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Yfi Handle Here it is a Taco Tuesday, March fourth. As we continue with the show Big Day Today, the President is going to be speaking tonight in a under with a joint session of Congress and the Supreme Court and just everybody under one building in one building, and it's going to be fireworks, guaranteed. He's going to talk about his first couple of months in office and then
what's going to happen coming up in the future. Also, a part of what's controversy is Trump has cut off a the Ukraine done as of right now, so a lot going on now. Tariffs are a big story because at midnight the tariffs started, and the tariffs to Mexico and Canada twenty five percent. I'm going to that later or maybe even tomorrow. What I want to do is talk about what's happening with China, because that's a different story.
China immediately retaliated. Tariffs against China kick in at midnight. Tariffs against the United States from China kicked in at midnight. Well, actually it's going to come in March tenth. But it was announced that the retaliation. Retaliatory tariffs are coming in immediately. So we had what ten days, seven days, and the move targets some of the top exports of US has
to China, soybeans, meat, green grains. Do you know that China is the largest importer of American dairy, American farming goods, grains. I mean, it's just a huge market. Tariff tariff tariff. American farmers are not going to be happy. Trump said he didn't expect Beijing to retaliate too much, and that's a quote because earlier tariffs the two countries sort of did a tick for tat, but it was not crazy war.
It is now crazy war.
Fifteen US companies right off the bat were placed on a list that doesn't let them import goods that can be used for military purposes. Another ten American companies, big ones are barred completely from trading with or investing in China. I mean, a trade war is happening, and we knew it.
We knew it, So okay, and there's there's a method to the madness.
Because Trump pads said one of the reasons or the reason he wants the trade war to happen and start throwing tariffs actually two reasons. One is because of the balance of payments we export, we import a lot more from those countries than we export, and that never does a country any good. And the other one is fentanyl and legal immigration. That's why in Mexico and Canada. Boy, there's a story there I want to share with you.
China said, you know what, any any war, tara war, trade war, any kind of war.
We're going balls to the wall.
And China, as you know, is the largest or I'm telling you largest market for American products for a by a long shot.
Last year, China imported twenty.
Billion dollars in soybeans and corn and cotton and other US farm products. One of the big ones is sorghum. So anybody know what sorghum is? I have no idea. I mean, what do you use sorghum for? Okay, it's kind of grain. But it's kind of fun talking about it because no one knows. And a great quote from Xiu Feng, the director of the Institute of International Studies at Nanjing University, quote, Trump is swinging his tariff stick harder and harder in Chinese.
He talked about Trump.
Swinging his ying Jing and you can look that up on the internet.
What a ying Jing is.
So the quote swinging his tariff stick isn't quite what the Chinese said, but it's kind of fun. So the leaders of Canada in Mexico held talks with the US trying to reach some kind of an agreement.
G and Trump.
No conversations whatsoever. I mean, it is simply, here are the tariffs. Here are the retaliatory tariffs. Here are the companies that we are not going to allow even to deal with US.
Now.
During his first term, Trump did place tariffs on Chinese products to try to reduce that trade surplus that China has with the US, and that started a tit for tat trade war.
But that is nothing nothing like what's going to be happening now, not even close.
And one of the reasons that Jingping did not go crazy is because he's looking at an economy that's not doing well, and he is looking at the balance of trade, which he needs desperately. Now none of that matters because the declaration of war has been made, and instead of Donald Trump stopping inflation day one, you're going to see
prices because of tariffs go through the roof. Now, Trump argues and it's a legitimate argument that if you put high tariffs and you make it very expensive for countries or to import, actually it's very expensive for countries export. Actually it's very expensive for countries to import. That's where the tariffs goes. And he said those countries are paying the tariff.
That's a croc.
I'll tell you who pays the tariff. It's American consumer and American manufacturers.
That's it.
The rest of it. When he says, oh, that's just not true, it's just, oh, what a shocker.
Not true. And so long term, Trump is right.
