In this electrifying episode, we dive deep into the latest developments in the Ukraine-Russia peace talks, showcasing the pivotal role of former President Donald Trump in facilitating dialogue where others have failed. With world leaders expressing gratitude for Trump's diplomatic efforts, we discuss the implications of his approach compared to the previous administration's inaction. Missouri Senator Eric Schmidt joins us to highlight the importance of election integrity and the need for Republicans to stand strong against the left's attempts to undermine our democracy. Tune in for a powerful conversation about American leadership, national security, and the fight for a brighter future!Facebook | X | Truth Social See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hour two, Sean Hannity Show, 800-941-SEAN-IS-WON-NUMBER.
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We've got to start with the news of the day and what plan B might be.
And I'm only thinking ahead.
I mean, my hope is, is that if Putin and Zelensky get together and they have bilateral meetings that lead to a trilateral meeting with Donald Trump, that, you know, maybe there'll be peace in Europe.
And that will be the eighth peace deal Donald Trump has had a hand in.
That would be the best case scenario.
However, what would plan B be?
What would Plan B look like if, in fact, Putin, as many suspect, you know, might not really want this deal to happen.
But I don't know the answer to that.
Anyway, here's world leaders yesterday praising President Trump for his role in the Ukraine-Russia peace talks.
I really want to thank you, President of the United States, dear Donald, for the fact that you, as I said before, broke the deadlock, basically with President Putin by starting that dialogue.
And I think it was in February that you had the first phone call.
And from there, we are now where we are today.
And that is, I think, if we played this well, we could end this.
I think it is an important day, a new phase after three years and a half that we didn't see any kind of sign from the Russian side that there was a willing for dialogue.
So something is changing.
Something has changed thanks to you.
I think in the past two weeks, we've probably had more progress in ending this war than we have in the past three and a half years.
And I think the fact that we're around this table today is very much symbolic in the sense that it's Team Europe and Team United States helping Ukraine.
All right.
And here is the president saying his motivation.
What is his motivation?
He wants to stop the killing about 5,000 to 7,000 people a week.
Listen.
We've had a very successful day thus far.
Important discussions as we work to end the killing and stop the war in Ukraine.
We're all working for the same goal.
Very simple goal.
We want to stop the killing, get this settled.
And then, of course, the president calls out the corrupt legacy media mob and their abusively biased coverage.
But remember, no world leader, none, could have accomplished what he so far has been able to accomplish.
That's meeting Putin in Alaska on Friday, having, you know, all the European world leaders and Zelensky at the White House yesterday.
And at least there's a window of opportunity to end the killing and end the war and bring peace to Europe, which would be in everybody's best interest.
The most amazing thing is, to me, Joe Biden never picked up a call as Putin is amassing troops and military equipment on the border, just like they didn't lift a finger Obama or Biden when Crimea was annexed.
And secondly, I think, you know, the most important thing is he never picked up the phone either and said, you know, let's talk.
Let's see if we can find a negotiated settlement here.
Only Donald Trump does it, and nobody in Europe bothered to do it either.
Senator Eric Schmidt, great to have you back.
Congratulations, sir, on the book.
Let's get your reaction to all this.
I think we're just so grateful, I think, to have a president that has the strength and the courage to fight for peace.
You know, it's such a contrast from what we saw and you talked about it the last four years, where there was no plan, there's no dialogue.
And I think President Trump, one of his great legacies, certainly from his first term, was there were no wars.
We weren't involved in any.
That's a great legacy.
Now he's extending that, taking it a step further.
He's trying to solve these problems around the globe.
He's already got a great resume on that just in six or seven months now.
But this is the one now.
I mean, who knows where this ultimately goes?
But the idea that he would open up this conversation to have the confidence to meet with President Putin in Alaska and then, again, have all the European leaders in Zelensky.
And you can just see in the room, this is what American leadership looks like.
It's what's supposed to be.
We're the United States of America, and we have a president now we can be very proud of, has all of his capabilities and is convening people.
The power to convene is an underrated power that the president has.
