impeach Bozberg and make him the prison lawyer in El Salvador.
Yeah, it's like a form of president.
You're president of the prison.
Clearly, you're looking for executive authority.
You know, but we do, I think, I think there needs to be some established procedure.
And again, under the 1813 Supreme Court interpretation of all of this, it's okay if they don't give him a hearing before they deport him under Alien Enemies Act.
He's fine there.
And even before they imprison them.
But at some point, if these individuals are saying they're not Trenda Aragua, we're going to have to hear those claims in some way, shape, or form.
And Dave, the other question is, what?
Impeach Judge Bozberg 00:04:13
They're supposed to be, we paid them $6 million to house these prisoners for a year.
So what happens after the year?
Does anybody know?
Do they like to get out of here?
Do they just get let out?
I don't think El Salvador wants them milling about.
No, that's the contract expires.
At the end of the year, they have to renegotiate, just like any other contract.
It's a pretty good deal for the administration.
Fair enough.
But let's just hope that they get it right because any person who's wrongfully detained there really is a tragedy because that is a terrible facility and you would hate for innocent people to be sent there.
And hopefully there will be some due process where they will have hearings.
But like I said earlier, we're in uncharted territory here.
And so Mike's guess is as good as mine as to what the next step would be.
You know, Mike, today on Instagram, I saw this young gal who was talking about medical tourism.
And she went to Turkey and in one day had every test you could have done on your body scan and blood tests and so on and dental work.
I mean, you name it.
They did it.
And apparently she only paid 800 bucks for this in Turkey.
So it's medical tourism.
I mean, what I feel like Trump is engaging in in penal tourism where he's getting this, you know how much it would cost to house 300 prisoners here in the United States for a year?
Way more than $6 million.
This is like the Turkish, this is the equivalent of the Turkish day spa.
I would say to these illegal immigrants, particularly these terrorists, there's a new sheriff in town.
And if you come to America, we're not going to put you up in four-star hotels anymore.
We're going to put you in an El Salvadorian prison.
Yeah, times have changed.
You guys are the best.
I've missed you.
Thank you so much for coming back.
Thank you.
Thanks for having us back, Megan.
All right, you guys, see you soon.
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Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show.
We are continuing to get incredible details about the downfall of former President Biden's campaign and presidency from two new books.
One of the new details includes Hollywood actor George Clooney, once raging against Morning Joe's Mika Brzezinski.
I love this story.
I love it.
It's for so many reasons, which we'll get to.
Joining me now to discuss that and so much more is Mike Solana.
Mike runs a news outlet called Pirate Wires.
Last time he was on our show, we got a huge response from our viewers and listeners, so we are glad to have him back on.
Great to see you again.
Thanks for having me back.
Okay, so I love this George Clooney story.
And let me make sure that I have the proper attribution so that I protect the innocent, the good reporters who are actually bringing this stuff out.
Hold on, where is it?
Where did I put it?
Where is it, Deb?
Oh, it's in the original.
It's in the AM update.
Sorry, guys.
Okay.
So, this is the Whipple book that we talked about the other day.
This Whipple book is, let's see, Chris Whipple, and it's called Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History.
Well, new nuggets are breaking.
Tara Palmieri, who's got her own sub stack and podcast now, she's been on the show.
She got a copy and released a couple of the nuggets, and so did The Guardian.
But hers was a really interesting nugget.
And she's apparently in this book, they reveal that George Clooney saw Morning Joe one day right after his op-ed, and Mika Brzezinski was suggesting that Barack Obama was behind the George Clooney op-ed that was basically making Clooney seem like Obama's puppet.
Here's the Mika clip.
I'm going to walk you through it.
Watch it.
Saw 22.
This wasn't George Clooney.
But what do you mean?
It just wasn't.
Come on.
Who do you think it was?
Matt Damon?
It was not Matt Damon.
It wasn't Julia Roberts either.
Who do you think it was?
You can say the name.
It's not Voltaire.
Are you saying you think Barack Obama put him up to this?
I think that Barack Obama has a lot of influence.
Okay.
Literally everyone thinks that he put him up to it.
I mean, this is like, but here's what is reported.
Whipple writes, at 10.05 a.m. after Morning Joe had rapped that show, one of the show's producers walked into his Manhattan apartment.
His phone started buzzing and he answered.
The voice was familiar.
How the F could you let her link me with Barack Obama saying he made me write the op-ed?
It was George Clooney.
The producer pushed back.
Listen, I didn't do that, he said.
You effed me.
Only with the real word, Clooney shouted.
You're my friend.
You should have stood up for me.
Oh my God, you little baby, you man-child.
Okay, that was me.
George, the producer said, this is not an effing movie.
There's no script.
It's just not a movie where you go script page to script page.
F you, replied Clooney.
F yourself, said the producer.
The exchange of F-bombs lasted about five minutes before Clooney hung up.
A few minutes later, he called back for another round of cursing and arguing.
The actor called a third time, just after noon, and the shouting match went on.
The producer had had enough.
This is a morning talk show on a cable channel, he shouted at Clooney.
Nobody gives an F what we say or if we say he should get out or if he should stay in.
Nobody effing cares.
It's skywriting.
It's effing gone.
George, I told you before.
We'll try and take care of it tomorrow morning.
I promise you.
I don't know whether I trust you, replied Clooney.
Well, F you, said the producer.
If you don't trust me, stop effing calling me.
Okay, we just got, we got to spend a minute on how pathetic these characters come across, right?
Like, I'm top and I'm telling George Clooney to F off, but I promise we'll take it back tomorrow.
I got you.
Please don't hate me, George Clooney.
What I don't understand is why he, I mean, presumably he wants people to know that he's associated with Barack Obama.
So maybe the interesting tell here is actually that Obama has declined in relevance.
Is that like really the reason that he's angry?
It's like, don't tell me that I'm, that I am like Obama's pathy.
Well, why not?
