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Aug. 16, 2025 - Sean Hannity Show
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Best of Hannity: Peace with Teeth - August 16th, Hour 2
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So I've been to 49 of the 50 states.
The one state I have not been to, which I have great admiration for, and I mentioned this earlier in the show to Newt Gingrich, is the state of Alaska.
Well, that will come to an end, assuming I arrived safely this week, as President Trump will be meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska for a summit in the hopes of bringing about a peace in Europe, which the president has been trying very hard to achieve.
The president commented on this at his press conference earlier today and said he's going to tell Putin he's got to end this war.
Here's what he said.
I'm going in to speak to Vladimir Putin, and I'm going to be telling him, you've got to end this war, you got to end it.
And he wasn't going to mess with me.
This war would have never happened.
You know, we had a discussion about it one time, and we never had that discussion again.
It would have never happened.
And what he was talking about is in his first term, he said, don't even think about going into Ukraine.
They had already annexed Crimea in, what, 2014 with Obama and Biden.
This entire issue was inherited by President Trump, and he's trying to resolve and untangle yet another Biden-Harris mess.
Then the president went on to say that he's going to call Zelensky, European leaders, after the meeting and try and make a deal.
And here's what he said about that.
I'm going to meet with him.
We're going to see what the parameters are.
I'm then going to call up President Zelensky and the European leaders right after the meeting.
Yeah.
And I'm going to tell them what kind of a deal.
I'm not going to make a deal.
It's not up to me to make a deal.
I think a deal should be made for both.
I think Russia has to get back into building their country.
It's a massive country.
I think they have 11 time zones, if you can believe it.
It's a massive, it's by far, from the standpoint of land, it's by far the largest.
They have tremendous potential in Russia to do well.
They're not doing well.
Their economy is not doing well right now because it's been very well disturbed by this.
It doesn't help when the president of the United States tells their largest or second largest oil buyer that we're putting a 50% tariff on you if you buy oil from Russia.
That was a big blow.
And then they say, gee, he wasn't so tough.
Nobody else would have done that.
And I haven't stopped there.
I mean, look, I was all set to do things far bigger than that.
But I got a call that they'd like to meet, and I'm going to see what they want to meet about.
I'd like to see a ceasefire.
I'd like to see the best deal that could be made for both parties.
You know, it takes two to tango, right?
All right, so he's going to try his best.
Senator Lindsey Graham, who will join us in a minute, said that Trump's going to meet Putin from a position of strength.
He said it on Meet the Press this weekend.
Here's what he said.
I have every confidence in the world that the president is going to go to meet Putin from a position of strength, that he's going to look out for Europe and Ukrainian needs to end this war honorably, and it's time to end this war honorably.
But how we do it will be historical.
And I'm confident President Trump will get a good deal for all.
All right, joining us now is South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.
Senator, great to have you back here.
So the president inherited this problem.
Joe Biden never even picked up the phone and called Putin and said, why are you amassing troops?
Why are you amassing this military equipment?
Never tried for a negotiated settlement before it even started.
Now President Trump is trying to untangle a mess.
Unfortunately, under Biden, it evolved into a proxy war as far as I'm concerned between the U.S. and Russia and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions, billions of dollars even that the United States was giving Ukraine.
Now under Trump, we're selling equipment, military equipment to Ukraine because Putin has been so difficult to deal with.
But he has agreed to this summit.
How do we define success at this point?
Because I don't see a scenario where Europe is going to step up and provide enough weaponry for Zelensky to fight a real war against Putin.
And we have to also keep in the back of our head that they're nuclear armed.
And I don't think the United States can sell them enough equipment that they can actually neutralize Russia in the end, although it is impacting Russia in a very negative way.
Well, as a good history lesson, so what does winning look like for the United States and the civilized world?
That Putin does not do this again.
There'll be no third invasion.
That we will do the opposite of what Obama and Biden did.
We'll set up a peace this time with infrastructure in place that would deter Putin or anybody else from Russia doing this again.
What would that look like?
Security guarantees to Ukraine, where that if you invade Ukraine, you invite all of Europe, not just Ukraine, where the Europeans guarantee security guarantees for Ukraine, that we continue to sell Ukraine weapons to make them the most lethal army on the continent.
If I had to pick an army to fight with right now, I'd pick Ukraine.
These are terrific fighters.
They've been fighting like tigers.
They're outmanned dramatically.
I mean, this is the kind of person you'd want fighting along your side, an Ukrainian who is in it to win it and not lose their country.
So the bottom line, yeah, they've been like 10 to 1.
