God's Debris: The Complete Works, Amazon https://tinyurl.com/GodsDebrisCompleteWorksFind my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.comContent:Politics, Democrat Peoples Cabinet Play, Harvard Endowments, Non-Essential DOE Staff, HUD Halts Sanctuary Funding, TikTok Sale, GLP-1 Country Specific Formulation, Jerome Powell, Fed Interest Rate, US Debt Refinancing, Tariff Negotiations, Kamala Harris, Colorado Pronouns Bill, Pro-Tariffs Persuasion, Jobs Report, Trade Deficits, Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, China's Negotiation Strength, Military Drone Importance, Trump's Tax Plan, Fiscal Framework, Ashley Allison, Scott Bessent, Zelensky Mineral Deal, Funding Illegal DEI, DEI Word-Play, China US Farmland Ownership, EU Censorship X Penalty, President Trump, Autonomous F-16 Jets, Inexpensive Drone Killing Lasers, Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
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At the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better, it's called...
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I should tell you that after the show, there will be a Spaces.
That's the audio-only feature on the X platform, hosted by Owen Gregorian.
For those who want to do the coffee with Scott Adams after party, it'll be more stuff, more fun.
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All right, well, let's start with weird news.
According to the Daily Mail, declassified CIA documents show that Hitler may have escaped Germany after World War II and was living in South America.
And the CIA apparently was looking for him 10 years after he supposedly died.
So according to multiple reports from the CIA archive, agents in South America were convinced the dictator was still alive in the 50s, and he changed his name to remain undercover.
Do you know what this makes me think?
It makes me think, I don't know what's true about anything in history.
I don't think any history is real.
I feel like all history is fake.
So, there was a time when I would have laughed at this and said, because that's me laughing.
That's my laugh.
And I'd say, I don't think so.
Next thing you're going to tell me is that the moon landing was, okay, let's not go there.
I'm going to say, I don't know if this is true, but I also don't know if anything else in history is true.
Well, speaking of Nazis, let's check in with the Democrats, see how they're doing.
According to the Gateway Pundit, the DNC chair, Ken Martin, he's decided to put together a little group called the People's Cabinet.
And people like Robert Reich are on there.
So it's supposedly a group of experts and ordinary people, he calls them, Experts, leaders, and everyday Americans.
And what they will be doing is fact-checking Trump.
But they will be doing it in the most theatrical way.
So, in effect, the Democrats, having absolutely nothing to offer to the country, have decided to put on a play, a theatrical production, called The People's Cabinet.
And apparently it requires a little person.
Robert Reich will be taking that role.
He'll be playing a far-left economist who says wacky things.
I'm looking forward to it.
I'm looking forward to the play.
Now, some say it could be as good as Snow White the movie.
So, if that doesn't get you there, I don't know what will.
I'm going to buy my ticket right away.
Because as you know, the Democrats don't have any policies or ideas or power.
So they're kind of left with doing one-man theatrical productions like Cory Booker recently did.
But now at least it's an ensemble.
Is that the right word?
Ensemble? The People's Cabinet.
Can't wait.
It'll be like Hamilton, but with fewer minorities, I think.
So Trump sent a list of demands to Harvard University, according to the New York Post, and they're going to lose $9 billion in government funding.
Let's stop right there.
Harvard was getting $9 billion in government funding?
Now, one of the things that many of you have heard but don't understand is that the so-called endowments They can't really use it for whatever they want.
So if you say to yourself, but Harvard has endowments worth X billions of dollars.
Why don't they spend that instead of charging people for tuition?
And the answer is the endowments usually are limited.
As in, here's some money to build the science building and put my name on it.
But they can't just use it for whatever they want.
Or, here's an endowment to give scholarships to a certain class of people.
They can't just take it and use it for other stuff.
So, if you want to be the smartest person in the room, when somebody else says, they've got these rich endowments, you should say, they do, but they're all restricted.
They can't just use them as a piggy bank.
Anyway, $9 billion, and again, I don't know over what time period that is.
That can't possibly be one year.
But maybe.
Anything's possible.
But the reason that they might lose that $9 billion is that Trump is insisting that they get rid of their DEI programs and clamp down on all the anti-Semitic protests and stuff.
And he also wants them to ban face masks on campus because that's one of the reasons that the protests can get out of control because people can cover their faces.
So... We'll see if Harvard blinks.
I'm going to say I think they will.
According to Newsmax, Sam Barron is reporting that the Department of Energy has decided that 44% of their staff is what they call non-essential.
44% of their entire staff is non-essential.