Like that would be, that would carry some weight for a George Clooney Coon previous era, but maybe not as much anymore.
Well, you saw in the recent poll of Democratic frontrunners or leaders, who is the leader of the Democratic Party?
Barack Obama only got 4%.
I know.
And I really thought it was him until that poll.
I think AOC had 10%.
So that's not good for...
Well, that's not really good for the Democrats, to be honest.
Well, I can understand why as a man, you would feel totally emasculated by what is probably the truth, which is you were just the puppet to a more important man's opinions.
You know, you may think that your president, he thinks he's a journalist now because he played one in a movie years ago.
He's out there lecturing journalists on how to do journalism and be great at the end of his new Broadway play.
Maybe he thinks he's president too, because I guess he doesn't want to be subjugated to Barack Obama because he was apparently genuinely pissed off.
And what's so funny about this is he's like, he's worried that Mika Brzezinski's implication on Morning Joe is going to hurt his reputation.
Somehow, somehow it's like, it's going to hurt his street cred with what?
The leftists who watch MSNBC.
George, I have news for you.
We all believe it.
She's not alone.
We know this is what has happened.
Why does he care?
I mean, do you think that maybe he has some kind of political ambition?
I think so many of them.
Maybe.
He thinks, you know, there's this wide open space.
There is no leader in the Democratic Party.
It's going to be me.
I'm going to roll out there.
Yes, Stephen A. Smith says he's going to do it.
Maybe.
Yeah.
I mean, he says he's not going to go.
It's like, ever since Trump ran, people think, well, anyone can do it.
You know, if Trump can do it, anyone can do it.
They never recovered from that original assumption about things.
And so now they're still trying to get people to go.
I mean, it might be better than what they have now.
I don't know.
On the dev side.
So here's the follow-up.
This Tara Palmeri had on the author, Whipple, and asked him whether Obama did tell Clooney to write the op-ed.
And Whipple had a story about Obama's former chief of staff, Bill Daly, and what he confessed to Whipple about whether Obama was really behind the George Clooney op-ed.
All right.
Do you follow me?
So this was Obama's former chief of staff speaking to the author of the book who was on this podcast.
And here is how that went.
Did you ever get down to the bottom of whether Obama did, in fact, tell George Clooney to publish that op-ed?
I don't think anybody knows for sure.
I asked his chief of staff, his second chief of staff, Bill Daly, what he thought.
And Daly said, I said, do you think he gave Clooney a green light?
And Daly said, I don't think he would have given him a red light.
So he wouldn't have stopped it, is basically what he's saying.
Obviously, I mean, that's an implicit admission by the guy, Obama's former chief of chaff.
Okay.
So it just shows how thin-skinned this Hollywood A-lister is.
And then this morning show producer who's trying to be like, I told him to F himself.
I told him to F off.
And then I told him, we'll fix it tomorrow.
Please don't be mad at us.
Please hope George Clooney can't be mad at me.
Okay.
Very chummy relationship, by the way, right?
Like I thought we were friends.
I thought I could trust you.
Well, you know what?
That was your first mistake because you shouldn't trust cable news producers.
They're only there to do one thing, put points on the board, not befriend Hollywood celebrities.
Okay, there's more.
In that Whipple book, he details how the meltdown around the presidential debate where Joe Biden imploded.
And he gets into great detail about how bad it was.
He spoke with Biden's former chief of staff who said, we were terrified.
I expected a disaster.
He couldn't make it through either of the debate preps.
He wasn't sure.
He didn't seem to be aware of the fact that he was president.
He thought he was president of NATO.
Yeah.
And yet they sent him off on stage.
And apparently, Joe Biden's sister, Valerie Biden, had a complete meltdown after seeing him on stage that night, blaming everyone around him.
Probably not Jill, Dr. Jill, but everyone else.
And here's a bit from that in that podcast, same podcast, Sat 24. 30 a.m. that evening, one of Joe Biden's best friends picked up his phone and saw that Valerie was on the line.
She was distraught.
She was in tears and she was furious and she could barely contain herself.
She said, what did they do to my brother at Camp David?
Was her opening line.
And she, again, couldn't go on much more than that.
She was so distraught.
She clearly was lashing out and blaming people other than Joe Biden, namely his debate team.
And she called back the next morning.
Again, called Biden's friend, said, how could they have done this?
How could he have arrived just minutes before the debate?
How could they not have given him decent makeup?
You know, how did he wind up looking like Dorian Gray?
And indeed, he did.
So what do you think?
I think it's interesting all these people are coming out now because there's a couple of books, as I mentioned, trying to do like the deconstruction of what happened with the debate and Biden's presidency, et cetera.
Is this the save your own ass effort or what is this?
I think, I mean, I think there's this power struggle and no one knows who's going to... who's going to be in charge of the Democratic Party.
I think the Biden stuff, I mean, as we were going through these details, it really was shocking.
I mean, I was shocked watching that debate.
And I had been criticizing.
I'd been saying, oh, this man has dementia or whatever, but I didn't realize it was like dementia, dementia.
Same thing.
I mean, that was way worse than I thought.
And then you can't help at that point, but then think about everybody associated with him.
And there's a lot of anger.
I think that there's probably even more anger on the Democrat side.
So I think these people are all positioning themselves to seem sort of like not the bad guy here.
They want to come out and be associated with whoever the new fountain power is going to be, but it's not going to be anybody associated with Biden.
And I think roughly it's that.
Yeah, that makes sense.
There was a young woman who worked in the White House under Biden, who was on CNN.
She's a, no, she was a campaign aide named Ashley Allison.
She went on CNN on Wednesday.
Listen to this woman, Sat 25.
Ashley, do you feel lied to?
Yeah, I do.
I think it, I hadn't been around the president before that debate.
And I worked for Joe Biden.
And if the people around him knew that he was not capable, it is unacceptable to me that they allowed him to go onto that stage.