If products from countries like Canada are exorbitantly expensive, United States manufacturer is going to go. It's cheaper, makes more sense to build a factory here, and higher American workers make sense. However, Trump is two months in. He announced the tariffs this morning or yesterday. He decided they were going to go full blasts.
And we didn't even know that because he had said a couple of days ago.
I don't know, maybe it won't be twenty five percent, maybe it won't be twenty percent against China, and then throughout the day he said, yes, there will be Okay, so he announces it takes twenty four hours to announce a tariff, and high tariffs means that in the long run, American workers are going to benefit because the factories are going to manufacture. Here's what I want you to do is build an American factory in twenty four hours, or build an American factory in I don't know, six months.
A year. Can't be done.
And so instead of I'm going to kill inflation, I'm going to deal with inflation day one.
Now it's yep.
Americans are going to suffer, but it's going to be for the long term. By the way, inflation and it's going to hit. I guarantee you is not inflation. It's the Biden inflation. Keep that in mind. You will hear that over and over again. And if the economy, because of tariff and tariffs and other economic moves, if the economy goes south, I promise you it will be the Biden administration that caused all this. One hundred percent. You're
going to hear some of that. I don't know, you might. Oh, we're going to talk about this one for sure.
Okay.
Tonight is going to be the presidential speech, a kind of state of the Union.
Presidents give this when they want to.
In front of Congress, and I'm going to talk about right now. Another big story is the White House announced stopping military aid to Ukraine, cutting it off at least for the foreseeable future, penning an agreement with Ukraine and a peace deal.
And that's a lot, a lot of complicated.
So tonight we're going to see the President and he's going to report on the state of the nation and that's in quotes, and boy, what a level of fury among the Democrats because everybody knows what's going to happen.
It's just to the extent we don't know that. And this is going to be pretty rare. I don't know if it's ever happened quite like this. Among Republicans.
It's gone everywhere from fervent support whatever the President does, we back him up to anxious deference. I don't want to get in the way of the president, you know that sort of thing. And you're going to see an encounter between the Democrats and the President tonight.
Some Democrats say they're going to boycott the address.
Others say, oh, they're going to attend, and they're going to show how happy they are with this speech.
Tonight tonight.
Well, one former Democratic congressman said this will be nothing more than Trump television spectacle. For him, this is just the highest level of television visibility. It'll be geared a spectacle and not a substance of view. Trump is a television guy. I mean, he is a master of what he does. No one else comes close. I mean, okay's this. In twenty sixteen at the Republican Convention, he said, I alone can fix it. That is the complete demise of
America under Joe Biden. That it was America's never been in a worse position.
In his first.
Inaugural, he vowed to stop quote American carnage. In a twenty twenty three speech, he said to his audience, I am your retribution. In January's inaugural, he said he has been tested and challenged more than any president in our two hundred and fifty year history. And I guess parentheses you say, including Lincoln close parentheses. Oh, I didn't say that, but you tell me the most of any president in our two hundred and fifty year history.
And I didn't think it was going to go that far.
I knew the evangelical said this, but I didn't think Trump was going to go that far, but he did. When he talked about surviving the assassination attempt, thank goodness he did survive it. That's just what we need, another dead president. He said, I was saved by God to make America great again.
It wasn't just a bad shot.
It wasn't that the shot just missed and killed the guy behind him, that firefighter. God is the one that moved the bullet a little bit to.
The left, so it only got his ear.
Oh okay, he's just done some weird things. In his twenty twenty inaugural or his first address he to the nation, he stopped in the middle of it and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh right in the middle of it.
I mean, that's never been done. Now.
Rush was diagnosed with lung cancer. Didn't know how long he was going to live. So yeah, but he could have waited until after the inaugurals, after the speech.
How about waiting ten minutes until you finish it up. Nope.
And during the inaugural he surprised the military family that year by announcing their husband and father was home from Afghanistan, and huge applause from the congress people, the senator in the audience, and chants of USA USA. This is from the congress people and the senators as this guy entered the auditorium.
