Megyn Kelly and guests dissect Kristi Noem's husband Brian's alleged $25,000 fetish spending and the strategic chaos of Trump's Iran war. They analyze how neoconservative advisors swayed the president despite military warnings, creating an echo chamber that ignored Dan Caine's concerns. With approval ratings plummeting to a net minus 47 among independents, the hosts argue this Middle East conflict has shattered the MAGA base, triggering record House retirements and threatening Republican midterm prospects as voters demand domestic focus over regime change. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111, every weekday at New East.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
We've got a lot of big news to get to today with the war in Iran, but we begin today with an unbelievable report from the Daily Mail, which has just been confirmed by the subject.
It's a bombshell in more ways than one.
Earlier this month, President Trump announced that he was replacing Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam while she was embroiled in multiple scandals.
She drew controversy by making herself the face of a $200 million ad campaign for the DHS, and she was accused of having an affair with her longtime aide, who is technically her subordinate, Corey Lewandowski.
Many blamed her for the politically unpopular immigration surge in Minneapolis, and her messaging around it was: you know, she got out too far ahead of her skis, saying things about Alex Predi, for example, that she couldn't back up, and kind of compromised the whole narrative in doing that.
All of that is what got her in trouble, but all of that is kind of nothing compared to what I'm about to tell you.
According to the Daily Mail, Noam's 56-year-old husband, Brian, is a secret cross-dresser who wears gigantic fake boobs and wears pink hot pants while he chats online with fetish models who have gigantic breasts.
Okay, for the listening audience, we're showing a picture of him that the Daily Mail found and published.
Think Kayla Lemieux.
Think the Canadian shop teacher.
He's clearly put on like a tight little sports bra that's sort of nude colored and has stuffed two enormous balloons down there for his breasts with the little like tie of the balloon appearing to be like mismatched nipples and then little hot pink biker shorts below or maybe their leggings.
I can't see far down enough.
Thank God.
But in other pictures the Daily Mail got its hands on, you can see him in his tight little leggings trying to look like a woman, but like a freak woman.
The Daily Mail reports that it has reviewed hundreds of messages involving Brian and three women from the so-called bimbofocation fetish area of the internet.
I don't know how he finds them, but this is where performers receive outrageously large breast enhancements to obtain a Barbie doll-like look.
And I guess he's been paying them to show it off for him.
And then he returns the favor in kind.
It's relevant.
It's obviously very salacious, but it's relevant because the reason if we had known this, she never would have been confirmed for this post is it makes her subject to blackmail.
It makes her subject to blackmail because if the Daily Mail can find these pictures and this fetish by her married husband, so can our adversaries.
And who knows who could go to Christy Noam when she was DHS secretary and say, you will do the following things or we will run to the New York Times with these photos.
One of the models who messaged with Brian told the Daily Mail, quote, his kink is for huge, huge, ridiculous boobs.
Yes, we can see that.
According to the report, Brian got in touch with a model using the pseudonym Jason Jackson.
That's what he calls himself and complimented her amazing curves, saying he would treat her like a goddess.
Brian asked, how are your boobs?
Would you go even bigger?
This is unbelievable.
I'm sorry, but it's just so absurd what like the ubiquitous nature of porn on the internet.
You know, it's not like when it used to be like Playboy and Penthouse and like a man would see a couple dirty pictures and read a dirty forum and move on with his business.
Like it's everywhere.
It's everywhere.
And any kink you have can be indulged, including like this.
I mean, this is a form of cheating.
There's no question.
Like, ladies, can you imagine if you found out your husband was doing this and he's not just looking at photos, he's interacting with the so-called bimbos, as I espoused here, quoting him.
How are your boobs?
Would you go even bigger?
Yeah, I'd consider that cheating.
He's clearly getting off to the site of these women who have just mutilated themselves for the pleasure of random strangers online.
And then he's returning the favor.
He's doing it himself.
Like that's a totally different fetish where then you've got to do it.
That's autogynophilia.
That's what most of these trannies have, where you get off.
It's a sexual fetish.
How many times have we discussed this?
You get your rocks off dressing like a woman.
And then so much the better if other women are around you or see you doing it.
That's clearly one strain of what Christy Noam's husband apparently has.
And don't tell me it's just the Daily Mail and we don't know because she's just confirmed it.
Okay.
This is the story's real.
We're going to have to deal with this because she's still in the government.
She's not in our DHS post, but she's been offloaded to this new commission that the president created and she's serving there right now.
Brian telling this one model that the Daily Mail made contact with that she inspired him to dress like a girl.
Quote, you turn me into a girl.
Should I put on leggings?
No, for the love of God, do not put on the leggings because those pictures may be even more disturbing than the enormous fake breast Kayla Lemieux wannabe photos.
I mean, honestly, that's what he looks like.
That level of breast enhancement and perversion, though he's not wearing a wig.
And by the way, his face is all over the photos.
He's not even trying to hide his identity as the spouse of the Department of Homeland Security Chief.
Here he is in another one of his little outfits with the same giant fake breasts giving a kissy face.
Is that what that is?
I don't like, he does the close-up of the fake breasts.
And then is it a kissy face?
Abigail Finan and I were debating it backstage where Abby made more just like a sour puss, but I don't know.
I don't know what that is.
But I can speak for all women in America when I say we don't want to see our husband doing it.
I mean, I feel for Christy Noam.
It puts a totally different spin on the affair she's allegedly been having with Corey Lewandowski.
Who could blame her?
Who could blame her?
It feels almost noble at this point.
I mean, like, it's not noble.
I mean, they're both married and have children and all the bit.
I'm just saying it definitely gives a different look at it because you never know what's going on in someone's marriage.
Now, I'll get to what she's saying.
She's suggesting she didn't know.
So, I guess technically it wouldn't justify the affair.
But even if you don't know, don't you know?
As a, as a, as a wife, you know, I had a dear, dear friend who had a husband who cheated on her for years, years and she finally found out when one of the women came forward to her.
And my friend didn't know, like we were all shocked, but my friend had been manifesting, I think, knowing without knowing, in multiple health problems and stress and anxiety that had been plaguing her.
I really think it's very hard for a spouse to get away with this for years, for, you know, who knows how many years this has been going on with him without the other spouse having something internal tell them something is off.
I just, maybe I'm just telling myself that, that you'd know, because we all want to think we'd know.
Anyway, back to the story.
A PayPal account associated with this Jason Jackson, again, that's Brian, would regularly send the woman money in installments, typically between $500 and $1,000.
That's your tax money going to use there.
In total, he allegedly paid the models at least $25,000.
The Daily Mail got in touch with Brian and he did not, notably, deny having explicit online conversations with the so-called Barbie or bimbifications and nor nor of sharing photos of himself dressed as the so-called bimbos.
So he did deny the notion that Christy Noam could have been blackmailed over it.
Okay, well, he doesn't know.
I mean, that's not deniable.
That's for us to decide whether she was subjected to black fit, could have been subjected to blackmail over it.
But he did not deny that it was him.
So, you know, it's a scoop by the Daily Mail.
And it turns out, you know, the right wing may have its own Kayla Lemu, though I don't think we own Brian Noam.
But this is Kayla.
Maybe the two of them can meet up.
He, Kayla, is a male, was the Canadian teacher who wore the fake Z cut breasts in school.
Take a look at them side by side.
They're basically twins.
They're twinning.
There's like, like, there's enough breast between these two to take up an entire aisle at the grocery store.
You think you've like the chicken breast?
Nothing.
This is pounds and pounds of breast.
I don't know what was Kinkela's fake boobs, but we are told that Brian's is balloons.
That's how it looks.
And now we get a comment from Christy Noam, who tells the New York Post, she's devastated by these allegations.
It's someone, some representative of hers saying she is devastated.
The family was blindsided by this.
They asked for privacy and prayers at this time.
I mean, she's got them.
She's got them.
This is not what you want to see if you are married to anyone to find out that this level of betrayal has happened.
This speaks to somebody's entire character.
The fetish, yes, but the lying, the deceit, the money, the getting off with another person, not your spouse, all of it is very dark and dirty and disgusting.
And I'm sure whenever she found out, whether it was today or previously, I'm sure it's made her skin crawl.
Like it's making our skin crawl.
And just what an incredibly reckless risk for her husband to have taken.
given the position she just held for the first year of the Trump administration.
It's not the president's fault.
It's her husband's fault.
And I don't know, I wouldn't be so.
They've been married since they were in high, like sweethearts since they were in high school.
He's talked about it.
She came on our show and talked about it.
She, you know, she was a young rancher's daughter.
They met, they fell in love.
Actually, I think we queued some of this up.
Here is, let's see.
Yeah, he gave an interview to Moms for America in April of 2021.
And here he is talking about how his relationship with Christy started SOT3.
We were friends and I was a classmate with her brother.
And so I was acquainted with her throughout high school.
And then she went to the same college I did.
We started dating when she was in high school.
And she went to college.
And then just, you know, the typical off and on relationship.
And we finally started to get serious.
And then we, you know, I asked her to marry me.
And of course, she said yes.
And so, but we grew up in the same community, going to the same school with the same group of friends, raised on a farm with the same kind of upbringing, good values, hard work.
And when I went to college my freshman year, she, I, I'd heard that she had some interest in me.
And then, of course, why wouldn't I have interest in her?
She's remarkable.
So we started dating then and then it kind of went from there.
And in 1992, we got married.
It really does make you wonder what causes a fetish like this in somebody.
You know, I remember Deborah Soe came on the podcast early on before we even had video.
And she's a specialist in this kind of thing, in these sex fetishes.
And she really thinks that they should be normalized and that we shouldn't stigmatize them.
I mean, this is a different scenario, given Christie's role, given the money that changed hands, given the fact that she's saying this was a secret from her.
But okay, let's say it wasn't a secret or it isn't in some marriages.
Like what causes it?
And Deborah Soe told us that one of the weirdest fetishes she ever dealt with was people who get turned on by the idea of an animal eating them, like eating them for lunch.
What causes that?
What happens to you in your childhood that makes that be your thing or makes this be your thing?
Where it's not only like the enormous breasts on a woman, I think a lot of men could say, yeah, I'm into that, but like the grotesquely enormous breasts and then you put them on?
I don't know.
I really, I would like to understand that better.
Not that much better.
I don't want to spend that much time on it.
Escalating War in Iran00:16:14
But in any event, that's the latest news out of the Department of Homeland Security.
We're actually going to pick it up in our second hour when the guys from RCP join us.
But now we turn to more important news on the war in Iran.
We'll pick that up when we come right back.
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We've been reporting for weeks that the Trump administration's messaging on the Iran war has been all over the place.
We've already won, but we can't leave yet, etc.
The latest example, the Strait of Hormuz, where roughly 20% of the world's oil supply normally flows before Iran effectively shut it down because of this war, causing the price of oil to surge.
As we told you, President Trump on Monday on Truth Social threatened to blow up Iran's energy plants and desalinization plants if the strait was not quote open for business.
And here's what Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Al Jazeera yesterday.
Watch.
Well, the Straits of Hormuz will be open.
When this operation is over, it will be open and it'll be open one way or another.
It will be open because Iran agrees to abide by international law and not block the commercial waterway, or a coalition of nations from around the world and the region with the participation of the United States will make sure that it's open.
One way or the other, it's going to be open.