And President Trump is a master at this.
And we'll see where this goes.
But I just think we should be very proud of our president that he's willing to go down this road here.
If you look at everything that the president is doing, I mean, we've talked about, you know, for example, Azerbaijan and Armenia and Israel and Iran and Egypt and Ethiopia and seven different peace deals that he's had a hand in.
I'm not saying that he's responsible totally for it.
Rwanda, the Congo, you know, conflicts that have gone on for many, many years.
And I asked him about this in my interview with him on Friday.
And I said, how are you able to pull this off?
He's tying everything into the economy and the trade deals that he's doing with these individual countries, which I think is pretty clever.
And he seems to understand something that most American presidents have not understood.
And that is the power and might of America's economy and the impact it has on all of these countries and their need to do business in the United States.
That's right.
And I think so many people, I see this in the Senate and others.
So many people just really like being welcomed and the red carpet rolled out and being flattered and all that.
President Trump is really engaged, I think, in the real hard work of diplomacy, and he understands the levers of power.
He understands that 40% of all the consumer spending in the world comes from the United States of America.
And so one of the things that nobody ever adjusted from, Sean, after the Cold War ended was that we had all these bad trade deals, and NATO was kind of essentially subsidized by the United States.
What President Trump has said is, look, you guys need to kind of stand up on your own two feet, and we're not going to get ripped off anymore.
We understand that we want to defeat Soviet communism, but that era now we're shifting.
So you guys need to be more self-reliant.
And also, these terrible deals that we had to sort of protect you after you could build up after World War II, that's a different era.
So he's using that.
He's going to them and saying, look, we're not going to get ripped off anymore.
What can you do if you want to have access to our markets?
And we're getting great deals.
I was just at the state fair in Missouri.
The farmers and the ranchers are really appreciative of the fact that they can now sell beef in Australia.
Like, there's all these kind of things that are unfolding that the president understands what the levers are.
He's not afraid to use them.
And people respect that.
You look at the respect that was in that room.
They know there's a strong leader in charge of the United States of America now.
And he's using that power for good, which is to try to bring about peace.
If you look at everything the president's doing, look at the economy, for example.
I mean, the president has $15 trillion in committed monies for manufacturing.
That's going to create a lot of high-paying career jobs for many Americans, but also things that impact our national security.
Everything from rare earths and semiconductor chips and pharmaceuticals and automobile manufacturing is coming back.
$15 trillion between companies and countries that are planning to invest in the next four years.
And probably it will be expedited because of what was in the one big beautiful bill, which is 100% bonus depreciation that incentivizes companies to build out very quickly.
So I think that's going to help the economy.
I think his position on energy dominance and freeing up fracking and drilling and also coal mining, that's going to help the economy.
I think the biggest tax cut in American history and no tax on tips or overtime, that's going to help the economy.
Then you looked at the president has been able to secure our border, bring even some stability and peace to D.C. and ND fund dismantled no bail laws, and he's deporting illegal immigrants in the country.
Pretty transformational, pretty big things.
And I'm not sure we'll ever see this in our lifetime again, a president that just works around the clock and takes on every big issue and is willing to expend the political capital.
I think most presidents would never dare go near Ukraine and Russia.
That's right.
And you know, we spent a lot of time with him, and I have too traveling around with President Trump, whether it's on Air Force One or Trump Force One.
And what you're struck by as a man is his energy and his love for the country.
You know, he just doing this because he really believes in America and he thinks that he can, you know, help save it.
And he is.
I mean, you just rallied off a bunch of accomplishments just in six months.
I was there in the White House Rose Garden there on Liberation Day, and I remember telling Jim Banks, who's another senator from Indiana, telling him this, we're never going to see anything like this ever again.
I mean, his willingness to take this on, I mean, no president in my lifetime has been willing to do that.
And he's understood for a long time, this deep connection he has with working class America, a so-called flyover country.
They know he goes and fights for them.
And yes, there are the jobs, but there's also this investment and a sense of pride and a sense of patriotism that comes when we know that we have a leader that's fighting for America.