I mean, it is going to be fascinating if nothing else.
And we'll see how far he goes, and then I'll tell you why it's going to be a complete fiasco. It used to be that State of the Union dress were pretty solemn occasions. You had a Democratic president, and of course the Democrats would stand up and applaud.
The Republicans would not get up. We have a Republican president.
The Republicans stand up and cheer, and they do whatever just they actually applaud and give a standing kind of ovation, and the Democrats sit down. So it goes along party lines. Well, two thousand and nine, Barack Obama addresses Congress and lays out detail of a bonnet Obamacare, and he says that undocumented immigrants would not benefit from the plan. Representative Joe Wilson from South Carolina Republican screamed.
Out, you lie.
Well, that opened the floodgates. And of course, my favorite congress Person, Marjorie Taylor Green, who came in the second time out with a make America great red hat.
And just I mean, how do you beat that? Right?
And just started screaming and heckling President Biden.
Now are the Democrats going to go that far?
I don't know how many Marjorie Taylor Greens there are in Congress, I will tell you. And she's still a congress person. Every time Trump says something, she will jump up and down and scream and you will see be a spectr. I think that's fair to say. And it doesn't matter what Trump says. There is nothing that he has proposed that the Republican Congress and Senate basically has not backed up. Nothing even undoing programs and bureaucracies that Congress put into place and voted on and funded. And
I am going to make a prognostication. And this is an if, and it's not going to happen. If Trump were to stand up and say during my term, I propose dissolving Congress or taking away all the power that Congress has, how many Republicans would be standing up and cheering?
How many? Not all of them, but enough. I mean, it's.
Gotten completely crazy. Well, I said, you know, we're in for a wa and it's just I've never seen. You've never seen anything like this. Pundits have never seen anything like this. Experts who have looked at government for fifty years have never seen anything like this. There's nothing in history of the United States that has occurred like this tomorrow, you bet we'll talk about it, Okay, local news. And that has to do with Mayor Karen Bass, of.
Course firing the fire chief Crowley. And it is what's her first.
Name, by the way, I kind of forget what her first name is.
In any case, this is Christian Crowley. Okay, thank you.
This is a situation where Karen Bass shows her great skill as a politician shows number one, she either is a liar or completely incompetent, or probably I think more truthfully, has a staff that is completely incompetent. And she is not blaming her staff. So this has to do with a Palises fire. Karen Bass, who had promised not to leave Los Angeles if she became mayors on an airplane and the inauguration of Ghana's new president.
She's there.
She had a thing about Africa, just kept on. She's been there like dozens of times. So now comes the National Weather Service issuing dire warnings about what was coming, the weather conditions, and it just got more dire and more dire, and it got to the point where the National Weather Service ended up saying it's going to be catastrophic.
It is going to be life threatening. It's one of those weather conditions that if there is a fire, which of course inevitably there always is, it's going to be devastating.
They were absolutely right. Ten thousand homes, sixteen thousand structures. Thank you. Karen Bass is in Ghana now.
She says she never got the warning and the reason she's firing Crowley, Kristen Crowley, is because Kristen Carowley didn't call her.
Crowley did not make the phone call to her.
Okay, how about the dozens of emails that went to the mayor's staff. Dozens and not just one person. We're talking maybe half a dozen, maybe ten. We don't know the actual number that got that information. And Karen Bass said they didn't give it to me. It's Crowley's fault because Crowley didn't call me directly. And by the way, is that what happens does a fire chief is protocol, The fire chief calls the mayor, not a chance. It's done through emails its warnings by the National Weather Service.
And on top of that, the city has its own organization, the Emergency Management Department, that also sent emails to Bass's office. And Bass said, never, never, my staff never gave me the warning. Okay, let's give her the benefit of the doubt. My staff never gave me the warning. Wouldn't you think she would instantly fire every single person on her staff that received the warning and didn't do anything about it, not giving it to the mayor for example.
And you're not going to see that. And she is saying, not.