But we have very clear objectives that we're trying to achieve here.
Those objectives are the destruction of their Air Force, which has been achieved, the destruction of their Navy, which has largely been achieved, a significant reduction in the number of missile launchers that they have, which we're well on our way to achieving.
And we are going to destroy the factories that make those missiles and those drones that they are using to attack their neighbors and the United States and our presence in the region.
We will achieve those objectives.
We are well on our way or ahead of schedule.
We will achieve them in weeks, not months.
And then we'll be confronted with this issue of the Straits of Hormuz, and it'll be up to Iran to decide.
And if they choose to try to block the Straits, then they will have to face real consequences, not just from the United States, but from regional countries and from the world.
Seems pretty clear.
But then Monday night, the Wall Street Journal out with a report stating President Trump was telling AIDS he's willing to end the war, even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed.
That's a huge change.
That is a very consequential decision, if so.
And then this morning, Mr. Trump posting on True Social, quote, all of those countries that can't get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you.
Number one, buy from the U.S.
We have plenty.
And number two, build up some delayed courage, go to the strait and just take it.
You'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself.
The USA won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us.
Iran has been essentially decimated.
The hard part is done.
Go get your own oil.
So it's all over the place, right?
I mean, the president himself was saying they have to open the strait.
His secretary of state literally the day before saying the strait of Hormuz will be open.
Trust me, it's got to get open.
And then the president telling aides per the Wall Street Journal, maybe we don't have to open the Strait of Hormuz.
And then finally this morning coming out and saying, ah, you know what?
If you're mad about the Strait being closed, go get your own oil.
London, Europe, UK.
I mean, it's so erratic that even Fox News, the biggest cheerleader of this war by far, is starting to ask some questions.
Watch.
If we cannot come to some type of peace deal with people who can't be trusted, then what?
Well, looks like the U.S. is going to escalate.
President Trump is already warning of widespread further damage, threatening to hit electric generating plants, oil wells, and Carg Island, as he's reportedly considering sending ground troops in to secure the uranium.
Now, knowing what little time we have and how quickly this can spiral out of control, we still have a lot of questions.
For instance, was the president fully briefed about the risks of all of this from the beginning?
And was he then able to take it all in and understand the complexity of this, how complex it could actually get, and further possibilities of casualties or other damage, the difficulty of dealing with these people?
Or was he told this would be relatively quick in and out?
Here to react to all of this and more is Brandon Weickert.
He's senior national security editor of 1945.com and host of NATSEC Talk on Rumble.
Brandon, great to have you.
Thanks for being here.
So let's just start with a disparate messaging on whether the Strait of Hormuz must be open or closed or something in between in order for us to end this war.
Well, thanks for having me.
It's good to be here.
And it's pretty interesting watching this because, you know, will they, won't they open the Strait when, as you note, 20% of not just the energy sources, but key fertilizers, helium that's needed for the production of silicon-based semiconductors, which is the basis of this AI tech boom that's really keeping the U.S. and Western economy afloat right now.
So the president is saying, he's sort of going, eh, not my problem.
And that's interestingly what Yaakov Armador, the former national security advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu, told me last Monday on another network, it's not their problem, but ultimately it's the whole world's problem if the Iranians keep this thing closed and they're going to.
So, you know, the president can say that, but then you look at what's going on, Megan, with the troop movements and the way that the U.S. military is still engaged, despite having won the war, supposedly, it sounds to me a lot like we are getting ready to make a move.
And unfortunately, I think it's going to be a disaster with U.S. ground troops going in somewhere in Iran.
But the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed in about 48 hours, Europe starts running out.
Asia starts running out of oil that they've had stockpiled.
And we start running out of oil in terms of what we brought in from overseas April 15th.
So unless that thing gets reopened soon, everybody's going to feel the pinch in the next 48 hours.
So Brandon, you think he is going to, he's still determined to go in with ground troops?
Because yesterday we had on Professor Pape who said, don't look at just the troops being sent over.
Look at all these supporting operations that we're sending in to support the troops.
But Trump is now starting to talk more like you and me, you know, about wanting to wrap it up.
So I have a glimmer of hope.
Right.
He talked about that before as well, though.
I mean, we were all hoping that he would supposedly taco, you know, out of the initial airstrikes because would love the taco, Taco Tuesday.
Who doesn't love it?
And, you know, but then he ended up still going ahead with the airstrike that started this whole war.
You know, so we have these periods where it looks like Trump's going to negotiate possibly and get find a golden off-ramp.
And then that turns out to be not accurate or that ends up being a ruse.
So I think the same pattern is at play here where he's saying something to keep, try to keep the markets calm.
It's not working like it used to, by the way.
And he's saying something to try to keep the adversaries off balance and to try to keep as many people on board with what he's doing until he thinks he can get that final kill shot in.
Except we've been looking for a final kill shot for the last 30 days.
It ain't coming up because the Iranians figured out our war plan years ago and they've decentralized their capabilities and their leadership and they've hardened them.
And so whether we're landing on Karg Island or somewhere along the Iranian coast to try to force open the Hormuz, the Strait of Hormuz, which will be like Gallipoli in World War I, which will end in a disaster for the United States Armed Forces, or if we have this sort of weird uranium Tom Clancy style hunt in the middle of the Iranian heartland, either way, this is going to end in disaster for the United States military.
It will end U.S. power projection for at least a generation into the Middle East.
Let's talk about the weird Tom Clancy uranium hunt.
That was a new one that was dropped on us late in this thing.
You know, it was like, first it was regime change and then it turned into, well, the nukes.
And then everybody was like, you said you destroyed the nukes in June.
Didn't we just do all that whole thing?
And then it kind of morphed into, well, we got to get the missiles.
And it was like, all right, well, the missiles do seem like a problem, but that definitely doesn't seem like it was your primary motivation.
They weren't firing them at us until we went there.
And then it was like, we got to get that Strait of Hormuz open.
It's like, well, it was open.
It was open before we started bombing them.
So we got to like have a war to solve the problem that we caused with the war.
And now finally, we're talking about we have to go in and get the uranium because Mark Levin said that on his program on Saturday night, which President Trump drove people to go watch with Mark Thiessen, was all about getting the uranium scuba tanks out of like the mountains.
It was like, okay, that's our new mission.
But then today, President Trump was called and gave an interview with CBS Wei Zhejiang, and he kind of went off of that a little too.
One of Trump's main war objectives, she writes, is to rid Iran of its nuclear capabilities.
I asked if removing its enriched uranium is necessary to declare victory.
Quote, I don't even think about it.
I just know that, you know, that's so deeply buried.
It's going to be very hard for anybody.
We've watched it for, you know, since the attack, we've watched it.
And at least I think finally people admit it was obliteration.
It's down there deep, and they haven't been able to do it.
You know, even without a war, they haven't been able to do it.
So it's pretty, it's pretty, it's pretty safe.
But, you know, we'll make a determination.
My own translation is he's saying the Iranians haven't been able to get to it.
It's underneath those three nuclear sites that we blew apart.
And so we feel like it's pretty safe and it would be very complicated for us to do, very hard for anybody, as he puts it.
And we haven't yet determined whether we're doing the Tom Clancy operation or not.
Well, if I were a parent of someone about to deploy, I'd be very worried that that's what the commander-in-chief is talking like on the eve of what will be a major ground combat operation.
I think this is a very serious thing the president is talking about doing.
And he doesn't seem, at least in public, to be taking it very seriously.
But every time that we turn around, there's an escalation from us against Iran.
I think it's important to note we don't like the Iranian regime.
They support terrorism.
We accept all of that.
At least I do.
But ultimately, as you noted, the Iranians were not going to war with us before we attacked them.
And every time the Americans and or Israelis have escalated up the escalation ladder, only at that point do the Iranians counterpunch, which is how we're in the position we're now in, where the entire Middle East is a battlefield.
Remember, this was supposed to be really a 96-hour pinprick strike against the leadership.
It was going to fold after that, just like Maduro's regime supposedly folded.
And then the people of Iran were going to rise up in 96 hours after the bombs fell on Khamani's head, and it was going to be great.
And Trump was going to look like a hero, and we wouldn't even be talking about this come March.
Well, here we are now in March, and I'm sorry, March and going into April.
And we are having this conversation now.
I think the bottom line here is I don't even think it's about the uranium.
My personal view is that the Israelis.
I don't either.
Yeah, I think the Israelis wanted this.
I think they pressured Trump.
I think that our friend Joe Kent gave a very good description in his resignation letter about the echo chamber that had formed around Trump.
I think the president is surrounded by advisors who are George W. Bush acolytes.
They're from that era of the Republican Party.
There are very few MAGA voices, America first voices around him.
And I think that he's listening to all these inputs, just like during COVID.
He's listening to Fauci.
He's listening to Berks.
He's listening to all the people who have the wrong ideas and who are not on his side.
It's the same thing here.
And now here we are where he's flailing around, frankly, trying to find how do I win this thing?
Well, there's no victory here.
So how do I get out of this without looking bad and making our position worse?
Well, unfortunately, the only thing he can think to do is to keep escalating.
And Megan, that's why I say I think we're going to see ground troops soon.
And I'm going to go one more.
I said this on another show.
I'm going to say it here.
I am convinced that in a couple of weeks, as soon as a couple weeks, we might actually see nuclear weapons being deployed, not by the United States, but either by Israel and or the Iranian regime, which I believe probably has a handful of rudimentary nuclear weapons that they've been playing with.
I mean, I was comforted by Professor Pape suggesting Israel knows not to do that because he was saying they know that they're not the entire Middle East hates them.
But if they drop a nuke in Iran, which, you know, the blowback of which will spread across the Middle East, they'll all turn on Israel.
And it's only a country of 9 million people.
Like it would just be too existential a risk for Israel to take.
Yeah, but if you're sitting in Tel Aviv and you are in the Likud wing of that government, which is very fanatical, you might be looking around going, hey, look, this is the use it or lose it moment.
The Americans under Trump can't be dependent upon.
We have no idea whether Trump is going to actually go forward with what he says or if he's just going to taco out and leave us holding a bag.
We can't carry that bag.
The Iranians are actually going to walk away from this stronger now.
So we are going to have to do something to bring them down to size.
And that is why I'm fearful, given the current government in Israel, that they might, if they think that the Americans either can't or will not be to achieve some semblance of success on the ground, that they will then just pop off some nukes.
And I think that's where this is headed.
And by the way, if they do that, I think at that point, we're going to find out real quick whether Iran has nukes or not, because I think that they would retaliate in some way using whatever nuclear material they have.
Iranian Munitions Shifts00:14:56
Yes, it is not too crazy to say this thing could turn nuclear.
I mean, that's what's really scary, that this whole thing could turn nuclear.
And we may not be in control, especially if we leave.
I mean, I want us to leave, don't get me wrong, but I want us to stand Israel down too, because if we leave and Israel stays and feels like they're now exposed to a very angry hornet's nest in Iran, they may do it because they feel like they've left themselves with no choice.
You know, that Israel may do it because Iran is now even more dangerous than ever if it does have a nuke that it wasn't using because the old Ayatollah, now dead, had a fatwa against it, but the new guy doesn't.
And now they're very pissed and feeling defenseless.
And Megan, you got to remember, we whacked not just the Ayatollah Khamani, but we whacked a bunch of IRGC senior commanders.