I deserve better as a voter, not even as a Democrat, as a voter, and as an American.
I do.
This is ridiculous.
We all knew.
I mean, we knew he was in bad shape.
I agree with you.
We didn't know it was DEF CON one, but we knew it was like two or three.
We knew he was bad.
I mean, we were calling for a primary before.
There were some Democrats who were like, hey, should we like think about this?
Should we maybe run some other people?
But I do, I think that there's a good positioning now to say, you know what?
I was also misled.
I was like the New York Times on COVID.
We were misled.
Who could have done this?
Who is responsible for this?
That's dust for fingerprints.
Yeah.
And they're going to jockey around and figure it out.
I mean, isn't the new book?
It's Jake Tapper is one of the guys.
It's just like, I'm going to reserve judgment until that book comes out.
I am excited to see what he has to say about it, but it's a tough pill to swallow.
I'll give you a prediction.
He's going to say he was all over the mental acuity problem.
And he'll probably have some examples.
I think the other guy was, the other writer on that, I think.
Yeah, Alex Thompson.
Alex was, I think he has more credibility.
He would have been fine.
Nobody would have, like, that guy's ability to cast this stone is unquestioned because he was pretty tough even on the Kamala thing.
He was tough all along.
He was like a normal reporter should be.
Jake's co-partnership on it complicates it.
And for as many times as he may have mildly pointed it out, they didn't have the story.
The left wasn't interested in the story.
It's like I asked the New York Times when I sat down with them last week or whatever, it aired last week, where was Peter Baker?
Why wasn't he, you know, where was your intrepid White House reporter figuring out that neurologists had visited the White House more than 10 times in a year?
Well, I think at that point they were just pot committed.
They were like, this guy's running against Trump.
Trump is Hitler in their mind.
And so it doesn't matter.
We have to run him.
And I think that that's really what the story would have been had he not stepped down and he ran.
It would have been that way all the way until the election, even after they had the debate.
I think the other piece of it is the left is losing its mind over Trump right now.
They're so angry at what he's doing.
It's like, older pet favorite causes, you know, being attacked one by one.
And so it's like, how did we get in this position?
Yeah.
Who, who let the infirm guy get all the way to that June debate?
And they can't blame him.
Right.
They can't blame him.
He has dementia.
They should be talking about Dr. Jill.
Dr. Jill, she's a medical.
Oh, wait, no, she's not.
But she knew better than anybody, and she shoved him weekend at Bernie style out of that stage.
You think it was her?
You think that she's going to blame her?
She's not the only one, but she's the number one person to blame.
It's disgusting.
I would never want this done to me by my spouse, and I would never do this to my spouse.
Never.
You're supposed to be looking out for them in sickness and in health and be able to step away from power, which she couldn't.
Okay.
Where was I going after that?
There's so much to get to today.
I guess we'll go to Donald Trump and tariffs because the Trump agenda.
They're very upset about, yes, tariffs and DEI and all of that.
This is something, we talked about this a little bit before we got to air.
I think we both have the same view on it, which is you say what you're saying.
You can't make me care about tariffs.
China Tariffs Explained 00:10:32
You cannot make me mad about them.
It's not going to happen.
You can scream.
You can yell.
You're getting it from all sides right now.
You're getting the sort of just classically presenting globalists.
You're getting Democrats, obviously.
You're getting more libertarian-leaning Republicans who wanted sort of anti-woke stuff, but not this.
And they're all disincentivized to genuine as much hysteria as possible.
But it has been 10 years of this now.
And it just started.
It's the beginning of Trump's term.
He has a lot of, there's a lot of reason for him to kick up a bunch of chaos and create a bunch of leverage and begin some kind of negotiations that I don't know really anything about at this point.
And it's okay to just sit down and be like, let's see how it goes.
Like, I think that's fine to just kick it day by day.
I don't know why we have to go to DEF CON 1.
As you were saying before, I agree.
It's like, let's just take a chill pill while we can still afford them.
Calm down.
Just sim the murr, as Bill Hammer used to say, sim the merr, calm down.
They won't.
But it is interesting to me because Trump always says, I ran on this, and he is doing only stuff he ran on.
Really, everything he's doing is a promise made, promise kept.
This one in particular has been a lifelong issue for Trump.
This clip has been circulating on social media.
I saw it on X a couple of times.
And it was back when we still liked Oprah in 1988, when she was still somewhat self-deprecating and likable.
Not her billionaire actress self, like, what?
With Megan Markle, what?
They wanted to know how dark your baby was going to?
What?
We don't like that version.
However, fat, fun Oprah was great.
Thin, bitter, too rich to relate to Oprah is not great.
So Oprah had Trump on in 1988 when he was, by my math, 41 years old.
Wow.
And listen to this exchange.
What would you do differently, Donald?
I'd make our allies, forgetting about the enemies, the enemies you can't talk to so easily, I'd make our allies pay their fair share.
We're a debtor nation.
Something's going to happen over the next number of years with this country because you can't keep going on losing 200 billion.
And yet we let Japan come in and dump everything right into our markets.
It's not free trade.
If you ever go to Japan right now and try to sell something, forget about it, Oprah.
Just forget about it.
It's almost impossible.
They don't have laws against it.
They just make it impossible.
They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs, they knock the hell out of our companies.
And hey, I have tremendous respect for the Japanese people.
I mean, you can respect somebody that's beating the hell out of you, but they are beating the hell out of this country.
Kuwait, they live like kings.
The poorest person in Kuwait, they live like kings.
And yet they're not paying.
We make it possible for them to sell their oil.
Why aren't they paying us 25% of what they're making?
It's a joke.
This sounds like political presidential talk to me.
And I know people have talked to you about whether or not you want to run.
Would you ever?
Probably not, but I do get tired of seeing the country ripple.
Why would you not?
I just don't think I really have the inclination to do it.
I love what I'm doing.
I really like it.
Also, it doesn't pay as well.
