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April 16, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:52:10

3655 The State of Trump Address - True News: Week In Review - April 16th, 2017

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio here with our good friend Mike for the week in review.
	Now, just before we start into the details, I just wanted to tell you that in reviewing my week, I find myself enormously pissed off with a lot of people.
	I'm not going to give you a sense of percentages because I would then show my math incompetence by going up around 666%, but people are just...
	Annoying me.
	Now, Mike, of course, is always the rock-solid base of stability when it comes to the emotional life at Freedom Aid Radio.
	But it's rough, man.
	It's rough.
	I mean, first of all, this Trump stuff.
	Oh, man.
	You're off the Trump train!
	You're off the Trump train!
	You're on the Trump train!
	You're being run over by the Trump train!
	You are the Trump train!
	First of all, the Trump train has someone driving on a track and you're just sitting in a passenger.
	I don't really like the analogy that much because you're just kind of passive in the back.
	But there's been a number of reactions to, I guess, my reaction to, you know, this talk of regime change and invasions and all that kind of stuff.
	And a lot of people are like, well, that's it.
	He's doing something I don't like or considering something I don't like.
	I've turned on him completely.
	Oh, my God.
	Can you imagine dating someone like that?
	No, no, I really don't want to.
	Let's go see the new Star Wars film.
	I hate Star Wars.
	I hate you.
	I'm setting fire to your car.
	I mean, okay, the guy can be dragged in six million different directions, as you can imagine, the amount of pressure being put on Trump as every president, but because particularly he wants to drain the swamp and expose the deep state and change things foundationally in America, so there's a lot of pressure, a lot of pushback.
	The compromises he's going to have to make are at least beyond my comprehension because I don't have all the data variables.
	He can do something or suggest something you don't like, speak up, It doesn't mean that you've got to hate on the guy.
	It doesn't mean you've got to turn completely.
	Like, I understand there's this emotion, well, I guess two emotions, called fantasy and disappointment.
	The fantasy is you're going to get everything you want.
	He's going to do everything that he said within 12 minutes of achieving office.
	No.
	That is a fantasy that is going to flipside you into a spiral of depression and hatred and, frankly, it's playing into the hand of the leftists, right?
	Because the deep state is going to fight back.
	The leftists are going to fight back.
	By trying to turn Trump, by trying to block Trump from doing what he wants to do, and then provoking despair and frustration and rage and hostility within you, what good is that going to do?
	The guy has four years.
	Give it some time.
	And then the other people are like, oh, I guess you feel bad for being pro-Trump at any point in the past now, don't you?
	Oh, God.
	Well, to hell with you people, too.
	To hell with you people too.
	Let's say that Hillary Clinton had gotten in.
	And let's say Hillary Clinton was talking regime change.
	And let's just put it this way.
	The last couple of times she talked about it as Secretary of State really wasn't so goddamn theoretical now, was it?
	Just ask Muammar Gaddafi.
	So if Hillary Clinton had gotten in and she was talking about regime change or some sort of military action in the Middle East, would she be listening to us?
	Would it matter what we said?
	No.
	Would a conversation even be possible?
	No.
	No, not really.
	Not at all.
	So the fact that someone's in there who listens, I'm not saying that Trump is tuned into us, but there is a following of the people who helped support Trump and helped him get into office.
	There's a following of those from within the Trump team that we know.
	So we can get messages.
	We have influence.
	We have influence.
	Credibility.
	You know, if you praise someone and you defend someone, then when you criticize them, they'll tend to listen to you more.
	Have you ever had someone in your life who's just like, everything you do is wrong?
	Other than, you know, it seems like 30% of YouTube sometimes.
	But have you ever had someone in your life, you stop listening to them.
	You stop listening to them because they're always complaining.
	Whereas if someone loves you and then says, I think you should do something differently.
	I think this is a big mistake.
	Well, that...
	So, it's just stupid, reactive, emotional, hysterical people.
	You know, we're in a long battle here, folks.
	Pace your goddamn selves.
	Pace yourselves.
	Stop burning out your adrenals with these highs and lows.
	It's a long battle.
	It's going to take time.
	It's going to be rough.
	There's going to be setbacks.
	This is not a slam dunk.
	This is not an easy in.
	This is not...
	You're not...
	You're not boxing girl guides here.
	You're up against the toughest enemies in the world with the most entrenched power and huge amounts of money and huge amounts of political power and huge numbers of voters dependent on them.
	It's a big, big mountain to climb.
	And sometimes you've got to climb down and you've got to go sideways and sometimes there's an avalanche and sometimes I overuse my analogies.
	But it's going to take time.
	Stop freaking out every single time something happens.
	Be calm, be resolute, and focus on the goal.
	Trump's going to make mistakes.
	Guess what?
	I'm going to make mistakes.
	Everyone's going to make mistakes.
	We put our best information forward.
	We make the best case.
	Cross our fingers and hope like hell that right decisions get made.
	But we have more influence now, those of us who are not on the left, we have more influence now than we've ever had before because The uniparty, the left-right side of the same coin, Democrat-Republican thing that's been going on at least since post-Reagan and arguably Reagan as well, we finally have some capacity for change.
	So dig in, get patient, relax, enjoy the ride, stay steady.
	Don't let the left get in your head.
	Don't let panicking people get into your head.
	They're going to try and burn you out.
	They're going to try and make you exhausted.
	Don't do a sprint when it's a marathon.
	They're going to try and get you up and down, rollercoaster to the point where you just say, Ah, to hell with it.
	I've got to back off.
	I've got to move away.
	This is driving me crazy.
	No.
	Steady and slow and patient.
	That's how you win an extended battle.
	Use your wits, use your smarts, and most importantly, stay stable.
	Don't freak out.
	And don't spend time with people.
	If people are freaking out, tell them to relax.
	Tell them to be patient.
	Tell them to continue to put forward best reason and evidence.
	And if they keep freaking out, take 12 steps backwards because they're like drowning people who are going to pull you down.
	Pull you down.
	What's the first thing you say when you get to a drowning person?
	Relax.
	Stop thrashing.
	Stop flailing.
	And you all need to manage yourselves.
	You all need to grow up.
	This is not going to happen overnight and it's not going to happen without setbacks.
	And I guarantee you, I guarantee you, there will be times where it feels that everything is lost.
	Maybe study the history of the Second World War.
	There are times when it feels nothing is going right.
	Everything is lost.
	Civilization is lost.
	The future is lost.
	Freedom is lost.
	That is going to happen.
	There will be a low point in what everyone is up to.
	And that's when you need to gather your strength and your courage the most.
	Because the mindset is how we're going to lose.
	Not the politics.
	Not the force.
	Not the war.
	Not the taxes.
	Not the regulations.
	Not the invasions.
	That is not how we're going to lose.
	We're going to lose on mindset.
	Whoever is the most courageous and steady is going to win.
	It's magic.
	But it's very, very meaty magic.
	If they can get you to freak out, if they can get you to turn on people, if they can get you to panic, then they're going to win.
	And there's absolutely no need for it.
	So if you're panicking, here's what you need to do.
	Turn off your goddamn router.
	Turn off your Wi-Fi.
	Turn off your data plan.
	Sit in a dark room, take some deep breaths, do some yoga, exercise, whatever it's going to take to calm the hell down.
	But don't go online and, oh, panic!
	Turn on this!
	Betrayal!
	Because that's taking your panic and metastasizing it to the social mind.
	If you want to kill your enthusiasm, I think it's a bad idea.
	But make that your own damn personal choice.
	Don't go online and start mucking with everybody else's confidence and optimism.
	Dad is working for the enemy and we can only fight this war on one front at a time.
	Betrayal from within, panic from within, flip-flopping from within, we're gonna lose.
	Don't be so desperate for a victory and so crushed by setbacks that you end up working for the enemy and screwing us all.
	That's a great speech, Steph.
	But in my myopic mind, it's just binary.
	So are you either on or off the Trump train?
	Can you just clarify that?
	I don't...
	If those are the only options, I'm actually going to stand in front of the Trump train and be a bald, speckled smear on the front.
	That's my particular...
	And other people are annoying me, too.
	I mean, we'll get into the...
	So this doctor was charged this last week performing genital mutilation on two young Minnesota girls.
	Mike?
	You know, girls from Minnesota.
	Just Minnesota girls.
	No other possible discerning characteristics that they could have.
	Just Minnesota girls.
	Travel to Michigan with their moms, perform genital mutilation on two young Minnesota girls.
	Now, did you know, of course you knew this, Mike, did you know that female genital mutilation is illegal in the United States?
	I did know that.
	Did you know that male genital mutilation is not?
	I did know that as well.
	Interesting.
	I think the patriarchy is not quite doing things the way that it should.
	I'm not sure why.
	But this is this kind of sexist law that people should be upset about, but nobody even talks about.
	Where are the feminists when a woman, a female doctor, is charged with female genital mutilation?
	Where are the feminists talking about this?
	Now, this is from CBC in Canada.
	Here's how politically correct things have become.
	This is a direct quote from the article.
	The FBI said the 44 year old doctor is a member of a cultural community that believes in the practice.
	A member of a cultural community that believes in the practice.
	I wonder why they can't say the word Muslim.
	Member of a cultural community that believes in the practice.
	Amish!
	No, no.
	Amish, stamp collectors, roleplayers, LARPers, people who go to Comic-Con.
	Furries.
	She denied performing it when interviewed by agents.
	She is charged with genital mutilation, making false statements, and other crimes.
	Where are the feminists?
	Where are people pointing out?
	Where are the feminists?
	Well, YouTube and Twitter, apparently.
	All right.
	That's the end of things that annoyed me.
	Well, the tip of the iceberg of things that annoyed me this week.
	And now we can get on to the week itself, if you like.
	I think you should just keep going, so if you're making my job easy today.
	Well, that's never part of my job description.
	My job description is to give you lots of edits to make your job harder.
	Healthy criticism is not something that people seem to have a healthy relationship with.
	There's a degree between I hate you and I love you.
	Somewhere in there, believe it or not, that there is.
	Not for certain personality types, there aren't.
	This is true.
	We get it, we get it, we get it.
	You were raised by single moms, and every time you criticized your single mom, she saw it as blanket hatred of everything she's done.
	I understand that, but please try and break out of the solitary estrogen womb and join us here in the gray zone we call reality.
	It is possible to experience an emotion without then vomiting it on the next person that you come in contact with.
	You don't have to be the mama bird that swallows the worms of bitter discontent and rage and then vomits it up into everyone else and poisons them.
	You don't have to be that person.
	You don't.
	In fact, you bloody well shouldn't be.
	All right.
	Well, let's talk about the Donald.
	And there's a lot of people that are starting to talk about his first 100 days in office.
	So I figured, hey, there's a lot of people that have been critical of the Donald, ourselves included, over the course of the last week.
	see what has happened.
	You know, is it the end of the world?
	Is the sky falling?
	Or is this just a whole bunch of panic being instilled by a whole lot of leftist mainstream media outlets that seem poised to capitalize on people upset with something Trump has done and then, like Iago, whispering into their ear going, he's flip-flopped on this or that.
	He's flip-flopped on this.
	Look out.
	Oh, no, he's betraying you.
	You've been betrayed before, right?
	It's just the same.
	Well, we're going to go through some of these criticisms and we're going to go through some of the main things he's done.
	And if you want a full Trump's first 100 days presentation, we might be able to do that as well.
	Let us know in the comments below.
	But we're going to go with the high 80 days, what's happened and the big things.
	The good, the bad, the confusing, and what we think of it.
	So up first, we have what I consider to be the biggest thing that has happened and the most important thing, the Supreme Court pick.
	So Trump promised to replace Antonin Scalia with a like-minded justice, you know, a constitutional originalist wasn't going to create the law from the bench.
	And Neil Gorsuch was just appointed to the Supreme Court.
	So that is a massive win.