We've had, and by the way, from a national security perspective, it's so important.
You can't have 80% of the pharmaceuticals come from somewhere else.
You can't have 90% of the chips, high-functioning chips, come from somewhere else.
You can't have, since NAFTA, 90,000 factories, 90,000 factories leave the United States of America.
So what this is about is repositioning our economy so we're more resilient, we're more resilient, we're more self-reliant, and we're going to continue to trade.
We're going to open up trade markets around the world.
But if we're trying to build F-47s, which we are in St. Louis now, it's like the next-gen fighter, we can't be relying on other countries for critical minerals to build those things from iPhones to fighter jets.
So he understands that intuitively, and he's actually using the tools necessary to bring those jobs home.
People have no idea how important rare earth minerals are towards our national defense.
All right, quick break more with Senator Eric Schmidt of Missouri.
He has a new book out, by the way.
It's called The Last Line of Defense.
We have it up on Hannity.com.
It's on Amazon.com, bookstores around the country.
800-941-Sean is on number.
We'll get to your calls coming up as well as we continue.
We continue now with Missouri Senator Eric Schmidt is with us.
He's got a new book out.
It's called The Last Line of Defense.
Don't forget, we'll be getting to your phone calls after the bottom of the hour, 800-941, Sean.
One other idea, the president brought it up in my interview in Alaska after the summit with Putin, but he brought it up in the pool spray yesterday, and that is that he wants Republicans to get on the issue of voting integrity.
For me, it's a pretty simple formula.
It's not really that complicated.
Paper ballots, voter IDs, signature verification, chain of custody and cameras for any mail-in votes, which I believe should be limited to the military and people that are sick.
I think every state has to have updated voter rolls for every election.
Partisan observers in every precinct in the country, they watch the voting all day, the vote counting all night.
We get an answer at the end of the night, and a winner is chosen, and we have integrity in the system.
First, let me play the president saying it, and then I'll ask you that question.
I would love to see election reform.
We have to do it.
I don't know why we're not doing it.
Look, the Republicans want it, but not strongly enough.
I mean, they got to want it strong because it can't be on a ⁇ it goes through a postman.
It goes to somebody else.
Somebody else, somebody, you know, when you go to a really well-run voting booth, you go in, you have to hand a card, a picture, or this, or that.
You don't have everything perfect.
You get sent back, go get it.
It's really, it's very hard to do something fraudulent with a vote.
Paper ballot.
Mail-in voting, they give you boxes of stuff.
You have no idea where they came from.
This mail-in voting, you can't have a great democracy republic.
You can't have it.
But maybe that's why we're going to end up with a communist mayor in New York.
Anyway, get your reaction to it.
And my list, I think, is as comprehensive as we'd need.
And I think everybody can have confidence in the process and confidence in the integrity in terms of the results.
And nobody's going to be questioning elections.
Democrats have questioned that Republicans have questioned the outcomes.
So I would think in the spirit of fair elections, those measures would go a long way to instilling integrity in the system.
Yes.
And Sean, this used to not be a partisan issue, which is kind of amazing.
There was something called the Carter Baker Commission about 20 years ago, and they came out with a recommendation of 10 things you could do to secure our elections.
And limiting mail-in balloting was one of them.
There's a lot of voter ID is another one.
All these things that for a long time were just sort of common sense.
But what President Trump's putting his finger on is something that's, I think, important to note is the left doesn't believe in any of these things anymore.
It's just about power and control.
And one of the things in the last line of defense, How to Beat the Left in Court, which is available on Amazon right now, the book that is launching today is we took this on in Missouri.
You know, Mark Elias came in 2020 for all these election laws, including in Missouri.
We fought back and we won, but he won in a few states like Georgia and in Pennsylvania, and their voting laws were upended, and they used COVID as a reason.
We can't ever forget how dedicated the left is to upending America as we know it.
You know, I brought the Missouri versus Biden lawsuit, the censorship lawsuit, taking the deposition of Elvis Chan, the FBI agent that was pre-bunkbunking the Hunter Biden laptop story, laptop story, taking the deposition of Anthony Fauci.
