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Welcome to Counterpoints. We always say that we have an amazing show today, really, really.
Really, Bryan, it's so excited.
It's incredible. There's so much going on in the world. Gold cards, yes, you can buy you if you have five billion dollars, don't blow it, because you can buy an American citizenship according to Trump. Coming soon, all right, coming soon to ocation.
Here you all right, So we're going to start with news that actually House Republicans past the budget resolution last night. We're going to walk everyone through exactly how they got there and what it means, what it could mean for medicaid, what it could mean for all kinds of stuff. So that's going to be up first. Then we have lots of updates from DOGE. As is the case every single day,
we learn more about what DOGE is up to. Sometimes these reports are conflicting, but we are going to get to the bottom of the last twenty four hours in doge world. Trump also introduced, as we just teased, a quite interesting idea about five million dollar gold cards that could replace visas.
And Ryan has some reporting.
A share from drop site on the bombing in Syria that just took place over the course of the last twenty four hours.
Yeah, Israel launched an aerosault over Damascus and its surrounding areas. Because why not.
That's and you had just on the ground as I was on the ground, right, Yeah, Boob had him on the show last week.
He just returned from Syria. We filed a dispatch last night with Ali Unis. We're also going to talk about Ukraine agreeing that Okay, you know what, after all, we will sign we will sign a deal around rare earth minerals and exploitation of our oil and gas and our ports the part they removed the we're going to take five hundred billion of it, So good negotiation from Zelenski. That's a pretty big sticking point. Five hundred billion dollar sticking point.
Well, it's still.
No security guarantees. We've got Steve Bannon comments about what what Trump should do with that minerals deal as well
that we'll get to it. And meanwhile, prosecutors are being rather shy in how they approach a domestic violence case where a Republican member of Congress was you know, according to police reports, bruised up his not wife, but girlfriend who lives here in DC, and she decides she is now deciding not to press charges, although there's so much evidence that seems like they really should be able to press are just the police were able to see the bruises.
It's pretty which is that's at least like, hey, you're coming with us type of evidence.
Yep, yep. But so we'll go into the sort of details of that story as everything we know about it, because it's kind of an interesting story about Ed Martin, who is in the news very much show in the news for saying that he sees himself as the president's attorney as DC.
He's the US attorney for DC, and he's about as radical a figure that has probably ever been in a job like that.
He's hardcore. Maga that he is.
Hard or maga. He claims he was not in the Capitol right on January sixth, but he was there and has made his bones as the defender of the hostages as Trump calls them, and is now just on a complete rampage, except against a Republican congressman who may have beaten their girlfriends.
Yeah, we'll see, we will dive into all of that. And man, do we have a good Friday show. I'm very sorry I unvirtunately have to miss it because I have to get out of flight. But Ryan booked Rohie Tropra.
Yeah, road Chropra the former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a former FTC commissioner. He kind of paved the way for the Lena Khan Andrew Ferguson bipartisan anti monopoly wing to take power in the FTC. Then he went over the CFPB, then he was ousted. He's going to respond to all of the various charges that he's gotten over the last several months. Jamie Diamond called him an arrogant pos I believe or arrogant sob Mark
Zuckerberg andres and Mark Andreesen. He has all the right enemies and he has them all very angry. So we're going to ask him why and see if he can defend himself against these defamations.
Super interesting. Ryan's going to pass a couple of my questions on so I'm excited to watch and hear how it goes. Let's start with our a bloc, which is that the House of Representatives passed a budget resolution last night. This is going to go through the reconciliation process to keep using this ridiculous parliamentary language. We can put the first element up on the screen. This was the vote total. Look at that razor thin margin. The vote was two
hundred and seventeen to two hundred and fifteen. The one and only Thomas Massey, American hero in my opinion, was the only Republican to vote no. Not because Thomas Massey had any issue with the proposed tweaks to medicaid, of course, but because it adds to the debt, and Thomas Massey is a hawk on that and is always ideologically consistent. Now, what's interesting is that There were three Republicans throughout the
day yesterday who said they were absolutely nos. Mike Johnson was able to flip two of them, Warren david Sel Trump with the help of Trump, Warren Davidson and Victorious Sparks. So now this bill heads over to the Senate, where it will have to obviously deal with some of the same concerns about Medicaid. Someone like Susan Collins is not going to be particularly excited to have to vote for what we can get into this in just a moment.
What many on the left will say amount to cut to Medicaid and the right will say is we don't know the particulars of how they'll get to these cuts yet, but basically they'll try to add work requirements and all kinds of different things in all likelihood.
Not to be the well actually guy, and we'll roll Massy in one second. Yeah, it doesn't quite go to the Senate yet. Oh no, you guys want to buckle up for little parliamentary lesson. Get out your number two pencils because this will be on the test. So the way that this absurd process works is the House floor votes on a budget resolution, which sets the outlines for
what each committee is supposed to then produce. So it'll say, hey, you Ways and Means Committee, you do taxes, we want you to cut four point five trillion dollars in taxes over the next ten years. You at Education Committee, we want you to cut this. You know, over here in the Health Committee, we want you to cut this much medicaid, et cetera. Like they just give a flat line. They don't tell you tell them how to do it. They say, just do it. Then the committees all meet and they
pass their individual pieces. Then the Budget Committee reconciles all of that into one place. Then they send that back to the House floor and then they vote yes or no on that, and then they kick it over to the Senate. And so the Senate is undergoing its own process of reconciliation as well. The difference being they are not dealing with that four point five trillion dollars in tax cuts. They're trying to only do the spending cuts.
And that's why you keep seeing Trump saying that he wants one big, beautiful bill, and what he means by that is that he wants the tax cuts and the spending cuts all done together. Now, Massey, the reason he's a no on this is that you might have noticed that the numbers four point five trillion in spending, tax cuts, and what was it one point five or two point five? It's all made up. So it doesn't really matter what these numbers are because these are projected out over ten
years and involve these projects that nobody takes seriously. One point five, yeah, one point five. So they're saying they're going So they're even in their rosiest scenario, they're saying that they're going to cut one point five trillion dollars in spending. Don't worry only bad things waste for an abuse, not the things that you like. Uh, And then they're gonna do four point five trillion in tax cuts. So here's here's Thomas Massey explaining why he voted no on this.
Will you just talk to us?
Are you still know?
Is there anything they they convinced me in there? I'm a note, is there anything? Look what let me let me their own numbers. If the Republican plan passes under the rosiest assumptions, which aren't even true, we're gonna add three hundred and twenty eight billion dollars to the deficit
this year. We're gonna add two hundred and ninety five billion dollars to the deficit the year after that, and two hundred and forty two billion dollars to the deficit after that under the rosiest assumptions, why would I vote for that?
Thre are you solidly you know?
Yeah, they convinced me.
I was at lean no and tell this meeting now, all.
Right, so Emily, what am I missing? That's a very persuasive argument from the right.
Yeah, I mean the only possible rebuttal to that from the right is that if this is your stance, you literally can't vote for anything because you will just not get anything, like yeah, right, he doesn't, which is perfectly consistent. So yeah, I mean, if you won't, I mean, it's it's obviously a sliding scale of like horribles. But basically, if that's your ideological position, you're consistent in it.
Count argument is come on, bro, Yeah.
The counter argument is really.
We got to do something, broa do something.
But that actually is the counter argument. That's literally the counter argument that you'll get from people like Mike Johnson, who used to be sort of freedom Caucus adjacent, like Massi's freedom Caucus adjacent, but those guys obviously now face looking at at this huge addition. As Massy pointed out, let's take a look at how Democrats are reacting up particularly to what's been going on, not deicaid wise, this is AOC let's roll a three.
There's a fundamental math problem here. There is a constant reiduration of waste, fraud and abuse. Sure, that's great, What is the identified amount of waste that this committee is identified? Because what the order that's been sent down here is fined eight hundred and eighty billion dollars. Not there is eight hundred and eighty billion dollars of waste, fraud and abuse. It's it's fined eight hundred and eighty billion dollars. And so we have not heard a single concrete number of
the amount of waste that's been identified. We have not heard a single concrete number on the amount of abuse that's been identified. And there's just kind of this vague
magic wand around waste. To my colleague from California's point, and waste is being used as a very large word here because what's being suggested is that long term care is wasteful in America, that children's health insurance is wasteful in America, that poor people seeing the doctor is a waste, that all of these people are disposable, that the elderly are disposable. So I think the problem here is that
the numbers don't add up. And anyone who votes on this budget this week is voting to cut Medicaid in America and voting to gut health care for Medicare recipients in America. There's just no other way about around it. And with that, I hoeld back.
So that's obviously a temperature track from the left flank, let's tune into the center left flank. Here's how came Jeffries.
Children will be devastating, Families will be devastated, people with disabilities will be devastated. Seniors will be devastated. Hospitals will be devastated, nursing homes will be devastated. So let me be clear. House Democrats will not provide a single vote to this reckless Republican budget, not one, not one, not one. They will not get a single Democratic vote. Why, because we're voting with the American people. They're voting with the American people.
So Rain, what's really interesting about that is this Republican resolution as it heads through the reconciliation process has a really easy giveaway to Democrats in terms of like political unity. When it comes to medicaiding, Republicans are really bad at explaining quote waste from an abuse as not like pushing back on the allegation that that's a cut as opposed to reform. They're really bad at making that case. Like
with medicaid. The media isn't being super helpful here, But if you dig into what they say they're going to do, it is more like cutting down on They say it's like waste, broad and abuse. But I feel like they say, okay, so you want to add work requirements and all of that, and we can disagree with it, but the word cuts. They should at least be like smart enough to try to find a work around politically to try and find a work around to that. But they don't.