	I had to listen all last year to people say, oh, Donald Trump will just appoint his sister or some liberal to the court.
	He's going to betray you on the Supreme Court pick.
	It's the most important thing.
	And you can't trust him.
	He came out with his list of names.
	And they said, oh, don't believe him on that.
	Don't trust his list of names.
	He's going to pick someone else.
	Well, he gets in, he picks someone off the list of names.
	Most people on the right seem to really like Neil Gorsuch.
	He seems to be as close to Scalia as you're probably going to find modern day.
	But slightly less full of pasta and cream sauce.
	That is true.
	And veal parmesan.
	I just wanted to point, which is good, because longevity seems to be quite important on the court.
	Yeah, so this was, all the Never Trump people said Trump was going to betray this promise, and he fulfilled it in the highest order possible.
	So...
	This is the first justice.
	There's lots of talk about other justices possibly retiring at the end of the next term.
	There's all of a sudden liberals very concerned about if Ruth Bader Ginsburg is eating kale, you know, all that kind of stuff.
	So now oh so many Supreme Court cases can actually go forward, such as the Rebecca Frederick's case involving the California teachers unions.
	You can look back.
	We had her on the show last year, and they were going to win that case, which meant that the teachers' unions couldn't withdraw dues from their constituents and then donate them to political causes.
	And then, unfortunately, Justice Scalia passed away, and that case wound up with a 4-4 tie, and Now it's going to be retried and brought back.
	And that's a huge deal.
	It's a massive deal.
	A staggering amount of money out of the Democrats' political machine.
	Mm-hmm.
	Oh, just think of all the forced union dues that go to political causes and what that means over the course of not just a year but a decade.
	Yay, freedom of association.
	That's something that's going to happen.
	And that's one case, folks.
	That's one case that could have massive impact on people being able to do with their money that which they want to do and not have it forced to go to stuff that they're morally opposed to.
	So yay for that.
	So how is this going to look years down the road?
	How many decisions is Neil Gorsuch going to be involved with that are going to lead to the United States being headed in a more positive direction?
	Quite a few.
	So anyone that's criticizing Trump and going, are you upset that you supported Trump?
	All I can say is, Neil Gorsuch, everybody.
	Neil Gorsuch.
	And I'm sure he's going to make a decision at some point that we're unhappy with.
	That seems to always happen.
	But...
	It's at Ruth Bader Ginsburg 2.0, which we assuredly would have got if Hillary were to be elected president.
	And then say goodbye to your guns.
	The biggest thing he's done.
	Do you disagree, Steph?
	Well, as far as the biggest goes, I think it's certainly the one that has the potential for the most long-lasting impact.
	Because, of course, the Supreme Court is where the final law of the land is decided, where there is a lot of conflict and having it tipped towards small government.
	You know, he's a good old waspy guy who is focused on limited government and constitutionalism, originalism.
	So it is certainly the one that is going to most likely outlast the Trump presidency.
	And yeah, I think in the long view, it's not, of course, the thing that's going to change something most immediately.
	But in the long view, it's a giant spin on the supertanker of the state.
	You don't notice it right away, but you do end up in a very different place over time.
	Well, next on the list is the main issue of conversation for the most part last year regarding Trump, and that's immigration.
	When it comes to his promise on trying to suspend immigration from terror-prone countries, it's not his fault that he wasn't able to do it.
	And now that there's someone on the Supreme Court that isn't nuts and the vacancy's been filled, there's a place to take that and try that case that may have a different approach than a judge on a bench making a decision that has nothing to do with the law whatsoever.
	So Trump tried to put through his travel ban twice, blocked by activist judges.
	that's probably going to change over the course of the next few weeks.
	There is a little criticism on the immigration front, and this is fair criticism.
	Trump has not repealed Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or the Dreamers executive order, which he did promise to do, don't want to say immediately, but pretty close to immediately.
	And he did promise this to people who had children killed by illegal immigrants.
	And I listened to an interview with a woman who said she wasn't expecting it on day one, but she expected it by now.
	He's talked about how this is a really difficult thing to deal with and lots of sensitivity around it.
	Well, Sean Spicer said, quote, his thinking is, we don't have to deal with this right now.
	I want to hear more.
	I want to plan how we deal with this.
	Let's not start to create a problem that doesn't exist right now.
	We're not capable of handling it right now.
	We've got to deal with the first million, end quote.
	The first million is, of course, referring to the criminal system.
	No, no, not just the people that are in the country illegally who are criminals by definition, but the people that have committed other crimes that are still in the country.
	So this is one of those things where I understand it.
	Other people are unhappy with it.
	I can understand why they're unhappy with it.
	Trump is going to be judged by the results he achieves not in 100 days.
	He's going to be judged by the results that he achieves over the course of years.
	I mean, he's got four years to get some stuff done, and he's already got so much on his plate and so much opposition.
	It's going to be – he can't do every single thing at once and face the public scrutiny and opposition that it would take to get all that done at the same time.
	Well, he's not a dictator and, of course, everyone who works for him has a range of opinions.
	Like, Trump doesn't just get to photocopy himself, right, and put himself, clone himself, and put himself in every position that he wants, so he has to get feedback from other people.
	You need people who are smart enough and independent and thoughtful enough to get things done, which means they're also going to have their own opinions and you can't just order them like the army.
	So that's important.
	I just wanted to put a little thing in here.
	This deferred action for childhood arrivals.
	You know, dreamers!
	They're just dreamers!
	Oh, God, the name!
	You know, it's like that old Supertramp song.
	Dreamers!
	You say you are a dreamer!
	Have you got your knife in my heart?
	Oh, no!
	Oh, man!
	That name, dreamers!
	Oh, it's such a Soviet-style reframing of this kind of stuff.
	Some of the stuff that the supposed dreamers, which conjures, you know, it's a four-year-old child that just happened to be brought here.
	How dare you want to kick them out of the country?
	That would be bad.
	You'd make him sad.
	And since we know that sad children seem to run governmental policy in many cases, that's not what the dreamers, more often than not, are.
	So I encourage you to go read some Ann Coulter, some Center for Immigration Studies work on a breakdown of Who the dreamers are and the pros and cons of rescinding Obama's executive order.
	And if you have to choose one or the other, I mean, if I had to choose one or the other, then for sure you'd want to get rid of the actual have committed violent or other kinds of crimes over and above, just being there illegally.
	You'd want to get rid of those guys first.
	So, I mean, just again, can't do everything at once, and you certainly want to deal with the more explicitly criminal elements before anything else.
	And it is true that sad children run policy, but it is not, of course, true that it is evenly applied.
	You know, as we talked about, you saw...
	The victims of the chemical attack.
	And I say alleged, again, we don't have any proof just yet.
	It's the Fog of War.
	The chemical attack in Syria, you saw all of those children.
	But the truck attack in Sweden, you did not see the gruesome, horrifying pictures.
	People pulled apart and smashed apart by this truck driven by the radical Islamists.
	And so you won't see those.
	You know what else you won't see?
	You won't see a 60 Minutes saying, we are now interviewing Sad children of fathers who ended up in jail because they could not pay their child support because they lost their job.
	So we're going to talk about how sad those children are because, you see, that would end up maybe interfering with some of the massive amount of female supremacy power that the left offers to short-sighted women in return for their votes.
	So it is, yeah, sad children will run policy, but it sure ain't evenly applied.
	Oh, he won't see sad children.
	So, kids, what do you think of your government education?
	Is it working for you?
	Is there anything we can do differently?
	You're not gonna see much of that unless it's under the guise of, we must direct more funding to the underprivileged neighborhoods, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Yeah, kids who have to go to their goddamn government schools in, like, Iron Man suits because of all the bullets flying around.
	Anyway.
	Well, next on this list is build the wall.
	So Trump has ordered the construction of the border wall, as expected, and requested plans to be submitted.
	The deadline for that just passed.
	And you can go check it out.
	There's a bunch of the plans currently online being reviewed to see who gets the bid.
	He's, uh...
	He's having some issues getting the actual funding allocated for the wall, which of course has prompted people to go, I thought Mexico was going to pay for the wall.
	You're lying.
	You're a flip-flop.
	He didn't say that he wasn't going to have the U.S. front the cost and then get repaid for it, which if you want it done quick is probably the way to do it.
	But while we're waiting for that process to unwind, he did sign an executive order increasing the number of Border Patrol agents and staffers for deportations.
	So a lot of stuff is coming up on that.
	We should have some information, I assume, relatively quickly on who gets the bid for the wall and the next step as far as that goes.
	What was it that the wall was going to save America?
	Was it like $100 billion a year?
	It was some insane amount.
	So spending $12 to $15 billion to save yourself $100 billion a year?
	If you can't do that kind of math, I don't even want you voting.
	If you can't sell that cost-benefit analysis to the American people, Paul Ryan, I don't know what to tell you.
	Also on our website, I definitely want to put, and just make a note of this, Mike, I want to put a countdown clock.
	And the countdown clock is how long it's going to be after the wall is built, or significant portions of the wall is built, that it takes for Roger Waters to get his band together and go and do a pro-immigration campaign.
	Concert of Pink Floyd's album, The Wall, on the wall built by Trump.
	I'm just telling you, it's going to happen soon.
	We'll put this down for predictions for the next year.
	And then Sting can go back and sing Inshallah at the Bataclan Theater again.
	Are there any more musicians or actors or entertainers stuff that are going to make anti-Trump statements and leave you to never watch their material?
	I beg you, please stop being so talented and then making me hate you.
	That's all I'm asking.
	I'm just glad Freddie Mercury isn't alive still because that would just break your heart.
	I'm sure something would have happened.
	The only immigrant from Zanzibar.
	Anyway.
	Yeah, we'll give him a visa.
	That's okay.
	If you can hit a high C in concert, you're in, baby.
	All right.
	Well, up next, sanctuary cities.
	So Trump put out an executive order asking the Department of Justice and Homeland Security to withhold federal funds except mandated by law from sanctuary cities.
	And as we talked about in a recent True News show, Jeff Sessions is moving forward with that plan.
	And you get some areas that we're talking about becoming sanctuary cities that are now backing off it.
	It's created a whole lot of discussion.
	Hey, all of a sudden when there's dollars and cents and your actions have consequences, people start to reevaluate what they're doing.
	So that's moving forward and that's a promise that Trump has certainly kept.
	I also wanted to mention something as well, that I'm not sure why the sanctuary cities need any federal money because diversity is a strength.
	These people are wonderfully productive, massive Contributors to the tax base don't end up on welfare, don't end up over utilizing local resources.
	So they should be more than happy to trade federal funds for being hosts to all of the illegal immigrants because it should be so much more economically productive.
	Isn't that how illegal or immigration as a whole is sold to us?
	So I'm a little confused about the math, but not really.
	Maybe they can explain to us why there isn't this massive financial boom associated with the sanctuary cities, but, you know, I'm not going to hold my breath.
	To be fair, at least in Europe, there are significant booms associated with sanctuary no-go zones.
	Significant booms.
	In fact, some of them you can hear for miles.
	Thanks for that stuff.
	I appreciate it.
	It's important to clarify.
	Pipelines.
	So Trump promised to move forward with the Keystone Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline.
	And guess what?
	He did.
	The goal is to increase U.S. energy independence from the Middle East.
	Hey!
	This stuff all ties together, folks.
	Funny how that works.
	American steel to build the pipeline.
	So that thing has been going on forever, drifting around, lots of protests, and now it's moving forward thanks to Trump.
	That's a big deal.
	U.S. energy independence?
	My God, can you imagine what the situation would be like now in the Middle East if the U.S. had energy independence decades ago?
	Can you ponder to think about that for a second?
	That's a whole lot of money not going to some of the worst places in the world just so we can get around and continue to work in a world economy.
	Well, this is a very, very brief, big picture time.
	But let's start with a small picture time.
	Trump is a fairly masculine fellow.
	I don't think he's particularly short of testosterone.