I wanted to write this book so people get an inside glimpse of what this terrain really looks like.
The left is not only at the highest levels of government trying to censor speech, but also this kind of woke indoctrination in our schools.
And we have to have the courage to stand up and fight back.
President Trump, I think, has given Republicans one of the ways he's changed the party, Sean, and I'm so happy about coming from a working-class neighborhood, and I know you feel the same way, is the courage to fight.
I think for a long time, we sort of lamented how dumb Democrats were and all the things that they did.
But now we have a leader who's stared down the lawfare.
He's stared down all the attacks.
He came back and sore comeback.
He's winning.
And that's a good reason for us all to continue to fight.
The last line of defense, it goes into everything from censorship in the digital age to opposition to vaccine and mask mandates and fighting woke ideology in school and border security and separation of powers and the abuse of activist justices on the courts and the weaponization of government agencies, our Second Amendment rights.
Anyway, it's called The Last Line of Defense, Senator Eric Schmidt, Missouri.
We appreciate your time.
Congratulations on the book.
It's on Amazon.com.
We'll put a link on Hannity.com and it's in bookstores around the country.
Thank you.
Thanks, Sean.
Talk to you soon.
800-941-Sean is our number if you want to be a part of the program.
It was kind of interesting if you really listen to Democrats and you pay very close attention.
We learned a couple of things about Barack Obama and David Axelrod is that privately they are talking to and obviously supporting Kami or Marxist Mandani in New York City.
Remember when that moment, Joe the Plumber, when Obama was running for president and he talked about spreading the wealth around?
You know, Obama always held these radical views.
We talked about the community organizer.
We talked about Acorn at the time.
We talked about the Choom gang.
We talked about Frank Marshall Davis.
We talked about Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorn.
We talked about Reverend Wright the Sunday after 9-11.
No, no, no, not God bless America.
GD America.
It's in the Bible, blah, blah, blah.
And that's who he always was.
But the difference between, say, Obama and Mamdani and the modern Democratic Party and Obama.
Obama, I would argue and always believed, you know, shared these views, but the political environment at the time would not allow him to be as honest as, say, a Mamdani, an AOC, a Jasmine Crockett, a Bernie Sanders, a Pocahontas, or squad member.
It wouldn't allow him to do it.
But I think he really believed it.
I think if he had the opportunity to be more radical, he would have done it.
You know, the disaster of Obamacare, the one example, the one thing that he hangs his hat on is an utter disaster.
I don't know why people put their faith in government.
All of you that listen to this program, I am telling you, don't put your faith, your hope, your trust in government, anything.
Just don't do it.
I mean, we need a strong military.
I would argue we do the military well, but we're probably not cost-efficient in terms of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.
They're going to have to come up with ways to save it.
And I think the best way to do that is grow the economy.
And that's what President Trump is in the process of doing.
I think he's got all of the building blocks put in place for a boom economy, which would be great for every American, especially a shifting economy with artificial intelligence.
And everything that President Trump does, the left is against.
I mean, they champion the rights of men to play women's sports.
That's a 90-10 issue, but they're on the 10% side.
They'll champion the likes of a Brego Garcia or the so-called rights of illegal immigrants over the safety and security of American citizens, you know, many of whom have been murdered and raped and victims of violent crime.
They don't seem to care that known terrorists are in the country, gang members, cartel members, and all these other violent criminals.
And they complain about, oh, well, they're actually arresting people that broke the law.
This is outrageous.
I can't believe it.
What about the treatment?
Oh, they're deporting people that didn't respect our laws, border sovereignty.
It's just their radicalism now is more exposed, and they're just more outspoken about it.
And I'm not sure why they, you know, after the last election in particular, why they would double down on policies that didn't resonate with the American people, but that's what they're doing.
And that is the state of the Democratic Party.
So when David Axelrod makes these comments, they don't want Trump to succeed.
He's not saying it outright.
He's just saying that, you know, world leaders.