No, it doesn't.
But, you know, I just probably wouldn't do it, Oprah.
I probably wouldn't, but I do get tired of seeing what's happening with this country.
And if it got so bad, I would never want to rule it out totally because I really am tired of seeing what's happening with this country, how we're really making other people live like kings and we're not.
People are tired of seeing the United States ripped off.
And I can't promise you everything, but I can tell you one thing.
This country would make one hell of a lot of money from those people that for 25 years have taken advantage.
It wouldn't be the way it's been.
And you know what's interesting about that clip, among other things?
That was 1988 before we decided to really open the floodgates to trade with China.
Yep.
And then, of course, by the time he ran in 2015, all he was talking about was China.
Yeah.
Well, he was right.
That was one of the, in Silicon Valley, around in 2015, 2016, that was the one thing at that time that you were allowed to talk about.
Because you remember, like, Peter was run out of town.
You could not talk about Trump at that time, but you could talk about China.
Everybody was already keyed into China.
And that was one where it was this thing that you would hear.
You know, I don't agree with him on everything, but China, which was very interesting at that time.
That was, it was like, he was super, super early to it.
And I was just thinking while we were watching that clip, you're right.
That was just before the China stuff happened.
China just retaliated or they said they were going to retaliate.
Yeah, they said, but as of coming to era, they hadn't announced what exactly they're doing.
I saw a bunch of things, but the one that stood out the most was they're going after rare earth metals, or they're saying they're going to.
What's interesting about that is that is a strategy they've been on for decades.
Okay.
So they're subsidizing their mining facilities and more importantly, their processing facilities while we have been regulating our processing facilities.
Our EPA makes it almost impossible to process things over here.
People think that rare earth metals means they're like super rare.
They're all over.
We have them in Texas and California and Alaska.
We just found a huge store of them in Maine.
We can't process them.
And this trade stuff actually, like if all, ignore all the other tariffs, this one thing with China, it really does matter because now it's being used as a weapon against us because we allowed them to subsidize their industries and because we didn't tariff in response, because we regulated our own out, they can now hurt us in this way.
So yeah, I think on this stuff, he's correct.
Yep, just getting this in.
China has responded.
China's finance ministry said it will match his plan for 34% tariffs on goods from China with its own 34% tariff on imports from the United States.
I mean, literally, like we almost send them nothing.
That's like, okay, but Trump's not wrong.
We import from China so much more than they import from us.
They're like, screw you.
We don't want to depend on you at all.
Here's the second thing.
Separately, China's Ministry of Commerce said it was adding 11 American companies to its list of unreliable entities, essentially barring them from doing business in China or with Chinese companies.
I mean, isn't this good?
I anchored a presidential debate at which we were pressing every single candidate up there about whether their companies had done business with China, why they did business with China.
Because if you do business with a Chinese company, you're doing business with the CCP.
Xi Chinpeng, yes, you have to.
That's how it works.
That's why when we talk about TikTok and we're like, this is a Chinese company, you're run by the CCP.
That's how it works when you are doing business in a communist country.
And it just, you know what it reminds me?
Like they're all the other tariffs aside, again, and I think you almost do have to decouple them because we're just in the beginning of the negotiations there, but on China, for them to be like, you know, we're retaliating in this unprecedented act of trade war.
Do you know how many tech companies are banned in China?
It's like Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, like the whole industry, not just tariffed.
It's an embargo.
They have been waging trade war against the United States, either obviously or in the case of like the rare earth metal strategy, sort of quietly for decades.
While we thought like, oh, we're just playing along.
And now one person says this is unfair and they're like grasping their pearls.
It's like when an Islamicist blows something up and then everyone says, hey, like it seems like there's a problem with Islamism.
And they're like, that's, that's, you know, that's violent rhetoric.
It's like, well, what about the violence?
Then that's kind of how I feel with the China trade stuff.
It's just ridiculous that I have to sit here and take it seriously.
I'm excited to see what Trump can do.
And I understand people are in, they're feeling uncertain because they rely on their 401ks.
You got retirees who are on a fixed income.
I get all of that.
But I think we just have to hold, just hold the line, hold the line.
That's what Trump is asking.
I believe that he will do something to watch out for the most vulnerable.
Like last time he did that when certain farmers got hit on his trade on his tariffs in Trump 1.0, I mean, now it was government quote handouts.
But if he's going to take away, he's going to have to be in a position to replenish just to get us through the hard period if it gets that bad.
Not into government handouts, but my point is like, if we're going to actively hurt our own farmers, they may need help just to get them through the bridge.
Whatever.
We'll see where it goes.
But I believe he's not just going to let Americans suffer.
The whole point of doing this is to make America and Americans prosper.
Right.
It's to reshore manufacturing is what he says.
I think there's like, are we doing trade deals or are we reshoring American manufacturing?
I don't know that they're not antithetical, but like, I don't know if they're the same strategy.
I'm willing to just sort of wait, though.
And then on the on the, you just mentioned something, you know, you're not into government handouts.
I agree.
But this is the complicated piece of the puzzle is that China really is.
And so if you're competing on a global stage, you know, and you have China massively subsidizing industry and blocking American industry from competing, what do you do?
Like it's not a fair, it's not like, oh, be a capitalist.
Europe is doing the same, you're massive, massive fines on American companies.
Like that's not a capitalist system.
So what is the correct way to navigate if your competitor is massively subsidized by one of the wealthiest countries in the world?
And it's like, I think that, I don't think the protectionism stuff is so crazy when that's the terrain.
It's just like, I think it's a different set of rules.
Well, we have a big, beautiful body of people from whom to buy and sell goods right here in the United States.
So, I mean, that's one of his goals.
He's not cutting off all trade.
He doesn't want to cut off all trade with all foreign countries, but he's playing some hardball.
And I heard an assessment on this morning's The Daily from their European correspondent suggesting, look, it may actually end with Europe before it even begins.