	And I just, to me, the image of Trump laying enormous amounts of white pipe just works for me at a metaphorical level.
	But very briefly, I mean, the spread of some more radical elements of Islam and so on has been facilitated by the massive, I mean, untrolled trillions of dollars that are poured from the West into the Middle East as a result of being dependent on Middle Eastern oil and other energy sources.
	Because so much money flows in from the West to Middle Eastern governments, they don't have to be responsive to their own people, which is one reason why they're so dictatorial.
	If America and the West achieves energy independence from the Middle East, it will cut off the flow of money that is being used to spread radical ideologies, particularly from Saudi Arabia.
	Also, it will turn the Middle Eastern governments, the oil-rich governments, more towards facing the needs of their own people because they will actually start to get significant amounts of money From taxation rather than from selling oil to the West.
	So it is a huge boon to world peace to have in energy independence from the Middle East.
	Much better for the people in the Middle East.
	Much better for the West.
	And the reason why it hasn't happened, of course, is because nobody wants to provoke a conflict with the Middle East and their stranglehold, at least formally, on oil.
	And of course, the Middle Eastern governments put a huge amount of money into American real estate, sometimes into American politics, into American investments.
	Threaten that.
	And I just wanted to mention, too, lawsuits against the Saudi Arabian government's involvement in 9-11 are going forward in the billions of dollars.
	So I just wanted to mention...
	Not just one, either, folks.
	Not just one.
	There's another one that went out, I think, a day or two ago as well.
	So this is going to be interesting to see how that completely unwinds.
	Also, and this another, I mean, any of these things taken in isolation would be a massive deal, but put them all together and it just shows you what Trump's been able to accomplish in a very short amount of time.
	The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
	Gone!
	No more.
	The U.S. is out of it.
	It's DOA not happening.
	We can thank Paul Neelan.
	Who ran against Paul Ryan for really bringing lots of attention and awareness to that.
	And I think Paul Nealon set the wheels in motion that led to TPP not happening.
	So, major kudos to him.
	Yay, Paul!
	Been on our show, too.
	He had a great interview, which I think has been a little underviewed.
	So, yeah, just go check him out.
	Oh, yeah.
	Paul's fantastic.
	And I'm not sure if he's going to try and primary Ryan this next go-around, but it wouldn't surprise me if he was.
	And he certainly...
	If Paul Ryan, you know, evil ex-objectivist Count Chocula himself, if Paul Ryan ends up pulling the funding for the wall, I think Paul Nealon might have just a little bit of a slippery slope to get into the office.
	So, also, regulation pullback.
	So Trump ordered a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated.
	So for everyone out there going, Trump is doing nothing to decrease the size of the state, shut up, please.
	I agree, but just I wouldn't say please.
	I wouldn't expect that to have been put in place under Hillary.
	Let's just say that.
	Also, the lobbying ban.
	So, under an executive order that Trump signed, every political appointee joining the executive branch either on or after January 20th, the day that Trump took office, must agree to the lobbying bans.
	This includes avoiding, for five years after leaving, lobbying the agency that they worked for.
	So, another provision...
	Sets a two-year period for which appointees must avoid working on issues involving former employers or clients.
	Trump is allowed to waive any of these restrictions at any time if there's someone he wants to bring in, needs some expertise, that kind of thing, but...
	it's a step in the right direction.
	There are some people that are critical of it because Obama had some semblance of a lobbying ban, and there's just, you know, jockeying back and forth.
	Obama's ban did more.
	Trump's ban did this.
	I mean, the guy who, the non-politician who is going to draw on the expertise from the free market, he's going to need people that were formally involved in lobbying in some way, shape, or form in his administration because that's where the expertise is, folks.
	So he's going to want the most knowledgeable people, so you're going to bring some of those people in.
	I have some criticisms of some of the people that Trump has brought into his administration.
	Don't get me wrong.
	There's people there that I don't particularly like.
	That being said, you're going to need some people that have some knowledge of the industries if you want to either regulate, change those industries, tweak regulations, do some different things.
	Yeah.
	Let's see.
	Yeah, the lobbying ban falls a bit short in its name because it prevents officials from lobbying the agency they worked for in five years after they leave, but it allows them to lobby other parts of the government.
	So it's not a full ban, but you get the idea.
	The order also lets lobbyists join the administration as long as they don't work on anything that they specifically lobbied for.
	So, as I mentioned, you're probably going to want some people in your administration that know what the hell is going on in that business.
	And...
	Obama's aforementioned order from 2009, which Trump revoked and superseded by this new one, blocked people who were registered lobbyists in the preceding year from taking administration jobs.
	So that meant for a year you couldn't bring anyone in that had the expertise that was previously lobbying.
	But of course, there's lots of...
	In the lobbying business, there's lots of big money floating around.
	So the idea that a company would put someone on ice for a year, that's not...
	Unforeseen.
	And that was the criticism of Obama's ban, that it was more window dressing.
	As long as lobbyists are complaining, I'm going to assume it's a good step forward.
	Well, one of the other things, too, is the hiring freeze, which we'll talk about in a second.
	Trump's hiring freeze, there was lobbyists complaining because there was no one in the positions, the government positions, for them to lobby.
	So they were having some issues.
	It's always, you know, it's very, always challenging for me when the parasite can't find, like it's proboscis of lobbying, cannot find the jugular of the host anymore.
	It's very, very sad.
	Well, let's just skip ahead here to hiring freeze since we just mentioned it.
	So, Trump signed in January a memorandum imposing an across-the-board hiring freeze for almost the entire federal government, with the exceptions of military and for positions that were deemed necessary for national security and public safety.
	So, as part of this, Trump gave the Director of the Office of Management and Budget three months to come up with a long-term plan to reduce the federal government's size.
	Now, three months have just about passed.
	So the hiring freeze has been lifted.
	And of course, this has been painted as Donald Trump betrays the hiring freeze.
	It says he knows it was a mistake.
	It was a problem.
	No, it was part of the original memorandum that they had a plan.
	Okay, never mind.
	So this director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Milvini, said, quote, We're good to go.
	And, yeah, now the agencies have until June 30th to develop a draft plan to, quote, maximize the performance of government workers.
	They might need longer than June 30th to get that done, but nonetheless.
	And a total of 180 days to submit their final plans to the White House, according to this directive.
	And the final plans and, quote, input from the American people in each agency, quote, will be part of Trump's fiscal 2019 budget.
	So hiring freeze, then slowly allow them to start hiring for essential positions, but they have to have a plan for maximizing performance and efficiency.
	This is waste fraud abuse that Trump talked about incessantly on the campaign trail.
	So this is another promise that he is working to achieve.
	You can criticize the way he's going about it, but this is something different than other people have done and actually trying to address the issues.
	So kudos to him for that.
	Agreed.
	Shall we talk about coal miners, Steph?
	Absolutely.
	Let's talk about...
	Let's talk about coal miners.
	Are you a canary?
	No, let's not go there.
	So Trump has enacted Joint Resolution 38, ending the Office of Surface Mining's Stream Protection Rule, yay, of regulation which claimed to protect waterways from coal mining waste and, like most environmental regulations, just made it Really impossible for businesses to do the things that they want to do.
	You know, there's already things in place if there is some type of exposure or land is destroyed or there's a chemical leak.
	There's already steps in place for that.
	You don't need an additional rule.
	But this additional rule to protect the streams pretty much made it very difficult for coal miners to stay in business.
	So he also, the Donald, signed a Congressional Review Act Now, that sounds like, wow, that sounds like you're removing important information that these energy companies need to disclose.
	That sounds bad.
	Well, what actually happened with that?
	And I think Eric Prince talked about this on our show.
	really difficult for them to compete internationally, any U.S. business competing internationally, because they'd have to disclose various things.
	And then from their disclosures, being a U.S. company, their competition, not in the U.S., not subject to disclosure laws, could then be tipped off as to what they were doing or where they were focusing and all that.
	So it really put them at a significant disadvantage.
	So this idea of disclosure, I'd like more disclosure.
	That's good.
	Well, in this case, it was really throttling U.S. energy businesses.
	Now, on the coal front, and this is one of the things, like, I think this is awesome.
	This is a big feather in the cap of the Donald, and no one's talking about it this week.
	So, gosh darn it, we've got to talk about it.
	So, North Korea conducts almost 90% of its total trade with China.
	That's a lot.
	Coal is estimated to take up as much as 40% of North Korea's exports to China.
	So 90% of total trade and 40% of North Korea's exports to China is coal.
	So coal accounted for a third of all official North Korean exports in 2015.
	So coal is really important to the North Korean economy in being able to export their coal.
	Well, following missile tests that drew international criticism, China banned all imports of North Korean coal.
	This happened on February 26th.
	There was international criticism going like, are they really going to enforce this?
	Is this going to be like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge, but under the table stuff still happens?
	Well, they've cut it off and they've sent the ships back.
	So how much of North Korea's trade involved coal?
	And their biggest trading partner just said, we don't want your coal anymore.
	Now, China still needs coal.
	So to make up for the shortfall from North Korea, China has ramped up its imports of coal from, guess where?
	The United States!
	Data showed no U.S. coal was exported to China between 2014 and 2016, but then shipments soared to over 400,000 tons by late February.
	Hmm, so Donald Trump...
	Passes regulations or withdraws regulations.
	It makes it easier for energy companies, including coal companies and coal miners, to go in business.
	And then takes someone that's agitating all kinds of things in the world, one of the most fierce dictators on the planet, and takes their main export and provides it to China instead of them getting the money.
	Yeah, this is a massive win.
	All the way around.
	And again, no one's really talking about this.
	And what a gambit and what a play.
	Trump just solved a bunch of problems by doing this and further ramped up the tensions on North Korea, who now can't rely on one of its most sound exports.
	And the U.S. coal miner and the U.S. economy benefits at the same time.
	Useful communist idiots, otherwise known as watermelons, otherwise known as environmentalists, you know, green on the outside, red on the inside, This is how stupid a lot of environmentalists are.
	They think, oh, we're going to shut down coal from the United States.
	We're going to drive these people out of business.
	And they think that somehow this is going to reduce coal emissions or environmental problems from coal because, see, it's not in front of my face, therefore it's vanished.
	Do you know what happens?
	Let me tell you guys something.
	If you can just put down the bong for a second and stop.
	Fondling your blow-up doll of Mother Nature with the permanently surprised expression of the stains.
	If you could just understand this.
	When you shut down coal production in the United States, guess what?
	The worldwide demand for coal doesn't mysteriously vanish in the same proportion.
	What happens?
	Why, yes, the coal gets produced in other far less environmentally friendly countries.
	If you shut down coal production in the United States, the economies of the world still need energy and coal is an extremely efficient form of gaining that energy.
	All it means is that more coal production is going to occur in places like China and North Korea and other places where they don't have even close to the environmental restraints and regulations that America has.
	So if you shut down coal in America, Oh, I'm a strong guy with a man bun.
	No.
	All that's happened is you've driven all of that coal production to far less environmentally friendly regimes who are going to crap up the planet way more than America ever could.
	Good job, guys.
	Good job.
	Well, this is very similar to what we just talked about with the pipelines.
	Would you rather the U.S. be energy independent or send lots and lots of money to regimes in the Middle East which are not exactly at the forefront of human rights?
	And I just wanted to point out, so like a lot of the stuff that Trump is doing relative to the U.S. economy and particularly the U.S. government size, I mean, the Feds took in more money last month than ever before and ran just about the biggest deficit ever seen.
	The Congressional Budget Office, which is pretty much the most blunt agency in the world, and I think they're that way because nobody ever listens.
	Here's a phrase.
	This is a former director of the CBL. He called the U.S. debt, and I quote, a serial horror story in which the greatest economic power ever to grace the globe sails directly into a self-inflicted crisis, suffering, and decline.
	That's not pulling a lot of punches.