Now, think of how profound this is.
Donald Trump is able to accomplish that which nobody else was able to accomplish, and that's get Vladimir Putin to the table.
You know, didn't work.
Joe Biden calling Putin a murdering dictator thug, which, by the way, I think he is, putting that to the side, neither here nor there.
The Joe Biden that never picked up a phone as Putin's amassing troops and military equipment on the border with Ukraine, the guy that was vice president when Obama did nothing when Crimea was annexed.
Remember, it was the Democratic Party that and Bill Clinton that forced Ukraine or talked Ukraine.
I don't know why Ukraine ever did this.
After the breakup of the former Soviet Union, they had 1,900 or thereabouts nuclear weapons, and they were convinced to give them up with security guarantees that were never fulfilled by anybody.
And Russia never respected the agreements that were signed at the time in terms of borders.
And hence we find ourselves in this situation and a vulnerable Ukraine because they were stupid to give up those nuclear weapons.
They never should have.
So Donald Trump meets with Putin in Alaska on Friday, has every European leader and NATO leader that matters at the White House yesterday.
And this is what David Axelrod's comments are.
The world has learned, and Vladimir Putin above all has learned that flattery is a very, very effective tool with this president.
And all of them are tripping over each other to do that.
You know, Putin, who's a master manipulator, I'm sure is giving Trump the impression that they are special friends and he wants to be cooperative to help him.
That is not who Vladimir Putin is.
Vladimir Putin is everything that has been said.
He's a killer and a thug, and he is pursuing his own agenda, which is for this Russian expansionist agenda.
It was under his friend, Barack Hussein Obama, when Crimea was annexed.
And what did Obama do?
Nothing.
I mean, maybe, maybe he's right.
Maybe Putin is trying to flatter Donald Trump.
Doesn't matter.
He showed up in Alaska.
And the fact that no European country, no European leader or no American president besides Trump could get him to the table speaks volumes or can get all these European leaders and NATO leaders at the White House.
Anyway, let's get to our busy telephones.
800-941 Sean is our number if you want to be a part of the program.
Joe in New York.
Joe, how are you?
Glad you called.
Yes.
Hey, thank you, Sean, for taking my call.
I really appreciate it.
So I just wanted to touch on the Ukraine situation here.
So, you know, my opinion, like I get before, you know, it was costing us money to give weapons to Ukraine.
And there was this whole narrative about, hey, we don't want to be, you know, spending money to help another country and so forth.
But right now, the way it's set up is that basically, you know, they're going to be buying weapons from the U.S. They're going to basically, you know, NATO's going to buy it from the U.S.
It's going to go to, you know, to NATO and they're going to disperse it.
So, you know, I just think that if we're basically saying to Ukraine or we're basically ceding or we're allowing Ukraine to cede territory to Russia, that's just from the perspective of America and who we are as a people.
I just think that's pretty weak.
I think what we should do is if they're willing to fight, if they're willing to fight and they're buying the weapons from us, then we should just allow it to, we should allow them to do that and not basically put demands on them about, you know, that they should, you know, cede territory.
You know, I heard President Trump this morning say something about, you know, Ukraine, you know, they're taking on a nation that's 10 times bigger than they are.
And I look, in my mind, I'm saying, well, we did during the Revolutionary War when you had the British Empire.
I mean, the British Empire was like 15 times bigger in terms of land area.
So I don't know where these ideas are coming from.
It's just, I just find it's the wrong approach for me.
We should just, it's not costing us anything.
We should just let him fight him out.
So, you know, this thing.
Well, I mean, what you're saying is we should we should just stand back, let the killing continue, not not care at all that it could lead to a wider conflict in Europe.
It's, you know, look, at the end of the day, we benefit the least.
I will concede your point.
We benefit the least of any country that is involved in these discussions right now.
However, America is taking the lead.
You know, look, I kind of agree with the Trump doctrine.
And the Trump doctrine I would define as this, is no forever wars.
We're not going to fight a proxy war like Biden was fighting with Russia by providing hundreds of billions of dollars in military equipment at our expense.