No, I wonder how they figured that out.
So, in all likelihood, there's going to be some big employee cuts there.
I think they should rename the department.
If 44% of your employees are non-essential, I wouldn't call it the Department of Energy.
I would call it the Low Energy Department.
Are you with me?
Low Energy Department?
Anybody? Okay.
Meanwhile, Housing and Urban Development, that you call HUD, is going to stop funding housing in sanctuaries, cities, and states.
So, if you were one of those states that depended on HUD to help you build some housing, and you had Georgia housing, good luck!
If you're a sanctuary city or a sanctuary state.
Because the HUD Secretary Scott Turner just sent in a letter saying you're not going to get it if you're a sanctuary city.
Now, I've never seen the government use its power this way before.
Because I guess I didn't realize how many things the government funds.
But watching the government use its just funding authority to change things.
It's kind of interesting.
But it makes me wonder if Democrats win or they're just going to reverse everything and they would just use the same threat.
Well, you better change it back.
You better give everybody masks.
You better go wild with DEI because we love our DEI.
So we'll see if any of this is lasting.
Well, as I predicted, Trump is going to extend the TikTok deadline.
That was the deadline to make a deal.
And we've learned as of today that China had apparently agreed to allow ByteDance to sell TikTok.
So they actually had a deal.
And then Trump ruined it by the timing of introducing tariffs.
And so as soon as China saw the tariffs, they said, oh, nope, change our mind.
We do not allow that sale.
So they're going to use it.
Now, I think that for however many billion dollars are at risk, the damage it would do to Trump...
If it just got closed down in the United States, it might be worth it for China.
They might say, well, China was only going to make $30 or $50 billion, and we're a big country.
We can handle not making that.
So I don't know.
I don't even think that a tariff negotiation would get them to change their mind.
I'm surprised there ever was a deal.
So maybe I'm a little skeptical they ever had a deal.
But especially since China knew the tariffs were coming.
So maybe they made it look like the tariffs were the reason, but they had always planned to say no.
They just said, oh yes, yeah, sure.
Yeah, we got a deal.
No problem.
Because they knew the tariffs were coming and they could just yank it at that point.
According to The Hill, Biden had proposed a rule that looks like the Trump administration is going to ignore.
And the rule would have been that if you had a body mass index of over 30, which would put you squarely in the obese category, I believe, that you would have been able to use your Medicare or Medicaid to get those GLP-1 weight loss drugs that are...
So popular.
And it looks like that's not going to be happening under Trump.
So if you're on Medicare or Medicaid, and RFK Jr. has said that he wonders why those drugs are made in other countries, but they don't give us the same version that they allow in their own country.
Does that worry you a little bit?
The drugs come from other countries.
But they won't sell the same drug that they give to us in their own country.
Now I don't know what's up with that, but I don't like it.
That sounds exactly like ours must be more dangerous than theirs.
I don't know.
But here's what caught my imagination.
You know how I always make fun of Democrats for not understanding human behavior?
Let's just see if all of you come to the same impression.
So let's say you were on Medicare or Medicaid and you had a weight problem and you wanted this drug.
And your body mass index was 25. But you couldn't get the drug unless you were 30. What would you do?
The Democrats are so bad at understanding human incentive.
I'll tell you what you would do.
You would eat like crazy until you were 30, and then you would go get the drug.
Because the drug would take you all the way past 25 and keep going.
So it's not like they're going to deny you the drug once it's working.
Once you're on the program, you get to lose the weight.
So yes, all the people who are close to 30, they would be incentivized to just eat terrible food until they reach 30. And then they're like, I think I reached it, Doc!
And the doctor would say, oh, finally, I can get you this free drug.
Now, do you tell me there wasn't one Democrat who understood that would have been just a nightmare?
There's no way that that wouldn't have been a big problem.
I don't know.
So we'll see.
RFK Jr. says you should eat right and exercise, and that should be your first line of defense.
That hasn't worked for people yet.
At least for the obese.
Obviously, they know that they should eat right and they know they should exercise.
But they weren't doing it.
So, obviously, this drug has a place.
Well, President Trump has called on the Fed chairman, Jerome Powell.
Now, he doesn't have control over him.
The Fed is an independent entity, so it can do what it wants.
But Trump's trying to embarrass...
Powell into cutting interest rates on the 10-year treasury because the 10-year treasury has fallen below 4%.
So at one point it was above 5%, not too long ago, but between the tariffs and maybe some other stuff, interest rates have drifted down, and this would be a terrific time to give everybody a little raise if they're paying anything on interest.