Yeah, and I'll give you my theory on why I think they can't do it, And it's because they don't like the program. Yes, fundamentally yes, And in a lot of cases they don't like the people on the program. And in fact, Steve Bannon on his show had to remind his audience and Republican lawmakers with them that there are magas as. He says, there are magas on medicaid.
Implicit in a lot, Yeah, that's right. Implicit in that is it's just not those poor democrats that you think about, poor black democrats that you think about, like in your head when you think about when a Republican is thinking about Medicaid, and a lot of people think about maning, that's what they think about. So he's telling them, Okay, if that's what you think about, I understand why you want to cut it. But it's not just them, it's
also magas that are on it. So you start from that premise that they don't actually like the program and they don't like the people who are on the program. So the way that they want to cut the program is to reduce the number of people that get the program.
And the way they do that is they throw up a bunch of paper work requirements and also this work requirement which would say you have to work twenty hours in order to get in order to get medicaid, and if you can't find work, you basically have to come to some community center and sit there with you know, on a computer or something and just wasting your time so that they can feel good about making you feel
bad about getting the assistance that they're giving you. And so they tried this in Georgia and they spent like seventy million dollars on this like pilot program and it ended up just having sixty five hundred people in it.
So it costs an enormous amount of money to set up these projects and programs to monitor all of these people, and then you don't actually you're spending enormous amount of money per individual when it would be so much easier just say hey, if you're under this threshold, you get this money. Now. The other way that you could cut spending on this program is to go after the businesses and the scam artists that are ripping it off there. And there is an enormous amount of waste in Medicaid
and Medicare. One of them in the Senate on that front. Yes, one of the guys in the Senate, Scott from Florida, ran the largest medicare scam in American history. And the way you do a Medicare scam or a Medicaid scam is like I heard recently about a Medicaid one in New York where people were saying, like a dentists will do these others like say we'll give you a poster for free if you will come in and sign a piece of paper that says I pulled your tooth or whatever,
and then I submit this. You could invest money in inspectors and probably AI at this point analyzing the different payment schemes and finding this fraud and targeting it and prosecuting and going after it. I think the reason that Republicans won't do that is it would make the program
work better. And as I said in the beginning, they don't like the program that because what that would do it would solidify it, and it would make people feel better about the program, and so they would support it more. But there is indeed you could. So it's eight hundred and eighty billion that they're trying to cut over ten years, I think you could actually do that without hurting individual people. But you would have to stand up a serious program
of investigation. Hey guess what, there's like one hundred and fifty thousand federal workers who are well trained that were just fired. You can hire them to do that at pennies, just continuing to pay their salaries. Actually, a lot of them are on administrative leave now or unemployment, so we're paying them anyway. We're just paying them not to work, So pay them, put them to work. Go find the fraud.
You know, it was much easier to do medicare and medicaid fraud before we have the technology that we do now. Like if you're some like South Florida like scam operation and you've stolen a bunch of Medicare numbers that you can find online, what they do is they steal these numbers, they pretend that they sold wheelchairs to them, They charged seven thousand dollars for one hundred thousand wheelchairs. They cash the check, move the money, shut down, and then start
up a new thing and do it again. I'm not a technologist, but it's got to be pretty easy to figure out how to make somebody prove that you actually did sell and have something to do with making wheelchairs or selling wheelchairs, Like did you do it or not? I mean, scooters is the big one.
It's very sad how like these grifts are so convenient for the political establishment like this is also part of the reason and as part of the reason why democrats are hesitant to be super like to take a scalpel to medicaid too, is that there's all kinds of people who benefit from the system, the people who benefit.
Least of all business owners, yes, exactly.
The people who obviously need it most. And so as long as you have the inertia where the system feels like it's working well enough and people aren't rioting in the streets, then you end up with just like the worst system ever.
Right, because Democrats are unwilling to go after it because then they'll get accused of cutting medicaid. In fact, in Obamacare, one of the good things that Obamacare did was cut Medicare advantage, which is this privatized version of Medicare which is absolutely rife with scams. And so they went in and said, we're going to pull out some of the bs profit from Medicare advantage, which is a thing to do for everybody except the scammers who are making that fake profit.
Yep.
And they spent the next ten years with Republicans complaining that they cut Medicare.
It's amazing, right, like wait a minute, what But on the other hand, yeah, so this is the problem is like Republicans will say, like to AOC's point, where she's saying they don't like you know, this is poor people are disposable, Elderly people are disposable. The principle of ideological conservative response to that is actually they end up paying more for worse care. That's what the actual conservative argument is.
And if you believe that, you also don't have many incentives to come up with a better solution, which is what we've seen for the past ten plus years of the Republican Party after the repeal and replace era, where there was nothing ever to reveal and replace with because Republicans couldn't agree on anything. There's just no incentives to either go fully, there's no good way to operate a system that aligns with the Republican parties don't aligned incentives,
and it's like, sadly the worst possible. I mean, if you look at studies unhappiness, like they've gone into indigenous communities that have barely been touched by technology and found that one of the constants the two things that keep people happy community like knowing that you have family around
you and friends around you. And health. So if your if you feel like you have your health covered, you feel comfortable with that, which most people in this country don't like one to five people are actually on medicaid in this country is a very very high number, and I'm sure it's a lot higher in some really deep red states. That's I mean, that's extremely precarious. It's not comfortable, it's very nerve wracking, and the people who make these policies don't understand that.
Yeah, and so if you if you noticed when you had your number two pencil out and I was explaining this process. Obviously none of this is going to get done by March fourteenth, which is the deadline for the government shutdown. But that's actually a separate track, just too late, at a layer of complexity to this. So you might you've probably heard the news talking a lot aboutourteenth. If they don't pass budget by March fourteenth, then the government
shuts down. That actually is not related to what happened last night. What happened last night is setting the kind of the ten year projections and the spending and tax policy for ten years going forward basically twenty twenty six on. So on a separate track, they're pushing forward with what they're trying to do with these budget cuts to solid it and to actually kind of codify that the dog cuts, which is what I think they should do. Like, you're going to do this, you do it the right way,
to do it through Congress. Who knows what they'll be able to cobble together. The Republicans you tell me, seem to be signaling quietly, Okay, we're going to do a CR, which is a continuing resolution, Like we're going to complain between now and March fourteenth, we're going to say we're not going to do a CR. We're going to we're going to denigrate the entire idea of doing a CR.
And then when we've tried everything else, on March thirteenth, at eleven fifty nine pm, we're going to do it, which is a continuing resolution which continues spending levels at a set level. Basically, I think they'll do it through September thirtieth, and then russ Vote, Elon, Musk and the others are going to take that amount of spending. And what they're signaling privately and somewhat publicly is that they
see that as a ceiling. So don't worry. That's a big number and you feel like you've been betrayed again. We're not going to spend all that money we're going to impound a bunch of it. We're going to ask for recisions from Congress. But the impounded part will then draw lawsuits and it will go to the Supreme Court.
And they think that that's when they'll get their chance to say that it is actually legal, contrary to the Empoundment Act for the President to impound congressional spending, and then that.
Will overturn potentially the Impoundment.
Act, overturn it, and then solidify this unitary executive theory that they've been trying to put into into practice. So that and then they go back by September thirtieth, but by then they hope they'll have passed their reconciliation tax bill. Right, Is that about what they're Is that what we can expect you think, Yeah.
I mean, I think that's probably a pretty good sketch of what'll actually end up happening here. You know. The the also the mentality with the one bill versus two bills, and Mike Johnson won that out obviously, right so far right. John Thune wanted to do two bills instead of just
one big beautiful reconciliation bill. Part of the thinking was that you'd be able to put a lot more of the tough stuff in the first bill with the promise of getting the tax cuts or something in the second bill, you would be able or you could do something the other way around, depending on your motivations. But that was a losing argument from Thune. So we'll see how they can keep these like really narrow majorities in the Senate in the House together to get these votes. It's not
going to be easy at all. But once again, Trump is the factor that can get things across the line, because I mean we've seen this multiple times with nominations in the Senate. He's able to make that math work by threats. One thing that people have talked about is the America pac that Elon Musk set up that was instrumental in Pennsylvania. That is a sort of sort of damicles people have said, hanging over the head of Republicans.
That's been able to get them in line so far throughout this first month of Donald Trump's presidency, his second presidency. So we'll see what happens with these votes. But that's very very powerful going forward. All Right.
What I like about this show, and I think if you made it through this segment, I think you have a pretty good idea of what's going on here in a pretty weird situation. Should we see if we can keep that up with DOJE I doubt it.
Let's take a trip to do Let's try though.
All right, let's start with President Donald Trump, who decided that he was going to clear things up for federal workers because there's been a very confusing situation where Elon Musk emailed everybody in the government and said, you know, reply to your boss and see see omb and tell us the five things that you accomplished last week very quickly. The FBI, the CIA, you know, d n I, the Pentagon,
lots of places that have national security applications. We're like, maybe it's not such a great idea to put all the information about what you did the last week into a public you know, basically a publicly available email. I tapped Ryan Grim's phone, which you will then be uploaded into some deeply insecure AI to have it analyzed. And Elon Musk's response was, hey, I said, don't send classified information. And they're like, okay, thanks that that still doesn't help.
