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April 14, 2025 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
01:02:21
20250414_trumps-tariffs-pause-dinner-with-bill-maher-ufc-ov
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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China's Economic Theft 00:09:32
China steals somewhere in the neighborhood of a half trillion dollars a year.
We ignored Osama bin Laden and then we said, how did that happen?
Well, we can't afford to do that with China because China is so much more powerful than al-Qaeda ever was.
We don't need this weirdo militaristic talk about China and I don't want to get into a war with China.
That's mental.
Check, just because we're not shooting guns and dropping bombs doesn't mean we're not at war with China, bro.
Trust me, they're poisoning the minds of the kids with the freaking TikTok crap.
They sent fentanyl to our freaking border.
How much more signs do you need to say that they are the enemy?
Is there anybody else that has a walk-in?
I mean, people are waking up, Piers.
I don't think they're necessarily bending the knee.
It's like America is just fed up and they're just tired of the nonsense.
Good for Bill Maher.
People are being rounded up for their ideas.
And that's new.
And that's chilling.
No, this is all a protection of Israel.
And once you take away his rights, you're taking away our rights.
And that's it.
Round them up.
There are no half measures in today's Fedrial public square.
President Trump's 90-day pause on most new tariffs was either a masterclass in the art of the deal or a panic-stricken climb down.
It depends on who you follow online and what you watch.
And the same camps are divided over Bill Maher, who has variously been described this weekend as a rabid MAGA convert and a sell-out dupe for reporting on his dinner with a president like this.
He's much more self-aware than he lets on in public.
I'm just taking as a positive that this person exists because everything I've ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent.
I never felt I had to walk on eggshells around him.
And honestly, I voted for Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk with Donald Trump.
That's just how it went down, make of it what you will.
Well, the truth is exactly where he is, somewhere in the middle.
If the 2028 election is somehow Obama versus Trump, as Steve Bannon suggested in the same show, you can safely bet that Bill Maher will not be backing the president.
But he's also figured out that defending Democrats to the hilt over every cultural excess and constantly smearing Trump as a dangerous demagogue who can do no right isn't working out very well either.
As for the tariffs, there's no doubt that they have caused chaos in the markets.
But there's also no doubt that many countries are now hurriedly negotiating new trade terms that will benefit the U.S.
And if MAGA is as divided and furious about the trade war as we've been led to believe, well, nobody told the crowd at UFC in Florida this weekend.
And making the entrance right now to a standing ovation, the 47th president of the United States of America, fight by UFC CEO, Dana White, and others, Donald J. Trump.
Is there anybody else that has a walk-in?
No other than a fighter?
So nothing is black and white.
Well, almost nothing.
There are still things like Taylor Lorenz's fangirling over Luigi Mangioni.
You're going to see women, especially, that feel like, oh my God, right?
Like, here's this man who's a revolutionary, who's famous, who's handsome, who's young, who's smart.
He's a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.
Sorry, what?
Surely everyone with a brain or a heart or a modicum of compassion can agree that someone who executes a father of two as he walks down the street is not a morally good man.
Well, let's find out.
To debate all this and more, I'm joined by Cheng Uger, the founder and CEO of The Young Turks, by Josh Rogan, analyst for The Washington Post, Intelligence, Vinny Ashana, PBD's podcast Angry Patriot, and Gordon Chang, the author of Plan Red, China's Project to Destroy America.
Well, welcome to all of you.
Let me start with you, Cheng.
Where are we with Tariffgate?
Because it seems to me the biggest problem right now for the administration is not the principle of leveling tariffs, which can be debated, or the overarching philosophy behind it, which is that America should be doing more manufacturing.
I think most people agree with that.
The real problem is the constant mixed messaging from the top people at the White House is causing, I think, real uncertainty and real damage, not least to Donald Trump's approval ratings on the economy.
Yeah, 100%.
There's really no argument about it.
I mean, the folks that are saying art of the deal are hilarious.
So, and it can be proven very simply.
So, first, he does these global, massive nuclear tariffs.
So, as you know, Piers, on this show, I said they'll never last.
They're maniacal.
And I also said, as you're pointing out, that tariffs can be done right.
They could be targeted and strategic based on industries or countries in specific.
So, then Donald Trump backpedals, and you can tell it's a backpedal and not some sort of art of the deal because he got absolutely nothing in return.
So, the 90-day pause was based on zero giveback from any other country.
It's because he had miraculously crashed the stock market and the bond market at the same time, which was previously held unimaginable because one is supposed to go up while the other one goes down, but he managed to do both.
And now, China tariffs are super strong.
Okay, exemptions for iPhones and electronics.
Why?
Because he hadn't thought it through.
He hasn't thought through any of this.
He's always doing this in a way that makes no sense at all.
And by the way, if you like tariffs and you like the idea of rebuilding manufacturing in this country, Donald Trump just did massive damage to it.
Because after this, who's going to want to do tariffs again?
So there's absolutely no planning here.
And then let's see how he negotiates, if he can negotiate with China at all.
But it's done nothing but damage and gotten us no good return so far.
Okay, Gordon Chang, your response to that.
Well, yes, so far, but we're very early into this process.
And yes, I don't like a lot of the turbulence and a lot of the backtracking, but we got to see how this turns out.
Remember, with this 90-day pause, President Trump is going to be negotiating with a lot of countries.
We're going to end up stitching trade deals with them, and we're going to leave China out in the cold.
And China's never been there, or at least hasn't been there for decades.
So I think this is a fascinating process.
It has actually a possibility of working, and it's absolutely got to work.
President Trump knows what he needs to do.
Now, he may not do it in the way we like, but I think he's going to eventually get it done.
So let's wait until the end of the process before making judgments about whether this works or not.
All right.
Josh Rogan.
There are 90 days.
Yeah, I mean, Josh, there are 90 days to negotiate with countries.
According to people at the White House, they've already had a lot of countries get in touch to try and do new deals.
Is it right to judge this now, or should we be a little bit more patient, notwithstanding the fairly reckless way that this has so far been rolled out?
Well, to be short, Piers, there is a lot of truth to the fact that all of these countries are coming to make deals with the Trump administration.
