Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the bench deliver a shocking win for President Trump by staying an injunction against his federal grant freeze targeting 21 states, including New York. This move halts Attorney General Letitia James's lawsuit accusing the administration of unconstitutional overreach regarding DEI and transgender policies, while simultaneously igniting controversy over the firing of NSA Director Tim Howe amid "Signalgate" conspiracy theories. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent negotiates with Japan amidst China's stock market crash, the episode concludes that these legal and economic maneuvers signal a decisive shift in executive power, leaving James's "sincere ignorance" rhetoric exposed as politically futile. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Supreme Court Smacks Down Judge00:07:59
Going on at this moment in time.
Supreme Court, kind of smacking down one Leticia James here, if you would.
This is a huge deal, you guys.
Welcome to the program.
I am Trish Reagan.
This is the Trish Reagan show.
We're going to talk all about Leticia's latest woe here.
Looks like New York's not going to get any of that money that it was counting on.
And then, of course well, you've got questions still mounting about just why exactly Donald Trump tossed out that head of the NSA as well as well some, some people there at NSC.
We're going to talk about that.
Meanwhile, oh my gosh, look at what's going on with China.
We got a market that kind of fell out of bed, but then recovered.
I mean, wow, the drama, the drama in the stock market today.
We're going to talk all about that and whether or not volatility is really here to stay.
We do know one thing.
China is basically toast at this point.
Yeah, like they need us a lot.
We are the only people out there that buy their goods.
Who else is going to buy all those Chinese trinkets that are littering your hallways?
Yep, that would be the US of A.
So Donald Trump threatening now another 50% tariff.
Meanwhile, negotiating quite nicely with Japan because Scott Besant just issued a note.
He is sitting down with Japan and negotiations have begun.
In other words, we're going to restructure this thing so that we got the good guys on our side.
Welcome to the program.
I am Tushri again.
Make sure you subscribe, share, like, comment, all that good stuff.
We're live.
I'm looking at everything you're talking about.
David Lorenzo, good to see you here.
Peace in my mind, all of you.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, Supreme Court just issuing kind of a victory, if you would for one Donald Trump.
Basically he put a freeze on all those federal funds that were going to all these states that, well, let's just say aren't really aligned with his way of thinking on such things like immigration, on such things as sports, women's sports, and on such things as education, DEI, etc.
So he said, you know what?
I'm going to actually just put a giant freeze on all the money that you guys are getting.
Pam Bondi announced it, and well, they didn't take to it so kindly.
In fact, what happened was they decided to sue after his department came out and said, well, you know, Doge is looking at this and we've decided that all of these federal grants need to have a moment in time that we like review them because, quote, the use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and Green New Deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.
This is according to the acting director of the OMB.
He went on to say this temporary pause will provide the administration time to review agency programs and determine the best use of funding for those programs consistent with the law and the president's priorities.
To implement these orders, each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all their federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the president's executive orders.
So in other words, they're saying, okay, you guys, you've got to actually show us if this is worth it and whether or not it's compliant.
And if you don't want to, well, we're going to figure it out because we've got Elon and we've got Doge.
Remember that mid-February?
Doge was getting in there and seeing where all these crazy, crazy, crazy spending boondoggles went and Leticia James at the time went nuts.
Elon can't do that, she told us.
No one elected Elon Musk and his minions, and no one has allowed him to have access to this information.
This is a violation of the separation of powers.
The United States Congress, the United States Senate, has the sole discretion in having the power of the purse, and not Elon Musk.
We are here today to seek a preliminary injunction to stand up against those forces.
Who believe that they can unilaterally have power and have control, all in the hands of the president of these United States?
Hmm.
Well, that didn't work out so well.
Because what happened was the judge decided oh, yeah, Doge can get in there.
I mean, we're not even getting to the Supreme Court stuff, but they decided that, we'll get there.
They decided that, yeah, absolutely, Doge had the authority to do this.
Here's Jonathan Turley explaining it.
You know, they need to get inside the books.
In order to figure out what's going on, you can't wall that stuff off.
It's federal money, for goodness sakes.
The fact that one of these arguments occurred on President's Day is a sort of reminder that we actually do have a president.
There's someone who is in charge of the executive branch.