	I mean, imagine if you sit down in front of your doctor and he starts calling your healthcare future this or your health future this way.
	Now, superpowers over the last thousand years, French Bourbon monarchy, Ottoman Empire, they all get crushed.
	Under their own wild debts and the CBO is normally very very pessimistic but Mike they've been wildly optimistic over the last little while so in January 2007 they issued their you know annual budget economic outlook and they said okay here's our 10-year projections about the national debt 10 years ago they estimated that by 2017 the debt held by the public would be 4.2 trillion dollars That's almost 25% of GDP. That's a huge amount.
	Ten years ago, debt's going to be $4.2 trillion.
	Hey, do you know what it actually turned out to be?
	What's that?
	$14.35 trillion.
	Good God.
	So it's more than three times what they projected.
	A pessimistic agency only predicted a third the debt that actually manifested.
	So this is debt held by the public.
	The total government debt is 20 trillion.
	That's 106% of GDP. CBO's projections were wrong by 10 trillion dollars.
	10 trillion dollars.
	And this is happening all over.
	The crisis of debt is not something that's ever talked about.
	The mainstream media is lefty and lefty demands infinite money in order to provoke their selected environment and buy lots of votes and to pretend to people that diversity is a strength.
	Yeah, diversity is such a strength.
	Why is South Korea, 99% ethnically homogenous, one of the richest and most peaceful places in the entire world?
	So in 2005, there's a board of trustees of various social security trust funds.
	In 2005, they said, oh, the trust funds are going to run out of money in 2043.
	Almost four decades.
	40 years, right?
	Now, in 2006, they changed it to 2040.
	It's only 34.
	By 2010, they changed when they're going to run out of money to 2037.
	And from last year's, year before last, 2016, no, last year's 2016 report, the estimate changed yet again to 2034, just 18 years in the future, right?
	So these things are narrowing.
	The closer that we get, the shorter the estimates seem to become.
	So, Something better damn well changed when it comes to government spending and regulations because the Titanic is really gunning it as it heads towards that iceberg.
	Didn't these offices doing these estimates understand that we had a recovery under Obama?
	Weren't they alerted to that fact?
	At least that's what I was told.
	Yeah, you can have a recovery in the same way you can avoid depression with a snort of cocaine.
	I'm just not sure it's going to solve your problems in the long run.
	It's kind of late now, but I just want to point out that Jeff Sessions used to respect The CBO, until he heard that they were blunt.
	Now, not so much.
	Oh, oh!
	Oh, that is a very subtle humor.
	That's over the head of so many people.
	Very, very subtle humor, indeed.
	Back on the coal miners in North Korea, I got a quote from the Donalds.
	He said, We have a very big problem in North Korea, and as I said, I really think China is going to try very hard, and it has already started.
	A lot of the coal boats have already been turned back.
	You saw that yesterday and today.
	They've been turned back.
	This was a very recent quote, by the way.
	He continues and said, the vast amount of coal that comes out of North Korea going to China, they've turned back to boats.
	That's a big step.
	And they have many other steps that I know about." So Trump's discussion with China seems to be rather fruitful.
	And we'll get to it later, but there's been some talk of he's not labeling China a currency manipulator that people are upset about.
	We'll get into the meat of that later, but keep that in mind.
	So Trump as well, working to bring back jobs.
	This isn't the biggest thing on the planet.
	The fact that he calls companies and met with CEOs to try and work out situations where large companies can bring jobs in the U.S., that won't be where the majority of the job growth in the United States comes from if Trump is successful.
	But at the same time, good God, it's nice to see someone showing an effort.
	The fact that over eight years Obama could have maybe picked up the phone once or twice and tried to get people to stay in the country instead of moving overseas is Instead, he gave speeches saying, oh, no, those jobs aren't coming back.
	There's nothing you can do.
	And Trump shows up and shows that he was very, very wrong.
	So it's nice to see him put in the effort.
	It's not going to have a massive, massive, massive impact on the bottom line regarding total jobs available in the United States.
	But it's nice that he takes the initiative and seems to care, unlike other people, which, well, I'd say remain nameless.
	But Barack Obama, George W. Bush, we can go down the line.
	Well, and I'm going to have to disagree with you.
	Mike here, which means that we're going to viciously turn on each other and rend each other to death like warring robots with fleshy meat hooks for cleavers.
	But no, I do think it is going to have a big effect.
	So each individual company, okay, you know, a couple of thousand here, a couple of thousand there, it's not massive, but it's the optics.
	Because if the huge companies are saying, you know what, we're turning around, we're going to invest in America, that has an optics and that has a ripple effect that's going to affect the decision-making of lots of companies he's not meeting with.
	Oh, I completely agree along those lines.
	I just mean the companies who directly meets with and gets them to pledge X number of jobs.
	That won't be the net sum of the employment that is created under Trump.
	Now, the shadow that that casts will be long and wide in addition to all the other stuff that he's doing with decreasing regulations and making a more business-friendly climate for environmental reasons and hopefully tax reasons in the near future.
	But no, I completely agree with you as far as that goes.
	Also, Donald said he's not going to take salary as president.
	Kept that promise, donated his first quarterly salary check to the National Park Service.
	So, if you don't like the National Park Service, you can disagree with that, but that's another promise kept.
	Can I just mention something here, too, Mike?
	Maybe we'll do a different show on this, but I just wanted to mention, you ever notice that the net worth of a lot of people, I guess prior to Trump or whatever, but the net worth of a lot of people who are in public service seems to be A little bit disproportionate to their salaries.
	Have you ever noticed that?
	It's like, I get paid $125,000 a year as a But my net worth is $15 billion.
	It's wild.
	And I'd love to know the mechanics of how that all works.
	And I can't remember who it was, but I was reading about something that came out of the Obama administration.
	It's like their annual salary was $150,000 a year.
	Their net worth was well over $10 million.
	And it's like, I don't care how good a money manager you are, that math does not add up.
	Well, this is something to keep in mind.
	And this doesn't necessarily play as much to Obama, because Obama actually was able to sell books.
	And most politicians aren't.
	But when you hear these politicians...
	Wait, wait, wait.
	I thought criminals weren't allowed to publish books to profit from the nature of their crimes.
	Did that law change?
	I hear OJ is planning something big in a bit.
	We'll see if that actually happens.
	But yeah, that's a tough one.
	But Obama was able to sell books.
	And he got massive, massive book advances.
	So that is something that you see.
	These book deals to people that can't in any way, shape or form sell enough books to justify such an outlay and speaking appearances, speaking fees.
	I mean, that certainly came under fire with Hillary Clinton.
	But folks, it's not just Hillary Clinton that gets paid large amounts of money or used to get paid large amounts of money for speaking appearances.
	It's a lot of people in the public sphere, even people that you may know and like.
	You know, some of these never-Trump speakers getting pretty nice paychecks to go speak to half-empty rooms.
	It doesn't really seem to make economic sense.
	I'm sure that has nothing to do with their political positions whatsoever.
	No, it doesn't at all.
	But moving on, yeah, it is interesting.
	Wait, wait, hang on.
	I remember who it was.
	Sorry.
	Susan Rice.
	Now, a diplomat is not making massive amounts of bank, right?
	Not sitting on treasure chests of smorg-sized coinage.
	But have a guess, Susan Rice, what do you think her net worth is?
	Oh, God, I have no idea.
	So, somewhere between 23.5 and 43.5 million dollars.
	Million dollars!
	Did she charge per unmasking?
	What happened?
	Million dollars!
	Oh, my God!
	I mean, a million dollars!
	I mean, that to me is truly astounding.
	That is not coming from stuffing away the pennies that come out of your salary.
	Oh my god.
	23.5 and 43.5 million dollars.
	Love to know how that came about.
	Probably never will.
	Steph, I think we need a moment of silence for these dedicated public servants that sacrifice for our benefit.
	No.
	I refuse.
	And that was as of 2012.
	I mean, it's probably changed even since then.
	And where is all the left saying, oh, you know, she's part of the exploiting the matter?
	Come on.
	Anyway, let's move on.
	All right.
	On the keeping your promises front, well, Trump promised to bomb the shit out of ISIS. You can disagree with it.
	You cannot like it.
	Given that he just dropped the mother of all bombs on an ISIS fort that the CIA paid four years ago in Afghanistan, he certainly is bombing the shit out of ISIS. I don't know that the shit could be bombed out of them more than dropping the mother of all bombs on Afghanistan without a mushroom cloud, and God knows, let's hope that doesn't happen.
	I believe if literal ISIS shit makes it into the stratosphere, that technically...
	Is a fulfillment of the promise to bomb the shit out of them.
	If it's in orbit, then yes.
	I just, I mean, first of all, people are then surprised that America is still at war, right, in there 16 years later.
	And that the Taliban has more territory there now than any time since 2001.
	But for the people who are under the thumb of these lunatics out there, I bet you that bomb came as a pretty welcome bang.
	Well, it is easier to hit the ISIS strongholds if you have the receipts for their construction in the first place.
	Oh, that's right, yes.
	Where should we bomb?
	I don't know.
	Let's call Langley to get the blueprints.
	Oh, man.
	Oh, this is like something out of the Evil Onion.
	This is like Kafkaesque, you know, like, I know exactly where to bomb because we built it.
	Oh, man.
	It's not Trump's fault, though.
	That's not Trump's fault.
	And yeah, promise kept.
	Bomb the shit out of ISIS. You can't argue that.
	Also, and he's been getting criticized on this rather unfairly recently, the promise to renegotiate and leave NAFTA, if applicable.
	Now, Trump has met with Justin Trudeau in Canada to discuss tweaking NAFTA, and they're preparing currently the United States for NAFTA negotiations later this year.
	So it's on the table and it's happening.
	This isn't one of those things where you can just snap your fingers.
	And I think because it hasn't happened yet or immediately, people are starting to go like, is he not going to do NAFTA? What's going on?
	And of course, are they just going to throw out NAFTA and start from scratch?
	Well, maybe.
	But I wouldn't believe that that would be the first choice.
	Obviously, you'd want to make the tweaks to the existing agreements if that was possible.
	It's politically a lot easier to modify an existing agreement than it is to scrap and build an entire new one.
	And that opens you up to a whole bunch of new lobbying rounds and everybody trying to get their hooks in and trying to get their own benefits and so on.
	So, yeah, if you can get what he wants.
	And this idea is like, I'm going to leave NAFTA. Oh, they're willing to renegotiate?
	Okay, let's see how that goes.
	You've changed your promise!
	Like if your wife says, if you don't stop screwing cheerleaders, I'm going to leave you.
	And then you stop screwing cheerleaders and she doesn't leave you.
	She's not broke her word.
	All was implicit is, I'm going to stop doing this if I can't get what I want within this framework.
	The whole point is to get the results, folks.
	The whole point is to get the results.
	If you get the results, you don't have to throw away the baby with the bathwater.
	So Trump just signed an executive order demanding a study within 90 days of all the ways other countries allegedly pull fast ones on the United States through anti-competitive trade practices.
	It is designed to be a systematic examination of things like non-tariff barriers, lax legal enforcement, currency manipulation, and other means to keep U.S. goods out while other countries boost their own exports.
	So there's 16 countries on this list, and it includes the places with the biggest trade surpluses With the United States.
	So there's, I mean, talk to any entrepreneur that's tried to do international business and getting your goods, stuff that people probably want to buy.
	Getting it into certain countries, not easy.
	So I think this study is going to show and break down lots of the challenges and issues.
	So Trump's going to have some meaty data to go to the table with for the NAFTA renegotiations later this year.
	And just remember, Saying, I'm going to change things if I don't get what I want doesn't mean that you can't work.
	Like, for instance, so recently Mike threatened, well, no, sorry, didn't threaten.
	So Mike said, Steph, give me a raise or I'm going to open you up to all the joys and glories of the Free Domain Radio inbox.
	And I said, here's my house.
	And so, you know, now he's staying.