They were doing it before.
They'll continue to do it.
And I'm rooting for the United States, and I think most Americans are rooting for the Trump administration to succeed, but it's impossible to ignore the fact that trade deals take months, if not years, to negotiate, and negotiating 90 of them in 90 days is not only unprecedented.
It's basically fantastical.
And, you know, will they get 10?
Will they get 20?
Will they get 30?
I hope they get as many as they can.
But what is the cost of that turbulence?
What is the benefit versus the price that we pay while we're subjecting our economy and our, and all these other economies, by the way, all these economies around the world that are so dependent on us to all of this suffering and pain while we change our policy this way and that way?
It just has to be weighed against the perceived benefits.
So it's complex.
And I'm not saying that they won't succeed to some degree, but it's impossible to ignore the fact that the way that they're doing it is causing massive, massive damage, not just to our economy.
And I agree with Gordon that, you know, it's time to confront Chinese predatory and unfair trade practices across the board.
But we can get one shot at this.
And I think isolating China is going to be really difficult, especially when China is increasing its relationship with all the countries around the world that we're also alienating at the same time.
So yeah, it's not impossible that he could succeed, but it doesn't look good.
It doesn't look good because of the way it's gone so far.
We have to be honest about that.
Piers Morgan Uncensored is now proudly independent.
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Now let's get straight to the point.
Confronting Unfair Trade 00:12:09
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Now on with the show.
All right, Vinny, look, you're a massive Trumper.
You were with him at the weekend at the UFC, and we'll come to that in Florida, where he got a roaring ovation.
There's no doubt there's a country, as always, with Trump, is split, where a lot of liberals are in complete raging fury about him.
And at the same time, in places like Florida, he can do no wrong.
But I saw a poll on CNN this morning, which has actually been, you know, the polling they've been doing on him has been quite positive until now.
But the polling on do Americans trust Trump on the economy and do they blame him or Biden for the state of the economy right now, they've never been worse for Trump.
So now the American people have moved from blaming Biden to now blaming Trump.
And his own approval rating on the economy is plummeting pretty rapidly.
Now, I know Trump well, as you do, and he won't like that.
He won't like the fact that his economic polling is plummeting.
So this has to work quite quickly, doesn't it?
Yeah, Piers, I think, well, first of all, just him walking into the UFC, like you said, we're going to get into, I've never seen anything like that.
I mean, I saw Michael Jackson when I was a kid, and it was at that level, but we'll get into that.
But Piers, here's my thing.
Obviously, all we're going to hear is the fear-mongering from the other side.
Everything from the past eight years when he first came in, it was we're going to go to war with Korea.
He was a Russian asset.
We're going to go to war.
Everything is fear-mongering, Piers.
The guy hasn't been in for three months.
Everybody needs to just relax, just like Gordon said, let it take time.
And I have an analogy, Piers.
Our country, like, you know what a heroin addict, when they finally stop doing the heroin and they put them in a room, they're detoxing, they're shaking, they're sweating, they're going through a bunch of, you know, the bodies are convulsing.
That's what America's going through, Piers.
We've been hooked on this freaking government.
Everybody walking all over us.
Every country taking advantage of us.
It's going to hurt for a little while, Piers.
But guess what?
The tariffs are going to work.
Stock market jumped 400 points today.
Everybody needs to chill.
And then, Piers, by the way, how many factories are reopening?
Steel jobs are coming back to America.
Japan pledged a trillion dollars to come here.
The UAE committed $1.4 trillion in 10 years.
Saudi Arabia just lined up $600 billion, possibly hitting a trillion.
It's not small talk.
It's respect.
And Trank said it's not the art of the deal.
This is exactly what it is.
He knows how to play this freaking game.
Now he doesn't have all the Russia and all the crazy shit happening around him.
Just give him some time.
Let him cook.
Everything's going to be okay.
You'll see.
Trust me.
All right.
Chank, trust Vinny.
Piers.
Yeah, no, I definitely don't.
No offense, Vinny.
So listen, what would have garnered trust is if he had done this in a rational way and said, here, here's the industries I'm protecting.
Here's the countries I'm targeting.
And I'm going reciprocal.
If China's got 20%, we're going to put 20% on them and it's non-negotiable, right?
Or we're going to negotiate it down to zero so that we've got it fair for both sides.
But to do 145%, I mean, you might as well do a million percent.
It doesn't make any sense.
At that price, you can't sell any goods.
So he's not thinking this through.
He's doing this in a crazy way.
And you guys are saying, hey, let's see how it plays out.
It's only three months in.
I get it.
And that's fair.
And there's a long way to go with four years.
But what you can't say at the same time is that it's worked so far.
It hasn't.
It did crash the stock market.
It did crash the bond market.
And Donald Trump retracted those because he had crashed the markets.
That's not part of any plan.
That's just a giant screw-up.
And he got nothing in return.
So you can say, hey, maybe he'll get better later.
And that's always true, of course, right?
But to say that he's cooking now, no, he's cooked, not cooking.
And so far, he's done nothing but absolutely bungle it and got nothing in return.
But Cheng, you expect, what do you expect in three months, brother?
It's going to take time and it's going to be ugly.
China has owned our asses, Cheng, for how long?
And the only thing I fear, Piers, the last time, because listen, at the end of the day, all these other countries are going to bend the knee.
China is our actual threat.
When people say they're our adversary, no, no, that's our enemy, okay, Piers.
It's freaking China.
And the last time Trump tried to hold them accountable and we had a trade war with China, a virus mysteriously leaked out of a lab that we not only opened, we funded.
And the main guy behind the helm that this virus leaked from got a preemptive pardon and his hands were washed and he has no accountability.
That's the only actual fear.
Trump is the only one that is holding their freaking foot to the fire.
And I'm sorry, Pierre.
And Josh, you said at the beginning that I disagree when you said that people are hoping for the success.
The majority of the people that I know on the left, Josh, hell no.
They're like, no, they want it to fail.
They want it to burn just so they could say it was Trump.
It was Trump.
We told you, that's not America, brother.
We have the freaking president of the United States.
He's the leader of the freaking free world.