Well, now they're adjutants and the younger guys who are a lot more hot-headed than were their commanders have risen to positions of power.
And you're witnessing them execute a very comprehensive, very methodical strategy of counterattack with these missiles and these hypersonic weapons and the drones.
Here's some data points that I've been throwing out the last week.
I just heard that we have officially expended one-third of our terminal high-area high-altitude area defense, the THAD.
We've expended one-third of those interceptors in this month-long war alone.
Those are the very important, high-powered, very expensive, I think they're about $12 billion a POP air defense systems that we have ringing the Middle East.
We've gone through one-third of those, and it will take about eight years.
If operations stop tomorrow, it will take eight years to replenish those numbers.
The Royal United Services Institute, which is one of the oldest, I think it's the oldest think tank in the world, usually very pro-war, by the way.
But they assessed last week that Israel is days away from running out of their important Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 exo-atmospheric interceptors.
It's a very fancy way of saying they have interceptors in Israel they rely on that go high, go fast, and go far into the atmosphere, into space, to knock out incoming missiles.
Well, they're basically out of those, which means they've got to wait for Iranian missiles and other attack systems to get closer to their territory, which of course increases the risk.
Then you have also this report coming out saying that we are about on the FAD system.
We are about three weeks away from being totally empty on those FHAD interceptors for what we have in our current stockpiles.
We're already cannibalizing stockpiles from Indo-PACOM, which is a very important command for deterring China.
And we need the FAADs in place to deter China.
They are being depleted now and moved over to the Middle East.
So what we are witnessing is a race to depletion.
And it looks like to me, the Iranians are beating us in that all-important race to depletion, which is why I think the Americans and Israelis are so spastically trying to up the escalation ladder because they figure, well, we're not doing well on this rung.
Let's go up one higher and we can maybe outmaneuver them that way and end run them.
Because otherwise, if we keep doing this match tit for tat, it's not going to end well.
I think the Iranians probably have about 18 to 24 months left of missile capabilities at least, which is based on what?
Based on my own observations and based on what I've been looking at, if you look at the way that the Iranians have shifted their munitions packages, this is not a country that seems to be running low.
I know Heg Seth and the boys keep saying, oh, well, you know, they're saying that.
Hegseth this morning said just in the past 24 hours, the number of missiles went down to like 95%.
Yes, that's watches, though.
This is my own assessment, so take from it what you will.
But if you take my assessment, I think the reason you're seeing that decline is not because they're reducing numbers too much.
I think it's because they recognize the Americans and Israelis have depleted for the most part their interceptor force.
So now we can conserve our fires.
There's this thing called conservation of fires.
And so no professional military wants to waste ammunition, don't waste ordnance.
So the Iranians are a professional military and they're saying, okay, we've now depleted.
We don't have to send swarms as much anymore because the interceptors are now pretty much drained and we can have our pick of the litter of targets.
And we know that there's a higher probability of those systems making it through.
That's why, by the way, you're now seeing the newer Iranian missiles being deployed.
These multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles where you have one missile and then multiple warheads that separate over the target makes it harder for interceptors to hit.
It's why you're seeing them deploy these hypersonic weapons.
You're seeing them deploy the Karamshar, which is a very complex system.
In the beginning of the war, Megan, they were using their old 10-year-old missile systems, rudimentary systems to just drain us dry.
Now they've up the escalation ladder and they're using their more sophisticated systems to really slam targets in Israel and throughout the Arab states.
And I think that's because they know that the American and Israeli stockpiles are drastically depleted and they don't have to expend as much ammo.
That is very scary when you think, well, I mean, basically in Israel, the Iron Dome has got big holes in it.
It's got big holes.
And they also punch those radars.
So remember, we had installed billions of dollars worth of early warning air defense radars in places like Bahrain, in places like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, et cetera.
And what were among the first target packages that the Iranians fired and they destroyed were those expensive radars, which is why now we're having to flood in these sentry planes.
And of course, the Iranians have apparently very good intelligence because last weekend, they blew up our spy planes that came in, our radar planes that came into Saudi Arabia the minute they parked at the tarmac, which means they have actionable intel, live intel.
Sure, the Russians and Chinese are helping them as well, but they've also got locals on the ground.
The Iranians have really good human intelligence, notably in Bahrain, which is mostly Shiite.
And that's why you're seeing those precision strikes with the drones against the Hilton Hotel, where so many of our troops and our CIA and intelligence people, they moved out of the base that's destroyed there and they moved into these hotels.
Well, it turns out I think the locals at the hotels and the drivers are calling up Iranian intelligence operatives saying they're on the eighth floor in the corner of this building.
Send your drone there.
And so we have a problem where the people of the region are turning against us as well.
This is going south very fast, which is what gets me thinking, not only is this not going to end anytime soon, but we're going up the escalation ladder with troops.
That ain't going to work.
So then they're going to move to, you know, the Israelis saying, well, we're going to have to do something.
Perhaps we short circus short circuit this by launching nukes.
Pray God, that's not true.
I want to follow up with what some of what Pete said this morning because he and Dan Raisin Kane held oppressor.
But before I get to that, I just want to stick for a minute on the Laura Ingram soundbite.
I did think it was somewhat promising to have someone as prominent as Laura, who I know the president admires, say, you know, start questioning, start poking.
How did we get here?
Better late than never.
It's certainly right, totally.
But it seems like the president may have been misled into thinking this was going to be a snap and by whom.
And obviously we know that Netanyahu was chief among them.
He was probably the biggest cheerleader, but we know there were a lot of Fox News personalities who got into the president's ear.
And then we talked briefly about how the president pushed to Mark Levin's show on Saturday night, where my friend who I really care for, Mark Thiessen, said the following.
And, you know, like, I can't see a world in which this happens, but Mark is very smart.
So you tell me your take on this prediction.
I never seen a war where the Democrats turned against the war on day one and are rooting for defeat.
You know, there are people in this country who hate Donald Trump more than they hate the Iranian regime that just massacred 32,000 people in their streets.
You know, they were all very upset about what was happening in Gaza, but 32,000 people massacred, and then Donald Trump comes in to wipe out the genocidal regime that actually was committing genocide against its own people, massacring them in the streets like that.
And Donald Trump, because it's Donald Trump, we have to play it down.
We have to say it's a defeat.
We have to say we're losing.
And they're all going to have egg on their face because we're about halfway through this thing.
And when this is all over, this is going to go down in history as possibly the greatest military campaign the United States has waged since the American Revolution.
Since the American Revolution.
Your thoughts on it?
Well, that's to be expected from Don Rumsfeld's former speechwriter, I guess.
You know, this is the same Pollyanna-ish predictions we were hearing in Iraq.
I just remind everybody, Iraq was actually supposed to take a few weeks, and then we were supposed to be out.
In fact, I know for a fact, Rummy had the plan for the exit was September 03.
The last tranche of U.S. forces were supposed to be pulled out of Baghdad International Airport.
And that's so that's when did we launch it?
We launched it in March, this month, actually, ironically, this month.
I think it was March 19th.
That we launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, which turned into a quagmire.
And by the way, we're still fighting in Iraq, just so the audience understands, even though we pulled out, they've ripped open the fighting again between Sunni and Shiite militias.
So we are still involved there.
So, you know, Mark Thiessen may be a nice guy.
I used to see him bouncing around Old Town Alexandria when I lived out there.
But ultimately, Mark is not the guy to listen to on anything related to war with all due respect.
Well, he's a wonderful guy, and he's very smart.
And I will say this, he's completely sincere in his announcements.
He became a star on the Kelly file.
So we used to open our show with him every night.
He could talk about it.
He's a nice guy.
I'm not a person.
No, no, I know.
I know.
I know.
I just like, I don't, since the American Revolution seems like a stretch to me.
And I think the problem is, like, President Trump was pushing people to watch that.
And clearly, President Trump watched that.
And back to Laura Ingram's question about like who's been in his ear and what have they been telling him that led him to completely reverse himself on his promises of no war, no Middle East war, and all the millions of tweets we've seen circulating from Donald Trump, you know, repeatedly saying it's so dumb to get involved in the Middle East war.
Why are we wasting all this money?
We should be focused on domestic politics, you know, leading up to when he was president.
And we're so confused about why.
2016.
Remember his famous South Carolina debate during the primary.
You might have even been there.
You know, he went in there, Trump did, and this is when I fell in love with him.
And I'm a three-time Trump guy.
When he went in there and he called out all of the Bush people in the audience, then he yelled at Jeb Bush and he said, you know, your brother light us into the war.
That was a doozy.
He was speaking for, I'm on the older side of the millennials.
He was speaking for my generation 100%.
He was speaking for the Gen Z generation and probably part of the Gen X generation as well, who knew that that war in 2003 was a doozy of a lie.
And we are still paying down that war, by the way, today.
And now here he is a decade later.
And I think it is the echo chamber that Joe Kent talked about in his resignation letter.
But I also think we need to not take away agency from the president.
I mean, he is the president of the United States.
I think he really was moved by the protesters.
I believe that.
I think he has heart.
And I think that he saw what was happening to the protesters in January and February.
And he was like, well, they're slaughtered by the Ayatollah.
Right now, I don't know to the level.
32,000 sounds a lot.
I don't know, but okay.
But it was clearly bloodshed.
It was horrible what was happening.
Again, the regime in Iran is not a good regime.
But ultimately, I think that he was moved.
And then you throw that in with his relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu.
And then you throw it in with the echo chamber of neocons that he only listens to now.
And this is how you have a perfect brew of him believing after Maduro.
And what happened in Venezuela and what happened in June with our Iranian nuclear power?
But I will just say he thought he could do it.
I will say General Kane, and this came out in the press the day before the war started.
There was a very contentious warned him.
Now, why Kane didn't resign in protest after that is beyond me.
And I think that that's actually a blight on his reputation.
I really want to talk about this.
This is underreported and undercover.
There is no question in my mind that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs didn't want this and warned the president we shouldn't do it.
That hit the press the day before we did this.
The day of the day.
And President Trump came out with a true social saying, all Dan Kaine knows how to do is win.
If I tell him to go in there, he'll win.
That's the only thing he just bellicoast his way around the clear warning.
And how did Dan Kaine's advice to the president not to do this wind up in the papers?
Well, it was me.
You tell me.
Vice Admiral from Fred Kocher, who was, I believe, his adjutant.
And it's a big mystery among people I know at the Pentagon.
Did the Vice Admiral do this of his own volition?
Did he just leak it because he was so worried that the president was locked into this horrific quagmire?
Or did he do it because maybe General Kaine asked him to do it?
Maybe that was sort of a quiet question.
That's my question.
And we don't know, but I will tell you, from what I can tell, and now I know there's an investigation, so this might be why, but I do think it's interesting.
They didn't fire Vice Admiral Kocher for leaking.
They removed him from his position on the joint staff, but he's been sent back to his regular post at the Navy.
So he is still technically.
And I welcome anybody to correct me online if I'm getting this wrong because this is the last I heard of it.
Was a few weeks ago.
He is still very much active at Vice Admiral in the Navy, which to me is odd because it tells me that perhaps this was not just Kocher acting on his own.
Maybe this was Kotcher representing the uniformed joint services command structure, most of whom, by the way, are Heg Seth and Trump loyalists now.