We still don't want all of our employees responding and telling Chairman she and deepseek exactly what they did the last week. So then Elon Musk said, all right, well, screw you. I'm going to ask again next week, and anybody who doesn't do it next week, they're going to be fired, despite what the Secretary of Defense or anybody else might say. So thankfully there is somebody in charge. Donald Trump decided to clear it up for everybody. Here's the man himself.
Can you clarify, hopefully, once and for all, what your expectations are with this email the federal employees? What are you going to use that information for? And do you see it as voluntary like opm said or Mandy.
Yeah, well it's somewhat voluntary, but it's also if you don't answer, I guess you get fired. What it really is, what it is is do people exist. We have this massive government with millions of people, and nobody knows who's working for the government who's not. So what they're doing is they're sending out a letter to everybody and they're saying, what were the things you did last week? I guess they asked for five and if people are working, it's easy. I could tell you five things I did last week.
I could tell you five things I did six weeks ago.
Right, Well, that's what I call government efficiency right.
There, right, somewhat voluntary, but if you don't do it, you get fired.
So it is somewhat volunteer.
Okay, So the Secretary of Defense or the director of National Intelligence tells you do not do this thing. The president tells you it's somewhat voluntary, but if you don't do it, you're fired.
I guess is that what he said?
He was like, I guess, so do you do it?
I think you do it. It doesn't hurt to do.
It, well, except it hurts national security.
Well if you, but he'd like, do it, but just be like, hey, to be clear, this is not actually what I did. No, there's no way to know. There's no right answer here. There's no right answer here. I mean, I think you obviously followed the directions of the department had and some.
Managers have instructed their employees to say, here's the five things you should say, Like number one, I fulfilled the responsibilities as listed in my job duties. Number two, Yeah, I coordinated with my manager on my duties and completed those. Which is amazing that you'd create all of this wasted time for work and managers to do this, and elonfficiency.
There actually have been sort of competing things from Elon Musk to who on the one hand, is saying that this is just a quote pulse check, like he's repeatedly said, this is just to make sure that you're not dead right, like you're not a fake person. We're cutting down always fraud andbs by just getting these responses back. But on the other hand, he's saying like, and we've seen it from the White House too. On the messaging is that like,
we don't think people are doing serious work. So are you supposed to take it as just a pulse check or are you supposed to take it as an actual inquiry about the substance of your work. It's genuinely like pretty there are thousands of people who have faced this conundrum over the course of the past week. Some of them are very important jobs, others of them probably less
important jobs. But if we have put B two up on the screen here, this is a script from NBC News that twenty one does staffers have resigned over a refusal to quote jeopardize American sensitive data. According to a letter that NBC News got, Ryan, did you read this the report, it's pretty it's pretty I don't know. I think all of this doesn't portend well for the future of DOGE, to be honest.
So in defense of Doge, these are Doggie in defensive Doggie. These are people who were already in the doghouse ye when when the dog Pound boss showed up, because this was the US what was it called the Digital Services of the Digital Services, and they just repurposed it as as Doggy, and so these folks are you know, these are former Google, you know, lots of Silicon Valley tech people who decided they wanted to come work in the
government and help the government become more efficient. That's why they went, you know, that's why they took this agency and converted it into the DOJE. And so these are not diehard Elon Musk fans, yes, or these are not Maga types.
So I mean, it's arguably the deep state that he's.
Targeting, except yeah, it's a fairly new deep state. But so it's almost surprising that they lasted this long. So I don't think it's that damaging necessarily to Doggy, because I think they can find some pups that'll come in and do their dirty work. Like there there are there's there's more than one big balls out in Silicon Valley that they can you know, there's no shortage of nineteen year olds on four Chan that that must can you know, recruit to come and do this work.
The response from Elin Musk was, quote, these were dem political holdovers who refused to return to the office. They would have been fired had they not resigned.
I mean, Katie Miller, Probably true.
Katie Miller said, quote, these were full remote workers who hung trans flags from their workplaces. That's the Katie Miller response to.
This, I gets what great are we in here? Probably true, might be true.
So anyway, that's They also named the DOZE administrator yesterday, like I think it was the Washington Examiner finally got their hands on the name of the person who, Yes, a person who seemed to have been on vacation who was formerly a part of the us D. And this is interesting because Elon Musk was seen as the head of DOGE, and then the White House confirmed last week that Elon Musk was not even part of DOGE formally, but was employed by the White House and sort of
oversaw DOGE in his capacity as a White House official as a special quote special government employee. So anyway, I guess I shouldn't have said that this doesn't portend well for the future of DOGE, but it does. Just there's there's an air of chaos around DOGE that doesn't bother the people involved in it at all. I mean, I think a lot of this was always intentionally, understandably going
to involve chaos. Everyone certain knew that. But there's chaos, and then there's chaos that's inefficient, ironically, and in this case, I do think there's just I mean that the like the the email one is a really good example, there's chaos to the point of creating inefficiencies to the end of efficiency. Like in the process of creating efficiency, it's just been a very it was always going to be messy, but they're creating more work unnecessarily for themselves.
Yeah, it's a it's weird, like why are they doing this? Why are they doing this weekly email thing? Like I've seen a lot of people be like, well, there's nothing wrong with like a worker telling their boss what they did the last week. It's like, Bro, you don't think
that they were already doing that. I guess, I guess, I guess if you have bottom barrel levels of hostility towards all federal workers, and you think that managers aren't managing their workers and workers aren't actually doing any work, then you need to come in and tell them to do this. But if you checked in, you'd see, like, this is a bureaucracy. These are this is a giant bureaucracy. The one thing that bureaucracies definitely do is this kind of stuff. What did you do, Like what did you
get done last week? Like check you know, who did you check in with? What meetings?
Half the work.
Just having meetings about meetings, And it is the criticism of a bureaucracy.
They spend too much time keeping track of that, right.
And so now Musk is going to come in with another TPS report that they have to complete that is supposed to be in the name of efficiency. It's like, so it's so dumb. It raises the question, Okay, what
do they really do, what's really going on here? And is it are they actually trying to create chaos Under the old argument that Democrats would always make about Republicans that they don't like government, and so then when they get in power, they make it not work and then they point to the fact that it doesn't work under them as reason that you should get rid of the government. Is it really just as simple as that old thing just now dressed up as a as a sleek cyber truck.
Cer truck.
Wow, that was beautiful, very poetic.
Yeah, that was a very poetic time.
Putting this stuff out for free.
Yes, well not if you want it commercial free.
If you want a commercial free taking points dot com.
So Rokanna posted a video of a fired VA worker that just in this bigger conversation about inefficiencies, I mean, the email point. I think some of this obviously is intentional. I mean, the rost Bilt playbook was explicitly before the election to push trauma for bureaucrats, and so I mean, I think that's that's obviously the playbook and part of this. But again, there's efficiency, there's inefficiencies that are sort of inevitable when you're creating cast, and then there's inefficiencies that
are hurting your effort to battle inefficiencies. So let's take a look at this video that Rokana posted of some people who have been affected by various cuts you enroll this.
I'm a veteran I deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. Anybody who asked me, you know, I would have told them I was told them for Trump. But at this point, I mean, obviously I never would have expected things to go this far. So this was really a job that meant a lot to me. So it was a way for me to help veterans that are struggling.
I served this country, but now under Trump's executive orders, I'm being discarded like I don't matter.
I don't think anybody's opposed to the idea of government efficiency and really getting rid of wasteful practices, but doing it in such a chaotic manner that leads to people getting fires by the tens of thousands. This was my dream job, and it's just being taken away by an administration who doesn't care about science.
It doesn't care about people who might be homeless.
I literally sink in my chair.
I had no idea that without due process, that I could just be terminated out of the blue.
I was a highly performing individual.
I would just ask President Trump and anybody else that might be in charge to reconsider your decision.
The United States of America is not a social media or tech company, and it should not be run like one.
Mister President, many of these people voted for you.
I don't regret voting for President Trump, but the actual policy is being pursued. Just don't come board at all with the actual holes the administration.
We want them reinstated. It's an absolute try.
Obviously that the president's of other day, except that Elon Musk was a patriot. When we see how many veterans we have on the line that are being absolutely devastated by this.
This has been devastating for our family.
We have a mortgage. We have to favor preschool.
Mine happened on February fifteenth, but the day before what many reporters are calling the Valentine's a massacre, my computer went black and I was unable to sign back into my computer.
You know, I was the source of our families healthcare. It's put us in a pretty strenuous position right now.
People getting fired and bringing back because they were fired without realizing how crucial their work is. It really leads to mistrust from the general public and steers people away from a career public service.
I was anticipating having, you know, twelve weeks of fraternity leaves through my work with the USDA, I.
Mean ren we talked about for months before Doggie actually went into effect. Those are actually went into effect, that there were going to be all kinds of tear jerking images of fired federal workers, whether they're on the streets with their ferns and boxes or talking in these video that Democrats put out that make the process complicate the politics of the process for Republicans now. A Harvard Harris poll this week found pretty widespread support for DOGE.
I think to the.
Worst polster in America should underscore although.
To be fair, to be fair, other because it's Mark Penn's yeah, to be fair. Other polls have found similar results.
If you ask should you cut federal spending and like.
Yeah, Well, And the reason I bring that up is because to the extent Republicans are able to say this is just about waste frauden abuse, and they keep saying waste for an abuse, waste frauden abuse, then they can they can politically sort of win the battle and overcome the obstacles of having all of these tear drinking stories
circulated through media and by Democrats. But those stories, the more powerful they are and the more sympathetic they are, they create a much higher hurdle to overcome for Republicans to make the case that this is just about waste, frauden abuse.