We have to back the guy.
I'm not saying blindly back whatever the hell that he's doing.
Check, I have some stuff that means you agree on that he's doing that I don't agree with, but when it comes to this, bro, when it comes to China, that is the actual threat.
They freaking, mind you, the past four years, they got away with everything.
They're flying spy balloons, Piers.
Nobody said shit.
All right.
They buy land at all of our military bases, nuclear missile bases, and Mounts of Montana.
Nobody says anything.
They do whatever they want.
And then when Sheik comes to San Francisco, Newsom cleans the street, kisses his ass.
It looked like freaking Beijing.
All right.
We finally got a guy that's holding their foot to the fire.
Like I said, it's going to hurt.
It's going to be a little turbulent.
But bro, the guy knows what he's doing.
He's a freaking boss and he's a businessman.
He's going to be fine.
The interesting thing about this.
Hang on.
The interesting thing, Josh, it seems to me about this particular crisis is it's entirely self-inflicted quite deliberately by the president of the United States.
This is not some existential disaster that's happened or a pandemic or whatever it may be or a terror attack or a war.
This is entirely orchestrated by Donald Trump and his team quite deliberately.
And I've got to say, you know, we were both on the Bill Maher show, and we'll come to that a little later on Friday.
But, you know, every time I've ever interviewed Trump 40, 50 times, however many it is now, he's always gone on about China.
And I don't think he's wrong.
So it's an interesting crisis where it's entirely driven by Donald Trump.
He's done this quite deliberately.
Most people, I think, agree with the overarching principle that America has been ripped off, certainly by China for too long, and that manufacturing has been allowed to migrate out of America for way too long and way too aggressively.
So everyone kind of agrees with why Trump is doing something dramatic.
What the point of argument is, is the implementation of a policy to try and reverse this trend.
And that's why it's interesting to me.
You know, when Trump talks about we've got to take that hard medicine, what Vinny just said, you know, it's very early to assess whether this will work or not.
It could be that in 90 days' time, the Trump team have negotiated a series of new, more advantageous trade deals with many countries.
I'm sure that's likely to happen anyway.
And it may be, we don't know, but it may be that China blinks, that actually China realizes it needs America more than America needs China.
Yeah, I think there's a lot right in what you said.
I've interviewed Trump for an hour on China alone, okay?
And I wrote about this in my book.
And here's what people really don't understand about President Trump and China is that President Trump's goal is not to decouple from China.
President Trump's goal is to make a deal with China, okay?
And that's not necessarily what everybody in his administration thinks.
But if you ask him, if you listen to him closely, that's what he wants.
And for him, all of these things are tactics to get to the negotiating table and make a deal with Xi Jinping, not to separate the United States from China, but to solve the unfair trade practices and keep going, the engagement.
That's what President Trump believes in his heart of hearts.
I'm 100% sure of it.
And the people who are close to him know that.
So what does that mean?
That means that these are all tactics meant to bring Xi Jinping to the table.
And I'm sure that eventually when we get to that point, the Chinese will negotiate.
And that will be a very painstaking process.
That's exactly what happened in the first term before the pandemic.
By the way, Vinny, I agree with you that the virus likely leaked from a lab based on a preponderance of the evidence, but I don't think it was intentional, okay?
I think it was an accident.
But that's neither here nor there.
To address what you're saying, Piers, we have to understand that this is all about deal making for President Trump.
Yeah, when I say I'm rooting for those deals to succeed, I'm not representing liberals.
I'm just a person.
I'm independent.
I'm not a liberal.
I'm just me.
And what I'm saying is that when you look at what happened this weekend, even since we were on that show, peers, we've had exemptions for some of the things.
Then there were no exemptions.
Then the exemptions were temporary.
Then this commerce secretary said one thing and the trade representative said another thing.
Then the president tweeted a third thing.
That's no way to run a railroad, okay?
We can't do that.
This is going to be a very, very difficult thing to pull off if we're doing it competently.
And when you have the three top officials in the United States saying three different things on the same day, even yesterday, that's just a recipe for undermining his own goals.
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Yeah, I mean, I agree with that.
Gordon, you know, there's no doubt that mixed messaging is a real problem right now.
Avoiding Military Conflict 00:08:45
And Donald Trump has to get a grip of that.
But you've written a lot and talked a lot extensively about the threat from China.
For those who don't fully appreciate why it's such an existential threat potentially to America Incorporated, for want of a better phrase, just explain what China has been doing, particularly in relation to intellectual property rights, and then abusing the legal process in a way that is very advantageous to them and very unadvantageous to people like the United States of America.
Yeah, China steals somewhere in the neighborhood of a half trillion dollars a year.
You know, give or take a couple hundred billion dollars.
That was the assessment from John Ratcliffe when he was director of national intelligence in 2020, just before he left office.
And, you know, this has been persistent.
It's been going on for decades.
And the issue really has been no American president has been willing to take the Chinese on on this particular topic until Trump in this term.
Not even Trump in the 45 years.
It's Trump 47 who is really doing this.
The context for this is that the Chinese regime believes the United States is an existential threat.
It believes that not because of anything that we say or do, peers, but because of who we are.
You have an insecure regime in Beijing, is worried about the inspirational impact of America's values and form of governance on the Chinese people.
So that means we will never have amicable relations with Beijing as long as the Communist Party rules it.
That's not a conclusion that most people want to hear.
It's not a conclusion that President Trump wants to hear.
But when he tried a trade deal with China in January 2020, just before the pandemic, the Phase I trade pact, it failed almost immediately because the Chinese violated it.
And they'll continue to violate it because they believe that they must destroy our country.
I don't like that conclusion, but unfortunately, we have got to face what the Chinese regime says and does.
We ignored Osama bin Laden.
We ignored him until one day when he killed 2,977 Americans.
And then we said, how did that happen?
Well, we can't afford to do that with China because China is so much more powerful than Al-Qaeda ever was.
I mean, Cheng, you're shaking your head, but why?
Yeah, so China has ripped us off.
They have a partner here in America that I'll get to in a second.
But we don't need this weirdo militaristic talk about China.