And you have states and judges, a few, that have seemed to have forgotten that.
But you're now beginning to see judges come to a more sober realization.
I've been mystified by many of these challenges.
In my view, the president has this authority, they can see these records.
It's a bizarre type of argument, Sandra.
It's sort of the Bernie Madoff approach to government efficiency.
You can go ahead and reform, but don't look at the books.
I mean, they obviously need to look at the receipts.
They need to look at where the money has gone in order to make these judgments.
And they seem to be finding a great deal of waste.
And I think that judges that aggressively try to prevent that are likely to be reversed.
And, Sandra, I think that when they got Judge Chutkin, who's viewed as not exactly supportive, Of President Trump, they thought this would be a slam dunk.
But even Judge Chutkin, they said, Look, I don't understand.
Where's my authority here?
And where's the imminent harm?
I mean, it's incredibly telling the way the judge responded here.
Okay, so that was to allow for Doge to get in and take a look at all this stuff.
And then Pam Bondi came out and she said, You know what?
We're cutting y'all off.
And Leticia James went berserk.
Remember this one?
Not only does this administration's new policy put people at risk, but it is.
Plainly unconstitutional.
The president does not get to decide which laws to enforce and for whom.
When Congress dedicates funding for a program, the president cannot pull that funding on a whim.
Well, guess what?
He decided to pull it.
And by the way, the Supreme Court just backed him.
It's a temporary order, but he's certainly been vindicated here.
Supreme Court coming out with a decision to stay a preliminary injunction against his freeze on federal grants, basically tens of billions of dollars that we're talking about, okay, that goes to 21 states, including New York.
She's the one that led this whole lawsuit.
It's going to have a big effect on all the different aspects of New York government and the other 20 states here that are involved.
So the court falls the the 4th, the April 4th Supreme Court victory, which in some ways could be a major assistance to the Trump administration's attempts to slash the federal budget, if you ask me.
You combine these two things together, and what it tells you is that the feds actually have a little bit more power than you might have thought.
So this is a really, really, really big deal.
That freeze on federal grants that would be going to all these states all over the country, 21 of them in Washington, D.C. as well, they're all fighting this.
They've gone through Rhode Island.
We've been covering it in and out, sort of the nitty-gritty.
here on the Trish Regan show.
So this is a big deal.
Okay, this is a big deal.
He's been vindicated and Letitia is in like meltdown mode.
I mean, she was not happy.
Did you guys see her on Friday?
Remember on Friday, I actually showed you some of that sound because she really, by the way, John Doyle, thank you.
Thank you for the generosity.
Much appreciated.
We're all independent here on the Trish Regan show.
The Stone of Hope00:03:10
Always appreciate your support.
She was out on Friday.
Letitia James, did you guys see?
Letitia had this complete Total meltdown.
It's like she knew this was coming.
She knew that the Supreme Court was going to come out on Monday and they were going to say, okay, no go.
You do not have access to those federal funds, at least not in the here and now, because Donald Trump as president and the feds, they have the right to look over where all of this money is going to see if it fits with their policies.
And it's like she sensed it, right?
Because did you notice how unhinged she was?
I mean, she was like completely off the rails, misquoting scripture in the whole nine yards, plus getting into the MLK stuff.
I want you to see it.
I want you to see it, and if you saw it before, you can watch it again because this is Letitia in all her prime getting totally crazy.
Again, I apologize.
Listen.
You might need to turn it up.
Years after the assassination of Dr. King.
And Dr. King talked about that stone of hope.
And it's that stone of hope that gives me a fire in my belly each and every morning.
It's that stone of hope that allows me to wake up and to stand to Donald Trump and to say, Donald Trump, I'm not afraid of you.
It's that stone of hope.
It's that stone of hope.
That gives me power, that's that stone of hope, and the belief in each and every one of you to let you know that I'm not going to allow my ancestors, all of those who died for me to be in this position, I am not going to disgrace them and disappoint them.
I am going to use the law both as a sword and as a shield and challenge Donald Trump.
And each and every time he issues an executive and illegal executive order, I am going to stand up to him because he represents to me sincere.
Ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity and so DEI as far as I am concerned is more than about just black people let's be honest DEI is about paid parental leave DEI is about disabled children DEI includes a number of categories so when they talk about DEI let them know that they're not only coming after us but they're coming after all of us fired up.
Sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
And so, DEI, as far as I am concerned, is more than about just black people, let's be honest.
DEI is about paid parental leave.
DEI is about disabled children.
DEI includes a number of categories.
So, when they talk about DEI, let them know that they're not only coming after us, but they're coming after all of us.
And we've got to stand together, a stand in community.
Stand with this great organization under the leadership of our civil rights leader, Reverend Al Sharpton, who has been a light, a bright and shining light in the darkness.
But I don't know about you, it's that stone of hope that inspires me each and every day.
And listen, faith and fear can never share the same space.
And so I'm covered by the blood, and I'm not afraid of Donald Trump.
You can come after me, but no enemy, nothing.
Formed against me will perish.
Nothing formed against me.
Violation of Federal Law00:05:42
All right, all right.
You go, girl, says Rev Sharpton, who collected $500,000 from Kamala's campaign before he interviewed her on MSNBC.
Corruption.
Now we're going to pan over to Rev. You thought you could preach, huh?
All right, all right.
They're having a good old time, but that was just hours before the news came on the Supreme Court.
Deciding that.
You know what he's got a leg to stand on here.
In other words, Leticia James, if New York is spending our federal taxpayer dollars in ways that it should not whether it be bringing in illegals, whether it be supporting dei efforts which the administration has said and, by the way, just take a look at the constitution happens to be unconstitutional then guess what?
You're in violation of federal law.
And so he doesn't have to give you any money.
Pam Bondy came out and said this few weeks ago, right, remember she?
She said, i'm shutting it off.
I'm shutting it off because, For goodness sakes, you people have no interest in upholding federal law, certainly when it comes to migrants that you're just welcoming in with hotel rooms and ethnically appropriate food to the tune of $300 and some odd dollars a week.
My gosh, Pam said, you guys are all getting sued.
And if you don't comply with federal law, we will hold you accountable.
We did it to Illinois, strike one.
Strike two is New York.
And if you are a state not complying with federal law, you're next.
Get ready.
And the great men and women of law enforcement are standing behind me today.
We have FBI, DEA, ATF agents.
ATF agents.
They put their lives on the line every single day to protect us.
And what New York has, they have green light laws, meaning they're giving a green light to any illegal alien in New York where law enforcement officers cannot check their identity if they pull them over.
Law enforcement officers do not have access to their background.
And if these great men and women pull over someone and don't have access to their background, they have no idea who they're dealing with.
Puts their lives on the line every single day.
Violent criminals, gang members, drug traffickers, human smugglers will no longer terrorize the American people.
And that is why we are here today.
You will be held accountable if you do not follow federal law.
It's over, it ends, and we're coming after you.
Okay, well, you better get ready, Pam, because you got a lot of work to do, certainly with one Leticia James.
I get it, you stopped her funding.
That's fantastic.
And now the Supreme Court has said, yeah, at least temporarily.
You can totally stop her funding.
So Letitia's out of money.
She doesn't have the federal funds to do all these crazy things, including, well, the immigration policies that they were putting in place.
She is flagrantly flaunting the law here, putting on her Twitter account, New York has laws that protect immigrants and limit cooperation.
Limit!
Imagine that!
Cooperation with federal immigration enforcement efforts.
What planet are these people living on?
These laws should be followed by law enforcement and officials in our state.
I'm always upholding our laws to protect.
immigrant New York.
So are you like your own little island there?
Are you just like another country?
If you are, then hey, you know, maybe you should go join Canada.
Of course, we might gobble you up too.
Just saying.
Anyway, these people are unbelievable.
Consider, consider what New York has been up against.
Consider what Texas has been up against.
The entire country has been up against as they've been flooding all of these people in.
It's finally come to a stop down 96% since Donald Trump took office.
But listen to John Ansfinden.
He just testified before Congress a couple of weeks ago.
This is the guy who's the VP.
On the border patrol, and he's like, it was nuts.
It was nuts, okay?
And Letitia wants this.
President Biden's executive actions and inactions during his term resulted in an unprecedented security and humanitarian crisis along our borders.
It didn't have to be this way, and we have to do whatever we can to prevent it from happening again.