Right, And if if they did all this and they made the government more efficient, and they and they like cut taxes for people, then you probably would have a decent chunk of the American public would be like, I'm sorry that this had to happen to these hardworking people, but you know, we have to live within our meets. Blah blah blah blah. They're not going to do that, Like I think, they're going to make the government much
less efficient. They're gonna and they're going to anger a lot of people, uh in how they do it, and they're going to basically go on a round of grifting. So one of the one of the workers in there was from the VA. The the doge lead who's handling the VA is just in fulture as so much is going on that has barely gotten any attention. He's the co founder of ring m D, which is a telehealth company.
I'm trying to think of what would be a more direct conflict of interest than sending a telehealth tech guy into the VA to slash and destroy it. So we're gonna make sure all these veterans get much worse care. Oh and guess what, I have a telehealth company here that is willing to step into the breach. Sorry that you know, we shut down these different community facilities. I'm sorry. We've extended way times and now you can't get in
to see an actual doctor for six months. But guess what, I have a Zoom for you for the low low price of whatever he charges the VA. Well, don't you worry about it. We're just gonna We're just gonna have the VA right it checked directly to us, and we're going to walk away with enormous amounts of money.
Yeah, I mean, and some of this has actually been cuts to There have actually been proposed cuts to telehealth coverage too. Like it's all very across the it's all over the place. What's actually what the actual strategy is. And again, like they would say that's completely necessary. I actually agreed to some extent that they're going to be conflicting cuts because they're trying to do this like sweeping quote revolution according to Elon Musk, and there's a lot
that can be cut. I saw an interesting post someone at the Manhattan Institute who said, imagine if Mitch Daniels were in charge of DOGE like you had this very it's an interesting catch twenty two because on the one hand, you don't have the I guess cultural capital and just like crazy will to do a lot of the stuff that Elon.
Remember the government the very mild manner Tea.
Party era governor of Indiana.
Yeah, who was all about it?
Sort of like a Coburn type of Tom Coburn type, who's.
All about it?
Uh, someone who would you know, like the Rand Paul annual Festivus list like these. This is you know, the bread and butter of somebody like Mitch Daniels. And it's kind of a fascinating hypothetical to think about, or just like a to think about what it would look like without Elon Musk, like Dose without Elon Musk, because on the one hand, you don't have the insane energy, but on the other hand you don't have the insane energies.
Could you even have DOGE without Elon musk't know, but without Elon Musk it probably would be there would be streamlining. I would imagine there would be like more consistency.
Last point on efficiency because we're not being a very efficient moving through this block.
We don't claim to be the department of That's right media efficiency.
Though, because of civil service protections, Musk had to go after people who were on probation. It's been widely reported that that means that they were hired within the last one, two or three years, but it also includes people who were recently promoted from one GT from one level to another. In that brief period during the promotion, you are back on a probationary period, even if you've been there for
fifteen years. So think about what that means. All of the people that he fired without checking with their managers about how valuable they were, without even looking to see whether or not they protected nuclear secrets, were trying to prevent an outbreak of bird flu, any of these things.
What they also did systematically is fired everybody who was you know, came into the government within the last couple of years, which means somebody over the last couple of years decided that this is a position that they needed filled. These are very hard jobs to get, like there is a it's a ridiculous ticket that you have to go through, and that would be a good place to cut usually and just you know, so you can actually hire fast. It can take like two years to get one of
these jobs. It's incredible because they're trying so hard to root out corruption, and I think they've gone too far in the inefficient direction because corruption and efficiency and transparency and inefficiency kind of go together in an uncomfortable way that we don't like to talk about. So these are new people, but then also people who got promoted. So who did you not fire, Like people who've been in the same job for like twelve years.
When some people have been rehired because they realize like, oh right.
We do have to actually do something about bird flu.
So again the inefficient inefficient. Now that to people like my friend's on the right, were like like, okay, so you are now like this is a just cause and you are now whining about the process, And I actually completely understand that, but I still my kind of arguments that would be we don't know how this all plays out, Like there's still a long way to go, right.
They'd say, you got to break some eggs and make an omelet, and I'm like, cool, where's the omelet?
Wait waiting for the outlet? All right, So let's pivot to this news that Kyle Cheney posted and be four about judges. Judges, judges, judges. This is the fight for the next couple of weeks. Obviously a lot of this has gotten tied up in the courts, but it just
took an interesting turn. So Kyle Chaney says a federal judge gave the Trump administration about thirty six hours to pay out hundreds of millions of hundreds of millions of dollars for work performed by foreign aid contractors and is demanding details about potential defiance of his orders.
Speaking of defiance.
Of the judges orders, Elon Musk posted this yesterday.
This is from this is be five.
If any judge anywhere can block every presidential order everywhere, we do not have democracy.
We have tyranny of the judiciary now.
Elon Musk also, I want to point out weighed in on something that Nai Bukele posted, where he said, if you don't impeach the corrupt judges, you cannot fix the country. They will form a cartel, a judicial dictatorship, and block all reforms protecting the systemic corruption that put them in their seats, and Musk essentially posted an agreement with that
point from Bukela, did you see musk posts on the strine. No, he reposted the Bukeli thing in agreement, and that to me is offensive, to be honest, because Bukele is making a very direct comparison between the judicial system in the United States and the judicial system in El Salvador. That's insane.
That is pretty insane.
I don't think our system is like perfect, and I do think there's some serious questions about separation of powers. But that's insane.
That is insane. Now. Of course, it is true that throughout our two hundred plus years for being a republic, not a democracy, as the right loves to tell, but actually.
It's not a democracy, there has been a push and pull, a tug of war between the executive of the legislative and the judicial branch.
And you would see people like me who are angry about Supreme Court decisions or FDR for instance in the nineteen thirties, who are angry about Supreme Court decisions hemming in the will of the people. During the New Deal, he threatened to expand the size of the court through a legislative action, and as a result, the Supreme Court back down and started allowing new Deal policies to go through. Hey, so this is kind of how it goes. These are
different power centers. These are the checks and balances that are built right into the system. For Elon Musk to be surprised that a check exists in a system, Uh, I was going to say, it suggests that he didn't, you know, go through elementary school in the United States. But he did not go through elementary school in United States, so he should go back and check out some of these, like how a bill becomes a law, and the checks
and balances and like all the things. Well, they're on the citizenship.
Test though, So here's what he posted.
Should have actually seen it then, unless he sent some gamer in to take a citizenship test for him.
So bu Kelly posted, checks and balances don't truly exist unless the judicial branch can also be checked.
Stops right there. Checks and balance exist, Salvador.
But he said checks and balances don't truly exist unless the judicial branch can also be checked and balanced, and Elon Musk responded, the only way to restore a rule of the people in America is to impeach judges. No one is above the law, including judges that is what it took to fix Elfalvador. Same applies to America, and it is true that you have to be able to check the judiciary one hundred percent. It's true that you
should be able to check to judiciary. Now Elon Musk going full Boukela here and the Trump administration, I mean, there's there are reasons to have strategically close relationships, as Mark Arrubia does with Bukele, But applying Bukeleyism to domestic politics is different than CosIng up to Bokelly on foreign policy, even if we disagree with that relationship doing it. Applying bu Kellyism to domestic politics is like it would be
just have a completely different country, completely different system. And you can understand why people would say, well, maybe that's a slippery slope to just completely politicizing the judiciary branch. And I agree the judiciary branch has like problems with being already overly political, but it's not El Salvador.
It's a very surprising thing for him to suggest, because you need two thirds vote in both the House and Senate to impeach a judge, and clearly Republicans don't have two thirds votes, so why float something you know, just happens.
To shift the Overton window.
Yeah, and so he knows that. I mean, I don't know if he knows not. Like the in the first couple of years of our republic, and people look up the exact judge on this, there was a judge who was ruling against the Federalists, if I'm remembering the details right, and people were and the Federalists were mad about that, and they tried to impeach him based on his decisions.
Not they didn't say he was corrupt. Alsee Hastings, late Democratic Congress and I think he's late, was impeached as a federal judge, but for corruption, and then he was elected to Congress. It was kind of funny. He's like, wait, didn't you didn't you get impeached and thrown out of office and then and then you won a congressional seat whatever. Okay,
but that was for corruption. The founders basically in that first or second term or whatever it was of Congress rejected that resoundingly, and a lot of the Federalists or whoever it was that would have benefited politically from getting rid of that judge yeah, said no, on principle, we do not want to set a precedent that a judge should be removed because we don't agree with their decision.
Yeah, well I'm not panic So yeah, I'm personally not panicked yet about this question because I think this is an intentional effort on behalf of the Trump administration to force judicial decisions about executive power and to and they've been very clear about this. RUSSBO has been very clear
about this. They think executive power is atrophied, and they want to force the question into the courts to get definitive answers on things like the Impoundment Act, potentially to overturn acts of Congress that they think have unduly sapped power from the presidency. And some of that I actually disagree with. I did think that creates a too powerful executive. But on the other hand, I do think it's a serious problem that you have. And we've talked about this before.
Sometimes at the EPA it doesn't happen as often to the left as it does to the right, But you have some bureaucrat who came through the revolving door and is making decisions that the president wouldn't be happy about to benefit the industry, to benefit oil and gas, industry, but that they came from. So there is a serious there's absolutely a serious question about how these executive branches, these executive branch agencies should be tethered politically to the
goals of the president. On the other hand, there are things like the FTC for example, or there are places where you have to have some level of distance and the judiciary is kind of the intermediary there.