They'll come to Trump.
They'll strike a deal.
The Europeans are feckless and have no power and no backbone.
I'm sorry, but it's true.
It's a lovely place to visit.
But I think they will come hat in hand and try to work something out with him.
And Mexico and Canada didn't get this particular round of sanctions or tariffs.
They got an earlier round and actually are already changing their behavior.
So it's Asia.
You know, it's Asia really that we have to watch.
And not even all of it.
I saw Vietnam also made a bunch of, they changed a bunch of their tariffs around.
They're anticipating this.
Yeah, like who knows what the money is.
But they were making a point about Vietnam and these other places, which is when Trump dropped the tariffs on China first time around, China outsourced its manufacturing plans to countries like Vietnam.
They do that in Mexico too.
So that they wouldn't be hit by the tariffs we put on China.
So they've been doing an end around Trump.
And that's why he did a sweeping, like, now it doesn't matter if you moved it to Vietnam, we're getting them too.
Yeah, I think it's really bad in Mexico because we have especially great trade deals with Mexico.
And so that, yeah, it's like that.
I think, listen, I don't, I don't know.
Again, you can't make me care about tariffs.
I'm going to just like chill out and see how it goes.
I'm caring mildly based on this conversation, but like, that's it, mildly.
But like, we'll see.
I think it's fine to say we'll see.
So speaking of the Trump agenda that the left is melting down over, tariffs, yes, DEI, gender, you know, you name it, we, we could spend all day.
Dangerous Trade Endarounds 00:04:41
Coincidentally re-emerges Kamala Harris, who decided to pop up this week at the Leading Women Defined Summit.
What a terrible name for a summit.
The leading women defined summit in California and had this to say, SOT 26.
Each day in these last few months in our country, And it understandably creates a great sense of fear.
So she's.
Because, you know, there were many things that we knew would happen.
We knew.
Many things.
I'm not here.
I told you.
Kamala Harris, dumb as ever.
I mean, she looks drunk to me.
She always.
I don't want to like, I mean, I don't want to throw around any crazy charges here, but that's not coherent.
Doesn't she always?
The thing is so irritating about her is like the way she talks.
Like she's really sharing something important.
I think it's just the wrong context.
If she just could have a Bravo reality television show or, you know, she talks about wanting a restaurant in Napa Valley and she had this whole, that sounds great.
I'm here for it.
Do that.
I would go.
I think she'd be really good at it.
I think she's just not good at this.
I think this is not the thing for her.
I don't know who told her to do this.
I feel like there's a person inside of her just who is really fun and like I would get drunk with, who's dying to get out.
And I'm just like, let this woman live her life.
Like, why do you, she's going to run for governor now?
Like, why are you making her do that?
Well, she has until what, June to decide if she's going to throw her hat into that ring or keep her hat out of that ring and potentially just go for the presidential contest next time around.
It will be fun to watch.
Here's one more from her.
Again, always trying to sound like she's got all the answers.
Here she is in Sat 27.
Fear has a way of being contagious.
When one person has fear, it has a way of spreading to those around them and spreading.
And we are witnessing that, no doubt.
But I say this also, my dear friends.
Courage is also contagious.
Curtis is also contagious.
What is happening is wrong.
The courage to say that there is a way that we must start to get through this.
Understanding our power in the democracy we still have if we hold on to it.
Oh my God.
Courage is contagious.
Nothing's being said.
Okay.
She said, what's wrong?
We have to be able to say what's wrong or that this is not right or whatever it is.
It's like super vague thing.
You're right.
Nothing's being said.
It reminded me of Corey Booker.
Yeah.
His 25-hour sort of last stand in Washington where all of the coverage is super glowing.
It's like finally someone is fighting.
Someone is standing up against the thing.
And there are no particulars about what you're actually fighting for.
No, no.
What are you talking about?
No.
You're not saying anything.
Why did you stand there, sir?
Why?
And that's, I mean, Kamala, why am I, I'm like, I'm like defending Kamala right now.
I'm like, cause I do think I'm like, I'm really rooting for her.
But, but, and she's not in Congress or whatever, but, but Corey reminds me of her.
And they're doing the same thing, which is, I don't think they believe in anything.
And I don't think they know what they're supposed to say.
They just have to sort of peacock strength or something.
And it's, it's honestly dangerous because what's going to happen is someone like AOC is going to is going to gain a lot more popularity because she's, I know what she believes in.
It's communism.
Yeah.
And she says it very plainly and openly.
And that's very popular for like the Luigi Mangion left.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
Exactly right.
Well, I don't think she's trying to project strength.
I think she's trying to project inspel.
I really think she wants to be 1988 Oprah.
And she thinks she's got the nuggets and that when she delivers them, we're all really going to swoon.
And indeed, the crowds in front of her try to, right?
Out of politeness or just because they've been told by the Democrats they need to love her.
But no one who's watching this on TV feels moved.
She's not an inspirational figure.
She very soon will fade away.
I mean, maybe she'll run for governor of California and win because there are lunatics out there.
Yeah.
But there's no way she's going to be president.
Yeah, she couldn't lose as a Democrat, which is why it's interesting.
If they're willing to give it to her in California and she runs as a Democrat, I think it's very likely that she'll be the governor.
Cuomo's Political Resilience 00:05:18
What about the fact that New York City is about to elect Andrew Cuomo as its mayor?
So it looks.
That seems less crazy to me than Kamala as governor.
But I acknowledge that it's also crazy.
I don't like, I get it because there's a paucity of options for New York City mayor who are running.
There's no, there's like there haven't been a ton who've thrown their hat into the ring.
And Mayor Adams, while he just lost the indictment against him thanks to Trump, by the way, with prejudice, the judge insisted that it be dismissed with prejudice.
He decided to switch parties and rise as an independent, but they're not going to re-elect him.
You know, the cozying up that was necessary for him to do with Trump to get the charges dropped is why he can't get re-elected as mayor.