	So this is how things work out.
	Wow, I have your house.
	Didn't know that.
	This is a legal, this is not a legal contract.
	This is a joke.
	All right.
	Well, up next, we have Trump mentioning that he was going to cancel global warming payments to the United Nations.
	Now, you may or may not remember that Obama, right before he left office, sent up a giant chunk of money.
	What was it, $500 million?
	I forget.
	But it was a whole mess of money that Obama signed over to the United Nations, literally right before he left office, related to climate issues.
	So the Trump budget, which was released on March 16th, Seeked to eliminate all the global climate change.
	500 million.
	Thank you for clarifying that.
	And do you know where he took it from?
	Because, you know, he didn't have that money in his pocket, not until his memoirs called, I'm really, really, really not a communist.
	Did he get it for a book deal?
	No.
	No.
	So, no, he took it from money that was supposed to prevent the spread of the Zika virus.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	So, sorry people dying of Zika, but there is a theory that the globe might warm up a few degrees in a hundred years.
	I'm sure as you cough your lungs into your dilapidated hut and die like a dog on the floor, you feel that it's worth it.
	Well, I think his reasoning went along the lines of the babies that are born with mycocephaly will grow up and still vote Democrat, so he doesn't really care that much.
	Well, they certainly will probably be dependent on socialized healthcare, so that is quite likely.
	So yeah, the Trump budget seeks to eliminate the global climate change initiative and cease payments to the United Nations, end quote, regarding all climate change programs and all of that.
	So that's a promise that he has outlined or has set on the campaign trail and is part of his budget, and that's the plan.
	So another promise kept.
	And Next, we move to transgender bathrooms.
	No, we're not actually moving to transgender bathrooms.
	Trump rescinded Obama's executive order regarding the transgender bathrooms in schools, and now states and public schools are going to have the authority to make their own decisions without federal interference.
	And I'm sure you're aware of how this was painted in the media stuff.
	Oh, I don't know.
	He hates people who have gender identity challenges or curiosities or whatever, and just the usual junk of Christian baiting hatred.
	Oh, yes, exactly.
	Now, how many things has Trump said, hey, this doesn't seem like a federal issue.
	Let's give it back to the states.
	Let's give them more control.
	I mean, it involves schools as well.
	And Trump ran on Removing Common Core as well.
	So the idea that he would want schools to be able to make their own local decisions instead of having the federal government dictate something to them.
	He doesn't want the curriculum dictated.
	He also doesn't want policy on bathrooms to be dictated.
	So yeah, the idea that this is spun is some type of Anti-transgender, anti-LGBTQ thing.
	That's a bit of a stretch.
	But nonetheless, that's how the media painted it.
	You know, what's funny, too, is that this transgender issue for bathrooms is very, very important.
	Go find me a mainstream media that allows Republicans to use the bathroom in their floors, right?
	Because they just hire so few of them.
	How about trans-political bathrooms in the mainstream media?
	Let's see how that flies.
	I identify as a Democrat, Steph.
	I just want to let you know.
	Moving next, we have Environmental Protection Agency stuff.
	Well, we mentioned a little bit regarding the coal situation and some of those regulations that were cuts, but Trump's budget, he wants to cut the EPA budget by 24%, which, if this does get approved by Congress, would slash the agency's $8.1 billion budget to, oh man, I mean, back to George H.W. Bush-era levels, the horror, and reduce the EPA's workforce by probably one-fifth.
	So, oh my goodness, we're gonna have to go back to George H.W. Bush era levels of government enforcement.
	To be fair, that's where they did film the Mad Max movies.
	So that's pretty much what it was like back then.
	And this, just before we go on, let's just everyone take a moment to just remember how boring and how predictable this script is.
	First of all, The EPA was put in by Nixon, right?
	And it was in response to, you know, the environmental hysteria that came out of Rachel Carlson's Silent Spring book, which was, you know, DDT is going to make the birds' eggs too thin to hatch, and it's all lies and nonsense, and the banning of DDT has cost an estimated 60 million lives around the world.
	But there already was protection in place.
	The EPA is not the only way that the environment gets protected.
	In fact, you could argue that the EPA is quite the opposite of helping the environment be protected by banning a lot of manufacturing or making it impossible to manufacture stuff in the United States.
	And by promoting energy dependence in the Middle East, it actually adds to the world's pollution by, as I said before, moving manufacturing to less regulated environments.
	But it's so boring because what happens is Environmental Protection Agency.
	People look at the label and think, well, that's about protecting the environment.
	And so if you cut it, the budget, by 24%, that means the environment is getting 24% worse.
	And it's not.
	The environment is going to get better as the EPA gets smaller.
	And Steph gave a great speech on the whole Carson thing in Toronto a couple years back that I suggest people dig up from the archives.
	I don't remember the title off the top of my head, but it was a hell of a speech.
	Mother Nature is a sociopath.
	That's about right.
	But yeah, great speech.
	And I suggest checking it out if you haven't gone into the archives and heard it previously.
	This is back when you could be not on the left and give speeches without having to give them through a gas mask.
	As we're sitting here recording this thing, like, seconds before we hit record, Mike Cernovich was assaulted.
	He's down in Austin, Texas, just did the Alex Jones show, and went up, said something on stage, and typical leftist, didn't like what he said, had to hit him.
	And, uh, well, you know, Mike hit back, let's just say that.
	He's doing okay, thankfully.
	Hope everyone's doing okay in California, Berkeley, currently.
	I think it's fair to say that if you attack Mike Cernovich, you don't know Mike Cernovich.
	It's worse than that, too, because they attacked Sertovich, who had Joe Biggs with him.
	Like, if there's two people that you probably don't want to walk into a fight with, they'd probably be draft pick one and draft pick two.
	If I had those two guys watching my back, I'd flounce in a 2-2 into a biker bar.
	That would be my favorite approach.
	All right.
	Well, Trump appointed Scott Pruitt as the EPA administrator, which collectively gave a heart attack to most people on the left and was part of the reason that Michael Moore said that Donald Trump is ending life on Earth.
	We covered that in a recent True News show.
	And Scott Pruitt has also called for U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords.
	So, Scott Pruitt, skeptical of the climate change, CO2 causes massive warming narrative.
	Yeah, a lot of lefties very upset about what's being done in the EPA, but personally, I think it's wonderful.
	Now we move to federal abortion funding.
	This isn't Trump directly, but this is the kind of thing.
	Listen, if something happens under Trump, he's responsible for the good or bad because he's in the top seat.
	That's the way it works.
	So federal abortion funding, Senate Republicans aided by Vice President Mike Pence, who had to come down and vote, voted to undo an Obama administration rule preventing states from blocking funding for family planning clinics that also provide abortions.
	So it returns to the states the power to exclude health care centers that perform abortions from receiving Title X money set aside for family planning and related preventative health services for women.
	Title X grants cover contraception as well as cancer and other disease screenings and treatments, but they cannot under current federal law be used to pay for abortion services.
	So remember Trump talking about how he's incredibly passionate and.
	Incredibly passionate.
	Wakes up in the middle of the night believing about or discussing women's health issues.
	Not sure I really believe that, but nonetheless...
	Well, you're still going to be able to fund screenings and health services and family planning stuff.
	Just no abortions.
	No one getting forced to pay for abortions that they don't want to pay for, having money taken from them to pay for abortions.
	And the states now get to make the decision instead of at a federal level if that Title X money goes to those clinics or not.
	So again, more stuff going to a state level, less federal authority.
	That's a win for most people that are concerned about big government and decisions being made far away from where they live that they have no control over.
	Truth.
	Trump also ended the Obamacare penalty.
	So you will no longer be fined if you are not able to afford health insurance, which is pretty much how it works.
	Now, by ending the Obamacare penalty, that will, of course, allow and they're going to do it anyway, but it's going to allow people on the left when Obamacare inevitably collapses.
	To say, well, you see, it wouldn't have collapsed if Trump didn't remove that penalty.
	By removing the penalty, it completely changed the game.
	It would have been fine otherwise.
	So that's going to happen, but at least now the people that can't afford health insurance won't have to chalk up money that they don't have.
	So we'll talk more about Ryan Care a little later.
	So Trump was also proven correct on the spying surveillance claims.
	There's still data to come in, folks, but...
	The not-so-incidental-incidental collection, it's kind of questionable.
	The Susan Rice unmasking stuff that came out, kudos to Mike Cernovich for breaking that story, just came out a couple days ago.
	We know for sure that the FBI obtained a warrant to surveil former Trump aide Carter Page in summer of last year under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA court.
	So remember everyone – when Trump talked about surveillance and some of the reporting from the left was brought up discussing FISA courts and everyone's like, no, that's not true.
	That's not true.
	That's not true at all.
	No, there was no surveillance.
	It didn't happen despite the fact that we're saying that there was surveillance for the previous several months saying that Trump is a Russian agent and spy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Well, no, they did surveil a former Trump aide in summer of last year.
	And Page had previously been an investment banker in Moscow, which you can see the connections.
	Trump's looking pretty good regarding the spying surveillance claims, and it's interesting to see the left walk back and where the goalposts get moved to next as more information comes out on this whole story.
	Well and this also Mike explains to me why this Marussia narrative was so obsessive.
	You know like watching them return to this was completely mad.
	Like was it Rachel Maddow recently?
	Did like half her shows have been on the Russia!
	Russia!
	Well now of course I understand it.
	I mean I understood it before as a way of explaining why they lost to Trump after claiming they were gonna win no problem.
	But now it's because, you know, it was under the excuse, I would guess, of the Russian connection stuff that all of these warrants and all of this wiretapping and listening in and all was done.
	Yeah, it's because of the Russian connection, right?
	So now, I mean, it was only a matter of time until Donald Trump found out about this kind of stuff.
	And he was, of course, going to make it public.
	So they had to keep...
	this Russian narrative going, partly to explain, it went on beyond just needed to explain why they lost.
	And now, given that lots of insiders in the Democrat Party at the top, particularly the previous administration, knew all about this stuff, sure, it makes perfect sense to me now why they had to keep it going, because this was going to come out at some point.
	And the stronger that narrative was, the more they could bury some of the horrendous, horrendous problems of all of this stuff.
	You know, I think it was Roger Stone who said this is like Watergate times 10.
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	This is Watergate times infinity.
	Well, they weren't exactly counting on Trump winning the election.
	You They counted on having Hillary in there that was going to install people in positions to where this would never see the light of day.
	And now that you have a Republican president, you have a Republican attorney general, They weren't counting on that, and it's not looking good for them long term.
	I hope to God that people are held accountable for this.
	I mean, one of the things, I didn't include it in my list here, but there's people upset, and I'm upset about this.
	I want to see the special prosecutor appointed to investigate Hillary Clinton.
	If we're not going to do the email thing, good God, talk to Charles Ortel and look at the Clinton Foundation.
	If you keep up with Charles Ortel, who's been on this show a few times, we gotta have him back.
	I know Hillary's not exactly something that everyone's terribly interested in present day, but there is so much dirt on the Clinton Foundation.
	So many laws that have been broken.
	Oh, so much stuff.
	But the question is getting someone that's willing to prosecute it.
	That's a big step, to prosecute the Clintons and bring something against the Clintons.
	Because the second that happens, the first domino that goes, it's going to make it easier for the next domino and the next domino.
	And there's lots of states that have separate laws that can bring action themselves without going to the federal level.
	Talk to Charles Rottel.
	He's got tons of great stuff.
	There has to be some level of accountability.
	You want to drain the swamp?
	I'd like to see the spying and surveillance stuff prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
	And I want to see that special prosecutor for Hillary Clinton, whether it's on the email stuff, which everyone knows was completely illegal, or for the Clinton Foundation, which, again, everyone knows their behavior was, well, Charles Rottel has proven and made the case as to why it is on the wrong side of the Charles Rottel has proven and made the case as to why Well, if we're going to go down this road, there's just two little tidbits I wanted to bring up.