Talking to the President00:02:23
They're trying to get a message out to the president, and they know the president doesn't listen to anybody when you're talking to him.
He watches it on the media that Trump is a creature of the 20th century.
He loves TV.
He's a ratings guy.
He cares about that.
And I think this is how the Fox News and the boomer cons and the neocons get through to him is through Mark Levin and the TV.
And I think that the people who are not interventionists have figured out too late in the game, you can't talk to the president always.
You're going to have to go on TV and get your points out that way because he'll see it then.
That is really true.
This is not an unfair criticism.
I've spoken to many people at Fox who've told me that administration figures will come to them saying, Please put me on because I have something the president has to hear.
And also, if their fortunes are dwindling, they want a hit, like on Fox and Friends, for example, because they want to show I'm on TV.
See, I'm relevant.
I'm making your points.
They know the shows he watches and they try very hard to get on them.
But look, we know that the case was made because we know that Tucker Carlson got in front of him three times in the month leading up to this war and just he wasn't persuaded.
So there, but there were just so many other voices.
It was nine to one that he was listening to, pushing him into it.
Not to take agency away from the president at all, but I do think a full assessment.
We know Trump made the call.
That's not a mystery.
But who pushed him into it?
Who made these representations?
Also matters.
It's a famous bubble.
When you work in D.C., I worked on the Hill for a period of time.
When you work in the White House, it's even worse, I'm sure.
You get into a bubble and you're always taking incoming, so you only start listening to friendly voices.
And, you know, I will tell you, I remember being mortified listening to Dan Cren Shaw at a private event in 2018 where we were at Capitol Hill Club, and he was gloating about how he, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham convinced the president to break his 2016 campaign promise to keep to pull troops out of Syria.
And he was gloating at the table about how, and I said, well, how, how did you even get him to do that?
Because I was very cross.
And he, he said, he said, well, he goes, I just, I just, we just appealed to his ego.
He has the ego the size of Jupiter.
And he said, and we just kept appealing until after two hours in the yellow oval office, he said, we all just, he said, we all just got him to break that campaign promise.
Breaking Pain with Relief00:02:55
It's the same thing with this war.
Same thing.
I mean, I'm thinking about Joe Kent's wife, his first wife, who was killed in Syria because she was left there.
And he had said to her in the last conversation, don't be the last one to die for a cause that no one supports anymore.
And Shannon was killed by the elements that are now we've elevated into power in Syria.
So, you know, it's well, that's a whole other ball of wax right now.
We elevated al-Qaeda, which is SUNY, instead of the Shiites there.
And now, like, they're cooperating to like, basically, we're working with terrorists now working with the terrorists.
Let's just be clear: it's ISIS.
They're working with ISIS.
Yeah, we're working with ISIS.
It's very dark.
And yeah.
There's more to discuss.
Can you stay over?
I've got to take a quick break.
Can you stick around?
All right.
Brandon stays with us.
And after Brandon, the guys from RCP will be here.
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The President Can Quit00:15:08
What I witnessed was motivation.
It was sheer mission focus.
It was the American warrior unleashed.
A crew chief we flew with summed it up nicely.
He said, It's been a busy few weeks, sir.
Tough stuff.
But I'm so honored to be called up.
This fight is long overdue.
We need to address it for our kids.
We cannot pass the buck.
Please thank the president from us.
I heard that time and time again.
Okay, that was Pete Hegset, our Secretary of War.
Like, to me, I just, it sounded like a Jack Nicholson impression.
I just, of course, the men and women in uniform speaking to the Secretary of War are going to say that.
That doesn't tell us whether this is, in fact, a noble cause or whether it was smart for the United States of America to do in the first place.
I don't, I care for Pete.
As you know, I backed Pete, but this like bravado is not going to get it done.
We actually need to be very serious and sober about the risks we're exposing he and the president are exposing those men and women who are so courageous to.
And for whom are we doing that?
Brandon Weichert is back with me now.
Your thoughts on that, Brandon?
Well, I call him Pollyanna Pete for a reason.
And I say this because I was a, like you, a very firm supporter of his.
I actually got a lot of pushback from friends of mine in the defense community who were like, why is this guy becoming secretary?
I said, look, I think he has some great ideas.
And to give credit where credit is due, he's done a lot of good work with until now with recruitment.
And he's done a lot of good work with acquisitions reform.
Now, acquisitions reform has been my great bugaboo for a decade.
So I give credit to Mr. Hegseth, but on the war, he's Pollyanna Pete.
And unfortunately, we don't need that right now.
We don't need a mindless cheerleader.
We need someone who understands strategy, ends, ways, and means.
And as I noted at the beginning, our strategy in this war, Megan, makes, and as you noted, makes no sense.
You saw in the previous hour you played Rubio's clip.
Rubio's now emphasizing, oh, we got rid of the Iranian Navy and the Air Force.
That was never a significant threat.
The Iranian Navy.
I mean, and also the other problem with that is we learned, we learned in our 20 years in the Middle East in Iraq and Afghanistan that it's not about that.
It's great.
Okay, Iran no longer has the Navy and the Air Force.
That's better than them having it, but that's not how these guys fight.
That's not the thing that kills Americans and makes the war go on and on and on.
It's like the mujahideen, the fighters, the like ongoing jihad from the like the caves.
That's what we've proven.
Learned nothing from 20 years.
Not inept at fighting, but it's a very much, it's a very difficult fight for us.
Go ahead.
Well, no, you're right.
And what we're facing is yet another, and it's different because it is more of a state actor, but it's a hybrid model.
We're facing yet another insurgency.
And that's basically what this is.
This is the unconventional insurgent model.
And I got to tell you, the Iranians are reminding me a lot of the Mooj, and they're reminding me a lot of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese.
Remember, the North Vietnamese, after the Battle of Aya Durang, or into the Battle of Aya Durang, the first major conflict battle we fought in Vietnam in 1965, the general there was saying that we want to kill Americans.
We're welcoming the Americans.
We want them to land so we can bloody their nose.
And it's interesting, President Pazeshkian of Iran, who, by the way, was raised among the Kurds, the Kurds that supposedly were going to overthrow the regime.
Interesting little fact there.
So he stood down on because it couldn't work, wasn't going to work.
But President Pazeshkian has said twice now in the last two weeks that we cannot quit the war in Iran because we have to bloody the Americans' nose so much that they never try something like this again.
So that is what you're dealing with.
That clearly seems to be what they're doing, Brendan, doesn't it?
Like that, the reason they're being so cagey about whether they're negotiating or whether they want an end to this war, in which we're killing lots of them every day.
Clearly, we are.
Look how many Vietnamese people feel like they can outweight us.
They're like, we don't really care.
We want you to feel the pain economically.
We want President Trump to feel the pain politically.
We want gas prices to go up and for you to get the message that this is a freaking disaster for you.
And it is.
And the Iranians, like I said.
So, you know, the Iranian strategy, I've said this on, I said this on Tucker Show.
I'll say it here because it needs to be constantly reminded.
Von Clauswitz, the great Prussian leader in the Napoleonic War, wrote a book called On War.
It's required reading at all the military colleges around the West.
And he said, essentially, politics is an extension.
I'm sorry, warfare is an extension of politics through other means.
You have to have a political end goal in mind that your military strategy is attempting to achieve.
In our case, what is our end goal?
It has shifted from regime change to we want to get rid of the nukes to we want to get rid of ballistic missiles in Iran to, oh, we're going to sink the Iranian Navy, sink the Air Force.
And oh, by the way, we're going to get them to stop supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.
So that's like six things that are kind of ambiguous.
And we've attached an Air Force-only, an air war-only approach.
You can't achieve those goals in a short timeframe with air power alone.
Meanwhile, on the Iranian side, Megan, their only strategic end goal, their political goal, is survival.
Regime survival.
That's all they have to do is hang on long enough for the Americans to run out of stuff and to run out of patience with fighting the war.
Now, there is a chance.
There is a chance now because as we were talking in the first segment, I got a note from a retired CIA guy, and he says to me, quote, he goes, I think we might actually be thinking, we need to be thinking the unthinkable that POTUS will actually leave the war by leaving the Iranians in charge of the Strait of Hormuz.
So on the one hand, I hope you're right.
That's how he says that.
I hope you're right.
And I hope that I think President Trump has seen these numbers that we've been reporting on our show, you know, and I've been reporting them on X, and I get all sorts of blowback, Brandon, because my audience loves President Trump for the most part.
I was a three-time voter for you.
You need to see this.
Yeah.
But even if you still love Trump and you want him to succeed, he's got another three years to go.
You have to see these numbers.
You have to see what's real.
It can still be potentially turned around.
There's no reason to double down on what we've already done.
If there's any way of wrapping it up quickly, we should.
And as I listened to President Trump over the past 24 hours, I think someone has seen the many Harry Enton reports, the Fox News polling, the Quinnipiac polling, the Reuters polling, that Amherst polling that came out yesterday putting his approval rating at 33%.
The drag that this war on Iran has been across the board for every single group that put him into office.
President Trump is brilliant.
He is very smart when it comes to politics.
And I think he's finally at the point where he's like, I'm out.
You know what?
F it.
I'm out.
It's Europe's problem.
Somebody else is going to have to deal with it.
The problem is, though, the enemy gets a vote.
And like I said, Pazeshkian is talking about, I'm not going to let go now until I've bloodied your nose.
And the Israelis get a vote too.
And the Israelis are making it clear they're not going to stop.
I mean, like I said, last week, I talked to Yaakov Armador, who was, he's still very much intimately involved with Netanyahu.
And he made it clear that the Israelis will only do what they think is in their national interest.
They do not care if the Americans want to reopen or keep close the Strait of Hermuz.
They do not care if the Americans bail out.
They will do what they perceive is in their national interest.
So that to me was an implied statement that they will continue pressing militarily, knowing full well it's probably going to rope us back in, not going to let us go.
And so this is why I see why I said in the beginning, I'm very doubtful that even if Trump wants to quit, which he probably does at this point, because like you said, he's politically savvy, he might not be able to.
This is the nature of what your previous guest, Mr. Dr. Pape, was talking about with the escalation trap.
You are trapped now.
Yep.
And so this is why.
Let me show you just one.
We could play these Harry Enton Sats all day.
Let me show you one.
SAT 12.
This is the lowest of his term, the lowest of his second term.
We're talking about minus 17 points, 17 points underwater.
So I went back and I looked at all of the presidents at this point in a presidency.
All of them.
All of them at this point in a presidency.
And guess what?
Donald Trump is the lowest ever, the lowest ever at this point in a presidency.
Yeah.
Today he updated that to say it's actually minus 19, not just minus 17.
YouGov with his latest poll, Trump's approval among independents, approved 22%, disapproved 65.
The trend for independence in March of last year, 12 months ago, Trump was one point underwater with independence, which is very good.
In December of last year, he was minus 26.
He was already losing them because of affordability issues.
And then March this month, he's minus 43 with the independents who are worried about their money and do not support this war.
The independents, there's almost none who are supporting this war right now.
And more and more, you're seeing the Republican Party split.
The core MAGA's for it, but every other Republican is at best split right down the middle.
Which is exactly what happened in Iraq and Vietnam.
If you remember, it started out strong support, patriotism, rally around the flag, and a lot stronger support, by the way, in Iraq in 03 than there was this time around in Iran.