Not only was the entire world encouraged to essentially illegally cross our borders, primarily with the goal of abusing the asylum system, but it caused our agents to be sidelined, left unable to do their jobs.
Our job shifted from that of law enforcement to that of processing asylum claims, since sitting behind computers on a virtual assembly line while illegal aliens disappeared into the country because we weren't there to do it.
And a lot of these folks were only discovered later after being arrested for all sorts of crimes, some of them minor and some of them horrific.
To put this in context, during the 12 years of Presidents Obama and Trump, there were approximately 1.6 million gotaways across all 12 years.
During President Biden's four years, there were over 2 million.
Now, this surge overwhelmed our resources and it led to tragic consequences.
During President Biden's tenure, we saw an average of 690 deaths at the border per year, with FY22 being the worst, and there were over 900 deaths of people trying to cross the border.
You compare that to an average of 370 deaths per year under President Obama and 280 under President Trump.
And now all of these deaths are unfortunate, but it gives you an idea of how out of control things were or became over the past four years.
Yeah, out of control.
Totally out of control.
And you got to start to ask yourself, like, what was this about?
You look at what Elon's been finding, right?
And there's more to come on that this week.
Elon and Doge have found that they were giving out, well, they're saying social security numbers.
It's mind-boggling, right?
To all of these people that were here illegally.
Elon Musk Vetting Conjecture00:14:54
And then the next question is, what was going on on the voting process?
Because New York wanted 800,000 of them to actually be able to vote in local elections and state elections.
800,000 people here illegally and they get to vote?
Are you kidding me?
Well, finally a New York state court actually turned that one down.
800,000 illegals voting in a state election.
You see what direction they're taking this in, ladies and gentlemen.
So yeah, Letitia's kind of bummed out.
Letitia's depressed.
Letitia lost.
Okay.
She lost and she's going to lose again and lose again.
I'm annoyed because I'm still waiting on that second court of appeals.
I'm still waiting to figure out when they're going to throw that case that she brought against Donald Trump to the tune of $500 plus million.
You know, with interest, it adds up.
When are they going to throw that one out?
That's still sitting around, even though those judges know damn well it has no legal merit.
So we're still waiting on that.
And I suspect there's reasons for it, right?
They're trying to like hold it out in case they need to go after him, this, that, and the other.
But it's pretty gross.
You know what else was kind of gross?
Craziness in the market today.
I got to tell you, gold was down a little bit.
Whenever anything's down, like I like to get in.
And so actually I was buying just as the market opened, I got some gold.
I got some.
Triple qs right, triple qm.
On the Nasdaq.
I got some broad exposure in the S?
P and some some, as they call them diamonds diamonds uh, over on the Dow, and it's been a wild ride.
We've been up, down and all around.
As we come up on the close of trading right now, I want to point out I think, gold still suffering a little bit off its highs, you get the Nasdaq trading basically flat, the S P basically flat, the Dow off a percent.
It could have been a whole lot worse.
Anyway, one of the ways I even out my portfolio and protect myself against inflation and some of these crazy, crazy moments is through gold, and you can do that too.
You know we're an independent show, so we are thankful for all of our sponsors here, and American Heart FOR GOLD is one of them.
You can get up to fifteen thousand dollars right now in free silver if you text my name Trish, to 655-32 or call him at 1-844-495-1115 up to fifteen thousand dollars right now in free silver, or you can just go to Trishlovesgold.com.
Trishlovesgold.com.
We're going to talk a little bit more about the markets.
I'm going to tell you a little bit more about what we've been doing over at 76, Research in light of everything.
But before we do, I have a question.
What about the spies among us?
What about the spies that are there deeply embedded within even, dare I say, the president's inner circle?
I wonder, because when I go back to this whole Signalgate thing, I keep coming back to the same conclusion.
I think this was a setup.
I think that there's no way that he just somehow, miraculously, put in a very liberal reporter by the name of Jeffrey Goldberg, who works at The Atlantic, into his phone.
I think Mike Waltz actually would not have done that.
Apparently he was listed as somebody else in his phone.
Like the whole thing makes totally no sense.
And so I think Donald Trump's looking at it and he's like, okay, yeah, no, this really doesn't make sense.
And he trusts John Radcliffe and he trusts Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth, et cetera, and Tulsi.