We could just keep it to economic competition and sometimes, by the way, economic cooperation.
And look, guys, we all seem to agree we need to deal with China over-tariffing us and getting an unfair advantage.
The right way to do that is to go reciprocal, to be tough, and to be consistent and not to wobble like Trump is doing.
So look, you know, you gain credibility through your actions.
And Piers, you know, last week I said there's no way that these tariffs would last.
And I was right.
Of course, these tariffs can't last because there's certain economic inevitabilities.
You can't crash both markets at the same time.
It doesn't work.
So we've got to be strategic in how we deal with China.
And talking in militaristic terms and how they're the evil enemy doesn't help at all.
It's just weird stuff to me.
So, and don't do anything in a way that pushes militaristic angles.
So, and I don't want to get into a war with China.
That's mental.
So now, in terms of who's their partner here in America, that's causing a lot of the problems that we never talk about.
And that's our corporations.
Because remember, these trade deals are not written with China and U.S. representatives.
The U.S. representatives literally hand it off to corporate lobbyists.
Corporate lobbyists write these deals for us.
And if you think about it, they don't have America's interests in mind.
They have Apple's interests in mind.
They have Intel's interests.
They have all these corporations' interests.
Why do you think the trade deals in the past have been so lopsided?
Because both establishment Republicans and Democrats have said, yeah, we don't really care what happens to the manufacturing base or the average American worker.
We just care about the donations that come in from all these corporations.
So they just hand them off and the corporations win by having their stuff made cheaper in China and then selling it here.
So corporate rule is one of the giant underlying problems that we never address because the corporations in America are not on our side.
They're on their side.
So we've got to start writing these trade deals.
And for God's sake, with Trump, you can't have him jumping around like a maniac.
You can say maybe he'll get better later, but you have to live in the reality-based world.
He screwed this up in the beginning.
Now we're in a worse situation, not a better situation.
Part of being tough is being strategic and smart about how you do it so that you can stay that course.
Okay, I mean, the other thing, of course, with Donald Trump is it.
Yeah, quickly, Vinaya.
I was just going to say, Chank, just because we're not shooting guns and dropping bombs doesn't mean we're not at war with China, bro.
Trust me, they're poisoning the minds of the kids with the freaking TikTok crap.
They send fentanyl through our freaking border that's killing Americans.
All right.
They steal all of our...
How much more signs do you need to say that they are the enemy?
Just because there's no bullet shot doesn't mean they're not the enemy, Chank.
And I think that attitude is the same attitude on why they've just been plowing us for all these years, but it's because we're like, nah, they're not a real threat, bro.
We would just push this thing, Russia.
Russia's the threat.
Pooh in this, pooing that.
No, no, it's Xi Jinping and their freaking country, bro, a freaking dictator communist that treats its citizens like freaking slaves.
All right, Chank?
Like actual slaves.
They have freaking slave war camps.
And if you don't have this guy's picture up in your freaking house and they come in, you're finished.
Your family disappears.
All right, Chank.
This isn't a guy to take lightly.
And Trump, like I said, is the only one that's going to step up and fight this guy.
Period.
Done deal.
Vinny, Vinny, they have people named it Uyghurs.
That's my last name.
Uyghur Turks in concentration camps.
I understand exactly how bad the Chinese government is.
But we don't need to go to war with them for no reason.
Let's do tough economic sanctions that make sense or tariffs that make sense or other economic measures that make sense that get parity and equality back for the American people.
Let's not let our corporate goons write these deals in a way that advantages them and China and leaves out the average American.
But we don't need to get militaristic, even though they're a terrible regime.
I understand exactly how terrible they are.
But we don't have to constantly push towards military conflict.
Very quickly, I just know what it is.
Well, hang on.
Hang on.
Hang on.
Don't talk at once.
The interesting thing, Check, about that is that if you look at how aggressively China has been expanding its military in the last decade, and you look at the jungle drums beating about a possible invasion of Taiwan and what the impact of such an invasion would have,
not least on America, given the amount of stuff that America gets in from Taiwan, you know, the big ultimate military test may well come if Xi Jinping tries his luck and goes into Taiwan to see what America does.
And China now has a military that is massively bigger and expanding at a terrifying rate, frankly, to potentially take on the United States in a military conflict.
So I do think there's a slight naivety about, well, you can park the two things apart.
One can be an economic war and we shouldn't have to worry about the militarily.
I think there are enough signs there to suggest that absolutely the world should be waking up to the potential military threat from China.
And absolutely, we should be fearful of an invasion of Taiwan.
So, Piers, you don't have to be naive about it.
You don't have to say, hey, let's not prepare.
Should we be thoroughly prepared if China takes military action?
Of course we should.
Same is true of Russia, but we didn't have to get, you know, threatened to bring NATO all the way up to Russia's border.
Nancy Pelosi didn't have to go to Taiwan to egg on the Chinese government.
We are purposely pushing buttons in Russia and China that leads, and by the way, in the Middle East, that potentially leads to more war.
Let's be prepared.
Let's be tough.
Let's make sure that they understand the consequences and let's deliver those consequences if they go to a military route.
But if we push them to a military route or we try to get ahead of them, we're going to needlessly engage in military conflict that hurts all sides.
Navigating Political Nuance 00:13:16
There are two wider parts of this, which I think play into something we discussed on Bill Maher, Josh, which got a lot of reaction, as you know.
One, of course, is Donald Trump's interactions with people and how he likes to bring people from the other side over to dinner and meet with them and sit down with them and break bread and stuff, as he did with Bill Maher, as he has done with Kim Jong-un on a much bigger global scale, of course.
And that plays into also his negotiating skills into how he navigates these relationships.
But Josh, just to ask you about the Bill Maher thing, what struck me is quite interesting about some of the reaction.
Some people were cheering you on when you took on Bill Maher for saying you thought it was compromising to his journalistic integrity.
I think it was a kind of overarching theme for doing what he did, because Trump, you thought, was basically playing him.
And other people were hammering you saying, well, isn't this exactly what Bill Maher was talking about in his monologue about the dinner he had with Kid Rock and with Bill Maher and with Dana White from the UFC, obviously, and Donald Trump.