But what happened was over the course of time, and it wasn't in Iraq in particular.
Remember, the first bombing on the airport road in Baghdad occurred, I think, six or seven weeks after we invaded.
So that was relatively quickly that the war started.
The support started turning on the war because it was the first air, you know, the first Marine that was killed was that 19-year-old guy by the IED, the improvised explosive device.
And from that day onward, you can track the decline in support in the United States and the rise of the Democratic Party, the return to power in 06, and that ultimately then laid the groundwork for the rise of Obama and really the onseating of that Reagan coalition that had dominated American politics since the 80s.
And that really ended there with Obama.
And that all goes back to the first bombing in Iraq in 2003.
Something similar is going to happen, I think, in Iran.
I just want to make it clear, by the way, the president can quit today if he wants.
We don't know what that's going to mean in terms of, is Iran going to stop or what are the Israelis going to do?
But even if it all works out according to plan, the time that it will be needed to restore economic capacity, the time it will take to rehabilitate the destroyed infrastructure of the Gulf Arab states, as well as Israel.
Now, the Gulf Arab states are more economically important because of the oil and the fertilizers and the helium is the big one as well.
It's going to take years and years.
I mean, they put on force majeure in Qatar on five-year contracts for oil.
So that indicates to me that they're anticipating.
Meaning they don't have to honor them because of like a massive intervention beyond their control.
So what that tells me is that the Arab states, if it all goes according to plan and they quit the war now, it doesn't matter.
We're not getting that economic capacity restored fully for months and months, if not years.
And we saw this, by the way, when Trump finally reopened after lockdowns and COVID, it didn't matter.
The economy did not rebound the way they said it was going to be.
Well, wait, but does this matter?
Because, you know, Trump's been saying we don't get our oil from the Strait of Hormuz.
So while, you know, Qatar may be suffering a problem on its balance sheets, we'll be fine.
Yeah, it's important that we understand global markets.
And I don't mean to sound like a jerk when I say that, because I understand people think in America, well, we have all the stuff we need under our feet.
And it's true, we do, but we don't actually have full productive capacity here in the United States.
And that is a business decision that has been made by various oil and natural gas and fracking companies because they want oil internationally in a price range.
They like it.
I think it's $66 to $88, preferably closer to $66.
They like it in that sweet spot.
So what happens if you overproduce at home your oil and your natural gas, you're going to lower the global price of oil, which means good for you and I at the pump, but it's bad for those oil companies which have to see ROI, return on investment.
So when we talk about why is what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz affecting us here, it's because we're integrating more than a dollar more a gallon than it was a month ago.
It's because we do not get all of our oil from our own, not only North America, but the Western Hemisphere.
And also, even if we did, we're still affected by volatility swings in the oil market.
So what that means is we are going to be subject to price increases and shortages here in the United States, especially because we don't have full capacity.
The infrastructure is not in place.
And the oil companies don't want to spend the money on expanding infrastructure in the near term for a variety of reasons, but mostly because that's going to harm their bottom line every quarter.
You know, they have to post a return every quarter for their stockholders or their shareholders.
So it's not in their interest to do this.
Long term, it is, but short term, it's not.
And everything in America is about the short term.
And the number one thing that's upsetting voters here is the economy.
So the last thing that we need to do is give them yet another hit in the economy.
We haven't even talked about the fact that the war is costing us a billion dollars a day.
They want $200 billion to fight this.
We can't afford that.
We can't afford to rebuild all of our military bases throughout the Middle East.
We can't afford to replenish all these interceptors.
And so like, we can't afford any of this, but we're going to have to because we can't sit exposed without these things lest we get attacked.
But wait, I want to ask you about something else, Brandon.
This just broke via the New York Times.
It's related, but not on the same exact topic.
The Revolutionary Guards of Iran just issued a threat against top American corporations accusing them of helping the U.S. and Israel carry out strikes against Iranians.
Quote, from now on, the main institutions involved in such operations will be considered legitimate targets, says the guard, in a statement that named 18 companies, including Apple, Guga, Google, and Meta.
The statement carried by Iranian state media called for employees of these companies, quote, in all countries of the region to evacuate their workplaces and stay a kilometer away from their officers.
I think they mean offices.
It was not the first time that Iran had threatened American tech companies earlier this month.
They threatened wider attacks against enemy tech in infrastructure belonging to seven U.S. tech firms.
Starlink and Satellite Threats00:06:11
They think the tech firms are helping, are assisting in the conduct of this war.
Now, this is a direct threat against the people who work at the branches anywhere in the region.
I mean, that's not good either.
Like, we don't spend a lot of time talking about the satellite problems that this thing is going to cause beyond the gas.
So, my, yeah, my first book was on space war.
It's called Winning Space.
It came out in 2020, and I talked about the threat to our space systems, which is still very underappreciated.
Your audience might be aware of these fireballs in the skies over Texas and Ohio.
Some of them are meteorites, but some of them, I think, are satellites being destroyed.
Now, I don't have proof of this, but my theory is I think somebody is clipping SpaceX, possibly Starlink satellites.
I hope that's incorrect.
I hope that they can prove that is not correct.
By clipping, you mean like tapping into it?
No, I'm sorry.
I mean shooting down.
And I believe the reason that Starlink is a target now is because we know 40,000 Starlink terminals were uncovered in Iran during the protests by the Iranian regime, and they are now associating that as not a private satellite company providing internet to people around the world, but as a backdoor way for regime change by the West using these decentralized satellites.
In fact, we saw the Ukrainians in the Ukraine war at the beginning were using Starlink to basically keep their units in the fight after the Russians attempted to de-link Ukraine from the world telecommunications network.
Now today, the Russians are using Starlink terminals as well.
So we're seeing Starlink increasingly used, whether intentional or not, by SpaceX, it's being used to, you know, in these combat situations or in these political situations, which is now in turn making it a target.
I think also there's probably some anti-satellite warfare going on because I was told years ago there is a fear that the Iranians put a cluster of EMP satellites or satellites armed with electromagnetic pulse weapons above the United States.
And I suspect we're probably taking those things down as a precautionary measure.
But ultimately, I think that the businesses, particularly the tech companies that they're singling out, the Iranians believe, and it's not always wrong, that these tech companies in some way or members of these tech companies are facilitating operations against the regime in Iran electronically.
So how do we get out of this?
If the president, pray God, calls you tomorrow to say, Brandon, help me.
He's never called me.
What should I do at this point?
Clearly, he's not big on talking to the critics, but what do you want to see happen at this point?
Well, what I would love to see happen is a complete reorganization of the U.S. defense posture.
I want to see the complete reduction, if not complete pullout of U.S. military forces from the Middle East.
We've lost this region.
I want to see the reorganization of our defense apparatus so that we are prioritizing only two things, only two things.
Western hemispheric defense plus space dominance.
And that is the only things that we should be focused on.
Patrolling the world's oceans and patrolling the world's straits and whatever sounded great in the 90s, very Alfred Mahan, influence of sea power upon history, wonderful stuff.
But we are no longer a unipolar hegemon anymore.
We have blown that.
The economic situation alone for consistently many years indicates we can't afford that kind of an empire anymore.
What I want to do is focus on rebuilding America.
I want to focus on rebuilding the defense industrial base truly, the industrial base.
I want to bring the factories home.
So you can't do those things if you are constantly engaged and exposed to the varying hostilities and grotesqueries of geopolitics in Eurasia.
That's Europe and Asia and the Middle East.
You can't do it.
You've got to be hard about this and say, we're getting out.
And I can't think of a greater example of why we need to get out than looking at how boxed in we are by the Iranians, of all people.
You know, they spend a fraction on their defense budget than we do.
Also, you know, we.
Well, but wait, but wait.
We're boxed in by the Iranians.
We're boxed in by Israel, who saw all of this coming and couldn't have cared less what this is going to do to the United States.
This chaos is going to be every single one of their interests.
Well, on paper it did.
But of course, if you look at what's going on in Israel now, I don't think in another decade Israel is going to be a real country anymore.
I think that they have been completely smashed.
If you look at Tel Aviv, the footage, you have to go to foreign sources because, of course, our own censorious media won't cover the story.
But if you go to some of these foreign networks in India and elsewhere, you will see the real footage being revealed on social media, on their networks.
You know, these Iranian missiles are nothing to joke about.
They're very serious and they're doing a lot of damage.
You're talking about their key ports, Haifa's getting hit.
ELOT has been blockaded on and off for years.
They've had an economic downturn because of this.
You look at the hundreds of thousands of professional class people who are getting their passports and going to places like Cyprus or Crete or Malta or London or Canada or here back in the United States.
They are leaving permanently.
So you have a brain drain going on.
How do they rebuild?
They can't rebuild.
And they're now breaking the IDF in this stupid thing in Lebanon.
You know, the Merkava massacre, they're sending hundreds.
They've lost over 100 of their Merkava.
A million people have been displaced out of Lebanon because Netanyahu saw an opportunity to anything related to Hezbollah.
But civilians are being killed there too.
And they're promising to do compare what they did in Gaza, which is very scary.
Yeah.
Brain Drain and Nightmare00:16:05
I don't think it's going to be a viable entity much longer.
And I don't say that pro or con.
I'm just pointing out if you look at the damage, I don't know how they get through this as an intact.
They were much stronger before this started than they will be coming out of it.
Let's just put it that way.
And it's like this was going to have to happen.
I'm not defending Iran.
Not defending.
I mean, we all can't stand Iran.
It's like, okay, we know what they've done.
They have been, you know, popping up here and there periodically over the course of the past 40, 50 years.
And they are responsible for American blood and treasure being spilled.
There's no question, but more got spilled just this week and more.
And it's doing more strategic doubling down this thing to us than it ever did before.
Yeah, that's the problem.
It's just, it's not worth it.
Not right now.
And we're about to lose politically as well if this keeps going.
Brandon, thank you.
You've been one of my sages in following you on X and the podcast that you do.
You're so smart.
I really appreciate it.
I love you coming back.
Thanks for coming.
You will, for sure.
We'll invite you.
Up next, the guys from RCP join us, and there's a lot to go over.
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Turning back to the double life of Christy Noam's husband, Brian, part of the Daily Mail report raising national security concerns that his personal fetish poses.
Again, he didn't admit it all to the Daily Mail, but when asked about the allegations that he's doing it, that he was paying women to show their breasts to him, enormous breasts, and to look at him and his fake enormous breasts.
The mail reports that Brian, quote, made indiscreet remarks about Christy Noam as well while on these forums.
In any event, Brian responded to the part about whether this all opened Christy Noam up to the threat of blackmail.
Because of course, the Daily Mail went to him for comment and he told the outlet, quote, I made no comments like that that would lead to that.
I denied the second part of that, but not the whole bimbofication parts.
And now we know that Christy Noam has spoken to the New York Post, not Christy herself, but somebody who represents Christy Noam has spoken to the New York Post and said she's devastated by it.
Got to get the exact quote.
Ms. Noam is devastated.
The family was blindsided by this.
They asked for privacy and prayers at this time.
So she's not denying it either.
Her people are saying she's devastated by it.
Okay, here to React, the guys from Real Clear Politics.
Before this show on the Megan Kelly Channel Sirius XM 111, you can hear them live.
Today we have Tom Bevin and Andrew Walworth.