Bottom line is three and a half years later, Putin's taken like 1% of territory beginning where he did in 2022.
The bottom line is to keep helping the Ukrainian military.
That's a deterrent all of its own.
Keep selling them high-end weapons as a deterrent, have security guarantees from Europe to Ukraine, backstop with the United States, integrate our economies and put European forces on the ground and have pre-invasion sanctions, telling Putin, if you ever invade again, we're going to crush your economy from day one.
But let me add something to your history review here.
I went to Biden and said he's going to invade.
I went to the Munich Security Conference.
The guy's going in.
Do yourself in the world a favor.
Get behind my sanctions, pre-invasion sanctions, telling Putin that if you go in this time, here's what happens to you on day one.
Biden and his whole national security team said that would be too provocative.
I couldn't believe it.
I had bipartisan support for sanctions against Russia before the invasion, but Biden wouldn't do it.
So what did Trump do before he left office in 2020?
He gave the Ukrainians javelin, anti-tank missiles.
And the only reason they survived the 22 invasion is that Trump had left them enough javelins to blow up Russian tanks to keep them from coming to Kyiv.
They were within eight miles of Kyiv, and it was these javelins that stopped the Russian invasion.
So what do you do now?
You end this war honorably and justly.
You're not going to evict every Russian from Ukraine.
That's not going to happen.
But you can do it in a way that we did with East Berlin and West Berlin.
At the line of contact, freeze it.
You don't cede territory to Russia, but you just acknowledge there are parts of Ukraine where the Russians occupy and try to fix it later.
But do what I just said: have security guarantees, build up the Ukrainian army as a former deterrence, pre-invasion sanctions.
Now, Trump's the best guy in the world to be in the room with Putin.
If you don't get that, you're an idiot.
All the people criticizing Trump are the same crowd that allowed Ukraine to be invaded twice.
And when he took Crimea in 2014, Obama did nothing.
He didn't create deterrence.
He just ended the conflict in a phony way.
And that's why he had the 2022 invasion.
Obama and Biden never told Putin, here's what happens if you do it again.
They didn't help the Ukrainians.
They refused to help the Ukrainians.
They didn't integrate our economy.
What did Donald Trump do?
He signed a deal with Ukraine on critical minerals worth trillions of dollars.
We have an interest now worth protecting.
Donald Trump has provided weapons to Ukraine.
He has an economic deal with Ukraine.
It makes it in our interest to end this war well.
So what's going to happen in Alaska?
You're putting the best person on the planet in a room with Putin.
Why?
Because he fears Trump.
He would not invade on Trump's watch.
You're right about that.
And he's going to do a deal with Trump because you don't want to get on the wrong side of Trump.
Why is he meeting with Trump now?
Trump put a 50% tariff on India, who's the second largest purchaser of Russian oil, and he's going to do more unless this war ends.
So I am very hopeful, prayerful, and excited that Donald Trump has got Putin's attention and we're going to end this war.
All right, quick break.
We'll come back more with South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham as we give you a preview of the coming Putin-Trump summit, Trump-Putin summit that's taking place in Alaska.
We will be there Thursday and Friday this week with full coverage, both on radio and TV.
My interview with President Trump right after the summit.
That's all coming up as this week unfolds.
More with Lindsey Graham on the other side than your calls, 800-941-Sean.
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All right, we continue now with a preview of this week's coming summit with President Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
We will be there with our coverage Thursday and Friday.
Why would we think that Putin would ever want to return any of the territory that maybe he's gained in this conflict?
Well, what I would say to that is that after the World War II, East Berlin and West Berlin was divided.
Over time, communism failed, and Germany's a reunited, united country.
There will be life after Putin.
And here's the practicality of what you're talking about: Trump has put Iran in a box, helped Israel destroy their nuclear capability for years without one troop on the ground.
He stood by Israel, but Israel's done the fighting.
Not one American soldier is going to Ukraine.
He's giving them weapons to fend off the invasion.
There'll come a time, and it's upon us.
I've been waiting for the moment to end this war.
It is upon us.
Putin's going to have a clear choice.
If you don't accept a reasonable, just peace agreement, Donald Trump is going to load up Ukraine with the most sophisticated weapons on the planet for as long as it takes, selling them to Europe.
Donald Trump is going after Putin.
By the way, that's a big difference from Biden, who is giving hundreds of billions of dollars in equipment to Ukraine.
We're going to make money.
I don't want to be a war profiteer.
We're not.
But we're going to sell the weapons to Europe, which is good.
We can't afford to give them away.