	Number one.
	Good job bringing down the child trafficking and pedophile rings.
	Good, good job.
	Keep on with that.
	Keep on with that.
	Seems like there's a story every other day.
	Yeah.
	Oh, man.
	It's great.
	It is, like, fantastic.
	And can we just touch on Lois Lerner for just a moment?
	Go for it.
	So some congressional GOP leaders are pushing the Trump administration to reopen the case against the former chief of the IRS, Lois Lerner.
	Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady and Tax Policy Subcommittee Chairman Peter Ruskam sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
	And they said, you know, the committees had gathered an extensive amount of information while doing an investigation into the IRS scandal.
	But, weirdly, Obama's Justice Department refused to even consider all of the information that they had gathered.
	They just ignored it all, pretended like nothing.
	Now, according to this Brady and Ruskin, I'm quoting from constitution.com, quote, there is clear evidence that Lerner was involved in criminal activity during her time as the director of the exempt organizations division of the IRS. And this is a quote, I think, from the letter.
	On April 9th, 2014, the House Committee on Ways and Means voted to send a letter to the Department of Justice referring former IRS exempt organizations division director.
	Lois G. Lerner, for criminal prosecution, as indicated in the attached letter of the committee's nearly three-year investigation, uncovered evidence of willful misconduct on the part of Ms.
	Lerner.
	Despite this fact, and for what many believe were purely partisan reasons, the prior administration refused to review Ms.
	Lerner's misconduct.
	It is clear that when the DOJ announced on October 2015 that it would not bring charges against Lois Lerner, the agency was following President Obama's signal on how he wanted the investigation to be handled, they continued.
	Taxpayers deserve to know that the DOJ's previous evaluation was not tainted by politics.
	This is a huge and serious issue.
	Using the awesome power of the IRS, For political purposes is such a violation of about every conceivable moral standard in a democracy or a republic that you could imagine.
	This is something that needs to be pursued.
	I think it may very well come out, statistically, that Lois Lerner and the IRS helped steal the election from Mitt Romney and passed it across to Barack Obama.
	There's a study that makes that exact case.
	Yeah, by denying right-leaning organizations the capacity to...
	To get their charitable status and by threatening to basically dox anyone who donated to a lot of these organizations, they swung a lot of activism, they swung a lot of money out of where it needed to be spent in order to win the election for Romney.
	Yeah, the fact that it may have toasted the entire electoral process and been a massive illegal overreach of the powers of the IRS and that the Democrats may be involved in using the IRS for these kinds of political Using
	government agencies to target political opponents.
	Hmm.
	Noticing a trend.
	On that front, there's another thing that Trump has accomplished, which, whether you're upset about what happened in Syria recently or not, you can't dispute the fact that it's pretty much driven a stake through the heart of this.
	Donald Trump is a Russian puppet narrative.
	That's DOA. And I don't expect—there's still going to be people on the left that continue to trot it out.
	But, oh man, it was dying to death before this happened, but after the Syria stuff, it's— Anyone that brings it up, you pretty much just have to laugh at this point.
	So now they're just going to pivot back to wanting his tax returns.
	Oh, we can talk about Russia a little later.
	And one of the things that people are saying like, well, Trump said that we were going to have a more positive relationship with Russia.
	Well, Trump didn't really shift here.
	You know, he said he wanted a cordial relationship with Russia.
	at an all-time low.
	Now, airstrikes and talk of regime change against a Russian ally, yeah, that's part of it, without question.
	But Russia relationship was at a pretty low point, given that the mainstream media had accused Vladimir Putin and the Russians of doing all types of nefarious things over the course of the last, it's been over a year now, it seems.
	I mean, you got Hillary Clinton saying it's an act of war, you know, any type of cyber attack, which we're going to blame on the Russians, despite the fact that WikiLeaks has shown that the CIA has tools that can mask where attacks are coming from, so you can blame it on other people.
	Funny how that works out.
	I'm sure that has nothing to do with this whole scenario.
	But, yeah, the Russia relationship in the United States was at a critical point long before the Syria deal, and that was because of the mainstream media, which it's not like Trump wanted that to happen.
	It's not like he had control over that to any degree, so...
	The fact that the relationship is strained now, yes, he's added to it by some of his foreign policy decision without question, but at least now the Russian puppet narrative is done, and now there's fertile ground for some type of reconciliation.
	He never could have had any sane relationship with Russia while the mainstream media was screaming about their Russia collusion narrative.
	There's simply no way he ever could have.
	So, I mean, I hate to sort of say it, but maybe the Tomahawks blew that narrative out of the water.
	And with that narrative out of the way, at least to a large degree, at least among the more reasonable people, now he can go and have a rapprochement with Russia.
	He can work with Russia without everyone screaming, Ah, you see the Russian collusion?
	Ha!
	So, yeah, it may be one of these rough-but-worth-it scenarios.
	And if it is, it's because of the mainstream media, not because of the tomahawks.
	Yeah, I mean, we have our issues with the tomahawks, but the big issue and what we really put up a whole bunch of feedback about over the course of the last week was the discussion of regime change.
	That's a whole separate animal.
	The tomahawks are one thing, we can talk about that, but regime change being on the table, that's an issue.
	And we'll get to that a little bit later as well.
	Trump's accomplished quite a bit in a very short amount of time there.
	And he's accomplished some more stuff that we'll get to.
	But this I kind of have this section labeled as meh.
	This is the stuff that I'm not exactly thrilled about, but it's what it is.
	So female pandering.
	So Trump has signed the Inspire Act that directed NASA to promote STEM fields to women and girls and encourage women to pursue careers in aerospace.
	They need encouragement.
	The law gives NASA three months to present two congressional committees with its plans for getting staff, astronauts, scientists and engineers, in front of girls studying STEM in elementary and secondary schools.
	He's pandering to the women for votes.
	No, it's not his fault.
	The fact is that, and this is to do with the race and IQ stuff as well, the fact is that the left needs to explain Diverse outcomes as the result of prejudice and discrimination in all cases.
	Now, when you understand the bell curve infant intelligence, when you understand the different abilities, strengths and weaknesses of various ethnicities, and when you understand the fact that, on average, women end up Not as smart as men in the long run by a couple of IQ points when you understand that women, a lot of them, and I think quite wonderfully so, choose to stay home and be good mothers and breastfeed their children when you understand that women don't have as much testosterone and therefore it may affect drive and ambition as much as men.
	It's not Trump's fault that this information is kept suppressed because if this information is out there, Then you'd say, okay, well, there aren't as many women at the top of STEM fields.
	Well, that's spatial reasoning, which women are a little bit less strong in.
	You know, where women are strong, which is, you know, language and narrative and so on, like in terms of novel writing and so on.
	Yeah, women are fantastic and they, you know, do half if not more than half of the great work in the field of literature and novel writing and so on.
	So, because the general population doesn't know the differences between the male and female brains, and listen, I mean, it was a press for me for quite some time, and I've even done interviews with people who say it's not real and so on, but the latest research seems to be pretty clear on this.
	So you would never expect there to be an equal number of women and men at the top of STEM fields.
	And I bet you if you're normalized by things like IQ and you're normalized by motherhood and you're normalized by testosterone, then you would find that it's actually completely and totally fair.
	And the idea that if girls see an astronaut, they'll become an astronaut...
	That's so insulting.
	I've got to tell you, that's pretty sad.
	That's pretty sad, you know.
	I had no idea I could be an astronaut until an astronaut stood in front of me and said, you can be an astronaut.
	I mean, did they think girls were that dumb, that they simply can't possibly...
	You know, when I was growing up, Mike, I never saw, when I was a little boy in the 70s, I never saw someone come in front of me and say, you can be a philosophy podcaster when you grow up, because that's what I'm doing.
	It's like...
	Oh, come on.
	Men don't need it.
	Why the hell would girls need it?
	Well, because they're trying to cover up a basic difference between men and women that shows up statistically in these kinds of fields.
	Well, and there's lots of female-dominated fields.
	Are we going to get people from those fields to speak to young boys in elementary school?
	I mean, is this a consistent thing?
	Of course not.
	It's just female pandering.
	Anyone bothered by the fact that the, what is it, of well over 90-95% of elementary school teachers are women?
	Anyone saying, oh, we've got to get more men in there, particularly for the boys growing up without fathers?
	You know, they need a male authority figure in their life when they're young.
	Don't hear any of that crap.
	I don't know.
	I don't have the numbers in front of me with how many female coal miners there are, but, you know, there's now a market for coal that China's opened up, so maybe we could get some coal miners in front of some young girls in elementary school to see if they want to go down and possibly get black lung.
	Yes, I know there's protections against that stuff now, but blah blah blah.
	You get the black lungs matter.
	Trump signed a bill allowing further NASA funding, including an exploration to Mars, hopefully, maybe.
	And we already talked about that, so we won't go into it to any degree, but yeah, lots of people love their NASA. They love their space porn.
	I think there's been several rants on NASA over the course of the show, and people always seem to have fun.
	Showing how viciously I just hate science as a whole, right?
	Science denier!
	Would you like to talk about race and IQ? No!
	That's completely different.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Next is the import-export bank, which this is one of those criticisms that just came out because of something Trump has said.
	And people are upset about this.
	So the 83-year-old export-import bank, excuse me, lends to foreign buyers of United States goods, helping to make them more competitive globally.
	Around 40% of the export-import money is used to subsidize exports from Boeing.
	You can see why people would not like this.
	Less than 20% goes directly to small businesses.
	And previously, Trump, during the campaign, called this bank feather betting and unnecessary.
	You know, it's pretty much the critics of it say it's just a subsidy for big business, that kind of thing.
	All right, so Trump said, quote, I was very much opposed to Ex-Im Bank because I said, what do we need that for?
	IBM and General Electric and all these?
	It turns out that, first of all, lots of small companies will really be helped.
	The vendor companies.
	But also, maybe more importantly, other countries give it.
	And when other countries give it, we lose a tremendous amount of business.
	So instinctively, you would say it's a ridiculous thing.
	But actually, it's a very good thing.
	And it actually makes money.
	You know, it actually could make a lot of money.
	So that's pretty much to the point we were talking about environmental regulations before.
	If other countries are doing something and you're not doing it, it does put your businesses at a disadvantage.
	It's interesting because he certainly did change his mind on it.
	He explained why he changed his mind, and he openly said flat out that he changed his mind, which normally politicians don't do.
	Well, I'm not going to have that as a standard.
	I mean, look at the evolution of my thought over the last 10 years of public-facing policy.
	Intellectual verbiage.
	And I think it would be great if there wasn't an export-import bank, but in order for that to be achieved, then staggering amounts of regulations need to be reduced and lower the corporate tax rate.
	You know, Mike and I were doing a show, we didn't end up publishing it earlier this week, and there was a writer on the web who was talking about How the military-industrial complex was responsible, partly responsible, for the fact that Germany has a giant trade surplus and America has a giant trade deficit with regards to manufacturing.
	And we went and looked up the tax rates.
	And was it 40% close in America?
	Oh, hi, Germany.
	Oh, the German one was...
	I forget off the top of my head, but much, much lower.
	Much, much lower, to put it mildly.
	No, I don't even think it was...
	Yeah, so lower the corporate tax rate and reduce regulations, and you won't need these kinds of prop-ups.
	Again, this happened today, and a lot of people aren't talking about it, but they've already criticized Donald Trump as a flip-flopper.
	So Trump just dominated the founding member of the Tea Party Aligned Freedom Caucus in the House, Scott Garrett, to serve as president of the board of the bank.
	Now, when he was in Congress, Garrett called the Export-Import Bank a bank that embodies the corruption of the free enterprise system, end quote.
	So this is similar to his appointment to the EPA, provided that Garrett does get approved.
	It's someone who has deep skepticism of the necessity of this bank being appointed to president of the board of this bank.