Sadly, Carl Cannon is off because I really wanted to talk to him about this.
You know, Megan, it's funny.
Just the three of us scheduled on a show and then it's like winning the lottery.
A story like this pops up.
We're like, oh my God.
So there is a new wrinkle to this story.
It's kind of interesting.
Mark Caputo of Axios seems to be getting ahead of possibly a report that he had this story and didn't go with it because he is tweeting out.
It reads, his tweet reads, yeah, I got a weird lead.
A source texted me February 13th.
They told Axios' Mark Caputo that an immigrant sex worker, possibly here illegally, wanted to go public about Noam's husband using her services online.
It was vengeance for DHS's immigration enforcement.
He says he wasn't able to land the interview because he couldn't get the verification the way the mail did.
The mail actually got one or more of these workers to talk to them.
They got the text messages with Brian.
They have pictures of Brian's face.
I mean, he can't deny it.
It's his face.
Plain as, you know, the day with his weird fake breast and his weird tiny little pants, hot pink and otherwise.
I know.
Andrew's shaking his head.
No, that's how we all, you speak for us all.
No, no.
In any event, the story's been circulating.
It doesn't surprise me at all that it was an illegal immigrant potentially who wanted this story out.
The question really is, might some of our adversaries have wanted it out.
Look at this.
Look at this.
Look what's on the board right now.
First of all, why are his legs smaller than mine?
They're teeny tiny little girl legs from the look of it in hot pink biker pants with his enormous cartoon-like fake breasts.
This guy was married to our Department of Homeland Security chief.
Andrew, of course, I'm going to start with you.
Well, I had two thoughts.
One was first, Leo Tolstoy said, what counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.
Did you just go to Tolstoy as our first author of the Christy Noam boob story?
Trying to elevate the story.
Did have to, he's a deep thinker.
Did have to look up limboification, which is a new word for me, but that is what this fetish is.
And then finally, my initial reaction, I wonder what you guys thought.
My frustration, when I saw the pictures, oh, this is fake news.
These are AI generated pictures.
I mean, these can't be real.
But apparently I was wrong.
I guess it's a real story.
And I mean, what can you say?
I don't know.
I do think that national security.
I have a lot to say about it.
The national security implications of this are serious.
You know, Tom, there is a case to be made in fairness, though, that like we've all known about the alleged affair between Christy Noam and Corey Lewandowski.
It's the most open secret you can have in Washington.
And, you know, maybe this is an argument for not just letting that kind of thing just kind of go by like it's a nothing.
Maybe there is a justification when you hear this.
Somebody like the DHS chief, okay?
She's like Monica Crowley, my friend.
She's in charge of protocol.
You know, she's overseeing the 250th anniversary.
That's great.
But it's like, no one's trying to blackmail Monica Crowley.
Homeland Security matters.
Forget the ICE stuff.
Like I'm worried about like terror attacks and so on.
They're the ones who raise the threat level, all that stuff.
Maybe this is an argument to like, you actually do need to kick the tires when you hear something like this about someone in that, because who knows how many layers there are to the compromised position she's placed herself in.
Yeah, I agree.
It raises the question about, you know, should spouses be vetted for these positions as well?
Because the obvious implication is that they go to him and say, listen, if you don't start leaking us information about what's going on in the Department of Homeland Security, we're going to expose this.
But look, my first thought at this is like, it all makes sense now.
Like, I could never understand why he stayed with her because, I mean, he sat behind her at the Department of Homeland Security and it was just sort of like being cuckolded like that.
It's like, you know, it never made sense.
And now it kind of does.
My other thought was like, I totally don't believe Christy Noam in that statement that she was blindsided by this and didn't know anything about it.
I would be that that seems impossible or near impossible to me that this was just going on and she didn't know anything about it.
And the last thing I would say is I don't buy the story that this was leaked by some illegal immigrants, you know, bent on revenge.
It happened after she's already gone.
I mean, we're hearing sort of rumblings.
My first thought was, well, Corey probably leaked it after he got fired.
I don't have any proof of that.
I'm just saying like that, that was my first thought, but that this had to come from someone who had this information and was holding on to it.
And it wasn't ever, it never made the rounds to the media in years.
And then suddenly, you know, she leaves the Department of Homeland Security and this stuff just comes out.
That's not coincidental.
So I don't buy the idea.
Yeah, so why do we know about her affair?
Why is that, Tom, that we know about her affair for all this time, but we don't, we didn't know any of this, even though he's posting pictures of his face on these message boards.
Exactly.
There's a lot more to this story.
And it's bizarre to begin with, but it's not over.
So do we, do we care now that Andrew, she is still special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, Western Hemisphere.
No one knows what that is because this news.
Now she's going to be blackmailed and nobody cares.
I don't know, I guess.
I'm not sure, but like, you know, it's not like she was on the message boards with the huge fake balloon breasts.
Like that would, I think she'd have to step down if that were the case, but do we care?
She's still married to him.
These pictures are unbelievable.
Like, I'm sorry, they're unbelievable.
And by the way, I have the same question on this dude as I have.
I know somebody who is in my orbit who was a man, very accomplished man in New York City, who suddenly I walked in, I saw this person one day, and they've gone trance.
Now they're purporting to be a woman.
They're wearing a dress.
They have long fake fingernails.
They have a full face of makeup.
They have pearls.
They have high heels, but they still have their man hair, which includes a bald spot and like man hair.
Easy on the bald spot.
I'm just saying.
Like, aren't you phoning it in?
Like, where's the full commitment?
I don't get that.
Why is this guy wearing the enormous Kayla Lemieu fake breasts and his man face and his man hair?
Andrew, that's, I know you can't explain that, but do we care about special envoy for the shield of America?
Yes, I think we do.
I think, I think she should.
My feeling is she should probably just resign from public life and take some time off to deal with her family or whatever.
They have three children.
This is embarrassing for them.
But it's just, you know, it's a terrible look.
And in a normal society, yes, this would be the kind of thing where you would sort of say, okay, I'm going to go to the farm and relax for a while.
But I am waiting for the Democrats to come to his defense.
That's what I'm waiting for because this is supposed to be okay.
Right.
I mean, you just, you know, he's, you know, whatever he's thinking, he's on some sort of spectrum.
And, you know, there were more than one gender.
And this happens to be one that, you know, you have a man's haircut and big boobs.
I mean, I guess that's.
Why can't that be one of the 58 genders?
I saw someone on X say, you know, you're so right.
He's lucky he didn't have like a puppy fetish.
Pretty funny.
Cricket is not here to see.
It's like a furry cricket.
God only knows what crickets saw in Cricket's limited time with the family.
Oh, man.
I just feel like, thank God we count our blessings that Cricket didn't have to see this.
I will say this.
Their children are 31, I think, 29 and 23.
I mean, that doesn't make it, it makes it a little better than if they were young, young, young kids, but I'm sure they're upset by this.
This is like, this is your night.
This is a nightmare to find out your dad's doing this shit.
It's a freaking nightmare.
And it just reflects so poorly on like our country.
The whole thing is so skeevy.
I do want to play this sound by Deborah So is I don't remember her official like degree.
She's like got her PhD and sexual fetishes and sex issues.
She's like a Woody Allen movie, but it's brilliant.
I know, but she's legit and she's very smart.
And she came on the show early on when we just had audio.
We didn't have video yet.
And listen to her talking about fetishes.
There are so many different paraphilias.
I really found it interesting to hear what people are into, why they're into it.
And I also wanted to help remove the stigma and shame that often comes along with having an unusual sexual preference.
I found that there are, and there's a larger body of research to suggest that paraphilias are innate in that they are with someone from a very young age.
They cannot be changed.
And that whatever it is that someone finds sexually interesting, if it's very unusual, there's a biological component to that.
So previously, it was believed to be purely a social thing or that it's something that someone learned.
I think it's a combination of both.
But the main takeaway is that if someone has a paraphilia, it's not something that they can change.
So if they're really into something sexually, they can't suppress that, especially not in men.
They can't suppress that and be interested in something else.
By the way, that completely tracks with what we know, for example, about like pedophiles.
They can't be reformed.
You can't just like say, okay, I did three years in jail and now you can have back out to society.
We know that's not true.
I don't think that's a sexual fetish, but I'm just saying like that logic that you can't be therapized out of your fetish or what turns you on seems real to me, which is why the marriage can't, in my view, continue.
Deborah So is, by the way, a neuroscientist who specializes in human sexuality and biological explanations for behavior.
I guess some online are upset that this came out on International Transgender Day of Visibility.
Not it, Tom.
That's not where the story goes.
It's not about that at all.
So we'll see what happens with Christy Noam and the husband.
It's a nightmare.
The whole thing is a freaking nightmare.
Okay, let's keep going because we have other things to get to.
There's been a lot of talk about the strait of Hormuz.
Trump said we have to have it open.
Marco Rubio said it has to be open, period, you know, before we end this war.
Then Trump, it comes out last night in the journal, has been talking to AIDS about maybe we peace out while it's still closed.
Like, let's not hang around there for too much longer.
Well, comedian Lionel Leed went out to the No Kings protest and he got to the bottom of this whole straits of Hormuz thing.
Take a look at this, not 7B.
Isn't it a little bit homophobic that we're so focused on the straits of Hormuz and not the gays of Hormuz?
I agree.
Yes, for sure.
Why do you sings are willing to leave the gays of Homuz behind?
I think it's just history historically.
Like, you know, gays have always been very discriminated against, which is wrong on so many levels.
Even in war.
Yeah, even in war, it just takes more reform in government, obviously, and then also educating society.
Just feel like if we're going to go and say, we can't leave the gay people behind.
I don't think we should go and say at all, but if we're going to the gays of Hamuz, we could turn it into fire island.
For sure.
What we need, Tom, is more education.
Yeah, right?
More education.
I think it was.
Polls Before March 30th00:11:49
I think Jesse Waters sent one of his guys into the, you know, the No Kings protests.
Spring break.
I mean, they often, you know, probably can't even find a ran on a map.
I mean, you know, we saw this with like the Palestinian protests and the whole river to the sea thing.
People didn't know what the river was or what the sea.
Like they don't know what they're talking about.
They're just out there because it's a vibe, right?
They hate Trump.
They want to be out there, you know.
And we were talking about these crowds.
She was young when you just played in the clip, but these No Kings protests were primarily overwhelmingly sort of, you know, boomers from the 60s that were kind of reliving the, you know, reliving their protest days, it seemed like to me.
But a lot of them still didn't seem like they could articulate exactly what it was they were objecting to or what they wanted.
It's, I don't know what to say.
I got one for you too, Andrew.
Tom's not having all the fun.
Here's seven C's.
Who thinks Iranians maintain such good women and LGBT rights as well?
Well, they have a good leader, Ayatollah.
Yeah, yeah.
He's very pro LGBT.
They said he wants the next Ayatollah to queen out.
Be a woman.
No, a guy, but he's a queen.
Oh.
Like a gay guy.
They wanted a gay guy to be in charge.
Who cares?
It's actually because Prophet Muhammad actually had a lot of gay friends.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, that's cool.
The guy's wearing a fuck Trump sticker.
These are Trump's enemies, Andrew.
You'd think he doesn't really need to worry, and yet the latest polls suggest he does.