That we've now reached a stage where people can't even go and meet with people from across the political divide without the people on the other side or their side throwing their toys out of a stroller and screaming and saying how disgusting this is.
I was curious about your reaction to the reaction and whether you understood that people were saying, well, this is exactly what Bill Maher's talking about.
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Yeah, no, I appreciate you giving me the chance to react to the reaction.
I mean, first of all, I don't think I was questioning his journalistic integrity at all because I don't think he's a journalist and he's a comedian.
And the first thing I said was that this is a tempest in a teapot.
And, you know, it's totally fine for people to go to meet with Trump and have dinner.
And that there is not, you know, that pretending that this is some sort of, you know, summit or some sort of big event is really not true.
So I don't think I tried to go to pains to not to criticize Bill for going, but to also make a nuanced point, which may have been lost by both sides, actually.
And the nuanced point is simply that from Trump's perspective, I question whether or not he was engaged in the genuine conversation for a seek for middle ground that Bill Maher was engaged in.
And we can have two thoughts inside of our head.
One is that Bill Maher went to meet with Trump to seek a middle ground in a conversation to bridge the political divide and heal the culture wars.
And I believe Bill was trying to do that.
And I'm skeptical that's not what Trump was trying to do because all of you know when you've met with Trump that that's always what he does.
When I interviewed Trump, the first thing he said to me was, Josh, you're the best reporter I've ever seen.
And you know this stuff.
He had no idea who I was, but this is what he does.
He charms you and he tries to get you on his side.
And then he tries to get you to tell whoever you're going to tell about the meeting that, oh, he's not that bad after all.
And of course, that's exactly what happened.
So I don't agree with people who say meeting him is some sort of bad thing, but I also don't agree with the people who say that somehow meeting with him is going to produce a good result.
It's essentially a non-event.
And, you know, and if we can sort of think of it as a PR stunt that, you know, had some cost and some benefit, some benefit in that, oh, well, we can sit together and have a meal together and some cost in that you gave Trump this opportunity to put you on display and say, look, even Bill Maher is okay with me, then we can agree that there's a cost and a benefit.
And people who are saying don't meet with him are wrong.
And people who are saying meeting with him is going to do something are also wrong.
And that was the nuance that I was trying to get across on the show.
But, you know, I feel like maybe in that moment, Bill felt that I was attacking him.
I wasn't.
I was, you know, I was trying to praise him.
And that kind of seemed to make him a little even more upset.
But, you know, what are you going to do?
Well, I thought it was a bullsy move to whack him off the top.
But what also struck me was that is there a slight hypocrisy and only your answer will reveal whether there is here.
You work for the Washington Post.
Your owner, Jeff Bezos, has done a lot more than Bill Maher in crossing the divide with Trump.
He used to be very critical of Trump.
But in the last year and a half or so, or since his shooting, actually, he seems to have performed a massive U-turn on Trump.
He called him and praised him after he was shot at a New York Times event in December.
Bezos said he was optimistic about a second Trump presidency.
He had dinner at Mur-a-Lago in December 2024.
He pledged $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund.
He attended the inauguration.
Amazon, obviously one of his companies, main company, streamed Trump's inauguration on its prime video service and is also paying $40 million for a Melania Trump documentary.
I mean, as a Washington Post senior journalist, how do you feel about all that?
Yeah, well, again, I don't think I, again, I wasn't trying to criticize Bill.
And if it came off that way, then maybe I didn't craft my critique perfectly.
I was trying to criticize the idea that, you know, engagement with Trump is some sort of bridge towards healing the cultural divide because I just don't think that's going to be the result.
And I think when business leaders go to meet with Trump, that's a different set of calculations.
And I'm not, I work at the Washington Post.
I'm not privy to what goes on at the ownership level.
You know, I just work there.
You know, I'm not part of the management.
I'm not part of the ownership.
I've never met Jeff Bezos.
I don't know what his calculations are.
And I don't, that's above my pay grade, Piers.
It's not a duck.
It's just I don't have any insight into what goes on above me at the Washington Post.
All I can say is that I'm not against engagement.
And I understand that Trump is the president and business leaders have to engage with the president.
And the way that they do it matters.
You know, that's how I feel about it.
And, you know.
But Josh, Josh, Josh, look, if it looks like a duck and it sounds like a duck, it's probably a duck.
I mean, you can appreciate that if you're Bill Maher watching you refusing to be remotely critical of what your own owner has done with Trump in terms of kissing the ring, you could potentially see that he might think there's a double standard there.
No, I see what you're trying to do, Piers, but I'm not in a position to comment on Jeff Bezos because if I comment on Jeff Bezos, then I could be fired from my job and you know that.
So I'm not going to do that.
But at the same time, I want to be honest with you so I don't seem to be dodging your question.
And my honest answer from my heart is, you know, every person that engages with this administration, including all the people on this panel, including you, including me, has to make that judgment based on their own calculations and their own values and their own interests.
And we have to be careful not to judge each other for where we all come down on that.
And, you know, that's the best answer I can give you, being honest without losing my job and also being true to what I think is very consistent, which is the same approach I had to Bill Maher, which is engagement is good and the way that you do it matters.
And your expectations of Trump's response should be very limited.
And that's my effort to answer you honestly, Piers, without getting fired from my job and without, but to trying to prove to you that I do have a very consistent philosophy on this, which is not going to please the Trumpsters and is not going to please the liberals because I'm neither a Trumpster nor a liberal.
Okay, Check, you're smirking a bit there.
Are you buying the Josh, I'm not ducking it Rogan response there?
No, I have sympathy for the brother.
I understand the situation he's in.
But I disagree with him on both counts.
I think that you shouldn't be overly naive, of course, going to talk to Trump.
You shouldn't be naive at all.
But you also shouldn't be overly cynical.
So naive is, I'm going to go talk to Trump and he's instantly going to change his mind and agree with me.
Of course, that's not going to happen, right?
But cynical is, oh, there's no value in talking to the other side.
There's no value in talking to the U.S. president.
You just shouldn't do it at all.
You should just, you don't platform him.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
And Commander-in-Chief.
Yeah.