So he's like, how could this have happened?
Is there some kind of security flaw?
After all, it was Biden's CIA that said, here you go.
Go for it.
Signal's secure.
Go ahead and use it.
By the way, you know who's on the board of Signal?
Six degrees of separation.
That would be one, Catherine Marr. who's head of NPR, which uses all that sort of, how do I say, USAID money that gets sort of washed and filtered through and then winds up helping to program.
That's a whole other story on the kind of money laundering that they seem to be doing with these NPR stations because, yeah, your taxpayer dollars do go towards it.
Anyway, David Haw got, forgive me, Timothy Haw got completely canned there on what?
Was that Friday?
Thursday night at like 11 o'clock?
And the news cycle's fast, right?
You gotta keep up, baby.
You gotta keep up.
He's out.
He was in charge of cyber command.
And everybody's like, oh, it's because of Laura Loomer, this conservative reporter that I know.
And I'm like, really?
Is that all it is?
I mean, hey, you know, more power to her, but I don't think that's it.
I think they may be using her as the fall guy.
But Donald Trump is looking around and he's saying, hey, wait a second.
The head of the NSA actually controls all these communications.
The head of the NSA could certainly get into one's phone like Michael Waltz's, change contacts.
This is conjecture, by the way.
I have no inside knowledge on this.
I'm just saying, and this is likely what's going through his head.
And then you couple that together with, yeah, some of Laura's reporting, which would suggest that maybe he's not as agnostic as you'd think.
And I think Donald Trump is left with the conclusion, hey, I need to really make sure I have my own people, my own team here.
And so that's what went down.
Here's Laura Loomer's tweet.
NSA Director Tim Haw and his deputy, Wendy Noble, have been disloyal to President Trump, and that is why they have been fired.
So she feels, and she may have communicated this lack of loyalty.
But again, it goes back to one thing.
Donald Trump's looking around saying, how did this happen to Mike Waltz when we're supposed to have the best cybersecurity around?
Can I trust my own peeps here?
Can I trust who's actually running the security op, given what Mike is saying?
Listen to him here on Fox News with Laura Ingram.
What staffer is responsible for this right now?
Well, look, a staffer wasn't responsible.
And look, I take full responsibility.
I built the group.
My job is to make sure everything's coordinated.
But how did the numbers work?
I mean, I don't mean to be pedantic here, but how did the numbers work?
Have you ever had somebody's contact that shows their name, and then you have somebody else's number there?
I've never made those mistakes.
Right?
You've got somebody else's number.
On someone else's contact.
So, of course, I didn't see this loser in the group.
It looked like someone else.
Now, whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean is something we're trying to figure out.
So, your staffer did not put his contact information.
No, no.
But how did it end up there?
Well, that's what we're trying to figure out.
Okay.
But that's a pretty big problem.
That is what I know.
That's where we've got the best technical minds, right?
That's disgusting.
And that's where, I mean, I'm sure everybody out there has had a contact.
Where you, it was said one person and then a different phone number.
But you've never talked to him before, so how's the number on your phone?
I mean, I'm not an expert in any of this, but it's just curious how's the number on your phone?
Well, if you have somebody else's contact and then it and then somehow someone sent you that phone, it gets sucked in.
Was there someone else supposed to be on the chat that wasn't on the chat that you thought was on there?
So the person that I thought was on there was never on there.
It was this person.
Who was that person?
Well, I'm not.
Look, Laura, I take responsibility.
I built the group.
Okay.
But look, that's the part that we have to figure out.
And that's the part that we embarrassing, yes.
But Pete and I are veterans.
We know these operations.
He has been an excellent Secretary of Defense.
And this was an operation that, I mean, it amazes me.
I guess the Democrats were fine to leave all the sea lanes shut down, were fine to have destroyers fired on dozens of times by this terrorist group, and fine to have Iran keep supplying them missiles.
That was okay.
The president takes decisive action.
And now we're seeing some real success in taking down their air defenses, opening the sea lanes, taking out their leadership.
We don't want to talk about that.
We don't want to talk about this.
Right.
I mean, it was a very, very successful mission.
So how did it get derailed with all of this?
Now, some people are saying, well, what the heck are they doing on signal to begin with?