So some of this.
Is just going to get kicked into the courts, and it's going to feel kind of nerve wracking as it's happening, because you don't know exactly how Trump and Musk will wield those powers. It's hard to trust how Musk in particular will suggest people in doggy dose wield those powers. But on the other hand, there are some serious things that do need to be resolved, and having i guess, more direction one way or the other won't be the
end of the world. In fact, it could actually be a good thing in some places of the government.
And interestingly, we're seeing multiple power centers within the executive So the judge that we just mentioned sold told the executive that they have to restart a lot of this foreign aid funding or face contempt charges. But we've also learned. I think it was in the Wall Street Journal that Rubio and Trump approved spending around you know, feeding the feeding the hungry, and AIDS funding as he said he would.
He said, if you if you really are just doing you know, poverty reduction stuff that isn't part of a deep state cabal, then I am going to give you a waiver and we're going to move move that money out. So they approved a bunch of that stuff, and then DOJE people came into the back end, and this is what people have been panicked about with the DOJE unchecked people and blocked.
It again, authorized by the Secretary of State.
Right, money authorized by the Secretary of States go back out, appropriated by Congress, authorized by the Secretary of State who was nominated and appointed by the President, confirmed by the Senate. And then Big Balls comes in or not. I don't want to slander Big Balls if he didn't anything to do with this. Some DOJE person goes in and just clicks a button and blocks it, and so the judge is saying, no, this, You've got to get this money moving. So it is who's in contempt. At that point, Rubio
is like, look, I'm trying to spend this money. Now he's not trying to spend all of it. There's a bunch that Rubio doesn't want to spend it. The judges saying you have to spend and that's usad and that's going to be very interesting. But what do you do if the kids are like, no, I'm not going to not here to do it.
H No, really, let's before we leave this block, kick it over to Representative Nicole malliots Hawkas of New York, who weighed in on Doge with some.
Criticis reelection right, there's one of the few Republicans this is a chief target of Democrats.
Yeah, she's in New York's eleventh district, which is actually kind of one of the interesting places. I mean, she she won pretty handily last time, but it's a She's one of those places in New York where you can kind of find mago world an interesting it places out surprise I think a lot of people in like DC Beltway media. So let's turn it over to Representative Malia Takis.
When I see what happened last week with the nine to eleven healthcare program, that employees were fired and that grants were removed, from the program. That disturbs me, and it just shows that they're acting too rash and that they need to slow it down a little bit.
And obviously you're going to start seeing more and more of the sort of dissent from Doge and Elon Musk and Trump may or might not understand that some people obviously have to stake out positions that put them at odds with those or at least publicly stakeout positions even if their votes end up in Congress looking different, and even if their sort of criticism doesn't have a ton of teeth because they're a single representative in a swing district.
So some of that you'll start to see more and more cracks in the foundation, as we have of the course the last week, people like you know, expectedly Lisa Murkowski coming out against Doge. It doesn't mean that the Republican Party as a whole is having problems with Dose. That said, this stuff does make it harder for She's responding to political pressures that Doge will have to answer to, not just in swing district but all over the country.
The debate over how astro turfed or not astro turfed, for example, what Rich McCormick got in a deep red district in Georgia. As we talked about last Friday with Crystal Ryan, that whether or not it's part of like it was organized by Indivisible or some left leaning group.
Isn't really the point.
The point is that the means they're able to suddenly organize a bunch of people to get people out to town halls because there is actually some like legitimate frustration in even red parts of the country.
Yeah, and so she represents Staten Island and then Republican leaning portions of like outer Brooklyn's interesting areas, to.
Quote Steve Benn, a lot of maga on Medicaid.
Let's move on to Donald Trump's suggestion that they up the price for American citizenship, because you actually already can buy American citizenship, but sort of through a process of like you have to like invest like a certain amount of money or in a property or something, and then
that moves you up in the in the line. So this is not actually a kind of brand new idea from Trump, but like Trump likes to do, he's really saying the quiet part out loud and just signing it and putting a price tag on completely so this new Trump idea for gold cards, we're going to.
Be doing something else. It's going to be very very good.
We're going to be selling a gold card.
You have a green card.
This is a gold card.
We're going to be putting a price on that card of about five million dollars and that's going to give you green card privileges. Plus it's going to be a route to citizenship and wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card. They'll be wealthy and they'll be successful, and they'll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people. And we think it's going to be extremely successful.
Never been done before or anything like this, but it's something that we're going to be putting out over the next would you say two weeks out, do.
You want to say a couple of words about sure a minute, you.
Have to invest a certain amount of money in this country in order to qualify for.
That goal card.
Yeah, exactly.
So the EB five program was really you lend some money, but it was all it was full of nonsense, make believe in fraud, and it was a way to get a green card that was low priced. So the President said, rather than having this sort of ridiculous EB five program, We're going to end the EB five program. We're going to replace it with the Trump Gold Card, which is really a green card Gold. So they'll be able to pay five million dollars to the US government. They'll have
to go through vetting. Of course, we're going to make sure they are wonderful, world class global citizens. They can come to America. The President can give them a green card, and they can invest in America and we can use that money to reduce our deficit. Why do we give out lotteries of green cards? Why do we give out EB five for green cards?
Brian saying, that's Howard Lutna. Though, if you were listening to this and you couldn't see the video, that was the dulcet tones of Howard Lutlin explaining this.
Here the former he was the head of what's the what's the private equity company? That was Gerald Old Trade Center. Yeah, a very interesting guy himself, and his story of nine to eleven is go find it if you can. Like he was, he would not be alive today if he hadn't taken his kid to kindergarten that morning he's the Commerce secretary. Yeah, and he was on his way to work. And I think they lost more than six hundred people at Canter Fitzgerald. So separate from that. So the EB
five program, they're kind of right that it's right for abuse. Basically, you have to tell the government, you have to you have to convince the government that you're going that the amount of money that you're investing is going to create a certain amount of jobs. And the threshold for it is different. How do you, like, how do you define it, how do you how do you prove it? How do you actually make sure that somebody's actually doing it or not.
It's all difficult, It's all, you know, just subject to different judgment calls. And so Trump's like, look, let's make it simpler. Write a check five million dollars pay to the Order of US Treasury. Yep, I guess they'll run a background check on your oligarch status. He said, well, he said, you know, or you're gonna let rush on oligarchs in. And he said, hey, some Russian oligarchs are not good people. I've met them. So I guess they'll they'll have the FBI do a little background check maybe
or maybe not. I mean who knows so, and then and then you're in. And you know, if you're like from the US perspective, like, I can see lots of arguments around fairness and on and on, But from a just national kind of interest perspective, this seems like a smart move for the United States.
Oh yeah, Like this is honestly a way more transparent and transactional, like nakedly transactional way to improve an already transactional program.
And I think you might have a decent number of rich people who would take it up for their kids. Yeah, like they like, if you can cut a check for five million dollars for no reason to the to the US, then you probably are already a global citizen because you can buy citizenship and like Cyprus or whatever, like less than that, and that gets you then citizenship in the EU. And you know, if you have citizenship in the EU, you have reciprocal trade, reciprocal travel privileges to the United States.
So the only reason you might need this extra gold card would be, yeah, for your kids, So you give them a trust fund and you give them then citizenship that passes down because if your parents are an American citizen. I presume, now, should we make them buy a Gold card for every one of their kids and cousins and everything. Cousins definitely, but kids. Do the kids automatically get a Gold card out of this?
That's a great question.
If they weren't born here, that's a great question.
But this is galaxy brain Trumpism, right. This is an idea that is so completely bizarre in Washington because it says we're just going to be transactional instead of we are going to mask our transactional process in the language of neoliberalism.
He's like, no, five million dollars.
Now, if you want it to be really neoliberal, the way that it should work is that you should be able to sell We're not going to print citizenships. Can't just create an asset bubble of citizenships. We have a flat number of citizenships out there, and if a rich person wants to buy it, they have to buy it from an American citizen.
Bid.
So, if you want to sell your American citizenship to an oligarch for five million dollars, you can do that. I bet you'd have a lot of people be like, now you have to figure out like, okay, we're now I'm a Now I am a country list like citizen of nowhere. So hey, Mexico, can I like come down and I have five million dollars, but I have nowhere that I can live.
Just live in international waters and be funny if.
You sold your citizenship and then at the ceremony, Ice arrests you and puts you in.
Attention, I mean, I guess, but that's the thing.
Like, so our visa program is obviously there's very compligated, but there are all different ways that elite companies are already gaming the system, and rich pople are already gaming the system. So Trump is like, if we're going to do it, like just streamline the process and be honest about it and stop like allowing these companies to poke different holes based on their privileges and their lobbying carveouts
and all of that. So honestly, if we're going to have the system, whatever, five million dollar gold cards might as well.
But we don't like people that become poor after they're rich, So shouldn't we charge them like a million a year? Keep it going, keep it going, And if you can't pay your million a year, then we're stripping that gold card from you. More of a subscription than like a country club. Like it's a big upfront fee, but it's not like you pay your upfront fee to the club. I mean, you wouldn't do that for mar A Lago, And so it's good. It's not good enough for mar
A Lago. Don it's not good enough for the United States of America country club membership. Here, big upfront fee and then then an annual membership on top of That's the.
Problem with that is you get to the renters versus owner's dilemma, which is serious. You don't want to have.
These people are renters. We could, we can. It's safe to be xenophobic. Now Trump one vibe.
Shift ye, Well yeah, ideally you want people to invest the long term health.