So... Well, at least anything that's going to be adjustable.
But more importantly, apparently the government has to refinance something like $9 trillion pretty soon.
And the difference between refinancing it at 5% and 4% is really, really big.
So the theory that I mentioned yesterday, that the big play with tariffs Might have been to tank the stock market temporarily, because then people move their money into bonds, and if they have their money in bonds,
supply and demand causes the interest rate to go down, and then you refinance your trillions and trillions, and then slowly you can let the stock market come back to the level you want.
Now, if that's what the...
Trump administration had in mind the entire time.
And honestly, it's starting to look that way.
It's starting to look like that was always part of the plan.
Not the only plan.
I think he genuinely, Trump, I think he genuinely likes tariffs and negotiating and all that.
But it could be that one of the biggest gains is this interest rate thing.
And you cannot, it's almost hard to put a value on it.
Because... It might be almost impossible to negotiate our own debt.
We could be in quite a bit of trouble unless we get this lower interest rate.
And now the table is set for it.
But I don't know that Jerome Powell is going to want to look like he was influenced by the president.
So I don't know that Trump is playing this right because he's putting Powell in a position where he's supposed to be the independent guy.
But if Trump is publicly saying you should do this and then he doesn't, it's going to look like he got influenced.
So I'm not sure the persuasion play here is quite right.
It looks like Trump might be doing anti-persuasion.
On the other hand, Powell's going to have a lot of explaining to do if he doesn't do it, because everybody's going to be hurt by it, and it's going to be a lot of pain.
So you'd have to ask yourself, is Jerome Powell on the side of the United States?
Or his own side?
Or somebody else's side?
If he doesn't lower interest rates.
So we'll see.
That'll be interesting.
Well, so far, the number of countries who have decided that they're going to immediately negotiate their tariffs with Trump, it's a small number.
But it's so far Vietnam, Cambodia, Argentina, Israel's already gone.
But it's a start.
So Macron in France is saying, don't do investments in the United States.
China matched our tariffs with their own, so they're looking tough.
So we're going to need to get at least one larger country to negotiate.
So it makes me wonder who's going to go first, if anybody.
So you can get all the little countries to capitulate, but that's not going to get you what you want.
You're going to need to get at least one big one to say, well, I'm glad I went first.
Billy John, we've got a troll here from YouTube.
Billy John, let me explain to you how time works.
Yeah, you seem to be confused.
You might be an alien from another country.
The Golden Age is something that you build toward.
And as I'll explain to you during the show, the temporary pullback in the stock market is not anything you should worry about.
And we probably are now poised for the greatest American period of all time.
It doesn't mean it's guaranteed, but I do think Trump has largely done all the right stuff.
And he's got really smart people behind him.
Scott Besant impresses me every time I see him on camera.
I think he's just the best.
Have you listened to him at all?
He's so good at explaining things in simple terms while also sounding like the smartest person in the room that when he's done, you say to yourself, oh, I feel a lot better now.
Yeah, if you hear Trump say stuff, you think to yourself, I don't know, is he just in salesman mode?
You know, is that all BS?
But when you see Scott Besant explaining something, he gives you all of his work.
You know, like he removes all questions.
So we'll talk about him a little bit more.
So yes, I think the golden age is looking actually pretty strong.
But Trump, and everybody's smart, warned that there would be a period of turmoil, which is the period to win.
Now, there's almost nothing I can think of that doesn't require some sacrifice to get there.
If you wanted to get in shape at the gym, it's going to be harder when you start.
If you wanted to go on a diet, it's going to be kind of painful.
If you wanted to improve your job, you're probably going to have to, I don't know, go to training or school at night or double your efforts.
So this is no different.
If the country wants to survive the death spiral it was in, you know, the death spiral, it's got to do doge, even if it's messy.
It's really got to do the tariffs, even if it's messy.
The big picture is really good.
If you're playing small ball, like the troll on YouTube, and you don't understand how anything works, it just looks like, oh, my stock went down.
My stock went down.
But we can get you to a smarter place.
All right.
There's a video of...
Kamala Harris acting drunk.
She finally appeared.
I guess she thought it was a good time to go to say something in public.
She was at some event.
And since the stock market was down, she decided that what she would do is, it looks like she was drunk, go in public and say, I don't want to say...
I don't want to...
I don't want to say...
I don't want to say I told you so.
*Sexy noises*
That's my Kamala Harris impression.
Pretty good, wasn't it?
Yeah. But I was watching The Five, and they showed that clip.
And Piers Morgan was on the show that day, and he just said, she looks drunk.