We have too much debt.
We can't afford it.
Well, so we're going to build more.
We need more ourselves.
Bunker buster is the whole deal.
We're going to be rearming America because we've been helping Israel, been helping Ukraine.
But here's what the magic of Trump: Europe's going to pay for it.
Europe's going to pay for us, you know, rearming, helping Ukraine as well as helping ourselves.
But the main thing here is Putin's going to have a choice.
Before, under Biden and Obama, there was no downside to continuing this war.
They were all talked.
What's the magic word that Biden used against Putin?
Minor incursion.
He said minor incursion, but when they said, what's your message to Putin about invading Europe?
Don't.
Don't.
Okay, the word don't has become a joke in the English language when used by Biden.
Now, what has Trump done?
He's gotten Putin to come to Alaska.
Now, why the hell do you think Putin's coming to Alaska to just take a vacation?
He's coming to Alaska because Trump has got him in a bite.
Trump has been selling, not giving, weapons to Ukraine, and they're using them very effectively.
Trump hit the second largest customer of Russian oil purchases, India, with a 50% tariff.
What has India done in the last week?
They made it.
You also got commitments for the European Union to stop funding his war machine by buying our energy.
This has been like our energy independence is going to be accelerated.
We're going to become an exporter of energy.
We're selling gas and oil to Europe that they were previously buying from Putin.
But here's the point: Trump is going to give the world a choice.
If Putin rejects a fair deal, then Trump's going to make it miserable for any country to do business with Russia.
Let me ask an exit question only because of the constraints of time.
What are the odds Trump is going to have to stand up like Reagan did and say net and walk away?
And then just go full bore with what you're talking about.
Plan B, we have about 20 seconds.
They're 100%.
If Trump thinks Putin's playing him, he'll get up and walk away, and the Russian economy will get crushed.
He's coming to Alaska for a reason.
Trump has got him in advice.
I'm very excited about this.
Well, it'd be great for the world.
I mean, honestly, these wars have to stop.
How many more people?
We saw more innocent dead civilians this weekend.
What's the upside here?
It just makes no sense.
But listen, and Putin, don't ever fool yourself.
He's a murdering dictator thug.
We know what we're dealing with.
Zelensky hasn't been perfect either.
But honestly, we've got, you know, the aggressor here has been from the get-go, Putin.
Lindsey Graham, appreciate it.
Hopefully, this ends in peace for Europe, although Europe, frankly, has been pretty pathetic in their contribution, if you even want to call it that.
Thank you, sir.
800.
Well, by the way, Lindsay, you'll join us on TV tonight with more of a preview.
We will be in Alaska doing this program on Thursday and Friday.
You are listening to the best of the Sean Hannity Show, and stay tuned.
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President Trump, when you look at the numbers, the statistics, the crime, we saw this Doge employee, better known as Big Balls.
We did not apply that name to him, but everybody knows him.
Everybody's reporting it as such.
He did something that was pretty brave and amazing.
There was a group of young kids that were out, and they were pummeling an innocent person on the streets of D.C., an innocent woman in this particular case.
And he decided he was not going to be like most people and stand by and allow that to happen.
And he got in the mix, and he got the crap beat out of him.
I give him nothing but kudos and props for doing so.
Then, of course, we had the issue in Cincinnati where you had a mob beating the hell out of people.
As it comes to the issue of D.C., President Trump said he's taking over D.C. police, and here's what he said.
This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we're going to take our capital back.
We're taking it back under the authorities vested in me as the President of the United States.
I'm officially invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act.
know what that is and placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control and you'll be meeting the people that will be directly involved with that very good people but they're tough and they know what's happening and they've done it before in addition um deploying the national guard to help reestablish law order and public safety in washington dc and they're going to be allowed to do their job properly Now,
we have some statistics on this, and the president put these out.
Washington, D.C., if you look at the homicide rate, and this is data based on estimates from 2019 to 2024, and the source of you care about it is the Congress and statistics and local government statistics.
The homicide rate of world capitals versus D.C., it's 41, I believe, per 100,000.
The next closest country is in Uruguay, and that's 16.1.
I mean, it's like almost three times the number.
Baghdad is 15.2.
Again, D.C. is 41.
Lagos, which is in Nigeria, is 15.
Panama City, Panama, 14.3.
Brazil, 13.
Costa Rica, 13.
Colombia, Bogota, 11.
Mexico City, 8.
Lima, Peru, 7.
Buenos Aires, Argentina is 5.5.
And I can keep going.
Kenya, Nairobi is 5.
Havana, Cuba, 4.