Yeah, well, you know, this reminds me of my mom used to, when she would get mad, she would say to me, and my brother, it's your whole damn attitude.
And I think that's what they're saying, right?
It's like they don't, the inchoate sort of argument against Trump is just that it's his whole damn attitude.
They just don't like him.
And so on the one hand, it seems like a sort of unfocused protest.
On the other hand, it's very focused.
It's simply sort of anti-Trump.
It's sort of, you know, we can call it Trump derangement syndrome.
But basically, he sort of has personified something to these people, which means that whatever he's for, they're against.
You know, anything that he does good for the country, they want the opposite.
And I mean, that's the way I think.
They've always been against it.
Yeah.
And they always say that.
Wait, Tom, if you don't start using it's your whole attitude against Andrew regularly on our side.
I will.
Missed a golden opportunity.
But can we talk about these polls?
Because these numbers that we've been talking about a lot on our show are, they're just dreadful for the president.
And you'd truly hate to see it if you're a supporter of his.
Now, the Democrats are loving it.
They're like, we can't leave.
We have to stay in Iran.
Even though they're totally against it because they want to see these numbers plummet further.
Only 8% support sending ground troops in.
I'm sure the Democrats are like, do it.
We need ground troops to support the straight of Hormuz.
How does one turn these around?
Like, is that historically, have we seen dips this low, like these numbers with independence, where he's got 22% approval ratings, and still a party able to win, let's say at the midterms, Tom?
Well, typically, I mean, the problem that Trump is experiencing, all right, midterms are typically lower turnout.
So they're base elections.
And Trump has, he has shattered his base.
I mean, the coalition that elected him and has fueled MAGA is now split over this.
And it's not like a, it's not a tiny split.
It's not a split over a sort of tangential side issue.
This was one of his main promises.
No new wars in the Middle East.
And here he is engaging in it and trying to say, you know, I'll define what MAGA is.
And it's not working.
It's not happening.
And so you go into midterm where your base is divided, the other base is united.
You're going to get your ass kicked.
And that's where Republicans are.
I think in terms of independence, you mentioned him, he's lost ground with independence.
And they're maybe, you know, 10, 15% of the electorate, which isn't huge, but is important.
And he's underwater with them, not only in his handling of the war, but then you go back to sort of domestic gas prices now of $4.
That's the main concern is the economy inflation.
He's not attending to that at all.
If anything, people would say he's making things worse.
And so, yeah, it's shaping up to be a perfect storm against Republicans.
And then, you know, after that, it's like, well, we'll have to see as the race starts to be the inheritor of MAGA, if somebody can put Humpty Dumpty back together again, whether that's Vance or Ruby or somebody else.
Right.
Now you're talking about 28, which is going to start in earnest after those midterms are over.
Yeah, I mean, here's the latest polling, Andrew.
I'll give it to you one second.
Let me just tell you, this just dropped.
YouGov, latest YouGov polling shows that his approval rating on handling Iran on March 9th, it was 39 approved, 52% didn't.
So he was minus 12.
March 23rd, he was down to minus 19.
March 30th, it's now down to 30, the swing, net 30.
So 30% of the people approve, 60% of the people do not, and some 10% don't know.
So he's gone from minus 12 on March 9th to minus 30 on March 30th.
With independence, it's worse.
He started off at minus 23 with just 30% of the independents favoring it.
And now he's down minus 47.
19% of independents approve of the war.
66% do not.
I mean, that, can you, like, how do you win a midterm election?
Do you need the independence?
Can you do it with just Coromaga if you're a Republican?
Because even if you look at Coromaga, which is like 15% of the party or the populace, and then you look outside of Coromaga, you've got sort of regular America First Republicans, and that second group is split, but MAGA's not.
They support the president, though, a little bit less than 100% now.
It was like, now I think it's 90.
So can you win the midterms with those numbers?
Well, back up just a minute.
I mean, you know, real clear, we average the polls, just so because you're quoting YouGov, that's a recent poll, but according to our average on the approval of war, it's 53.1% disapprove, 39.6% approve.
But your overall point is correct.
These are not great numbers.
No, and the past three days, we've had like a slew of polls.
We've had four plus polls, all of which have these same numbers.
Yeah, no, no, I'm saying the numbers are not good.
And the answer to your question is I think the problem with Trump is that he not only, he motivates his base, but he motivates the Democrats maybe a little bit more.
And so I think that the fact that he's not on the ballot is a problem because Trump voters might not come out as much.
But what we're seeing in all these special elections, and every special election is special, I get that.
But when you look at the trend, those are all going against the Republicans as well.
So no, I think he loses the House, but I think that people expected him to lose the House anyway, just based on sort of historic trends.
What about the Senate?
Well, that's an interesting question.
I mean, we've talked about this on our show a lot.
I mean, the Senate is an interesting thing because in my view, the Senate comes much more down to sort of candidate quality in these individual races.
So you really have to look at individual races.
But overall, certainly it's more in play right now than people thought three or four months ago.
Can I just add, even if you set aside Donald Trump and the Iran war, Republicans have an enthusiasm gap, right?
That's very clear.
And what's going on in Congress, like they won't pass the Save Act.
They just like did this, the Senate just did this ridiculous deal, declared victory and went home for two weeks.
And Mike Johnson was like, what are you doing?
So there is huge, huge frustration with the elected leaders in Congress from the base of the Republican Party.
And you could really see the bottom drop out to the point where they're just like, I'm not voting for these guys at all.
I'm not going.
I'm not going.
I'm not doing it.
And then they would lose the Senate.
I mean, they definitely, there are enough seats out there that Democrats could pick up.
If the bottom really fell out, they could easily get there.
I shouldn't say easily, but they could definitely get there.
And that would mean Susan Collins would lose in Maine.
That would mean, you know, they might lose.
Television might win in Texas.
Yeah, maybe.
I was thinking more like Alaska, Ohio, Sherrod Brown would win there.
And they defend in Georgia and Michigan.
And suddenly, you know, you're right knocking on the door of 51 votes.
And so that is certainly possible because from what I see where I sit, there's frustration with Trump, but there's also huge frustration with like John Thune and all the Republican leadership in the Senate in particular.
What is this, Debbie, that you sent me?
Is this Republicans?
Okay, she's pointing out to that same YouGov poll, the polling of Republicans shows that as of March 9th, Trump had 83% approval of the war.
By March 30th, it was down to 68%.
So he's losing now Republicans too, by pretty significant amounts.
I mean, if you look back at when the Iraq war began, the numbers were far, far, far better than this.
The majority of the country supported the effort.
And that was across the board.
It wasn't just like the one party, the Republican Party that George Bush was from.
Now you've got the numbers dwindling by 20, just about 20 points, down 15 points, even amongst Republicans from a couple of weeks ago.
So it's not great.
Here's the other thing that I'm looking at, Tom.
So in 2026, the midterms, Republicans defend 23 of 35 seats, but many are in red states.
So there's not a lot of, not a ton of opportunities for the Democrats to convert.
They could do it to gain control, but it's not great.
In 2028, 34 Senate seats are up.
Of those, 19 are held by Republicans, 15 by Democrats.
Republicans have to defend more seats.
Democrats have more pickup opportunities.
And so I think the thinking is they can't give up three or four seats in 26 and then be exposed to that map in 28.
Yeah.
And then, you know, if, let's say, JD Vance is the nominee, which at this point, he's probably, you know, the favorite according to all the polls.
And I think that's probably right.
And he's got to defend Trump's record.
And let's say the economy hasn't been great or isn't great.
And he's got to defend war and all that.
You're looking at Democrats controlling the White House, the Senate, and the House.
They would have, you know, all the powers of government at their disposal, at their disposal.
And they would immediately, I'm sure, abolish the filibuster, legislative filibusters and important.
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Selv om du vet at du ikke skal gjøre det, så strekk du ut handa.
Det er akkurat da du må stoppe deg selv, og ta handa tilbake på rattet.
Skal du få det til, så burde du lage deg en plan.
Da blir det litt enklere.
Å kjøre er det eneste du skal gjøre.
Hilsen statens levesen.
Fra medskaperen av Yellowstone kommer en ny romantisk dramaserie med Michelle Pfeiffer og Kurt Russell i hovedrollene.
En vakker historie om sorg, og om å finne veien fremover.
Jeg tror ikke jeg er større for dette.
The worry is what you do next.
Some times it's the most difficult journey to find out what's going on.
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It's me, Megan Kelly.
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Redistricting and Control House00:15:26
Just take a look here.
Oh, hello, most House retirements since 1930.
So far, this cycle, already 36, 36.
That is the grand record over the last nearly 100 years.
My goodness gracious.
That actually beats the former record in total, which was 34 back in the 2018 cycle.
And that wasn't that long ago.
And I do recall that was a very, very good year for House Democrats.
The bottom line is this: you don't run for the exits unless you know trouble is brewing.
And House Republicans so far believe trouble is absolutely brewing.
Okay, what they're looking at is the president of the United States and his approval rating.
So why don't we just take a look here?
Why are GOP retiring?
Okay, when the president's approval is less than 50%, I went back all the way through the record books, all the way back since 1938 and midterm elections, when the House, the press party in the House, on average, loses 34 seats, loses 34 seats when the president's approval rating is less than 50%.
Well, that's certainly not what we want to see come November.
Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show.
Tom Bevin and Andrew Walworth are back with me.
It is amazing the number of retirements they're having amongst Republicans in the House, Andrew.
And a lot of people thought it was because, you know, leading up to now, it's tough to ever buck Trump.
You know, they're kind of a rubber stamp.
And if they're not a rubber stamp, he attacks them.
And so, like, it's just not a pleasant life.
You know, now it's maybe that's still there or not, but it's like you're also probably going to lose, right?
Like, they see their fortunes rise or fall with the presidents, is basically what they're seeing.
And probably even worse so because they're not Donald Trump and Donald Trump's not on the ticket.
At least he has some hope of getting like the MAGA faithful out there to vote Republican.
But when in the midterm he's not there, I don't know.
You tell me, how does it affect your average Republican House member?
Well, I think those numbers are indicative of just what he was saying, which is that basically a lot of Republicans are thinking it's two things.
It's not that fun to be in the House right now.
And second of all, they're going to lose, so why bother?
So I think that's bad for Republicans.
I think what might be, you know, what the Republicans hoped would offset this a little bit would be redistricting, but it doesn't even look like they're going to pick up that many seats through redistricting.
So, you know, I think all indications are pointing to a bad bad midterm for the Republicans in the House.
I mean, I don't think there's any other way to look at it.
But having said that, you remember, Tom, the midterms of 2022, and we really thought there was going to be a red wave and it turned into a trickle.
It was like not a wave.
They did take control of the House, but it was like tiny, by a tiny, tiny margin.
So it was like, I don't know, like, how much stock can we put into these historical trends?
Because things do seem to be a little different now.
People are entrenched in their partisanship.
I don't know what you think.
Yeah, no, I agree with that.
I mean, Harry Enton, smart guy, whatever, but like there are a couple different things, right?
That comparing 1900 and the 1930s to now is completely different, right?
And one of the things is Trump.
I mean, Trump's never had 50% job approval rating.
He came in in 2016 with, I think, 44% job approval rating and went down from there.
And Republicans, you know, he still managed to win Senate seats in 2018, even though Republicans lost.