Right A million a year. Yeah, but that's it just went up to two.
You're doing the wall.
Well, just got ten b there too. Now, well, we'll see how this goes. This is like one of those Trump ideas that he says and then you don't know if it will actually happen. But now in his second term, everything he says seems to actually be happening. So be on the lookout for the gold card. Maybe you could do it. Will you want a style.
I think you would need legislation because EB five is legislatively constructed.
Yes we've said that many times in the last month.
But do your legislation. Like this is the thing like people like, oh, stop stop, stop saying you need Congress to do all this stuff. It's like, guys, you control both houses, you have Congress. Just do it.
They're lazy, Just do it.
Well.
Some of this is intentionally testing executive power, Like some of this they actually want it to be. You want to prove that it should be the executives authority to do X, y and z. But some of it they're not trying to make a point, so they might as well just fold it into the.
Reconcisation's with the CFPB gutting in the crudred percent parliamentarian be just fine with that.
See all right, let's move on to the awful reporting that you guys have up at drop set.
It's not awful reporting.
It's reporting on something awful I should be clear about. Out of Damascus, Ryan, what can you tell us.
You can put up this uh this d D one here. So Tuesday evening, Israel launched air strikes around around Damascus after a day earlier net Nyah who came out and claimed that you can put up D two here. Here's a drop drop site piece by Martazo saying all the units, I can put a link down there and people can go read it. So yesterday or Monday, net Yah who said southern Syria is now off limits for the Syrian government.
It is they and net Yahoo referred to it, and so did Defense min Or Israel Cats who confirmed that Israel was the one that carried out these air strikes as a security zone quote unquote security zone. So this is a the facto annex station of Syrian territory way north of the Golan Heights, effectively saying anything south of Damascus is a no go zone for the Syrian government.
This is a heavily Druze community. The Drews are a significant element of Israeli kind of pluralistic propaganda, where they will point to the Drews and say, look, you call us an ethno state, but here are the Drus who are living here in Israel and they have equal rights. And you'll have a lot of Drews who will say, we don't actually have equal rights, so you don't treat us as equal sitis, but we do get treated better
than Palestinians. And then there's a whole hierarchy. There's the Palestinian who's a citizen of Israel, and there's the Palestinian who lives in different areas of West Bank. Palestinians, then further who live in different areas of West Bank, and then all the way at the bottom Palestinians who live in Gaza and have effectively zero rights, including the right
to life. And so the Syrian government has truly bent over backwards to convey to Israel and to the United States, Europe and everybody else that they want no peace of this Axis of resistance. That Assad was a member of this access of resistance. I want a dubious reliability, but a member. Nonetheless, they overthrew a sod and they have said that they do not want any of the smoke,
and you can't handle any of it. They're completely destroyed, and immediately upon taking power, Israel bombed all of their military bases, destroyed all their planes, all their anti aircraft, like, they completely wiped out any capacity for this new state to actually defend itself. They are an offshoot of al Qaeda, at which people love to point out has bombed everyone you can think of, going after everybody you can think of, except Israel. So there's never in this like al Qaeda
Israel hostility. All of this was done in the vain hope of appeasing Israel, that Israel would say, finally we've gotten rid of the Assad family, which has been our enemy and and has refused to reach you know, full agreement with us, even though they did reach, you know, various different deals that are in place, and so finally we can now have a neighbor that we can coexist with. That there was that there was hope that Israel would see it that way. Israel does not see it that way.
Israel sees it as an opportunity to expand the land that it controls. Continuing with this very confusing thing where on the one hand, this Israel has a right to exist, on the other hand, refusing to ever define where the borders of Israel end. Because if it has a right to exist but it doesn't ever define where its borders are, then does it have a right to exist in southern
Syria and the southern Syria now Israel, Southern Lebanon now Israel. Meanwhile, there's a a you know, mass invasion of the West Bank underway, which we can talk about in a second. But so this is putting pressure on the Syrian government. We can put up C three. So the these are protesters marching marching through Damascus.
Uh.
They are. They are chanting in Arabic, but the translation is Oba loved jilani bomm tel aviv Uh. This is and this is indicative of the public pressure that the head of Syria is under from the Syrian public to stop just rolling over for Israel. But it's not really up to him, and you can read the piece by
Martazan Ali. They don't have the capacity to do anything against you know, they're they're still they're still fighting there, you know, with some you know, gangster elements of the assadig that are still around as basically you know, meth meth traffickers of Captagon traffickers. So the idea that they're going to take on Israel with any with any seriousness
is a fantasy. The real concern that that Israel has, and this is talked about in the story as well, is that Turkey is the backer of this news Herian government and Israel is worried that Turkey is going to use the foothold in Syria to begin flexing muscles, and which is plausible. Yeah, it is plausible, and to re become the great power in the region because.
They've indicated that.
And also like this period from nineteen seventeen would follow follow the Empire until today is the anomaly in world history. You know, for more than two thousand years you had two empires that controlled the entire Middle East, the Byzantine Empire and then the Ottoman Empire two. Like that's an
enormous amount of stability going back to BC. And so you can imagine, like, so nationalism was kind of forced on this region after World War One in a fake way where there weren't really random random borders and fake made up nationalities with people deliberately pitted against each other so that the West could keep them poor and struggling
and extract their resources. If we actually cared about reducing the amount of conflict in the region, you'd probably go back to everybody, you know, unified under some type of government. This was the dream that kicked around as the kind of pan Arab socialist movement which said we're not Iraqis and Runians and Turks and Syrians and you know, we're
all Arabs and Persians and we're all in this area together. Now, Turkey has a different idea back in the back of Ridiwan's mind where he's gonna say, well, how about we just bring back the Ottoman Empire m h. And then Israel's like, well, wait a minute, where do we where do we fit into that?
That's off some red flags?
Yeah, hold on, because this whole area over here of Palestine when it was in the Ottoman Empire was not an independent country called.
Israel, And what do we know about So both hag Seth and Rubio, what can we assume or how can we assume they'll handle Israel's move here?
Essentially, you know Ruby Ruby, Well, Rubio is an interesting case because he is completely hemmed in and has no basically no authority left and doesn't even seem like I was for a minute complaining that the State Department wasn't having daily briefings. I'm like, why would I want to go to a State Department daily briefing as if they have anything to share with us, which would imply that they know what's going going off. They have no idea they're learning from us what's going on Rubio.
Because Trump calls the shots in a way that Biden didn't like. The Trump right, the Trump presidency calls the shots in foreign affairs in a way that Biden really let blink in call the shots. Yeah, very different.
Rubio, in my this is my forecast got played in the most hysterical fashion. Like Trump plucked him out of the Senate so he can make his daughter a senator from Florida. And the second that she is a senator from Florida. Not the second, but give it forty five days, Rubio will be fired as Secretary of State, so he will have lost the Senate seat.
I don't know.
Trump seems very happy with Rubio so far, because.
I mean, as long as Rubio keeps kissing his butt.
But Rubio also like plays the role like Trump. We know that Trump sees these literally as casting decisions, and Rubio has really he keeps playing.
His role, then he can stay in that role. So I think the US is just going to be as they have been for you know. Ever, just let Israel, you know, is Reel said it would withdraw from southern Lebanon as part of the ceasefire deal that we negotiated the time for that expired and they said they're not really going to do that. Uh, and they then, you know, go invade and bomb Syria. And right now they are
launching that. They've sent tanks and a major military incursion into into Janine until Karum really trying to wrestle full control of the of the West Bank, displacing tens of thousands of people, seizing homes, seizing entire you know, villages and cities, and uh, you know, in the direction of complete annexation of the of the West Bank. So they're they're they're they're going for it.
Seeback pastor resolution.
What was that annexation of the border in Samaria for it? Yeah, so we'll see it.
But I see packed away in on another country, like just getting to annex territory.
I mean, I just say that because it's it's an interesting indication of where the people who are pressuring the Trump administration are right now, Like they didn't even really have to do, like they didn't have to talk about that, but it's a priority.
So look, Israel has unlimited weapons from the United States, and it has the military capacity to throw throw people out of their homes and seize more land. It's twenty twenty five, and they're going to do that, So I guess I hope, I hope that they're proud of themselves.
Well, Trump obviously is not the ideologue that Mike Huckabee has ambassador to israel Is and the people who Huckabye represents ideologically, which is a big chunk of professional Republican politics. But Trump has, you know, did the ceasefire, for example, as Biden was leaving office, helped the ceasefire, sent Steve Whitkoff to aid Blincoln in the ceasefire agreement, to the chagrin of the Hakapies of the world.
So it's not as though they're fully in control.
Trump, you know, will push back when he thinks it's detrimental to his goal of looking like the peacemaker in chief, as we hear the White House repeatedly refer to him too, but not always, so that'll be interesting when to watch for sure.