And I think Jesse and Greg were sort of on the same page.
And I'm so confused why we can be in a mode where there are now a couple of books out where people are admitting that the insiders all knew that Biden was mentally disabled.
And I'm thinking to myself, the insiders, everybody who had a television or could hear or see knew that he was mentally disabled.
And we could see the same thing, exactly the same thing with Harris.
She's clearly inebriated in public on a regular basis.
And are we going to just do the same thing?
Are we just going to wait a few years and then somebody will write a book when she seems like she's not a threat anymore?
Somebody is going to write a book and say, "Oh yeah, we all knew.
Everybody knew.
We tried to take the drink away from her, but she fought us.
Looks like that's what we're going to do.
We're just going to repeat the same thing and act like we're surprised again." So that's coming.
Speaking of books, so one of the two books that alleged to have the inside story of What was happening during the Biden-Kamala changeover.
The book called Fight alleges that Harris and Walsh were completely shocked that they lost the election.
And they were actually asking their staff if they should do a recount.
So I wonder if at any point they asked themselves, was this rigged?
Because I'll bet they did.
Even if it was only privately.
Don't you think they said to themselves, everybody said we were going to win.
And apparently they've been shown, they've been looking at polls that were just the ridiculous rigged polls.
Yes, I think some of the polls were rigged.
So I guess their staff, they must have put them in this weird position where they thought, Oh, we're definitely going to win.
And then she had the surprise of her life.
Anyway, so apparently, according to this book, she blamed Biden for staying in the race too long and said she could have won with more time.
Okay. How much time do you think that would have taken?
40 years?
In Colorado, it looks like there's a bill that's going to the next level.
So there's a proposal.
That if parents in Colorado refuse to use their children's preferred pronouns, they could lose custody of the children.
That doesn't even seem real, does it?
No, it's not real yet.
It's a proposal.
But they got the green light to create the bill, I guess.
And misgendering is called coercive control.
Could you imagine?
Can you imagine losing custody of your own child because you didn't go along with some pronoun stuff?
That is so beyond anything that my brain can even handle.
I just look at it and go, oh, how is this even possible?
So with any luck, that will not become any kind of a law there, but we'll see.
All right.
I thought I would give you a little, very quick, easy set of arguments that are the best arguments about all the tariffs and the situation we're in.
So I've heard some good arguments and some bad arguments, and I'm going to tell you the ones that look most persuasive to me and most correct.
I think in this case, when you're talking about economics, being persuasive and being right...
We're kind of the same thing, and that's not always true.
But you don't want to mess around with economics, right?
So you don't want to be real persuasive and wrong.
Although, you know, in politics, sometimes that can work out for you.
But not when it comes to your finances.
You want your most persuasive argument to be also accurate.
So let me give you some of the best arguments.
I saw Victor Davis Hanson.
I always say his name wrong.
I feel so bad about it.
But I was hearing him saying that if tariffs are bad, and all the smart people know that tariffs are bad, and that's what we've been hearing, right?
The critics, everybody knows tariffs are bad, tariffs are terrible, tariffs are bad for your country.
Then the question would be, why does every country have tariffs on us?
Are we the only country?
That if we put a tariff on, it's bad for us?
Is China going out of business?
They've got tariffs.
To imagine that tariffs are bad for a country while every single sophisticated modern country has tariffs?
All of them.
That's a pretty good argument in favor of tariffs, isn't it?
What is the counter argument to that?
Once you've pointed out that every...
Smart, successful country has tariffs.
Every one.
I think there are no exceptions.
How can you argue that we're the only country it'd be bad for?
And is it destroying all those other countries?
Doesn't look like it.
China seems to be growing.
It's actually a best argument in favor of tariffs.
Now, the other argument is, of course, that it's primarily for negotiation.
And that if you look at, say, Vietnam, they've already offered free trade, zero tariffs.
If you look at Argentina, they're also negotiating no tariffs.
So if you look at it as a negotiation, it's a slam-dunk smart thing to do that's already working, because at least two countries have already said, yep, no tariffs.
We need to get the big countries, or it doesn't matter that much.
But at least directionally it looks good.
So those are your two arguments.
Every country does it, and it's a negotiation.
So if you like no tariffs, this is how you get there.
The only way to get to no tariffs is to put one on the people who you think you can negotiate to get rid of them on both sides.
Then there's the stock market argument.
I guess the stock market was down $6.6 trillion in market value.
I always tell you, ignore any numbers that don't come with percentages.
In this case, the percentage is the thing you should look for in the stock market, not the number.