I think they would re-elect a crook, but they're not going to re-elect somebody who's cozy with Trump.
Right.
And so Andrew Cuomo now is 38%, which is what you need.
I mean, that's all you need is this divided field to get the damn nomination.
And then, you know, I don't remember, like the last time we had a Republican, truly Republican mayor, it was, I think, Bloomberg had already declared himself an independent when he ran and run.
So was Giuliani with 9-11.
I mean, it was 25 years ago.
So I just, I can't get over the fact that the city is thinking about returning the guy who did what he did to them on COVID.
He did it.
It was his policies.
He doesn't apologize for them.
He's not sorry.
He's the one who ordered COVID-positive patients into all the nursing homes so that the most vulnerable and elderly amongst us were almost certain to die.
And some 15,000 of them did, between 9,000 and 15,000, depending on the count.
And they're on track to re-elect this maniac.
Yeah.
I think we could just memory hold COVID.
I think it's just, it's just a classic trauma response.
The whole country wants to forget it.
There's no reckoning.
You know, it's like this never comes up.
Did you get vaccinated?
I did get vaccinated.
Me too.
Does it bum you out when you see all these videos with people being like, you're going to die soon?
From the vaccination?
Yeah.
I don't know what I think about anything anymore, which is the problem of COVID.
That's the great, that's the actual legacy of COVID.
We don't talk about it, but we all have evolved because of it.
And I don't trust anyone now.
Yeah, to the point where I actually don't know that getting the vaccine was, I don't know how I feel about that.
Oh, no, I wish I didn't do it.
And that's why I'm even reluctant to say it.
It's just a little bit more.
But it didn't make me anti-anny vaccine.
I told the audience, I got the shingles vaccine.
Then I'm very pro that because shingles seems like a hideous condition.
And you just get two shots six months apart and then you don't get shingles.
And I had the chicken pox when I was little, so you can get painful shingles.
No shingles.
New things.
I don't want to experiment with new things.
I would like other people who want to experiment can experiment and I'll learn from that and then I'll decide.
But this was a massive experiment that we gave to the entire.
I don't want to really speak on this because I'm not a, I don't know.
I'm not even a base biologist.
I'm not a biologist at all.
I'm going to leave that to them.
I just know that I don't trust the people who told me I had to do it.
And I have questions.
But I think that's why someone like Cuomo can get up there and have a chance because people just don't want to face what happened during COVID because it was too crazy.
I mean, locking up a playground in New York City, locking up playgrounds, kids inside for what, a year.
Maybe it wasn't as bad in New York as San Francisco.
I don't remember.
No, it was.
It was just as bad.
It was insane.
I think it was just too big.
And then to face it is to face what?
How you behaved during COVID?
How many of those people who were voting for him were crazy COVID people who were yelling at people in the street who didn't have their mask on?
I mean, that would happen to me in some ways.
I got yelled at in New York by some lunatic with a mask that read vote.
Yeah, I wonder who they were voting for.
Yeah, I mean, outside, outside, we're not wearing a mask.
Yeah, I was outside too.
Get it together.
But there was a mandate that you were supposed to wear a mask even outside if you weren't able to socially distance.
I can't remember the particulars of it, but it was absurd.
Yeah, I think you're right.
We've memory-holed COVID.
Although I will say some good news on that front this week, um, Fauci's wife just got fired from the NIH by the Bobby Kennedy crew.
So, yay, good, goodbye.
She was making almost 300,000 bucks.
Do you think that there's a chance?
I know that Fauci got pardoned, but now that we're, we have all these books coming up about Biden's dementia, the cognitive decline.
Um, there's the question, and it seems increasingly legitimate.
Trump kicked it in into the public sphere that maybe you know he wasn't signing these pardons.
How real do you think that is?
The fact that like Trump is going to try to undo it and could Fauci I don't think so.
There's no requirement that a pardon even be in writing.
And Biden's on the air on camera defending them.
Okay.
So I don't think there's much there, even though I wish there were, because I do think, Anthony, my opinion is Anthony Fauci started the COVID pandemic.
He funded that gain of function research in the Wuhan lab.
We know that they were studying bat coronaviruses to try to make them more dangerous.
What are the odds that that research we funded had absolutely nothing to do with the actual virus?
I mean, there's been no proof of it, but we haven't looked.
I'm well beyond that at this point.
I think that it was, I mean, I'm, I don't want to say it was done on purpose by China, but like Trump was very popular at the end of his term before COVID happened.
Very, very popular.
The stock market was ripping.
People would not even really, there was no more anti-Trump like derangement.
At that point, it was just kind of people had resigned themselves to it.
He was going to win.
And then there was a pandemic and he lost.
And who was being hurt the most by his trade policies?
China was being hurt the most by his trade policies.
Elon Musk Platform Control 00:14:22
I don't.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm just asking questions.
No, that's why people call it a pandemic.
But I mean, come on.
Like, it just is a little bit too.
Who would say it's beyond the Chinese?
Who would say that?
It's definitely not.
It's definitely not.
And it would be smart.
It would be in within.
There's a great book, The Hundred Year Marathon, that talks about the Chinese strategy against America.
And then actually, you know, we've been out of this kind of secret war with China forever and we just didn't realize it because Westerners think of war in a different way.
They're super charismatic.
And it's like that Jon Snow, you know, with a sword facing people.
It's like, that's how we think about war and courage and greatness.
And the Chinese prize intelligence and strategy and having to being able to defeat an army without ever firing a bullet.
Like these are the stories that you hear about in China.
And this is well within that.
It's a very smart strategy rather than brute force.
Oh my God.
And careless in terms of absence of heart or empathy, even for their own people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's also communism.
What a shock.
Exactly right.
Okay.
Speaking of heartless, Kara Swisher.
We have an update on Kara Swisher, who we both had thoughts about.
Love.
One of my muses.
Yeah.