How is it that things are that out of control in our nation's capital?
Well, I can tell you in large part, we know the answer.
It's defund, dismantle, no bail laws.
Now, I'm not exactly sure if there's a correlation to all of this, but we're going to talk to Byron Donalds about all of it.
Anyway, he joins us now, Congressman from my great free state of Florida.
Congressman, how are you?
Should the president, is he right, looking at that number, comparing it to other capitals around the world, countries that you would think have much higher homicide rates and violent crime rates?
Should the president somehow get involved and protect the nation's capital?
Absolutely.
President's absolutely correct.
The mayor and the city council of Washington, D.C. are not doing all they can do to protect D.C.
A lot of it are these weak on crime policies that they have, cashless bail and the like.
I don't know.
Most people don't know this.
In Washington, D.C., to be tried as a minor, you can still be 24 years old and be tried as a minor in Washington, D.C. Completely outrageous.
So what you have is a city that's not under control the way it needs to be, not secure the way it needs to be.
And it's the nation's capital.
It's outrageous.
The president's absolutely correct.
Remember when Rand Paul, I think it was at the Republican National Convention in 2020, got all the mob of people surrounding him.
Whenever I go to D.C., I have to have security with me.
I don't do that everywhere I go.
I really don't.
I don't want to live my life that way.
In the free state of Florida, I tend to protect myself.
I don't give away my personal safety, security strategies, but I don't need the security that I need in places like New York City or places like D.C.
I mean, I think that speaks volumes, doesn't it?
It does.
And what it speaks to first and foremost is a commitment to police officers, a commitment to law and order, letting them do their job.
And then the secondary commitment is not having these woke DAs who refuse to prosecute or who water down heinous crimes based upon a woke ideology or DEI or whatever the case might be.
Look, at the end of the day, if you're going to have a safe community, people have to be held accountable.
That's the way this works.
All right.
Another issue that came up with you.
Now, we've had three people that have said that they identify more with their home country than they do with America.
Now, Representative Delia Ramirez says she's more Guatemalan than American.
This is an elected congressperson.
I'm like, that doesn't make sense to me.
Previously, we had Congresswoman Omar say she identifies more with Somalia.
Now you have this Democratic Party-backed, you know, Mamdani-like radical Fata in Minneapolis saying the same thing.
He identifies more with Somalia than he does with America.
And I'm trying to understand.
I don't know.
Then why, if you identify more with your home country, why are you even here?
It doesn't make sense to me.
And here's what you said this week.
I've had a chance to meet Delia, but let me just say, you don't get to represent another country before you represent the United States of America.
David, you said it better than I could.
That is the oath we all take as not just members of Congress.
The president takes that oath.
Every governor and every state legislator in our country, they take the same oath.
And to say that you're more Guatemalan than American, I think is reprehensible.
You have a duty to represent the people, the American people who voted for you to be their representative, not to put them in second-class status.
But this is, quite frankly, very typical of the left.
Because when you look at what they advocate for, doesn't matter if it's Hamas or some third world country where they think it's okay for people to come in our country illegally, regardless of the implications on the American people.
Too many elected Democrats are far too concerned about representing interests outside of the United States of America as opposed to representing the people that they were elected to serve.
That's not a white supremacist statement.
That's not a nativist statement.
That is a real statement.
That is a constitutional statement.
And it is the standard that every elected official should have.
Listen, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
And if maybe people think Somalia or Guatemala are better countries than the U.S., I don't know how to interpret what they're saying.
Do you believe they're suggesting that they think it's that?
Or are you thinking that they have more of an allegiance to that country?
What's your interpretation of it?
I'm not even going to try to interpret it, Sean.
The eye of the beholder is the United States Constitution.
The eye of the beholder is the American people, not another nation.
If you want to have that stands, that viewpoint, if that's what you feel you want to portray when you're speaking, then go represent those countries.
Either be their ambassador to the United States at the U.N., go do that, or go live in those countries and run for office over there.
But if you're going to take the oath of office in the United States, it doesn't matter if it's city council, mayor, state rep, Congress, Senate, governor, president, you take that oath.
It is an allegiance to the Constitution and to the people of the United States of America, first and foremost.
Oh, I agree.
All right, let's talk about some other issues that are going on.
What do you make of what we're learning from the declassified information Tulsi Gabbard has released?
To me, I think the investigation, Cash Fatel, Pam Bondi, Dan Bongino that they're involved in.
Do you think when you look over a period of time that there has been and remains a grand conspiracy to destroy Donald Trump and put cinder blocks on the scales of presidential elections?