But here's the first part of the argument.
It is completely normal and completely predictable.
That there will be 10-20% pullbacks in the stock market for any number of reasons.
Sometimes it just gets ahead of itself.
Sometimes there's some big impact in the country like COVID or something else.
But there is no world in which you can go for 20 years without a 20% pullback.
There's just always a pullback.
This just happens to be...
The reason it's happening at the moment.
So I guess NASDAQ is already down 20%.
That's the most normal thing in the world.
If you own stocks, and ideally you didn't need to cash them out right away, it shouldn't make any difference to you that it went down 20%.
Because I think this would be my third or fourth time in my life.
In my adult life, where all my stocks went down 20%, and 100% of the time they came back.
So the first argument about the stocks is that if you didn't sell it, you didn't lose anything, and a 10% to 20% correction is completely normal for any number of reasons.
This just happens to be the reason right now.
Then I'm going to give you another argument that I worry might cause you to buy or sell stocks based on this advice.
This is not advice.
This is not advice.
But I'm going to give you a frame because we're in such an unusual situation.
If the stock market continued to go down and we got into a Great Depression, The value of stocks would be even better once we were in the Depression.
If you had bought stocks at the depth of the Great Depression, you would have done great.
Sir John Templeton did exactly that.
He's one of the greatest investors in American history.
And he started during the Depression.
He said to himself, huh, either the entire country is going to go to hell.
In which case, nobody's money is worth anything.
It wouldn't matter if you had your money in your mattress or in the stock market.
If it all goes, your money is worth nothing, no matter what.
So this is one of those situations where you could imagine it's leading to complete ruin of the United States.
So should you invest?
I don't know.
Where else are you going to put your money?
Would you put it in some other country?
If the United States was going to go down the toilet and just be completely out of business, that would take most of the world would follow, I think.
So you have one of these weird situations where it seems like things can't get much worse, but if they did get worse, it wouldn't matter where your money was, it would be gone.
It wouldn't matter if you were in bonds or...
You know, buried it in the backyard.
It wouldn't be worth anything if everything else went to hell.
So I'm not going to tell you this is a buying opportunity.
I'll just disclose that the last thing I would do is sell my stocks now.
That's the last thing I would do.
But I'm not a financial advisor.
Do not take any financial advice from me.
It's not advice.
All right.
Then there's the argument that the only people being hurt are the wealthy because it's the top half of the economic United States that owns stocks.
There's almost nobody in the bottom half that owns any stocks.
And the top 10% own, I don't know, 88% of them or some crazy number.
So if what Trump is doing is...
Reforming the United States economy such that it brings back more manufacturing jobs, then that would be great for the bottom 50% of the country.
And ultimately it would be great for the top half as well.
But in the short run, the people at the top are going to take a little scare.
And the scare is, well, there goes 20% of your money.
But it's not really gone.
As long as they can ride it out, and rich people can ride it out generally.
All right, then there's the jobs argument.
You probably saw that the jobs report were unexpectedly terrific, but this was before the tariffs were announced.
They were certainly threatening for the last month.
Everybody knew they were coming, but the U.S. added 228,000 jobs, and that was way above what we thought it was going to be, 140,000.
Now, I would say the best argument about jobs is that it didn't have much to do with either president.
Probably wasn't because of Biden.
Probably wasn't because of Trump.
Probably just the economy sometimes has a good month.
And so I don't think it predicts anything about tariffs.
It doesn't say that the tariffs are a good idea or a bad idea.
It doesn't tell you that it'll be the same next month.
It's just sort of good news for March, because it could have been worse.
But it does show a little bit of strength, which is a good time to do the tariff stuff.
Then there's the inflation argument, the argument that the tariffs are going to cause inflation, because isn't that what happens when prices go up?
It's called inflation.
But apparently we have a history that shows that...
Past tariffs, because we've put tariffs on before, didn't increase inflation.
And the people who are smarter than me say the only thing that increases inflation is printing money.
You don't increase inflation by tariffs.
Now, that might be counterintuitive because you're saying to yourself, but my goods and services, well, goods, will cost more.
How is that not inflation?
And the answer is that there are individual price increases.
That would be real.
But that the economy adjusts.
It adjusts fairly quickly.
And you would have alternatives.
So if you said, but the cost of my German car went up 20%, I say to you, well, why don't you buy a Ford, which is giving you now the employee discount that's cheaper than it used to be.
So you could have an option of spending less if you're okay with American choices over other choices.
The other thing is in the long run, of course, if manufacturing comes back and we can make our own products, prices could drift down.