So she came to middling fame as a tech journalist.
I mean, let's be honest, most people have no idea who she is.
As a tech journalist.
And I told the audience earlier this week this story, I know you've seen it, about how she and I were friendly, not necessarily friends, but friendly.
And then she just did something so despicable around the death of my sister.
While we were still friendly, like it wasn't like there'd been any frost between us.
She was such an incredible asshole that I completely changed my opinion of her.
And I told that story for the first time because she had once again been attacking me.
And she responded to it on threads by saying, I guess MK discovered I'm an open lesbian.
That was her takeaway.
What?
Of course, I knew she was an open lesbian from the moment I met her.
By the way, Kara, you're not hiding it.
No, it was very clear.
I didn't care.
Like, I don't know what that was her takeaway.
She discovered I'm an open lesbian.
And then she went on with the even more despicable Don Lemon.
She's one of the people apparently who watches those four viewers, his YouTube show, and had another comment because he asked her about it.
And here it is.
I am uncomfortable about the whole thing because I think, you know, I'm like, ugh, dude, she would be jocking.
We're starting on the White House correspondence dinner.
When things are this serious, that's one.
Two, you know, if I run into some people, I feel like there's going to be a beef and then it'll be Kara.
You know what I mean?
Like, you can have my back, the two of us.
And like, like, you know, Megan Kelly recently insulted me as she does to you quite often, by the way.
So you're used to it.
But I insulted her right back now.
I'm sick of it.
I know, but I don't even speak to her because I think she's, I think she's flirting with me.
That's what I think is happening here.
But, but that's what my wife said.
Stop flirting with my wife.
Because the things she said were like, she takes the balls of tech people.
She goes for the jugular.
I'm like, oh, tell me more.
Okay.
So she's suggesting that I have some sort of romantic affinity for her.
Kara, I'm sorry to break your heart.
It's a no.
It's a hard no.
And if I ever were to embark on a crossover tour on my sexuality, which I haven't in 54 years, it would clearly not be you.
It would be like a Jillian Michaels type, you know, like the lipstick lesbian, not you, who looks more like a man, which is, yes, I guess what I'm into, men, but actual men with penises, like my husband.
This is a sick person.
So just to set the stage again, what an incredible fucker.
We were friendly.
I liked her.
I did was nothing but nice to her.
She fucking used the death of my sister as this excuse to like, she crapped on Abby when she said she can't make your podcast because something personal happened.
She decided to say, oh, she's afraid of me.
And when Abby had to reveal it was because I'd had a death in the family, she didn't say, she didn't reach out to me and say, I'm so sorry.
She just said, oh, well, I was only joking about her not wanting to be here.
Sorry.
And her response to my telling the story is, oh, she finally found out I'm a lesbian and she's attracted to me.
There's something wrong with this person.
Well, she's a narcissist.
I mean, that's what she's known for in tech is her deranged narcissism.
Like the way that she was talking publicly about your podcast or about the network that you're doing was, you know, I told Megan about podcasts and it was this very sort of I knew nothing about podcasts.
I mean, she's not the first, this is not the first time she's done this.
I mean, she has this, this, there's this almost position she takes where like she invented podcasts and it's it's bizarre.
I think that she covered business for so long.
I think she really wanted to be one of the business guys and she never was and her media company failed.
This is what she had the red chair that she was in.
That was from the recode days.
You know, she really wants to cling to this idea that it was this really important thing.
And maybe it was briefly, but I see her now as she's just another talking head.
And how is she viewed in the tech industry?
With an eye roll.
And like she's sort of a buffoon.
Should I tell you my Kara Swisher?
Yes.
When I first met Kara?
So I met Kara at Peter Thiel's book party.
So I was still am, but was working for Peter at the time.
It was, it was over 10 years ago now.
And I'm introduced to her from a mutual friend.
She's super short.
It's the first thing I noticed.
Like she's very small and she has inside.
She has sunglasses on.
And we talk for whatever, about whatever for a moment or two.
She looks at me.
She's like, you're really smart.
And this was great.
You're one of the good ones.
We should get coffee.
And I was like, oh, okay, cool.
Yeah, sure.
I'm like young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed.
Like she is someone who's writing about tech.
I'm like, that's interesting.
Sure, Kara.
Do you want my email?
And she's like, I'll find you.
And then she walked out.
That was the last I ever heard of her until years later.
I was writing and she attacked me online, but said, but he's a good writer, though.
And I loved that.
I felt good about that.
She probably won't even remember that, but I will.
Cause I'm a fan.
I mean, she's a very small person, honestly.
Like there's something wrong with her because you don't behave like that.
But don't you need a villain?
Like, she gives us.
So many.
Yeah, but she's like a fun one.
I mean, she's just easy to beat back against.
I mean, she's always saying the dumbest things ever.
I find her, I enjoy it.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I don't think a lot about Kara Swisher, but she comes from me.
And how about Don Lemon?
Like, and I attacked her back.
Okay, guy, I know your 10 little lemon heads really enjoyed it.
They're jealous.
You're killing it.
And they know that.
And it's undeserved.
And, you know, you have the wrong politics.
They're all struggling in the media stuff.
It's kind of interesting.
You, and I think anyone who's, who's, who's sort of not on the sort of consensus liberal side of things, it came up in a very difficult environment.
It was hard to, first of all, put out an opinion.
You were always being attacked.
So it was like training under 10x gravity or something when you were giving your opinions.
And then to have any kind of media, anything, you had to build it from scratch.
And they're used to the machine just sort of feeding them.
Yes.
Now they're outside of that and they're struggling to gain the audience.
Kara has a bigger audience than I think Don is really struggling.
Don't in the bowl.
And I think that they look at you and they're like, you know, what does she have that I don't have?
And it's like, well, a career doing this.
How much time do you have?
Yeah, exactly.
And they don't even, that's their real problem is they don't even understand what they don't have.