So like, of course, Bill should go to talk to him.
I would go to talk to him in a second, but I wouldn't go in there thinking like, oh, I've got some sort of magical answer and Trump's going to now come out a progressive or an actual populist rather than a fake populist.
But does it make sense to try to bridge the divide?
Hell yeah, it does.
So look, look at, you know, so I go on the Patrick Badavis show that Vinny's on from time to time.
And sometimes we yell at each other and a lot of times we vehemently disagree.
But sometimes we find agreement, like Vinny and I have on Israel and a couple of other issues.
So, hey, we bridged the divide there.
And you know what?
Not only did it help on that particular issue, but it starts to heal a little bit.
And I know that people on my side in particular don't want to hear that.
And so others have gone on the same show and thought the great strategy is to just yell the entire time at them, right?
But then you're not listening.
You're not actively engaging.
You're not repairing any bonds.
And for this country, and I know, no, like, again, the cynics hate this kind of talk, but at some point, we have to heal the bonds.
And it starts with simple conversations.
And if you can't speak to the president of the United States because you're so bitter and mad about it, that's not at all productive.
And it doesn't go towards healing any bonds.
It's not going to happen overnight.
It's going to take a long, long time.
But we should at least have the decency to talk and to listen to one another.
I think that's essentially exactly.
Another question.
Yeah.
Vinny, you were at the UFC thing.
I was struck by the incredible ovation that Trump got there.
There's no doubt that in vast sways of America, he's not just popular.
You know, it's a gigantic kind of superstardom fandom that goes on with his fan base.
And yet there are other parts of America that completely detest everything Trump says and does.
How do we bring these two factions together?
How does the United States of America become more united?
I think, and Chenk made a good point.
Josh made it, and you make a good point, Pierce.
Like, it's like enough of this.
I was having a conversation before I came in the van.
This whole left, right, your side, my side, your side of the aisle, my side.
Piers, I'm a Christian and I read the Bible every single day.
I'm trying to learn.
I'm trying to be a better person.
I'm trying to walk in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.
The two main things in the Bible, Piers, is love God with all your heart, your soul, and your mind, and love your neighbor.
It's that simple.
We're supposed to love each other, okay?
I mean, it's not easy, Piers, when the mainstream media for all this time is saying that this guy's this evil monster, Hitler, all this stuff.
That doesn't help.
It hasn't helped.
And that's why all these big networks, all these freaking mainstream medias are on the cline.
You mentioned Jeff Bezos.
You no wonder why he's changed his tune, Piers.
They lost over 250,000 digital subscribers.
The traffic dropped from 22.5 million to 2.5 to 3 million, lost $100 million in 2004.
All right.
He blocked the Kamala Harris endorsement.
I mean, people are waking up, Piers.
I don't think they're necessarily bending the knee.
It's like America is just fed up and they're just tired of the nonsense, Piers.
And I'm proud.
Good for Bill Maher.
All right.
First of all, Trump didn't ask for the meeting, Piers.
Kid Rock is like, you know what?
You should meet with him.
Would he meet with me?
Yes.
Boom.
A comedian just like myself was in the White House with the President of the United States.
A guy, bud you, two, one talk crap about the other, other one goes back.
Bill Maher has been going at this guy forever.
It's starting to ease up, Piers.
It's like, by the way, this guy's going to be gone in less than four years, okay?
Like this, just everybody needs to just calm down and love each other.
Stop listening to the people in this hate because they divide and they conquer, Piers.
That's what that, the goal forever has been divide and conquer.
But we are all brothers.
We are all sisters.
We're supposed to love each other and not let this evil evil, because that's what it is, Piers, keep us all separated and fighting each other.
Just on that point about Trump gone in four years, Steve Bannon was also on Bilma and said he's definitely going to run for another term.
So liberals may not get away from Trump quite as early as they hoped.
Let me bring Gordon.
I want to change subject with you to these two big deportation stories.
Free Speech vs Deportation 00:15:11
One involving this El Salvadorian, Kilmar Garcia, who's been sent to a prison in El Salvador, the country where he's come from.
Now, he was residing in the United States.
He was an illegal immigrant, but he was married in the United States with three children, all with special needs.
He has always emphatically denied being a member of this gang, MS-13, despite the authorities believing that from one source, I understand, that they think he may have been.
There's certainly been no sign of him involved in any MS-13 gang activity that anyone has brought forward as hard evidence.
And in 2019, although he was on a list to be deported, I believe, his lawyers argued successfully that his life would be in danger if he was sent back to El Salvador from other gangs who had threatened him previously.
What is your view of this?
I mean, are you comfortable with America sending people from the United States to an El Salvadorian prison?
And given they've accepted this appears to have been an administrative error in sending him because of this order in place not to send him back, why do they not just pick the phone up, the administration, to El Salvador's president and get him back?
Well, they should, because this was apparently a mistake and the administration has not shown reason for it other than they've made a mistake.
But let's start, you know, and the broader issue, it's going to be the United States needs to deport substantial numbers of people who came into our country with false asylum claims.
Some of them are really dangerous, as we saw with the gangs that were attacking the homes in Aurora, Colorado.
But from my perspective in China, we know that a certain number of Chinese migrants are either Ministry of State Security agents or they are People's Liberation Army officers or soldiers.
And they have come in here for no good because we are seeing this increased tempo of incursions and attempted incursions in our military bases, these drone flights, all the rest of it.
This is extremely disturbing because they've come here to attack us.
They're looking at our patterns.
They're looking for our vulnerabilities and they are ready to strike.
So yes, we do need to deport a substantial number of people because this is a matter of national survival.
And yes, the Trump administration should admit it made a mistake in this particular case and bring him back.
There's no question about that.
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Yeah, I mean, Cheng, the other case is the Mahmoud Khalil case, who was the head of this very aggressive pro-Palestinian group at Columbia University, who was sort of leading the mob, as we saw at the time, who was seen reportedly distributing pro-Hamas literature.
Now, he's there on a green card in the United States, which has different rules of due process, it turns out, because if you are there on a green card, and Josh and I discussed this on Bill Maher, but there is a difference in how you're treated in terms of due process to an American citizen.