Potentially. But also, if food and energy prices went way down, your overall inflation rate would look pretty good.
And it turns out that if we make and sell all of our food to Americans instead of selling some of it overseas, it might actually be cheaper.
So food prices could go down.
Egg prices are down.
We might find that food prices are not that affected by the tariffs.
But oil had just reached an all-time low.
If every one of our goods and services went up in price, but oil went to an all-time low, it might cancel out.
Because oil and energy is one of the biggest expenses that goes into any product.
So you might end up finding out, oh, the economy looks like it took a big hit, which causes the demand for oil to go down.
Which causes the products to cost less.
So the argument on inflation is that the only thing that causes it is printing money, and that tariffs can cause individual prices to go up in the short run, but it doesn't cause inflation in the long run.
That's the argument.
Then there's the trade deficit argument, where...
Where most of the countries we're dealing with, they sell us way more things than they buy from us.
And I've seen two arguments from smart people.
One said the trade deficit is nothing you need to worry about because it's just numbers on a piece of paper.
And it doesn't matter that we're buying more than we're selling.
I'm not sure I buy that.
The other argument is the opposite.
It says over time...
If you're only buying more than you're selling, then you're probably printing money to cover the difference, and you're basically going to be out of business eventually, and we may have reached eventually.
So I do think we have to figure out that trade imbalance thing.
So I think the best argument is you can't go forever with trade imbalances, but you can definitely go for years as long as you're willing to.
Print money to make up the difference, and you reach the end of that working.
So we're probably at the end of that working.
So trade deficits, we probably do have to fix.
Then there's the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 argument.
And the argument is that when the U.S. put tariffs on other countries in the 1930s, it was one of the triggers to create the Great Depression.
Now, the problem with that argument is that it's an analogy, right?
Even though you say to yourself, well, it's not an analogy, it's exactly the same thing.
It's putting tariffs on things.
But no, this is not 1930.
There are too many differences.
The biggest difference is that I wasn't there in 1930, but these tariffs are for primarily negotiation purposes.
Was that true for Smoot-Hawley?
When Smoot-Hawley put their tariffs on, did five countries immediately contact the U.S. and say, hey, how about we all drop all of our tariffs?
Because that's what just happened with these tariffs.
So I don't think you can compare a country that was teetering on the edge and wasn't using it for negotiating with whatever's happening today.
There would be just too many differences.
And then you might remember...
As a cynical publius, who's on Axe, a great account to follow, cynical publius, argues that back when Gore was arguing with Ross Perot about NAFTA, Gore argued that NAFTA was a good idea, and Perot was saying there would be this giant sucking sound that would suck the industry out, and Perot was right.
So, apparently, Perot's argument that we should have some trade barriers, which you would think typically would be bad, probably was right.
So, when you think about things that limit trade, you can't really just compare 1930s to today.
There are just too many differences.
So, some are saying that I saw the Wall Street Journal had an opinion piece.
That China had a good week, meaning that things are looking good for China because they just have some kind of negotiating advantage.
And they kind of do.
They kind of do.
So one of the things China has, as I mentioned, is the TikTok thing.
Trump has a lot riding on the TikTok deal because I think one of his biggest funders...
...is an owner of it and needs some kind of an exit or some kind of a deal to not lose all of his billions.
And Trump's put his reputation on it, and now China just yanked it back.
So now they have something to negotiate with in addition to the tariffs themselves.
So then there's also the China has those Panama Ports that we don't want China to be controlling.
But, I don't know, does that work for China or against it?
Because we could always just go in there and just take it.
And I don't think China would start a war over it.
So that's part of the negotiations.
But I saw today a source that said that China's exports, only 15%, 1.5%, is to the United States.
And then I said, uh-oh.
Uh-oh.
That means that they're not dependent on selling things to the United States.
It's only 15% of their exports.
It seems to me they can ride this sound pretty well.
So they probably played this exactly right by just matching our tariffs, which are unsustainable in either direction, probably.
Whereas we might need the things they have, like their You know, various parts that are necessary for our industry, using the rare earth minerals, etc.
We might need them a lot more than they need us, and that surprised me.
If you had asked me how much of China's exports go to the United States, if I hadn't looked it up, probably would have guessed north of 30%.
And if that were the case, then we would have a pretty good negotiating position.
Because, you know, 30% of what they export, they're not going to lose that.
But 15?
15 is right at the point where they could say, you know what?
There are other people who will buy these things.
It's not like we're even going to lose any sales.
We'll just sell it to Russia instead of you.
We'll just sell it to Japan instead of you.