Yes, 100%.
I believe that.
And now we're seeing the declassified information that supports that.
It's not even a hypothesis.
It's now becoming a fact right in front of our eyes.
And I think what we're seeing is the deep state, is the weaponization of the government, of the intelligence apparatus, obviously against President Trump, but really against Republicans overall.
I mean, the president says it better than anybody that, you know, they're not after him.
They're after us.
He's just standing in the way.
And what this is about is having absolute power and control over the apparatus of the federal government.
And you have too many players in the deep state who are willing to subvert information, put out false information, weaponize our government, weaponize media against the American people so they can institutionalize their radical agenda on the American people.
At its core, that's what I believe is going on.
It just so happens that Donald Trump was the man in the arena at the time.
But they would do this to anybody else.
If they do it to him, Sean, they'll do it to me.
They'll do it to you.
They'll do it to anybody that they feel is a legitimate threat to them holding on to power in Washington.
The amount of collateral damage and the amount of money the people surrounding Donald Trump have had to spend and the sleepless nights that I'm sure was associated with it is incalculable to me.
All right, quick break.
We'll come right back more with Congressman Byron Donalds of my free state of Florida on the other side.
We'll get to your calls, 800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
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Congressman Byron Donalds is with us, 800-941-Sean, our number.
We'll get to your calls on the other side of the half-hour break.
Here's how I see it.
We now, with this declassified information, know a couple of things.
We know that they knew and were warned ahead of time as early as July of 2016 that Hillary Clinton was going to go forward with what they knew to be a phony narrative that Donald Trump colluded with Russia as a means of distracting from Hillary's email server problems.
We know they were warned not to use her bought and paid for dirty Russian misinformation dossier, which even Bruce Orr warned James Comey about in August of 2016.
We then know that it didn't work.
They first initially tried to use it to prevent Donald Trump from winning.
And then afterwards, our senior career intelligence officials, they came out with an assessment and determined that there was no Trump-Russia collusion.
And this is in early December.
Barack Obama didn't like the outcome.
Apparently, he got with his top deep state group of officials, and they decided to come up with another intelligence assessment, one that totally contradicted the real intelligence assessment.
That then was a plan to undermine Donald Trump's presidency as far as I'm concerned.
And for three years, I can tell you on this program and on my TV program, we were unpacking every single layer of that onion and we did get to the truth.
The rest of the media, you know, peddled lies and conspiracy theories, which I think has led to their, they have no legitimacy left.
And I think that legacy media, for the most part, is dead, gone, and buried as a result because they lied all the time.
Is that in and of itself, that one presidential cycle, do you believe that these people need to be held accountable?
And will they be held accountable?
Because I don't want to raise expectations for people.
I do think they need to be held accountable.
The question now is going to be, what is the criminal standard that you're going to hold them to?
I think now I'm really happy that the president revoked all their security clearances because it's proven now that they never deserved them in the first place.
And so I'm glad their security clearances are revoked.
But they are the threat to our constitutional republic, Sean.
They're the threat to democracy.
And as much as they were trying to project onto Donald Trump and onto MAGA and onto Republicans, no, it's the radical Democrat power structure that is the threat to democracy.
So yeah, a lot of people need to be held accountable.
And I think that the top of that list, if you were going to ask me today, is probably going to be John Brennan and James Clapper.
They're going to be one and two, and then it really falls in line after that.
And the reason why I say that is because they're the ones that actually had to go carry out the work in the bowels of the intelligence agencies in order to weaponize the federal government against an American president.
You know, and then in 2020, I would argue they had verified in March of 2020 the authenticity of Hunter's laptop.
They went out and pre-bunked it all summer long, meeting weekly with big tech companies.
They knew the story would break because Bob Costello, Rudy Giuliani's then attorney, had a copy of it.
They knew he had a copy of it.
They knew it would be leaked.
And then when the story did break in the New York Post, they wouldn't verify what they knew to be true, that it was authentic.
And then I would argue from 2020 to 2024, the weaponization of the DOJ and law fair that was designed to bloody up Donald Trump so we would not be a viable candidate.
Am I wrong?
No, that's absolutely correct, Sean.
Everything you just said there is 100% true.
It's a dang shame that the media lied about it.
Unbelievable times we're living in.
Hopefully these, if we don't hold these people accountable, and we often don't, I think we really are putting at risk the country.
Byron Donalds, we always appreciate you.
Thanks for checking in, as always.
800-941-Sean is our number if you want to be a part of the program.
You are listening to the best of the Sean Hannity Show.
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