And it seemed to me, and the argument I made on Bill Maher, was if this guy had repeated exactly what he believes about wanting the destruction of Western civilization, about distributing pro-Hamas literature, etc., if he'd done all that at his interview for his green card, he would have been rejected a green card to come into the United States.
So by that principle, why should the United States not be able to deport him?
As indeed, it appears they have the legal authority to do so.
Yeah, first of all, I don't stipulate to any of your facts.
I don't believe they're facts at all.
They've never been proven in court.
They've never even been shown in court.
They're just BS that the Trump administration is throwing out.
There's two different issues here.
One is, how do you do the deportations?
And if you're in favor of the deportations, then you should be upset at Donald Trump because he's doing the cause of deporting criminals that are undocumented from here harm by overstepping for no reason.
So this guy, Garcia guy, was, they even admit in court, sent there by error.
So why don't you bring him back?
Why are you insisting on sending the wrong guys to the dungeon in El Salvador?
Why are you even insisting on sending people to a dungeon in El Salvador?
So that doesn't make any sense.
We have perfectly good prisons here.
We could deport people.
So I'm not telling you not to deport MS-13 or the Venezuelan gang.
I'm telling you to go ahead and deport them.
Just don't deport people that aren't in that gang.
So we're asking for just bare minimum due diligence and due process, which is really, really important because that isn't about the immigrants.
That's about our constitution.
And our constitution does apply to naturalized citizens.
In fact, it applies to every person that's here.
Yes, there's some votes, rights like voting that doesn't apply to green card holders, but the Supreme Court has said for 200 years the First Amendment applies to them, which brings us to the second issue.
Why are we snatching up critics of Israel, not even America, not any other country, not any other religion, not anything but beloved sacred Israel, and having mass men grab them off the streets for writing an op-ed against Israel, talking about economic sanctions and boycotts, not anything militaristic, not anything related to terrorism.
So notice no critic of China or Russia or America is getting rounded up.
Only critics of Israel are getting rounded up.
And that's just a stone cold fact.
So I don't like Israel running this country, which is obviously what's happening.
I'm sick of it when Biden sent blank check after blank check to do the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
And now Trump says, hold my beer.
I could do even better.
I'm just going to, any critic of Israel, I'm going to trash the First Amendment.
He was theoretically for freedom of speech.
This is canceled culture on steroids, where a foreign government cancels people inside this country because they dared to criticize Israel.
It's totally, utterly unacceptable.
And it's destroying our constitution on behalf of a foreign government.
Totally unacceptable.
All right, Vinny, I see you ready to let rip.
Josh, I'll come to you in a moment.
But Vinny, I can see you simmering like a volcano there.
Yeah.
Well, well, first things first, Piers, when it comes to the deportations and the, how do we get here?
How do we get to the point where we have to reverse and send illegal gang members to get the hell out of our country?
It's because the Biden administration with Alejandro Mayorkas literally let a freaking invasion of the country happen with zero accountability.
Okay, because he got a pre-pardon too.
Let's move on to that.
You mean to tell me out of the thousands and thousands that homeman security with Thomas Holman and Christy Noam that we've deported these freaking murderous gangsters, we have one guy, one guy that nobody on this panel knows because none of us have the actual inside scoop is a freaking gang member.
And why is he fearing for his life in another place by other gangs?
Could it be that he is in a freaking gang?
All right, none of us know.
Okay, none of us know the thing, but if it's one, and we're asking Piers, why haven't they called and tried to get this guy out?
Maybe he was in a gang, okay?
Let's think about that.
And going to Chenk's point, Chank, you know I'm with you, brother.
America, if you're an American, freedom of speech, First Amendment, you can talk all the shit you want whenever you want about anything because it's an app.
I'm a free speech absolutist.
But if you are here, Chank, and you're here on a green card to try to come here and learn and listen, I'm sorry, Chank, you're handing out pro-Hamas shit and you're trying to rally the troops and try to get people angry.
And here's my thing, Piers.
Talk First Amendment all you want.
If you're hitting and fucking abusing Jewish students, I'm sorry, Chank.
That shit doesn't fly with me at all.
That's a crime.
At all.
Okay?
But Vinny, he didn't get it.
That's a crime.
So he didn't get it.
That's a crime.
If you hit a Jewish student, of course you're a goner.
Yeah, but Chank, okay.
Hang on, Chank.
He was.
But Chenk, hang on.
He was the leader of a protest group who are on record of saying they want the destruction of Western civilization.
Now, can you imagine saying that's what you want at a green card interview and being allowed to become an American green card holder?
No, absolutely not.
So, Piers, here's what's happening.
So these guys criticize and lead protests against Israel.
So then our government goes on a fishing expedition.
Also, by the way, by some vigilante pro-Israel groups that go around taking their pictures, looking at their social media, scouring it, and trying to find anything where they could say, well, he once is connected to a group that one guy in the group said this and this and this.
So, oh, no, no, no, this isn't about criticism of the people.
No, this is the leader of the group.
Oh, this is because, oh, he did this wrong.
Or a guy he knew that knew a guy did something wrong or said something wrong.
No, this is all a protection of Israel.
And once you take away his rights, the Supreme Court is very, very, very clear.
You're taking away our rights.
And then, Vinny, you'll be arrested for saying what you say about Israel.
And I'll be arrested and we'll all be deported.
I don't want to give him away my First Amendment rights for Israel or any other country, period.
Full stop.
I'm not interested in the witch hunts.
Oh, Urzchurch, she wrote an op-ed.
That's not into her life.
What did she say when she was 13?
Israel's feelings have been hurt.
Get real on what's happening here.
A different government is running our government.
I just want to very quickly.
I'm going to come to Josh, but just to be...
I'll come to Josh.
One second, Josh.
I'll come to you.
Just to be clear, though, there is a big difference between being an American citizen and being a green card holder, which I think is slightly lost on you, Cheng.
You don't need to have committed a crime to have your green card revoked.
The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has been told he's perfectly in his rights to deport Mahmoud Khalil.
And I think you're being extremely naive about what his involvement was in those protests.