I asked some people close to Trump what this exact question, like, what is Trump going to do about these efforts by then Yahoo to continue to expand territory and also to looks like he's trying to blow up the ceasefire and Gaza and they said, Look, wick Cough is very committed to making sure the ceasefire holds and that phase two is completed. But Trump is not focused on it. Trump is focused on Ukraine and getting and getting a deal there. Interesting,
that's that, that's where his attention is. So let's let's talk about the progress, you know, toward toward that. And we can put this next element of the scream of
the New York Times. US and Ukraine agree to minerals deal official say, And so to back up here, the Treasury Secretary went to Ukraine offered this deal like, hey, look, we will actually not you're not going to promise that we're going to do anything, but we will, you know, invest in some kind of resource extraction and in exchange for that, you give US five hundred billion dollars worth of rare minerals plus basically control over oil and gas
in your ports. And Zelenski then leaked that to the lawmakers who came to visit, slammed it in the press, said he wasn't going to do it. Trump responded by calling him, you know, a tinpot dictator and say and then saying that it was actually Ukraine that provoked the war and now siding in the UN with Russia against a resolution that what condemned Russia for the invasion, right, basically adopting the argument that it was Ukraine's provocations which
were real, not Ukraine's provocations. That's actually kind of to back. So they are mostly US provocations and NATO provocations. There were Ukraine provocations of course, like the Maidan ku in twenty fourteen, the far right seizing power there, banning the Russian language in the east. So then you get this civil war over in the east. You get Zelenski elected on a promise that he's going to reach a peace
deal Donetsk and the rest of the eastern Ukraine. He comes under enormous pressure from the ultra right, and instead of that, he kind of ramps up the war in the east. And then Russia sends its actual troops instead of just its proxies into Ukraine. And so you can see how there's responsibility on both sides. But Trump very
clearly angered by this rejection. It's like, actually, this is all Ukraine that started this war anyway, and so now Ukraine has come back and said, okay, well we'll agree to the deal, but we're not doing this five hundred million dollar thing we will create, they said, they'll create a pot or fifty percent of the revenues from the extracting of the of the rare earth minerals will go into a fund that will be used to redevelop Ukraine.
But then we get all the rarests. So that's the that's the deal.
What do you think, Well, I think it's actually pretty significant as a if it holds, which it may or may not because there's so much there's still a lot of moving parts. But if it holds, I think it's a pretty significant notch in the Trump foreign policy wins column,
just because there was mass hysteria. First it was kicked off with the jd Vance speech in Munich, but then Trump's various provocations towards Zolensky over the course of the last week, which he said even like I had Victor Davis Hansen on my show yesterday and he was saying, or today and he was saying, you know, some of the stuff is actually crazy, Like some of what Trump is saying is it's wrong, and it's counterintuitive to what he's actually said himself about Putin.
Starting the war like it.
Which is why it's very obviously hardball, It's very obviously.
Part of argument is that Putin would have done.
It if Trump was there, exactly solicited.
In that as im Putin did it.
Wait, yeah, exactly.
So that's that's where like some of this hysteria I feel like from the media and European leaders has not been It's just it's lacks all of this context about how Donald Trump negotiates, which is that even some people in like America versus Mago world were concerned that he was talking so tough about Putin after he won the election, and they're like, oh, great, Trump's been overcome by the neocons, and we should know by now that this is literally
just how Donald Trump negotiates. Over and over again. He does the same thing. His position on Ukraine is actually one of the most interesting, which is that he would say all kinds of nice things about Vladimir Putin in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, whatever, and then he was the one who was arming Ukraine more than Obama.
And so it's clearly what he does publicly, what he says in his conversations with other world leaders is always like you can't connect it to the policy decisions that he's making or may make, because he's just doing the psychological it's his psychological attempt at manipulation, manipulation, manipulating other world leaders into getting deals. He acts like a he's
in the middle of a business transaction. He's trying to get the property rights to someplace he wants to build up in Manhattan, like he's just trying to flatter people, or he's trying to piss people off to bring them to the table. And in this case it seems to have actually worked. It seems as though Zelenski and people who are pro Ukraine, who are saying Donal Trump is so awful, have actually come to the table to haven't seen the United States is backsliding into authoritarianism by siding
with Putin. It's like, okay, you just cut a deal with it. Like obviously his leverage, his attempt to create leverage here was successful. So that all of that is to say, like the last couple of weeks of coverage of Donald Trump's negotiations in Ukraine, I think got the situation woefully wrong, and this is just proof that he was negotiating. But I think it was clear all along that he was negotiating.
Well, so let's hear from Trump himself, who is asked, you know, what does Ukraine get out of this? Let's roll this.
What does Ukraine get in charge?
Three hundred and fifty billion dollars and lots of equipment and military equipment and the right to fight on and originally the right to fight. Look, Ukraine, I will say, they're very brave and they're good soldiers. But without the United States and it's money and it's military equipment, this war would have been over in a very short period of time.
Meanwhile, related to this, by the way, did you see the news that Congo, which is facing this massive insurgency Rwanda back to insurgency, reached out to the US and said, you like rare earths, we have tons, We'll give them to you if you will sanction Rwanda for supporting the M twenty three insurgents. Here like taking us from the global police to the global mercenary mercenaries.
Yes, and by the way, a fairly brilliant approach to negotiating with Donalds. Yeah, like that's we were just talking about the gold cards. Yeah, just like it's transactional naked mercenary in this sense, literally mercenary, but you know, he is sort of like figuratively mercenary in many other senses. So Trump is not the only one capable of doing successful Trump negotiations. So we'll see how that goes.
And so Steve Bannon was asked about Trump's minerals deal by our old friend Michael Tracy at Sea Pac. Let's roll, Bannon.
My advice is, walk the fuck away. I want to walk away so hard. I'm even prepared to say, Okay, maybe we don't even investigate, which I think we have to, but we have to walk away. I don't want their minerals. Okay, there's enough minerals in the rest of the world. What's the reasoning behind this proposal?
Then?
Why? I think President Trump looks at a rack and looks at the other places in Afghanistan, and I think, as the deal guy is sitting there, going look, remember in Iraq, in Afghanistan then didn't take the oil the net President already didn't take the minerals in Afghanistan. The net present value of our expedition it was nine trillion dollars. Think of what this country would be like that if the last twenty years we spend nine trillion dollars in
rebuilding America, the factories. Who would have What would Detroit be like? What would Saint Louis be like? What would Baltimore be like? What would the Great Seas of the East be like? What would Detroit be like? If we spent nine nine trillion dollars on American citizens on the soil of the United States of America, this would be a paradise.
We didn't.
We pissed it away and let people steal it, and so many people dead, and countries ruin and culture's ruined, and the Christians eviscerated for nine trillion dollars. I think it says in President Drummers says, Look, if these guys did it, what we should do is at least get something for it.
I mean, that's the way he exchanged for a security guarantee, though, which could necessitate or require some kind of US military action. In fact speak of World War two. It reminds me of the British, arguably very foolishly extending Poland to so called security guarantee that they didn't have the ability to even uphold, and then World War two gets declared once Hitler goes into Poland. Now that's a very extreme scenario,
but a security guarantee. I mean, those don't have a great record throughout history.
No, very few people understand that the reason that World War Two, which had been building in the same kind of way this is triggered in September nineteen thirty nine is because the Germans knew it, and the Germans also knew that the French and the British couldn't stand up to it, and that would give him every pretext roll across Western Europe.
Just two bros talking about World War Two on the floor of Seapack. I saw Tracy walking in the Seapac. I was interviewing someone outside of Seapack. I saw Tracy walking and I was.
Like, oh boy, to get some videos.
Here it goes. And so this was obviously Bannon. This was taped with Bannon. I want to say, this is Friday, Thursday or Friday, so way before the news came out, just in the last twelve or so hours that Trump had successfully negotiated this deal. So it'd be interesting to see what Bannon says now that Zelenski is giving apparently the mineral rise.
To say that it's successfully negotiated and it's like we'll see, well, we'll see, but obviously he got into a gree paper getting passed back and forth.
But even like in yes, but even in to even.
Have what they're saying they have is an open question. And it to Bannon's point, there's.
Minerals everywhere, like in Russia, even as Putin well and in contested regions as well as Putin talked about the Domboss recently. And your point about the Congo is a good one. But no, I mean, even even in theory getting Zelensky, I shouldn't even say in theory, but like in practice gains Lensky to say, sure, after all the hemming and hung in the last week looks like a big Maga victory. And so does Steve Bannon say great, like this was well done by Trump, or does he
say I don't want the minerals. I think it's actually pretty interesting because it's a contrast with the usai D draw down, and your point about US becoming the placement of the world versus the mercenary of the world is a really interesting one because some people in the usai D debate, like you actually sort of saw this play out when Mike Ben's went on Tucker Carlson Show, and Ben's was saying he was worried that a lot of MAGO world doesn't want to be precise and sort of
take a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer to a lot of usai D in realizing that some of this is beneficial, like the empire is beneficial, And Tucker Carlson's was sort of like, I don't know, I'm kind of done.
With all of it.
And that's a pretty interesting tension that we see play out here. If you want the US to stop quote economically colonizing the world, this mineral deal feels like an extension of economic colonization to it. It sort of feels like Barisma as a matter of fact, except this was more nakedly transactional than Barisma usaid and all of that.
So I think that's one of the trend lines actually to watch over the next couple of years is how Mega handles the question of economic colonization and empire right, and.
Maybe they'll just eventually work their way right back to creating a new usai D soft power instrument, right, but just different. Yeah, And also one last part on that classic Steve Bannon riff, like he's on Afghanistan, Like I think, like he's just he's just nailing every piece of it. And then he throws in and all these Christians got killed.
It's like, where did that come from? Like I thought the whole idea of Christianity was that we're all created by the Creator and like all equal in his eyes. So why does he have to emphasize that it's Christians there were Christians that were killed to like try to land the idea that people getting killed in war is a bad thing. Doesn't it also suck that when a Muslim gets killed?
Yeah, of course right, I mean so.
It's just like I always seeing that from Bandonits like I agree, I agree, agree, and then whoop and yes, I don't like when Christians get killed either, but also don't like when atheists or Hindus or Jews or Muslims or anybody gets killed.