My fault, dog ate the homework. She's the one at fault. She's the one that ate the homework, Kristin Crowley, and that's why I fired her. By the way Kristin Crowley is appealing, the mayor has the absolute authority to fire any department head.
Because the department has worked for the mayor.
They were not elected, they're selected by the mayor and city council approves, but it's protocol that may hires his or her own people. Now within the city charter, anybody who is fired. Apartment head is fired has the right to appeal to the city Council, who can override that firing, and that's precisely what's happening in the vote is coming down today. Is probably going to be reinstated. Absolutely not. There's no chance. The mayor has too many supporters in
the city council. This is all politics. You don't go against the mayor. And virtually all of the council people are a Democrat.
She's a Democrat. You don't screw with a democratic mayor.
You know. Now, I may have voted to not reinstate, and the sole reason is there has to be a relationship between department heads and the mayor has to be and if she gets reinstated, you can imagine the antagonism between the two going forward.
Okay, wait a second.
Now, you say that Trump only wants people who are lockstep with him, right, but not about relationships and people he trusts. But with Mayor Bass, you say it's about relationships and people they trust.
Yeah, it is, but she inherited Crowley and what normally happens with a mayor coming in these positions are not political. What Trump has done is he hires for department heads. That is, when you're talking about cabinet positions, those are political. That's a political. Hiring a fire chief is not political. By the way, do you have any idea whether whether Crowley is a Democrat or a Republican.
I don't.
She's a political scapegoat now, well said that's her party.
She's a political scapegoat, not even political, because I don't think politics have anything to do with it.
It's just Karen.
Bass covering her ass, which should have third degree burns on it personally, okay or done. We'll see what happens today. Okay, here's what's going on. And I don't know why people are so upset. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post twelve years ago, and he said when he bought it he is not going to turn the paper into his personal mouthpiece.
The values of the Post did not need changing. He said, we will.
Remain our duty, will remain to the readers and not to the private interests of its owners.
Well, okay, he posts on x now.
That there's an overhaul of the opinion section, and it's going to be limited to these two concepts, or it's least going to be biased towards the two concepts personal liberties and free markets, and all kinds of fireworks came as a result of that, the Post opinion editor resigns. And here is the interpretation is that this is about Don Trump. This is about Donald Trump, right, and Bezos is bending the neee.
But I have a question.
Papers are biased anyway, aren't they. They endorse candidates, The editorial board endorsees. As a matter of fact, I don't even know if it's the editorial board. It's the official position of a paper that endorses candidates. Now, usually it's because of experience or it doesn't matter. The point is is that they do it anyway. And Bezos is saying, you know what, we're going to change the quote independence of the editorial board. But it's his paper, and he is going out of his way to say this is
going to be the opinion section. Now that's very important that he has told us it's the opinion section. And why can't his paper give his opinion if we all know that it's his opinion.
Where's the fault here?
There's something about this that I don't understand because usually the opinion and official position of the paper is the editorial board, and there should be a firewall between what the editorial board does.
Maybe they throw around all.
Kinds of ideas and then in the end they agree or a majority of the board agrees, they're going to go in a certain political political view. Well, you know the La Times did that with our new publisher. You know, he decided he was going to spin it and not
go the way of quote all independence. But you know, in the end, in the end, I think the papers, all the papers have an absolute duty to be as objective as possible with the news, much like Amy has the duty to be as objective as she popped Ussibly, can news departments have to I can be as biased as I.
Want because I'm not the news.
The editorial portion of the paper can be as biased as it wants because it's not the news.
The only thing I ask is.
That the paper differentiate between the two. That's the difference, and not take. Oh here's a question, by the way, and it just occurred to me, is you've got the president what he says is always news, and he talks about all the accusations against him as fake news. Does the paper publish the accusation that it's news is fake news? I guess it has to, doesn't it? The president said? The president claims. The president's position is I don't have a problem with that, and a lot of people do.
KFI am six point you've been listening to The Bill Handle Show. Catch My Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app