Totally wrong.
He was the leader.
100% wrong.
He was the leader of the person.
He was the leader.
He was the leader of the protest group there who committed multiple acts of violence and vandalism who were harassing and terrorizing Jewish students.
And that group is on the record of saying some stuff, which if you repeated, and he was the leader, if you repeated that.
In other words, not a green card.
Guilt by association.
Not him.
Guilt by association.
None of that is true on Örster.
The one thing that's true is that every person being investigated is a critic of Israel.
That's the one thing that's a connective tissue.
And this is super important, Piers.
All right, you guys are legally and constitutionally wrong.
So the 1952 law does give Rubio the theoretical power that you're talking about.
But the Constitution has been interpreted by the Supreme Court for 200 years to apply the First Amendment and the Constitution to resident aliens like green card holders.
So that means those things are included.
No, that's fine.
And what the Supreme Court has to eventually decide is this law unconstitutional, which it most certainly is.
It's definitely unconstitutional.
Yes, but Chenk, it's not a First Amendment issue.
That's the point.
If you're supporting a prescribed amendment, if you support those conflicts are resolved, you just simply don't understand.
I do, but if you support a prescribed terror group in the United States as a green card holder, you can be deported.
That's the point you're not getting.
Let me bring Josh in here.
Josh, how do you think about this?
She's a critic of Israel.
She got rounded up anyway.
And neither did so many others.
But hey, every critic of Israel is rounded up, coincidentally.
And then I found a cousin of an uncle of an aunt who once said something mean about Israel.
And that's it.
Round him up.
Okay, get real.
Are you guys all pretending that this isn't the supporters of Israel?
Are you all pretending?
Listen, Israel didn't order Trump to do this.
Go back and pretend.
Go ahead, Archie.
Let me come with the journey.
I have a question.
Talking of rounding people.
Hang on.
Talking of rounding people up, I have a question for you, Josh.
How many people did Barack Obama round up and deport in his eight years as president?
Do you know?
Off the top of my head, Noah.
Is that the question?
I'm again.
I have that number at my fingertips.
I'm sure it was over a million people.
Two million?
Okay.
It was actually three million, over 3 million people, which is more pro-rata per year than any president in the history of the United States.
He was known as the deporter-in-chief in Mexico.
So, yeah, by Chenk's rounding up claim, he was rounding up pretty much everybody could get his hands on and throwing them out of the country.
And what did I hear?
What did I hear from the left?
Absolutely nothing.
Nobody even knows how many on the left that Obama deported.
They didn't care.
It's only become an issue with Trump.
And I would say that on the Trump deportation issue, look at what's happened on the southern border already.
In under three months, Donald Trump has pretty much totally stopped the number of people coming over the southern border illegally from the millions that were doing it every year in the four years of Biden's administration.
That's an incredible achievement, which no one's talking about.
So no one on the left talks about Obama's deportation record because it doesn't suit their agenda.
No one on the left is giving Trump any praise for what's happened on the southern border.
And on the rounding up issue, again, Josh, I'll let you respond to this.
But, you know, Chenk is just fundamentally wrong about the difference in which the First Amendment is at play.
Not because it doesn't apply to everyone.
It does.
It applies to me if I'm in the United States.
It's not a First Amendment issue if you are supporting a terror group.
Period.
It is.
End.
Right.
Okay.
So now, a few things.
What does it mean to support a terrorist?
First of all, I think they're, I'm not speaking for the left.
I'm just speaking for me.
And I think the big difference with the Trump deportations is that people are being rounded up for their ideas.
And that's new.
And that's chilling.
And that's something that we have to think about and reckon with.
And that is the important difference.
Supporting Terror Groups 00:03:02
And then, you know, to Chenk, I would say, listen, it's not, they're not only rounding up anti-Israel people.
I, not as a Jew, but as a human being and as an American, I don't want to see anti-Semitism and the fight against anti-Semitism used, weaponized to erode people's civil liberties.
That offends me as a Jew, as a human being, and as an American.
But it's not just the anti-Israel protesters.
There are Chinese citizens who are being deported.
There are Russian citizens who have been sent back to very cruel fates who are against the Putin regime, who are now no choice but to go back.
And just yesterday, they sent thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. military for 20 years, who were in the process of securing what we promised them, which was safety from the Taliban by being able to live here.
We brought them here and we put them to a process and they got an email saying, get out in seven days, okay?
Thousands of them.
And all of my sources in the military community are aghast, Republican and Democrats, because these people sacrificed and worked for our freedom and whether or not you agreed with that mission and were abandoning them.
And they never said anything about Israel.
No views on Gaza whatsoever.
So again, if the principle is you can just be thrown out without due process, then that's the principle that we have to think about and litigate.
And no, I don't agree with you, Cheng.
It's not just about Israel.
Although, again, criticizing Israel should not be grounds.
And material support, that's the standard, not just support, material support.
That's something that will have to be litigated.
And, you know, I'm sure that a lot of people will, including the targets here, will say, no, you know, passing out a pamphlet is not material support.
And one last thing, Piers.
You know, you said this on the show and you said this again today.
If he had said something in the past that was the thing that he said in the present, then he wouldn't have got his green card.
Well, you can't, that, you know, the time-space continuum doesn't work that way because the circumstances two years ago were not the circumstances today.
So we can't project a 2024 situation on 20, whenever it was.
It might have been five years ago that he had that interview because there was no Gaza war.
There was a different policy.
Things have changed.
People change.
You know, the circumstances change.
So we can't say that he lied on his green card application by not uttering the things that he thought five years later because that's a logical fallacy.
So let's just put that to the side and say that he deserves a right to his own defense.
Full stop.
Yeah, look, I think we've got to end it there, but I would say on that point that I think he got it in 2022, which would have been just before October the 7th.
That doesn't mean he didn't have pro-Hamas views before that.
I don't know the answer to that question.
But I do think, regardless of that, if you're on a green card and you later support a terror group, then I'm afraid America has every right to throw you out.
That is my view.
I may be wrong, Check.
Sometimes I am.
I don't like to admit it, but sometimes I am.
We shall see.
But thank you all very much indeed.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
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