No, there's a charitable reading of that though, which is he's trying to appeal to conservatives who do see these regions as categorically like radical.
Islam, appealing to the baser instincts.
I don't think it hasn't necessarily be xenophobic. I think it's I think there is an instinct, like, especially after nine to eleven, for people to say everyone there's like radical.
I guess a reverse version that the left would do is to say, hey, look, these medicaid cuts are going to hurt trans No, no, they're going to hurt poor white people trying to appeal yeah a mega.
Person absolutely, yeah, I mean.
Rather than making more universal argument.
Right, right, But I think the left also does it in its own way.
Because when they're appealing to their to the left yet.
Yeah, but I don't think it necessarily has to be xenophobics as much as it's just I it could be, But I also think it could be, like there are a lot of people who don't. I actually think a lot of people, like for example, in the West Bank, genuinely don't understand how significant those ancient Christian communities are.
So yeah, I mean, where's Jesus from.
It's a good point.
So let's let's move on to the scandal of a Republican congressman getting getting out of a domestic violence charge.
It's awful story. We have an update in the unfolding saga of congressmen Republican Congressman Corey Mills, who is facing a SA allegations, serious assault allegations, and this is a really complicated story. It brings in the interim DC Attorney General Acting Attorney General Ed Martin, who's a pretty interesting character from Maga World. So I'm gonna bear with me as we go through the details. Is we don't want
to get anything wrong on this. We want everybody to have the specifics of this story because it's a big one and it's an interesting one. I'm reading from a report in The Independent, which I think actually aggregated a lot of the different parts of these allegations. So right now, the police department has said this is an active criminal investigation and there's no further information on the case to provide at this time. But last Wednesday, Corey Mills is mistress.
He is married. This is a woman that is not his wife. Twenty seven year old woman called the police to his apartment in Washington, d C. To hold a nine one one operator that she had been assaulted by Corey Mills. Mills quote vehemently denies any wrongdoing what's song and is confident any investigation will clear this matter quickly. That's according to his office in a statement to the
Associated Press. Now Mills told Politico both myself and the other individuals said what they had claimed took place and never took place, and that's been reported multiple times. Now. The Independent says a police report that it was provided with describes the initial nine to one one call as alleging a simple assault with hands or feet involving the mistress, whose name is Sarah Radiani. She's the head of a
group called Iranians for Trump, as the victim in this case. Now, a previous police report that NBC Washington got said that Mills, who she's apparently been with for over a year, grabbed her, shoved her and pushed her out of the door, which left her with bruises, and then she let the police listen in on a phone call between her and Corey Mills, wherein he allegedly told her to quote lie about the origin of the bruises. When police, according to the report,
encountered her, she was physically shaking and scared. Now, the Independence says these are quote circumstances that would typically prompt an immediate arrest of an alleged assailant. The Independent goes on to say Raviani then recanted her claims, including about the origin of the bruises when officers said Mills would be placed under arrest. So when she was told that Corey Mills, Congressman Corey Mills would be arrested, she recanted
his claims. People who have covered and worked with victims of domestic violence know that that's a familiar pattern of people who are victims of domestic violence. Unfortunately, that's it's incredibly traumatic as a like emotional process to go through. That can increase the pressures, and you know, it's enormously difficult to judge people in those situations who are legitimate victims of domestic violence. But obviously then and recanting the
claims takes away some credibility from the claims. Now Mills has not been arrested, and this is interesting. Officers, as the Independent says, quote initially classified the cause of family disturbant, though after Commander's reviewed investigative materials, it was reclassified as a domestic violent assault investigation. But Raviani now says that there was no physical altercation at all. She was drinking and sleep deprived and that explains why she made the allegations.
She says the bruises came during a recent trip to Dubai and we're not from Corey Mills. Now Ed Martin, who is the interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Columbia, so here in DC is really hardcore maga ideologue. Trump appointed him last month. He has The Florida Democratic Party will add this from the Independent has accused Martin of quote running cover ups for Republicans, but he is not obviously not bringing He's not arresting Mills.
So far he has, yeah, he has paused the The d C asked d C, which is not charged, right, DC, which is not a state, asked Martin to sign off on an arrest warrant for Mills and the Mills office, uh not Mills office. Martin's office refused to do so and said they want further investigation here. What's what's so incredible here, it's it's not it's not unprecedent, but it's unusual.
They have him on witness tampering and obstruction of justice, dead to rights because the police officers were there with Mills on the phone, with Mills telling his girlfriend Rabbiani to quote lie about the origin of for bruises. That's witness tampering and obstruction of justice, like just even if you don't have anything else, if you're hold to lie, and also obviously.
And then you lie, then you change your story lie.
Then obviously if if you're being if he is telling her to lie about the origins, that is also a confession of where they actually came from. And also it doesn't make any sense like she had According to the police report, which was altered twice, the bruises to the officers appeared to be fresh. Everybody in a jury would know what a fresh bruise looks like, and you would know what a bruise that you got in Dubai the
day before looks like. And so then when she comes back and says, actually it came from somewhere else, not what I originally said. After she told she showed that she let the officers listen to the claim.
But what did they hear? That's the thing, like, we don't even.
Know, right, I mean, they should tell a grand jury, get an arrest warrant, but Martin is going to block that. Martin is the guy who yesterday the day before tweeted, I am the President. We are the President's legal team, and we look forward to defending the president at all costs. No, what, No, that's not what you are Well, it's.
Sort of true in a technical sense if you look at what the role is like. In a technical sense, if you are in that position, it is your job to defend the executive branch and the constitution people versus Yeah. Right, yeah, So there's like a technical world in which that's right. The spirit of it, though, looks like from what he said, it looks like, what's the best way to put it, like special privileges to the president and then.
Also to his wife beating oh, fellow party members. Because the key, as we talked about in day Block, they passed this budget by the skin of their teeth if one vote had gone in an opposite direction. So so does he.
Now bring charges after the budget resolution vote is over.
But they're going to need him again over and over.
But they could replace him pretty easily.
Takes a while, and so then you're down to vote for that stretch of time. So I would imagine they're going to just prop them up just because they want to vote, just like they did with George Santos even though they didn't want him there. He probably he said, look, i'll vote. You have a tiny majority I'll vote your way, just keep me out of prison as long as you can.
Well, actually they regret now most I mean I think if you talk to most like Maga Hill Republicans, they will say they actually regret getting rid of Santos when they did, they could have actually used him.
One they got Swozy in there.
Well yeah, but also they feel like they could have used him longer on votes and it would have been more beneficial.
So this time, yeah, let's see. It's if there's any equitable justice at all, or if if you're in DC and you're Republican, laws don't apply to you, and what Trump say, if you're if you're saving the country, you violate no law. Who's people assume that just applied to Trump? Why would Trump not apply that same rationale to anybody who's going to vote with Trump to quote unquote save the country. Corey Mill is going to vote with Trump. Corey Mills can violate no law.
It's actually a really good callback, an important callback. If that's the mentality spreading in MAGA world, and there's again they will the charitable interpretation of it is you violate no law if you are acting in the spirit of the Constitution. And you're you eventually it's upheld right in
the court of law whatever. But that's definitely not that's that's definitely not the the I would say best interpretation, or that's definitely not you can't just default to that charitable interpretation in the case of Musk in particular reposting that gleefully so especially we were talking about Bikelley early in the show and all of that stuff. So anyway, the last thing I want to say is it's rather interesting that she is the head of a group called
the Iranians for Trump. That may or may not have anything to do with this, but it does add an element of potential foreign questions that are raised, espionage questions that can potentially be raised. But it also at this point just looks like there's clearly enough evidence if they have a police report where police are listening, the police are involved in a call, so they should have a
record of a call. They have testimony of the officers who were listening to a call in which he instructed her to lie, meaning those bruises were not from Dubai, and then her story changes after the call. There seems to be plenty of evidence in that case to actually bring charges. Now, maybe Ed Martin and the police department knows something that we don't. That seems unlikely at this point. It is always a possibility maybe they know something that
we don't. But at the same time, what we're seeing also does look like a fairly tragic, conventional domestic abuse situation, where you have a woman who is pressured and bullied out of holding to allegations that end up with her significant other going being arrested. So it's not a typical of how people who are experiencing that kind of trauma handle. The situation just appears on his face to be a really really sad story and one with political implications.
And also somebody who runs Runnians for Trump. Yes, it's just interesting in itself.
It's a very interesting group.
Washington is Yeah, Yeah, Washington is filled with interesting people.
It sure is, sure is Ryan. I'm really looking forward to the Friday edition of the show. I'm sad that I can't stick around for it. But this is a huge interview. I mean, Wall Street should be eager to tune in to Fry It counterpoints Friday this week.
If you if you're a banker, plunk down your your your premium subs, so you can watch this watch this one early.
Curious what his because so we had Doha Mechi on last week. People should go watch that edition of the Wednesday Show. But I'm curious what he makes of what he thinks. Andrew Ferguson will continue to do in his role at the FTC because he should have some good insight into the new Brandyceians, So the sort of progressive legal world and the maga legal world, the like new the conservative Yeah, the Conservatives, they mingle, they know each other.
So that's an interesting Uh. I wonder what he thinks about that.
Yeah, this is the guy that Jamie Diamond called an arrogant s O B and Mark Zuckerberg said is just how to destroy America.
So we will see how he responds to that, because I know you're gonna ask him.
Yeah, all right, stick around, we'll see you on Friday