	So if you're going to talk about reforms from within...
	That would be the way to go about doing it.
	And yeah, again, lots of people are just saying, well, he changed his mind, not pointing to the fact that he explained why he changed his mind and not providing the piece of detail that he nominated someone who called it a bank that embodies the corruption of the free enterprise system previously to serve as the president of the board, which kind not pointing to the fact that he explained why he changed his Called it a bank that embodies the corruption of the free enterprise system previously to serve as the president of the board, which is kind of relevant.
	If you had a cure for heroin addiction, would you really pull someone off methadone until it got implemented?
	I don't think so.
	A lot of this stuff is baby steps.
	If you just pull it right away, then stuff's going to collapse and you're getting blamed for it.
	But slow and steady, over the course of not 100 days, but hopefully four and maybe eight years, you can start to see some differences.
	So, now we move to the stuff that I kind of have in the, this is stuff that Trump has done that I don't agree with and I don't quite like.
	Obviously, regime change in Syria.
	Trump talking about that and his people talking about that.
	Now, he just gave an interview with the Wall Street Journal, which he elaborated on this, and let me know what you think of his quote stuff.
	On whether the U.S. would insist that Syria's Assad step aside, Trump said, quote, I think that there's such outrage over what he's done, and I think we've highlighted that.
	I think there's such outrage.
	Are we insisting on it?
	No.
	But I do think it's going to happen at a certain point.
	But we're not going into Syria.
	End quote.
	That's encouraging.
	Trump, on whether peace would be impossible with Assad still in place, quote, So I certainly consider that
	an encouraging sign.
	And you have not heard, over the course of the last several days...
	The usual suspects, Tillerson and Nikki Haley, really out there beating the drum for regime change.
	That seems to have been tamped down.
	So, again, if it was just the airstrikes and regime change isn't, you know, ground war, let's get troops on the ground, let's go with McMaster's plan that, again, Mike Cernovich was the first one to break for troops on the ground in Syria, and Trump said no to it.
	If that's not going to happen, then okay.
	We're not in a very bad place.
	We're not in a bad place.
	It seems to be going as sort of, at least I predicted, that he was going to talk tough and then fog it afterwards.
	And I think that's perfectly fine.
	That's perfectly fine.
	So, next up on the list, on the things that are not so great, the whole handling of the Obamacare repeal.
	As I said before, Trump gets credit for the good and the bad, being the man in the big chair.
	That's the job.
	That didn't go so well, and I know that there's people that say this was a 3-D chess move to discredit Paul Ryan, but that doesn't really have a null hypothesis.
	The first major legislation that you're going to try and affect, I mean, you could say the immigration stuff, but that's executive order.
	That's different.
	The fact that the first big step was a fail?
	Not great.
	Not great at all.
	He should have gone for taxes, in my opinion.
	Well, we did a whole show, breaking down all the things that could be done in the healthcare field to bring prices down and make it more efficient.
	The problem is, and this is a fair critique, and plays into our next point, which Trump went off on the Freedom Caucus, the House Freedom Caucus, which, you know, they're more Tea Party, small government-ish type people.
	Politics is the art of the possible.
	If you don't have enough votes to do what you want to do, it doesn't really matter.
	If you want to do it, you can't get it done.
	He's not a dictator, as we've mentioned.
	Despite the fact that they want to say Donald Trump is this, that, and everything, he's not a dictator.
	He's actually got to pass some stuff.
	So there's not enough people in there to pass what the Freedom Caucus would like to pass, but I'd probably like to see passed.
	So that's a challenge.
	There's other ways to go about it.
	It's a bit complicated.
	But...
	Yeah, not exactly the best thing to go on first and have a dust-up about and a failure, a public failure.
	And yes, Paul Ryan comes out looking terrible, but Paul Ryan was looking terrible before that.
	The fact that Trump chose to trust Paul Ryan with his deal doesn't exactly make him look great when it comes to the Obamacare repeal.
	The other thing, too, is that when it comes to healthcare in particular, there is going to be visible suffering with anything that changes with regards to healthcare.
	And it's not really the same with tax cuts.
	I mean, there'll be outrage among the, you know, radical egalitarian crowd and so on.
	But with healthcare, anytime you touch it, there are going to be winners and there are going to be losers.
	And some people, when you start touching healthcare and you start changing the incentives and you start changing payment structures, some people are going to suffer.
	And, you know, I wish it wasn't the case, but, you know, if you've got a town where everyone, you know, they've been putting some sort of addictive drug into the water, then getting people off that addictive drug is going to cause suffering.
	And America has become, and it's not just America, this is the West as a whole, has become peculiarly allergic to suffering.
	In the past, it's like, well, we've got to send millions of men off to war.
	Well, maybe that's the clue that it's men, right?
	But there is going to be suffering with regards to health care change.
	And the media, of course, is going to find everybody negatively impacted by health care change and saying, this person can no longer get the medication that they wanted.
	Even though people who are actually on Medicare have worse health outcomes than people who don't have access to it.
	But they'll find some sad...
	Faced person with tubes up their nose and tubes in their arms and so on who will be suffering because of some change in the way that healthcare is funded or delivered.
	And that's a very, very tough thing to overcome because people react emotionally so much these days that when they are presented image of somebody suffering because of healthcare change, people are like, well, we can't have that happen.
	You know, I mean, suffering has happened in all kinds of changes.
	I mean, America wouldn't exist if people didn't want to suffer to bring it about.
	Well, and some of the changes that can be made without suffering are not easy, such as tort reform.
	If Trump starts talking about tort reform, boy, you're going to get just about every lawyer in America gunning for Trump and suing him to stop the reform.
	So that's not exactly the path of least resistance, especially when you're trying to do a bunch of other things.
	You see, with tort reform, all the lawyers will put forward, this person was viciously harmed by this hospital, but now they can't get recompense because Trump has changed and he's starving.
	Even that.
	Yeah, that's true.
	That's true.
	So there's not a whole lot of good solutions.
	You start going after the price of drugs, you're going to get attacked by the pharmaceutical companies.
	There's someone to oppose every single step that you can take that will make healthcare cheaper.
	You know, this might not be done this year.
	There might not be improvements this year.
	It might take Obamacare completely failing to get some kind of change.
	But at least we have an administration that will let it fail.
	I mean, Obamacare has been a failure from the beginning.
	They've just been pillaging every single public purse they can get a hold of in order to prop it up, and that won't, I think, happen under Trump.
	That's true, although he is talking about, after the Obamacare or Ryancare situation, he was talking about now tasked Tax cuts.
	And now it's back to, I want to get healthcare done first.
	So healthcare is back on the block before tax cuts.
	So there's people concerned, like, okay, are tax cuts going to happen now?
	Because the healthcare thing is a huge, huge challenge.
	So we'll see what happens, but that certainly was something in the loss column for Trump, and I don't think that can be reasonably disputed with a 3D chess hypothesis.
	Now, one of the biggest criticisms of Trump that not many people are mentioning, Mike Cernovich mentions this, and there's some people in the alternative media that have pointed this out, but I think Trump's Communication and messaging is probably the biggest.
	I don't want to say failure, but certainly the spot on the resume that needs the most improvement.
	I mean, the mainstream media is continuing to do that, which the mainstream media does.
	And I'm telling you, Trump needs to get out and talk to the people directly.
	When he did that press conference way back when, where he tore into the mainstream media called CNN fake news.
	Like, I know time is valuable.
	He's involved in a lot of different things.
	Sometimes you can't put yourself in front of the press, especially if you're doing military-related stuff, because you can't talk about certain things and not answering questions oftentimes is answering a question.
	So it is tough.
	But I would like to see him get out in front of the people more.
	And he can do that without doing press conferences.
	I'd like to see the press conferences, because good God, that press conference he gave before was a morale raiser for all the people that supported his campaign.
	But I'd like to see him involved in his own messaging.
	I'd like to see more tweeting.
	And not measured.
	I mean, he's the president, so it's got to be a little more measured than it was during the campaign.
	But I want to hear from Donald Trump.
	I want to hear from the president of the United States directly.
	He can do he can do YouTube.
	He can do Periscope.
	He can do FaceTime.
	He can do all kinds of stuff.
	I want to hear his thoughts on what's going on when it's going on.
	And I don't want it filtered through the mainstream media.
	I want to hear from him directly.
	And I think if more of that had been done leading up to the situation in Syria, I don't think people would have been at the point of like, oh, man, you know, like he tries to do immigration and that gets stopped by activist judges.
	Okay, we're trying to do healthcare.
	Oh man, that didn't go so well.
	Oh man, I think people were poised to be like, oh man, Trump!
	And then maybe if you talk to people a bit more before that, when regime change – well, people are going to be upset about regime change anyway.
	But the missile strike and all that, I think people would have been a much better place to hear out what he had to say if messaging had been better.
	So I think that's the thing that really needs to be improved going forward.
	And there are other people suggesting this, but I hope the administration listens and gives us some more Trump talking directly to the people that walked into the ballot box, pulled the lever or pushed the button to put him in the position he's in now.
	Right.
	All right.
	There's some false criticisms floating around of Trump.
	We mentioned a few earlier.
	Here's a few more.
	So, we were discussing the whole China situation, the brilliant deal that Trump clearly worked out to some degree to get China to now take American coal instead of North Korean coal.
	People were upset because Trump had promised he was going to declare China a currency manipulator.
	So, on his contract for first 100 days, he says, "Instruct the Treasury Secretary to label China a currency manipulator." Now as we mentioned, every country is a currency manipulator.
	The U.S. is in a glass house throwing stones if it wants to go that direction.
	President Trump says he offered the Chinese president a more favorable trade deal for Beijing in exchange for his help on confronting the threat of North Korea.
	We have tremendous trade deficits with everybody, but the big one is with China.
	It's hundreds of billions of dollars a year for many, many years.
	And I told them, I said, you know, we're not going to let that go ahead.
	Now, I did say, but if you want to make a great deal, solve the problem in North Korea.
	That's worth having deficits.
	And that's worth not having as good a trade deal as I normally would be able to make, okay?
	I'll make great deals.
	You cannot allow a country like that, North Korea, to have nuclear power, nuclear weapons.
	That's mass destruction.
	And he doesn't have the delivery systems yet, but he, you know, he will.
	So, you know, we had a very open dialogue on North Korea, end quote.
	So the fact that Trump has had some very productive conversations with China, Which have led to major steps, such as the moving of who China is importing coal from.
	Now's not the time to say China's a currency manipulator and start throwing that relationship into a state of disarray, especially considering the United States is a currency manipulator and every country is a currency manipulator for the most part.
	Another point that people are very upset about recently, the Federal Reserve and Janet Yellen.
	So, President Donald Trump said this Wednesday that the U.S. dollar is, quote, getting too strong, and that he would prefer the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low.
	And people were very upset about that.
	So, Trump was asked whether Yellen was toast when it came to being nominated for another term.
	Now, keep in mind, this is the same Janet Yellen who kept interest rates incredibly low throughout Barack Obama's tenure, and has inched them up a couple times since, uh, Trump got elected.
	When you have as much debt as the United States does, high interest rates winds up being a bit of a challenge.
	So Trump said, quote, No, not toast.
	You know, I like her.
	I respect her.
	She's been here.
	She's been in that seat.
	I do like low interest rate policy, but I must be honest with you.
	I think our dollar is getting too strong, and particularly that's my fault because people have confidence in me.
	But you know, that's hurting.
	That will hurt ultimately.
	Look, there are some very good things about a strong dollar, but usually speaking, the best thing about it is that it sounds good.
	You know, it's very, very hard to compete when you have a strong dollar and the other guy, other countries devaluing their currency.
	It's very hard for our manufacturers to compete.
	End quote.
	So many people thought like it was just a given that Trump was going to pick a new head for the central bank when her term was up.
	I don't think this necessarily changes that at all.