So the Chuck Todd podcast, it's the Todd cast.
He just left Meet the Press and NBC and launched a podcast and got this long, glowing profile in the New York Times, among other places that promote him.
And even after that, what's the latest number, Debbie?
He has a following after, again, glowing in the New York Times, a following of 470 subscribers.
Oh, wow.
Not 470,000, not 4,700.
It's so strange because not all of them are like, like some of them do reasonably well, right?
It's like some of them.
Look, I'm sure he'll improve.
Oh, he's up to 518.
That's my staff and me who were checking it out this morning.
We, of course, you know, you start slow and then you build over time, but that's unbelievable.
He hosted Meet the Press for how many years?
And he just left.
It's not like, you know, when I started my podcast, I'd been off the air for almost three years, two plus years.
Like he just left the MSNBC and the Sunday show and nothing.
There are two kinds of people in these machines.
He is someone who is, it's like he's operating on borrowed magic.
He's at an institution and he's benefiting from the brand of that institution.
And then you have, or you had a person like maybe Glenn Greenwald, who when he left his company and started his substack, he removed the reason everyone was reading.
That's so true.
And so all of these places, these huge institutions, they have people like this who are, it's like the power law.
Everyone is actually tuning in for this or that person.
And if they leave, the whole machine is threatened.
And those people have never had an easier time now plugging into sort of new, even things like you're a writer, you have Substack, you can just start right away building a business.
They're going to have a really hard time.
All these huge giants.
Yeah, it's the difference between being a platform player, you know, like Don Lemon.
It's like only people ever, reason anybody ever watched him is because he was on CNN and they had on CNN.
And I'm afraid the same is true for Chuck Todd, a platform player, and being somebody who has a genuine, powerful connection with their audience.
There are a couple people on Fox News who I think could still do it.
Definitely Gutfeld could do it.
Jesse Waters could do it.
But I mean, for the vast majority of news talent, they're platform players.
And when they come out into the sharky oceans, they find out it's a lot harder, you know, to make it than it looks.
And, you know, something I was going to say, right now, under Trump, yes, now the social media companies are like, okay, we're going to restore free speech.
I mean, from YouTube to Facebook, they're all starting to say that now.
I'm glad they're finally seeing reason.
But let's be honest, for the past five years, they have been censoring everybody right of center on all of our opinions.
Only Elon, even Twitter was horrible until Elon, only Elon Musk in the time of war chose the right side and stood up for free speech.
And honestly, it's because of him.
In large part, and every, all of us who are out there saying the things, even when you couldn't say the things that we preserved the right to say the things.
So, like i'm thrilled that now these other tech companies are being like okay, you can say the things now, but I will always look at them as cowards.
Right, and it's like you have it for now.
That could change tomorrow.
I mean, who knows what's going to happen politically over the next few years?
So you have to build up as much as you can now and build up as much cultural power as you can and just get as many email addresses as you can and and build your own little castle.
Yeah, because you just beefed them.
You just don't know what's going to happen with the platform on that.
That reminds me I I, I need, I do need to remind my audience to send in your email.
We never sell email lists, you don't have to worry about that, but we are trying to get an email list of our subscribers just in case this happens to us.
You, if you would like to do that, please do it.
Just go to Megancalli.com and you'll see there how to do it.
Um, but yeah, because for that reason, belts and suspenders like you don't.
You never know what big tech could do, what the next administration could bring.
But i'm just saying it's like you're right, people like those two have been out there with the benefit of, you know, liberally controlled outlets everywhere.
It's been ubiquitous around them and this is why the Snow White story, for example, has been so interesting.
Right, like it's cracking we're, we've infiltrated even Disney.
Now we're able to punish the wokest people at an institution like that with our dollars and our voices in a way we could not have six years ago.
Yeah, the Snow White thing is phenomenal.
Someone told me uh, just before I came on, that they, they got rid of um, they canceled the tangled one.
Yeah yeah, the like, the next live action, which is disappointing to me because I was really looking forward to them announcing that it was going to be sort of like a bald Repunzel and they were going to do like an like, have like an alopecia moment or something.
And it's like this is like it was just inevitable.
Uh yeah, I mean it's.
The Snow White thing is a perfect storm, right it's, I mean it's.
You had this obnoxious starring lady, you had the dwarf drama which went back and forth.
You had it both ways.
You had it being, it was like I don't know, bigoted against dwarves for having dwarves, and then it was.
It was bigoted against dwarves for not was the following backlash, but that's a campaign.
I mean, it just never it was, it was, it was uh, it was endless.
But I think yeah, it's like Disney's gonna have to figure it out.
Now they have to navigate culture and maybe they just never really knew what culture was because of the platform censorship.
Now you can see it and it's as it's very just obvious that people are yeah are, infuriated by this.
They're sharing the story with each other.
They don't want it, and so what are you going to make for them?
If anything?
Now they have to deal with us.
It's like there have been a couple of really important moments in getting to this point and yes, Elon buying X was a huge one.
I think conservatives holding the line on BUD Light was another huge one, You know, they got that message loud and clear eventually.
This Disney thing is important too.
It's not as big because we won.
Trump has been elected.
We're still fighting.
The woke wars aren't over, but we got our president elected and the DEI's executive orders and so on.
But that one was easy because she was so alienating and she just annoyed reasonable people all over the country and probably all over the ideological spectrum and they've suffered.
Yay.
Yeah, I don't.
I mean, where do you think it, where do you, I guess, where do you think it goes from here?
I think we're going to get tired of all the winning, like Trump says.
I'm looking forward to getting tired of all the winning.
Right now, I'm not tired.
I'm really enjoying it.
And I think our biggest problem is to get these judges out of the way so we can let the wins unfold.
And that's why the Supreme Court needs to do its job.
And that's where we started the era and that's where we end it.
Mike, thank you.
Thank you for having me.
A pleasure.
Mike Solana, everybody.
Hope to see you again soon.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no
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