So... China is in an unusually strong position.
So I don't know where that's going to go, but I hope Trump has some negotiating tricks in his bag.
Well, according to Fox News, the military looks like it might cut 90,000 troops because of budget reasons.
Now, does 90,000 sound like a lot?
It does.
But we're also entering the drone age.
So if these 90,000 people can't operate drones, I just don't know if we needed them that much.
So I guess we're going to have to rejigger our entire military so that we've got the right mix of people.
But it's going to be drone operators, drone experts, drone retrievers, drone defenders, drone everything.
So, probably 90,000 is survivable.
You probably heard that a federal judge ordered that, what would you call him?
I'll just say that individual that the Trump administration had shipped off to the El Salvador prison system.
And the federal judge said he did not have due process.
There's some question whether he was ever in MS-13, but apparently he'll be brought back.
I don't have an opinion on this, because if you don't know for sure if he was part of MS-13, Pam Bondi seemed to think he was.
I don't know if the evidence for that was good or not.
But I don't mind that we correct.
So, it looks like this was just an error.
And he already had a court order prohibiting from being deported specifically to El Salvador.
So, I think the administration admitted at least that much was a mistake.
That they didn't notice that he couldn't be sent to El Salvador because of specific dangers there, I guess.
So, if he is truly innocent, And he's never been part of MS-13.
This is a pretty bad mistake.
But we also live in a world where things don't work perfectly, especially if you're moving fast and you're trying to save your country.
So I'm not going to defend it.
I'm just going to say, unfortunately, we live in a world where this can happen.
And I don't have any further opinion on it.
Well, Trump's tax plan is being hammered out in Congress, and the Republicans are going ahead with what they call trillions of dollars in tax cut extensions, because we don't want the current tax system to time out.
It was scheduled to time out, and then taxes would have gone up.
But he wants to increase some border security and some military.
It looks like Rand Paul and Susan Collins broke with the party and voted against it.
But what they're working on is what they call a fiscal framework.
You know what that sounds like?
If you said, hey, I'd like you guys to come up with a budget, and instead of coming up with a budget, they came up with a fiscal framework, would you think that they had done a job?
If this were corporate America, and you knew that all these people were working on a budget, but what they returned to you with was a fiscal framework, that's almost like not doing work.
I mean, it's pathetic, honestly.
And it just signals a completely broken process.
No, we don't need any frickin' fiscal framework.
Just give us a budget.
Or maybe give us a few of them so we can pick one.
But no, I don't want a fiscal framework.
All right.
You may have seen this clip.
There was a guest on CNN named Ashley Ellison, and apparently she worked for Joe Biden, and she said, I worked for Joe Biden.
If the people around him...knew that he was not capable.
It is unacceptable that they allowed him to go on that stage.
And her excuse was that she worked for Biden, but she didn't spend time around him.
So therefore she was surprised to find out he was mentally degraded and the insiders knew it.
To which I say, nice try, Ashley Allison, trying to cover your ass.
The rest of us knew it just because we had televisions and eyes.
You did not need to spend time around Biden to know that he was mentally degraded.
We've been over this.
But I think all the Democrats now are trying to find a get out of jail free card where they can give you some reason why it wasn't really their fault that they were supporting a candidate with no brain.
And this was a good try.
If you weren't paying attention, you might say to yourself, oh, okay, well, they lied to her.
I guess she's mad at those other Democrats, and this must be the honest and smart one, because it sounds like if she'd been in that situation, she would have told people.
No, she's just another Democrat liar who absolutely knew he was mentally degraded, because everybody did.
Everybody who had eyes knew it.
So don't lie to us.
You know, a year later, and say, well, I didn't spend any time with him.
How could I possibly know?
Now, do you think she also doesn't notice that Kamala Harris is often inebriated in public?
I guess we'll have to wait for a new book to come out, and then people will say, well, I didn't spend much time around her, but how could I possibly have known?
Just watch the videos.
Just look at her.
It's kind of obvious.
Pierce Morgan knew.
So we learned a little more about that mineral deal with Ukraine that kept falling through.
Scott Besant was on Talking to Tucker.
And here's what he says.
So he says that apparently Zelensky had guaranteed that the deal was on.
And then kind of threw the U.S. under the bus by going into the White House and the NACLAN like it wasn't on or he was still negotiating and blowing it up.
And here's what Scott Besant thinks is the real reason the deal looked like it was going to be signed but then wasn't.
Now, this is his own speculation, but he's pretty clever, so I think I'm going to go with him on this.