	Do you really want to go to war with the head of the Fed when she's still got many, many months left on her term?
	Is that really what you want to do when she could raise interest rates and crash the economy?
	Well, this is the thing, right?
	I mean, people have to remember that Trump is presiding over an economy which has 600,000 different tripwires that can blow it all up, which will all be blamed by the economically illiterate masses following the lead of the economically illiterate mainstream media that are heavily biased towards the left. which will all be blamed by the economically illiterate masses If there's any economic dislocation or recession or depression, it'll all be blamed on Trump.
	And there are so many people who can pull that tripwire.
	And it goes back to saying he didn't like Fed policy.
	So maybe he talked about getting rid of Janet Yellen.
	And then if Janet Yellen is going to do, even perhaps based on what he said, do more of what he wants, then he doesn't need to get rid of her.
	I mean, again, they are opening negotiation gambits, right?
	His famous book, The Art of the Deal.
	They're opening negotiation gambits.
	You know, if you don't want to pay $10,000 for the used car and you say, well, the most I want to pay is seven and you end up going for eight, are you a liar?
	Have you flip-flopped?
	It's an opening negotiating gambit.
	You know, what order should this stuff be done in?
	Gee, I don't know.
	That's why Trump has the job.
	And it's a difficult job.
	And going to war with the Fed first, you probably want to get your feet under you when it comes to some...
	Getting some stability in the job market and some other stuff to the degree that is possible in the current economic climate.
	If Trump is able to do that, you'd probably want to get some of that stuff happening before you go to war with the Fed, start putting out the audit, the Fed bill, and all that kind of stuff.
	So again, is this a flip-flop?
	It's hard to say that it is if you are aware of just dynamics.
	You're not going to say someone's toast when A, you're not focusing on that right now, and B, the person could do some serious damage to you if they wanted to in the short term.
	All right, next up is NATO. And this was, I've seen this repeated from lots of people, including people that I trust.
	And I dug into it and it's like, hey, the claim is Trump flip-flopped on NATO. No, no, he hasn't.
	Not at all.
	Not even close.
	But it's being repeated.
	Stop repeating it.
	So during the campaign, Trump at times declared NATO was, quote, obsolete.
	But after meeting with the NATO Secretary General, Trump said that the alliance is, quote, no longer obsolete.
	So now it's, Trump flip-flopped.
	NATO is not obsolete.
	He said it was.
	Okay.
	You're noticing a trend with these.
	So on March 21st, 2016, Trump said, quote, so last year, folks, almost over a full year ago, Trump said, no, I don't want to pull it out.
	NATO was set up at a different time.
	NATO was set up when we were a richer country.
	We're not a rich country anymore.
	We're borrowing.
	We're borrowing all this money.
	We're borrowing money from China, which is sort of an amusing situation.
	But it was so much different thing.
	NATO is costing us a fortune.
	Yes, we're protecting Europe with NATO, but we're spending a lot of money.
	Number one, I think the distribution of costs has to be changed.
	I think NATO as a concept is good, but it is not as good as when it first evolved.
	Okay?
	So that was in March of last year.
	Now, Trump was asked around that time, do you think the United States needs to rethink U.S. involvement in NATO? Trump said, yes, because it's costing us too much money.
	And frankly, they have to put up more money.
	They're going to have to put some up also.
	We're paying disproportionately.
	It's too much.
	And frankly, it's a different world than it was when we originally conceived of the idea.
	And everybody got together.
	But we're taking care of, as an example, the Ukraine.
	I mean, the countries over there don't seem to be so interested.
	We're the ones taking the brunt of it.
	So I think we have to reconsider, keep NATO, but maybe we have to pay a lot less towards the NATO itself.
	He was asked, So you're really suggesting that the United States should decrease its role in NATO? And Trump responded, So on April 4th of last year, again...
	Trump commented on people responding to this saying he wanted to leave NATO and that saying.
	And the press, which is so totally dishonest, the press goes to headlines the next day, Trump doesn't want NATO, wants to disband.
	That's not what I said.
	And said, you've got to pay your bills.
	And you know what?
	If they can't pay their bills, honestly, there should be, they've got to go because we can't do this.
	Okay?
	It would be the greatest thing for Europe to have Europe spend more on defense.
	It would starve their giant, disastrous welfare programs of enough money to attract everybody on the planet, and it would remind them, of course, that the world is a dangerous place and they need to stay alert.
	When you can offload your costs to someone else, all of a sudden, hey, we can expend money in all types of interesting areas which may not be to our benefit.
	Funny how that works.
	So April 27th, Trump said, The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense.
	And if not, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves.
	We have no choice.
	So all of his stuff is around they have to pay their fair share.
	They have to actually pay for the defense that the U.S. has been paying into for a long, long time.
	Then again, on July 27th of last year, I think NATO's great, but it's got to be modernized.
	And countries that we're protecting have to pay what they're supposed to be paying, end quote.
	Completely consistent.
	So about 3.6% of all U.S. GDP goes towards defense spending, which is way above NATO's official guidelines, and member countries or member states have to spend at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.
	So the U.S. is almost twice that, but in 2016 only Five of the 28 countries in the alliance hit the target of at least 2%.
	That's US, Greece, Poland, Estonia, and the UK. And only 10 member states out of the 28 in NATO spend the required 20% of their defense budgets on major equipment.
	So yeah, it's just a form of war welfare and it should stop.
	So in December, some NATO allies moved towards Trump.
	Funny how that works.
	And vowed to contribute equipment and additional funds, as the agreement says in the first place.
	Is NATO obsolete or was NATO obsolete as it had been previously, which Trump pretty much described?
	The issue is the funding and the fact that the U.S. is subsidizing the defense of other countries and can't continue to do that.
	So Trump in this meeting with the Secretary General said, quote, Now the NATO Secretary General,
	Jens Stolzenberg, said, quote, Sure.
	Now that you're bringing up that we're parasitical cheapskates, I guess we'll have to change.
	Damn.
	We have now turned a corner, end quote.
	So here you have the Secretary General of NATO saying that Trump has had an impact on other member states and people are talking about, okay, someone's finally paying attention and it's going to have us live up to the agreement that we agreed to.
	Darn it.
	So, is it obsolete now?
	If the U.S. is no longer subsidizing them, then that's a different question.
	It doesn't mean stay in NATO, but it may be a different game and a different conversation to have.
	So again, this isn't a flip-flop.
	And so many people, even people I really like and respect, are saying it's a flip-flop.
	And good God, it is not.
	Well, of course, NATO was formed with the threat of the Cold War, with the threat of the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
	And that disappeared decades ago.
	And Trump's right, of course, the big challenge, the big destabilization factor facing Europe is now terrorism.
	In fact, just last month, France was tracking 17,000 potential terrorists within their own borders.
	Yeah, because that's really possible.
	And so if NATO, if they're not chipping in and they're facing an enemy that's long gone, guess what?
	They're kind of obsolete.
	Mm-hmm.
	If they're refocused towards terrorism and they pay their fair share, it's a different ballgame.
	That's pretty simple, folks.
	Pretty simple.
	But you'll read on CNN and other things, Trump flip-flops on NATO, betrays supporters and promises.
	It's bullshit and it's bad for you.
	Trump accomplishments, some lies about Trump, some things Trump has done that haven't exactly gone the way his supporters would like.
	But overall, I mean, I looked at this list and I'm like, good God, this man has accomplished some pretty impressive stuff in a short amount of time while facing opposition from everybody that there is there to face opposition from.
	You got the media, you got the establishment Republicans, you got the Democrats.
	You got all the international nonsense that goes into it.
	And, I mean, you look at his contract for 100 days, and he's made a decent dent in it.
	Given the opposition, that's really impressive.
	So I hope people were encouraged listening to this as I was putting it together, going, I'll be damned.
	The SOB's done a pretty remarkable job given everything he's faced.
	And some of this, oh man, we've been betrayed.
	Donald Trump is terrible.
	Hillary Clinton, blah, blah, blah.
	I hope that starts to fade out because we got a lot more time left in the four years.
	And if he continues at this pace, a lot of great stuff is going to be accomplished before the end of his first term.
	And when you criticize someone who's Taking a deviation from the high standards you're expected, that's not because you think they're bad.
	It's because you think they're better than what they're doing in the moment.
	If you have Pavarotti in your opera and he hits a couple of bum notes and you say, hey Pavarotti, those are really bad notes.
	What do you need?
	How are we going to fix those up or whatever?
	That's not because you think that Pavarotti is bad.
	It's because you know how good he could be.
	And I know that we get criticism, too.
	And some people, of course, do it in a negative way.
	And some people do it because they know how great this show can be.
	And if it's not meeting that standard, they get frustrated.
	I understand that.
	I understand that.
	You know, like Freddie Mercury, when he was starting a tour, had the most amazing voice.
	It tired pretty quickly.
	He was too lazy to take singing lessons, so he never quite got around to using his voice in the right way.
	He had terrible nodules and so on.
	But it's frustrating.
	You know, you're paying to hear a great singer and he's like cracking his way.
	I think there was one concert he actually had to cancel a couple of songs in.
	His throat was hurting too much.
	So it's frustrating when people aren't living up to their potential and criticizing them on those grounds is not out of contempt or hatred.
	It is out of a kind of frustrated love.
	And we accept it.
	And the funny thing, too, is that people are yelling at us, you know, you shouldn't criticize Trump.
	You're better than that.
	that it's like so we should change our behavior to conform to a higher standard that you have for us but we should not ask trump to conform his behavior to a higher standard that we have of his okay got it you hypocrites yeah there's something i'd like to close with The people that are shamelessly cheerleading someone as they say that they might do something which is completely impossible.
	Completely impossible.
	You're not going to get IQ. 83 at best people to form a safe regime and a democracy with peace, love and happiness.
	It's not going to happen.
	And if you shamelessly cheerlead as someone flirts in that direction or people associated with Trump make claims in that direction, you're not helping the guy.
	You're not helping the guy at all.
	So anyone that doesn't push back against regime change in Syria or Middle Eastern countries with IQs...
	Hovering around the 80s, you need to look at yourself in the mirror because you're not helping the guy that you elected.
	You're not helping the guy that you claim to support.
	You're hindering him and leading him down a primrose path.
	If a blind guy is wandering into traffic, you don't go, I'm sure he knows what he's doing.
	No, you go, excuse me, blind man.
	You probably don't want to march into the path of that oncoming truck.
	That's something you probably want to do.
	But if you are the type that may or may not want to just watch the blind man march into traffic so he gets hit time after time after time and flies through the air after vehicles strike him, crack his bones, his skull, and many other interesting parts of his anatomy, if you want to watch that, watch him fly and watch him splat, well, that's your own prerogative.
	But you're not going to have my support, and I think you're doing more damage to the person you claim to support than if you were to just be honest about the facts.
	In the first place.
	So that's all I have to say on the matter.
	But shameless cheerleading?
	Yeah, I don't think so.
	I'm not on that team.
	The only time I'm getting off the Trump train is if Trump gets off it himself.
	You invade a country in the Middle East.
	You're going to activate a bunch of sleeper cells or other reactionary cells within Europe and within America.
	Lots of terrorist attacks and stifling of the domestic agenda and so on.
	And the other thing, Mike, just in your analogy, Let's say it takes place in Europe, this analogy.
	Who's driving that truck?
	No wait!
	I don't think we need to answer that one right now, but it's something people think about.
	So thanks so much everyone so much for listening and please let us know again what we can change, what we can improve, what we can remove.
	Hey, maybe next week we'll do a bunch of separate stories instead of Syria, the state of Trump.
	We'll hopefully be able to do a bunch of separate stories next week, but thank you for your patience as we delve into the big main topics.
	Yeah, I hope it's helpful.
	That's sort of what it is aimed to be.
	And please don't forget to go to freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	That's freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	The link is in...
	The video notes.
	And please, please help us out with a subscription or a one-time donation.
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