You know, they shouldn't have been going back and forth on signal like this.
Keep in mind, and John Radcliffe said this in the hearings, it was Biden and the CIA that said, here you go.
Here's signal.
You can use this pretty freely.
So that just gives me a little bit of pause.
I'm like, oh, okay, really?
And so getting back to what may have given the president pause.
As Laura had pointed out, maybe his NSA was not as agnostic or apolitical as the NSA probably should be.
I don't know.
Maybe this guy was fantastic.
However, given the level of, dare I say, paranoia, given what went down, you can understand how some of her comments are resonating.
She wrote, as a Biden appointee, General Howe had no place serving in the Trump administration, given the fact that he was handpicked by General Milley, who was accused of committing treason by President Trump.
In other words, General Milley and President Trump, they got a bit of a history.
Okay, so this is General Milley's guy, and her point is, understandably, you know, maybe you don't want General Milley's guy.
If nothing else, you know, you want to be able to sleep at night, for goodness sakes, and you don't have to sleep with one eye open.
So General Milley's guy gets in there, and she's saying, why would we want an NSA director who was referred to Biden after being hand-selected by Milley, who told China, remember Milley, that he would side with them over Trump?
The vetters should have been more critical given the fact that the Pentagon revoked the security detail and clearance for retired General Mark Milley, who called President Trump a fascist.
Why would we want Milley's hand-picked choice for the NSA director?
Very good question.
Walsh said we don't.
And he was referred for firing.
Given the fact that the NSA is arguably the most powerful, most, most powerful intel agency in the world, we cannot allow for a Biden nominee to hold that position.
So again, the NSA would tell you, okay, well, he's completely, you don't have to worry.
Like he's a military professional.
He's not political.
But in light of what just went down with Signalgate, yeah, everybody's like, well, isn't he going to fire someone?
Isn't he going to fire Pete Hegseth?
Isn't he going to fire Mike Waltz?
Isn't he going to fire John Radcliffe or Tulsi or somebody?
And he's like, oh, I'm going to fire somebody.
But it's not going to be one of my people.
It's actually going to be the head of the NSA as well as several people over at NSC.
And it is my understanding that there are more that are on the way.
As for Wendy Noble, this was the second in command.
She's pointing out that, look, this woman's a protege of James Clapper.
Again, not exactly friendly territory, right?
I mean, Clapper, you know, basically was very much at odds with Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump has called him a whole bunch of names.
So to her point, why do you want Clapper's protege there as second in command at the NSA?
I mean, this is actually sort of basic stuff.
And wasn't Howard Lutnick in charge of the transition team, you know, the guy who's like Mr. Tariff right now, who kind of freaked everybody out and then some because of his math?
Apparently, he and Peter Navarro are struggling with ninth grade algebra.
We'll get to that in a second.
But, you know, you got to wonder who's vetting?
Who's doing the vetting?
Good points here from Laura.
I just think that there needs to be more appreciation demonstrated to Trump loyalists because.
Um, unfortunately, we do see a lot of gatekeeping in the GOP, and the thing that I harped on the most during the campaign season was you know the importance of vetting, vetting, vetting.
We need to vet people so that we don't have the same nightmare that we saw happen in the first administration where people who were disloyal to President Curry favor once the election's over after you know talking him the entire election season and therefore get promoted, even though they didn't like him during the election season.
what kind of problem do you have?
I think you got a problem.
I think Laura's absolutely right.
I don't know what kind of vetting went down.
Again, Howard was supposed to be in charge of this, but apparently he was more interested in becoming Treasury Secretary himself.
That all didn't pan out.
And so we have a whole bunch of people there that I would just say the NSA, I don't disagree with her on this one.
In light of the sort of peculiar animosity that is so heavily directed at one Donald Trump, you need to vet everyone and you need to make sure that the inner circle is secure.
And I'm not so sure it is.
You know why?
You know why?
You know what happened last week on Wednesday before Donald Trump went to the Rose Garden to announce his tariff plan?
Well, a couple things.
In addition to some of the math being flawed, we'll get to that, which just tells me the people running the show, you know, he shouldn't have to be sitting there doing math equations for them, for goodness sakes.
But what concerns me, what concerns me is that there was news that Elon was stepping out.