And the other thing, too, is that historic number of 34 seats that he was mentioning on average, well, because of redistricting, because of gerrymandering and what's been going on, there just aren't that many seats at play.
I mean, so even if Republicans have a terrible night, you know, maybe they lose 25 seats, but there just aren't by the time you get to 34 seats, you're into deep Republican territory.
And some of those retirements, by the way, are, you know, Sam Graves just retired from Missouri and these are deep Republican districts.
They're getting out just because they're tired of the job or whatever.
It's not like those seats are going to go Democratic.
So, but the point is taken that when tons are blowing against you, you know, it's a lot of these folks decide that they're just done with it.
It is, it's all going to be in the minority.
You know, we can talk about how big a wave it'll be, but it looks like it's going to switch the control of the House.
And that's, I mean, it is sort of a light switch here.
I mean, and the Democrats, at least traditionally, have been a little bit more disciplined than the Republicans when they have a narrow majority.
So if that trend holds, I mean, you know, maybe they'll only have a five-seat advantage in the House, but does it really matter whether it's five or 30 seats?
Well, I mean.
And who will be the happiest man in Washington, Tom Bevan, if the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives?
Who's going to be the happiest man in Washington?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Mike.
Mike Johnson.
Yes, he's such a nice guy, but he seems so unhappy in that role.
It is just a thankless, thankless.
It is a thankless job, particularly on the Republican side.
To Andy's point, Nancy Pelosi did a better job of managing a very slim majority.
Hakeem Jeffries is no Nancy Pelosi.
So, you know, even if he's got a five-seat majority, it's going to be tough.
And certainly, you know, if Democrats win the Senate, they'd have, at best, maybe a one-seat majority there.
So it'd be 51, 49.
And then you still got President Trump as a backstop to veto anything.
So, you know, it's going to be, we're in a very tribal, very partisan, very evenly divided country.
We have been for a number of cycles.
And this is just the way, you know, once I get a tiny majority in the House or a tiny majority in the Senate, and they're not able to necessarily do a lot with it other than investigate, which is certainly something that Democrats will do when they get control of House oversight.
And if they win control of the Senate, they will definitely, well, they're probably going to start impeachment proceedings in the House anyway.
Yeah.
But two cheers for Mike Johnson.
Let's talk a little bit about the presidential.
Yeah, two cheers for him.
I was going to say, I mean, I like the guy.
He's done a hell of a job when people didn't even know who he was before he took the office.
I know.
And like he's managed to keep the president happy and not have a full revolt in the House, but he's now controversial, obviously, given the role.
I want to ask you one other thing.
So I'm not going to play it, but Harry Enton did another thing on JD Vance versus himself and his 2028 odds.
And he showed that Vance had fallen from 53% odds.
It wasn't a poll.
It was like a polymarket thing.
53% likelihood of becoming the nominee six months ago to, he says, 37% today.
And again, that's not a poll.
That's like you go to Polymarket or one of these betting sites.
And, you know, when people have to put money behind it, the theory is that it'll accurately reflect what the public sentiment is.
It's probably not a great time to ask that question, right?
Because the Trump administration's fortunes aren't favored at the moment, given everything that's going on.
But is there any doubt in your mind that JD Vance will be the next nominee, Andrew?
Because I feel like for me, I have no doubt that unless he chooses not to run, he's going to be the nominee.
I think last time I looked at the polymarkets, I think Donald Trump Jr. was in second place in those bettings.
So I don't put a lot of stuff in the middle.
Yeah, I don't put a lot of stock in the betting right now.
But yeah, you would have to say that I think he's going to be the nominee.
I mean, you know, people talk about Van, about Rubio, but if you look at what's going on right now and, you know, Rubio being so identified with the war, I wouldn't think his stock is rising.
I'd be curious to see what the thing was.
So that's very interesting, Tom, because if you talk to sort of the neocons in the Republican Party, they're like, Marco, it's Marco.
Nobody likes JD now.
You know, JD's going down and Marco's going up.
And I have to say, from where I've been sitting, I'm like, what do you base that on?
Like that, that's just instinct because the war's not going well.
Trump is the grand poobah.
You know, the party loves Trump.
Even the non-MAGA people tend to love Trump if you're a Republican.
He's got, amongst Republicans, very high approval ratings.
So if his number can go down, anyone's can, including Marco Rubio, who's much more associated with the war and with hawkishness than JD.
And I also think it's significant that they're saying JD should be the negotiator to bring this thing to a close because like the Iranians can trust him since he's not hawkish and he can get the president on the phone whenever he wants to.
Yeah, look, it's interesting.
I mean, on one hand, he's the heavy favorite and you have to assume that he is going to run and will most likely be the nominee.
However, you know, look, I've talked to a bunch of folks who are who have and seen some of this stuff online.
And, you know, you always fall into that trap.
Am I too online?
Is this really representative of what's going on in the country?
But the folks who were America firsters were like, that's it.
Like anybody who's involved in this administration, anybody who got us into the surround war, whether it's JD or Marco, like we're done.
Not doing it.
Got to be someone else.
Got to be someone from outside to sort of reinvigorate or whatever MAGA.
So the challenge is going to come perhaps in 2028 from someone on that side of the aisle, whether it's Joe Ken or Tucker or somebody else who will come in there.
They're looking at Tucker, but I can't see a world in which Tucker runs when JD is running.
They're too close.
Well, right.
I agree with that.
But the thing is, then, okay, but JD is going to have to, therefore, somehow, you know, he's going to have to distance himself from Trump on this issue.
He's going to sort of have to reassert the fact that, yeah, I wasn't really for this war, but I was, you know, I was loyal and I was doing my duty and all that.
I think to sort of recapture some of those folks and whether they believe him or not, whether they think he's sincere about that or not, he certainly had this sort of non-interventionist bona fides before he became vice president.
And even during that early, you know, the early Iran exchange, he was on those text messages where he was like, I don't think this is a good idea.
That's the JD that I think people, at least on the MAGA side, they, you know, they like that part of him.
And so again, a lot of this depends on how does this war work out?
Is it still a disaster six months from now?
Is it a disaster?
Are we still there a year from now?
Then does he have to defend it as he's starting to kick into his campaign for president?
That would be, that's going to be a really interesting thing to watch and to see him.
It is going to be very interesting.
Because I think, Andrew, he needs to give the answer that Kamala Harris failed to give you.
You know, is there anything you would have done differently?
He's going to have to say, with all due respect to the boss, you know, going into Iran probably wouldn't have been my choice, but I believed in the president because he's smarter than the rest.
And as I said publicly at the time, I could get behind it because Trump is a unique commander in chief, unlike George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
Yeah.
But when he's going to have to give this answer, he's still going to be working for Trump.
And while Trump will be a lame duck at this point, is Trump ever a lame duck?
Like when he leaves the office, he's still going to be very loud, very influential in this contest and every other Republican contest for a long time.
Yeah, I think when you look back on this period, you'll, you know, we will think about how he talked about both Rubio and Vance and how much we tried to figure out where he was leaning.
Because sometimes, remember this?
We made a big deal of the fact that he would mention Rubio first when he was talking about the two of them as being the next leader of MAGA.
And the fact that he was talking about Rubio being the next leader of MAGA at all was kind of interesting to a lot of people.
It's just too early to tell.
It so much depends upon how the war goes.
And, you know, if we're all vacationing in Cuba and playing golf in Greenland, I mean, you know, the world might look very different.
They may all be clamoring to take credit for these adventures.
Well, Cuba, I mean, you know, Trump keeps saying Cuba's going to fall on its own because they have no oil.
They have no electricity.
We're letting one oil tanker go through from the Russians so that probably the government officials can turn on their lights.
But it's going so poorly there that it is possible something could be negotiated with Cuba.
Yeah.
The regime's not so great.
They're really not so pro-America.
So I don't know.
I know I've been waiting to play golf.
I don't think that the possibility of military operations down there is still on the table after this disastrous Iran.
Thank God.
I've been waiting to play golf in Cuba for a long time.
Every time we predict they're going to fall in six months, they don't seem to do so.
I'm just a little skeptical.
But I thought that was interesting, Megan.
Like I think Trump, when he initially launched the strikes against Iran, really did think and was told and was convinced that we could get this done in four to six weeks, despite the fact that his regime had been in power for 47 years and had total control of the media and all the guns and everything.
And then, you know, he turns around and he says the same thing about Cuba.
Oh, I think they're going to fall.
Like pretty soon, it's going to happen.
It's like, well, maybe or maybe not.
I mean, that regime has been in power a long time as well.
Same situation.
And these regimes are much more durable than sometimes our politicians think they are.
So I thought that was an I would love to see it happen.
I think everybody would love to see it happen, most of all Marco Rubio and because he's got family ties and all that.
But it's not just going to happen organically, I don't think.
The Cuban people have been suffering under that regime for 50, 60 years.
Well, the other thing that we didn't talk about with Marco is, you know, and I like Marco, I'd vote for him in a heartbeat, but it's not great.
They kind of put him in the position that Pam Bondi put herself in with the, I've got the Jeffrey Epstein file list on my desk right now, right?
Like she put herself in that position by saying it wasn't true.
And then she had the influencers there and she embarrassed the influencers.
Poor Marco kind of took a similar shot to the face in being the one who had to come out and be like, we did this because Israel said they were doing it and we knew that we would get attacked.
And we didn't want to get attacked first.
We wanted to do the attacking first.
So that's the reason we did it now because of Israel.
And then everybody was like, he was like, oh, what did I say?
You know, we did it because of the Navy and the Air Force and the missiles.
And it was like, suddenly the whole thing about Israel went away as though we'd like the evil press have made it up.
It's like, no, you're on camera.
Havana Drive and Embargo00:02:32
You said it.
You're stuck with it.
I think he's been dinged up a little bit by that.
You know, I'm sure the administration gave him permission to say that, not realizing the amount of blowback he'd get.
So it's just an interesting footnote to whose fortunes are rising and whose may not be.
I too would love to see Cuba.
They say wonderful things about Havana.
It's supposed to be very beautiful because of the embargo and all that.
They say that all the cars are stuck in like the 1950s styles that we had here.
We might go down the street and see an Ed Sultan.
It was very full of pastel colors and warm winter nights.
And if we could just get rid of those pesky communists, it might be a lovely thing for the United States to have in the toolbox, you know, as a territory or not, you know.
Yeah, imagine how prosperous they'd be with all the tourism dollars they generate too.
It would be remarkable.
Seriously.
I don't just like having a rum drink.
One of those white suits.
I always thought that that would be fun.
Big Trump Hotel right there in downtown Havana.
Yeah, right.
Yes, I would do it.
That one I'm kind of rooting for.
I always talked into Greenland too.
Never talked into Iran, however, and remain against that one.
Guys, thank you both so much.
Got it.
Thanks, man.
Thanks.
Great to see you.
Don't forget to check out the Real Clear Politics podcast.
You can listen to it live right here on SiriusXM Channel 111 right before we air, or you can listen to it via pod later, wherever you get your podcasts.
That was Tom Bevan and Andrew Woolworth.
Carl Cannon is also part of the crowd, though not today.
Thank you all so much for listening.
We will be back tomorrow, and we look forward to talking to you then.
We've got a couple of interesting legal cases we're going to go through.
Stay tuned.
Okay, see you then.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
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