He'll sell them the weapons so that they can defend themselves against an invasion.
I think America has to be that shining city on the hill and advance the cause of freedom when at all possible, but without being the world's policeman.
I know it's selective at times.
I don't think we'd lose a lot of capital if President Trump helps Armenia and Azerbaijan or Egypt and Ethiopia or Iran and Israel or the Congo and Rwanda or any of these other places where he's played a role or India and Pakistan, for example.
So I don't think we're any worse off for it, but I do believe that there is a time and a place for military force and it doesn't conflict with the idea of no forever wars.
And the president showed that in his first term by beating ISIS and taking out Soleimani and taking out Baghdadi and associates and even dropping the mother of all bombs on Afghanistan and in his second term, knocking out Iran's nuclear sites.
So, you know, if you want him to fight it out, okay.
But if you have a chance to stop the death and stop the conflict and maybe in the end, actually even help save Ukraine as a country, because the longer this goes on, I say the odds are greater that although,
you know, if President Trump, if Ukraine is able to get enough money through rare earths and NATO and European countries, you know, they could fight on for a long period of time, but then we're also, it's like a cancer that could spread throughout the continent of Europe.
So I think it's worth a shot.
And I kind of support the Trump doctrine and what the president's doing.
Let's see how it plays out.
If it doesn't work, then the president plan B would be to punish Vladimir Putin economically.
I guess those arguments are all valid, and I get all that.
But at the bottom of this is, like you said, President Trump signed the rare earth mineral deal, right?
So there's an incentive for Ukraine to become free.
And the other thing is, freedom isn't free.
Whether we're talking about the Revolutionary War, the American Revolutionary War, or World War II, like what did we do?
We fought to the end.
Like, yes, there's lives, there's death, but there's no Americans involved in this.
You know, we're trying to support.
You said, you know, America is the light on the hill.
Yeah, we all agree on that.
So my thing is, yes, death is bad, but my thing is they're going to fight it out.
We're basically saying that, you know, America is like, we don't have the capability to help them.
And we're not even, they're not even, we're not even paying anything for it at this point.
They just want to get to their borders.
We should allow them to do it.
You know, basically, President Trump today was saying, you know, that, you know, Ukraine, like, who would want, who would want, you know, Ukraine a part of NATO that's bordering them?
Well, you know, I don't know what's going on in the Senate and the Congress, but there's already four countries that are part of NATO that are basically bordering Russia.
It's Estonia, Latvia, Norway, and Finland, I believe, is even part of NATO.
So this whole notion about, hey, they don't want Ukraine part of NATO.
If Ukraine wants to be free and they want to join the freedom-loving people of the world, it shouldn't be up to Russia to dictate to us what a free country should be.
I mean, we're not losing anything here.
Like Trump did all the right steps.
You know, we're talking about Biden.
You mentioned Obama about, you know, ceding the Crimea.
Yes, I agree with that.
But we are where we are now.
So, you know, all good points where you're saying I just think that they should be allowed to fight for themselves the way we did during our revolutionary.
Okay, but they're fighting for themselves, and they're at a point now where they're drafting 60-year-olds into their army because they don't have enough people to fight.
That's the reality.
So at some point, you got to ask yourself, what are you going to have left at the end of this conflict?
You know, the amount of rubble and wreckage and death and dying has been, and the cost has been enormous.
I'm not saying at the end of the day, they may end up fighting it out, but if you can take a window of opportunity and at least give it a shot, why not?
We have nothing to lose here.
Nothing.
And the only thing we have to gain is maybe lives can be saved and maybe we prevent a broader conflict in Europe as a result of the president's actions.
That, I think, is a noble cause and a noble thing for America to do.
And it is in no way contradictory from my perspective of the president's own doctrine.
But I hear what you're saying.
I do.
I think America has this unique role in the world.
And if we can do good with, you know, we've accumulated more power, abused it less, and advanced the cause of good more than any other country in history.
And I think we should continue that tradition without getting involved in forever wars.