He said to Tucker, quote, you know who doesn't sign that deal?
Someone with their hand in the till.
Because apparently the mineral deal was designed in a way that was hard to skim so that the Ukrainian people would have gotten a benefit and the American people would have gotten a benefit, but it would not have gone through the skimmer in between third parties who want to take their billion dollars from everything.
And so it was the criminals who killed the deal, because they weren't getting a cut.
Now, he doesn't have proof of that, as far as I can tell, but it would explain everything we saw.
So the fact that it explains everything has some weight, but that's his opinion, and I won't argue it.
I guess the Supreme Court gave Trump a win on the DEI funding for schools.
So now he's going to be allowed to block $65 million that the Department of Education otherwise would have granted to Democrat NGOs to promote DEI in schools.
It's amazing to me that DEI is just flat out illegal.
And we still have to fight to defund it.
How many illegal things that are obviously illegal and the government has, you know, the current administration has declared illegal.
How hard should you have to fight to not give money to the illegal thing?
It's just incredible.
Speaking of that, James O'Keefe got on Hidden Video on his OMG company there.
He got this NIH official.
He said that he was coaching researchers how to work around the DEI ban by using the word ancestry instead of race.
Oh, my God.
And, you know, it's just a typical white guy.
It's always the white guy.
I feel like, you know, the worst offenders are the white guys who just can't let go of their DEI because they have their jobs, so they want to make sure that, you know.
No white guy coming up can get their job.
Then FBI Director Kash Patel says he's going after China's influence on American farmlands.
So you know the issue.
China has bought a whole bunch of farmland in the U.S., and a lot of it is near our military bases.
But to me, this seems like as big an issue as it is.
It seems to me like it's one of a thousand things that China's doing to the U.S. every day.
Apparently China's expenses for spy stuff on the United States is just through the roof.
That's Fox News was reporting on that.
Then the European Union is still trying to censor Elon Musk on X. So interesting engineering is talking about this.
So the European Union...
The regulators are trying to levy a billion dollar penalty against X. And it's because they violated their European Digital Services Act, according to the New York Times.
Now, we assume that all this is just a way to get to Musk and defang him.
Also to destroy free speech in the United States because X is the primary place.
And if they can find a way to make it impossible for Musk to stay in business, then the last bastion of free speech in the United States will be destroyed by Europe.
Probably with the help of Democrats in this country, but by Europe.
Now, I've got to say this puts the future of NATO very much in question.
Because I'm not willing to defend a country that's destroying free speech in the United States, no matter how cleverly they do it.
And this is kind of clever.
They create a set of laws and act like it's for everybody, but then they really go after X and try to put him out of business.
Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable.
Now, whatever Trump does, and I assume he'll respond to this.
Whatever Trump does in response, it should be a 10 out of 10. In other words, we should never have this conversation again.
We should never, ever be talking about Europe ending free speech in America.
If they bring it up again, I mean, I would just say, we're out.
Good luck with Putin.
And just remove all our assets and say, good luck.
But I definitely wouldn't.
Change anything at X if that's possible.
Well, the U.S. Air Force is retrofitting some of the F-16 jets with software to make it autonomous.
So there'll be no pilot.
And they've got several of them that they're working on.
They've got six of them they're playing with.
And apparently they're pretty close to having autonomous jets, at least the F-16s.
Now, at the same time that we're putting these F-16s up autonomously, the UK has developed a drone killer laser weapon that only costs them $13 per shot, and it usually takes one shot to take out a drone.
So, I'm not so sure that F-16 drones are going to last in the battlefield too long, because...
Yeah, you gotta figure all of our adversaries are gonna have these $13 drone-killing lasers, too.
So your drone better cost a lot less than an F-16.
So, I don't know.
I don't know if the F-16 drones have much of a future.
According to Ars Technica, most Americans think AI won't improve their lives, but the people in the business think it's gonna be terrific.
So there's this gigantic difference between the people who are just casually reading the news about AI and saying, I don't think this is going to make my life better.
And then the researchers and the techies saying, oh man, this is going to be the most amazing thing.
So we're really not on the same page on this.
We'll see.
All right, that's the last of my stories.
I'll remind you that Owen Gregorian is going to host in just a few minutes.
A after party on the Spaces app, which is within X. So go to X, and if you can find my account, you'll see I reposted it, the link, or you can just search for Owen Gregorian on X. It'll pop right up near the top of his feed, and just click that.
I will probably be listening, maybe anonymously, but that is all I have to say for today.
I hope it made you all a little bit smarter and happier, and I will see you again tomorrow.