And this got leaked just hours ahead.
of the tariff news coming out.
Don't forget, Elon has actually been more pro-free trade.
He wants to clamp down on China, but not in the same way that, say, a Peter Navarro would.
Peter Navarro, who used to be a UC Berkeley economist, and I used to put on television, I can remember back in my CNBC days, against Steve Moore for Fireworks Friday, because you could have the commie versus the capitalist, and that made for exciting TV.
But now Peter Navarro is running this whole op.
Okay, so just think about that.
Just think about that for a second.
Nothing against Peter.
I mean, he was willing to go to jail.
He didn't need to go to jail, but he was willing to go to jail for the president, et cetera.
He could have just testified.
Apparently, he chose not to.
Wound up in jail, which actually just in some ways, you know, might allude to some guidance issues.
I don't know.
We'll leave that aside for just a moment.
First, think about Elon.
Elon, who has put tons of money into this, who is aggressively working and taking on the system in a massive way with Doge, et cetera.
He gets told by the media, by Politico, by Bloomberg. and by the Daily Mail that he's out like literally within 20 minutes of this cabinet meeting ending?
I don't know quite how that happens.
If you're told in a cabinet meeting, I get some confidential information that Elon's going to be eventually leaving and suddenly it makes headlines, I find that really peculiar.
I think you get somebody within the system that's leaking like a sieve and that's where your issue is.
By the way, this shouldn't come as a shock because, well, Elon only said he was going to be there 130 days to begin with.
Here he is.
If that passes, our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week.
And so far we are succeeding.
Yes, they are succeeding.
Leaking Cabinet Secrets00:03:14
That was not the one I wanted, but that's okay.
He's working hard.
What he also told Brett Baer in that interview on Fox News was that he would be departing.
He would be departing in what?
You know, the end of May, because he was only going to be there 130 days.
So again, I go back to, why is it that all of a sudden, right before they roll this whole thing out in the Rose Garden with the math, that even they're like admitting does not make sense, because they apparently confused?
This is not Trump's fault, believe me.
This is.
He deserves better.
This is my entire point.
He deserves the best of the best.
He should have had Doge in there checking the math, but those guys didn't want Doge because there's this weird little power battle going on of some sort.
I'm just, you need everybody on the same team.
Okay, all hands on deck right now.
I'm sorry.
So the math that a ninth grade algebra student could do um was proven wrong by aei, the American Enterprise Institute, which looked at the formula and the formula is like basically off chat GPT.
And they found that they confused wholesale prices with retail prices.
And by doing so, they actually inflated all the tariffs by like times four.
So, hey, I mean, it gives you a starting point, shall we say?
And you've heard Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, say, we're just negotiating.
We're just good.
This is a negotiation standpoint.
This is as bad as it can get.
But did it really need to be that?
Like, can't we just make sure that we have the right mathematicians in place?
So that we don't totally freak out the market now.
Look, all's well that ends well, didn't I tell you?
I said i'm buying buying buying, buying.
Every single time everybody's running for the hills.
What do I do?
I buy because you know what.
I am a big believer in America.
I also have time on my side and I have the liquidity to be able to do it.
So you know, you don't do this if you don't have money hanging around that you can invest.
You don't do this if you need the money next year or next week, or even three years from now.
I'd be careful.
But i'm looking at it saying this is an opportunity, because I haven't seen the Vix, the volatility index, in this kind of territory for quite some time.
I mean, it was up in the 80s, around March 2020, but there's been like four periods in history where we've seen this kind of volatility since 1952.
So to me, it represents an opportunity.
Meanwhile, we got some good news.
We got some very good news because we've learned from Treasury Secretary Besant today that he's negotiating with Japan.
The president has said to him, make sure you get a deal with Japan.
In the meantime, China.
Good luck, China.
Ooh, things are going to be tough in China because you know what?
We're not going to buy their stuff.
He's slapping another 50% tariff on things.
We're going to get to that in just a second, but I first want to point out none of this should surprise anybody.
What did he say back in 2012?
This is a good one.
Take a listen.
And I said, somebody said, well, what would you do?
What can you do?
So easy.
I drop a 25% tax on China.
And, you know, I said to somebody that is really the messenger.
The messenger is important.
I could have one man say, we're going to tax you 25%.