Well, welcome. It is verdict with Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you and Senator I got to say you were right, but you were kind of like a really long, you know, big cast that you said of a net over the timeframe. You said that Canada and Mexico would cave in thirty six days and it was only thirty six hours. Like, I need you to narrow that window down next time.
Well, it was a stunning victory, a victory for the United States, a victory for President Trump. We predicted on Monday's podcast that the tariffs that have been announced against Mexico and against Canada that they would be lifted, and we predicted the reason they would be lifted is that both Mexico and Canada would cave to President Trump's demands and would lean in vigorously to help us secure our borders. You're right, we got the timeframe wrong. I said that
within thirty six days the tariffs would be lifted. It was, as you noted, thirty six hours. They immediately said, no, we can't take these tariffs, will do whatever you want to secure the border. It is a huge victory for keeping America safe. Secondly, this week we had Prime Minister net Yahoo from Israel in the United States meeting with
President Trump. President Trump directly made major news on multiple fronts, including announcing that he was the United States is withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, is cutting off funding for UNRA, and President Trump addressed the threats of Iran to try to assassinate him. It was it was powerful, and it demonstrated real strength. And finally, Doge Elon Muskin. Doge, I gotta say I'm excited about Doge. I'm excited about
what they're doing. They're already highlighting and going after incredible waste, incredible abuse throughout our government system. And I got to say that the Democrats are lighting their hair on fire. They're running around in absolute terror. We're going to break that all down for you.
I tell you, the pace that they are are getting things done is one that is amazing. It's why we love doing the show. So I will remind you make sure you hit that subscribe or auto download button because there is so much it's breaking. We don't want you to miss a single episode. So hit that subscribe or auto download button wherever you are listening to this podcast
right now, because we will be doing. I have a feeling a lot of quote emergency pods when there is really big breaking news on other days that are not a normal day's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, that we do this show. Let me take a moment and tell you about what's happening in Israel. And after more than a year of war, tear and pain in Israel, there is still a great
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dot org. You can also call them eight eight eight four eight eight IFCJ. That's eight eight eight four eight eight if CJ eighty eight four eight eight four three two five are support IFCJ dot org. So, Senator, we talked about this, and you said it spot on. Donald Trump knew what he was doing with the tariffs. He knew not a five percent or ten percent or twelve percent tariff was probably not going to get it done.
He needed to go heavy handed. He went twenty five percent on Mexico, twenty five percent on Canada, and he didn't flinch. He signed the executive order and said, you know, you remove Canada, you remove Mexico, and both countries not only do they flinch, but they said, let us help you secure the border and stop the flow of fetnah at the same time.
Well, and one of the things to understand, we talked about this at length and Monday's podcast. I think there's a real difference between the tariffs President Trump announced on Mexico and Canada and the tariffs he announced on China. The tariffs on Mexico and Canada President Trump uses tariffs as leverage to get concessions on other issues that matter to America, and I think with Mexico and Canada, that's what he was doing. Separately, President Trump also believes in tariffs.
He believes in them as a source of revenue for the federal government, and he believes in them in terms of supporting US manufactury and production. And what we said on Monday's podcast is the Chinese tariffs, the ten percent tariffs I believe will continue the entire Trump presidency. They may even go higher. That's an additional ten percent on Chinese goods, above and beyond the existing tariffs that I
expect to be long standing Trump policy. The Mexican and Canadian tariffs, and it was twenty five percent on all Mexican goods, twenty five percent on all Canadian goods except for energy exports and energy exports from Canada, it was just ten percent. That was designed, as I said on Monday, to bring Canada and Mexico to the bargaining table and
to force them to make real concessions. And what I predicted is they would do that, and in particular that Mexico would deploy thousands of troops to the border to
help us secure the border. Well within hours on Monday, President Claudia Shinbaum, the president of mexicounce that she'd struck a deal with Trump to pause the tariffs only for a month, so he hasn't eliminated them from a possibility, but he's paused them for a month in exchange for her promise to number one, deploy ten thousand Mexican troops to secure the border, and number two to tighten cooperation on drugs and weapony trafficking, and number three to further
negotiations on border security and trade. And so that was the concession that Mexico made. Canada made similar concessions. Canada said likewise that they were going to lean in and assist on stopping illegal immigration across our northern border. They were going to lean in and join us in fighting
against fentanyl trafficking. And Canada did the same thing. Canada put out an announcement that they were implementing a one point three billion dollar border plan with new choppers, technology, personnel, and they said that they're also deploying ten thousand frontline personnels working on protecting the border and beyond that, Canada's prime Minister said that he's going to appoint a feentanyl czar to lead the fight against vtanyl, and Canada also
designated the Mexican drug cartels as terrorists, and a Canada US joint strike force was launched a fight organized crime and fentanyl and Monday laundering. What happened with both Mexico and Canada is exactly what the President anticipated.
Now.
To be clear, the President delayed these tariffs only for a month. I think that is very much embodying Reagan's old adage of trust but verify. Okay, they've committed to lean in and help. Now they need to do it if they don't want these tariffs to go into effect. And look, the tariffs, if they went into effect, they would hurt US consumers, but they'd hurt Canada and Mexico much more because their trade with US US is a much much bigger percentage of their economy than it is
the other way around. And that's why Trump's threat produced such rapid action.
You talk about a trend, and in government we see a lot of what I refer to as kind of BS fluff press releases of bipartisan this or we're gonna get this done and we see a lot of that happen, certainly for the last four years in the Biden Harris administration, where you name things like you know that you're gonna do and fix and everything's gonna be amazing, and nothing comes of it. These announcements that are happening. I mean, you want to talk about significant, real change is happening
with with these countries and what we're doing. Just looking at the aspect of hey, we're gonna help you stop fetnyl coming into your country, and we're gonna work with you, and we're gonna do all of these things, and we're gonna put money in resources. This is a significant win for keeping people safe in this country from the drugs as well.
It is and you know today in the said Judiciary Committee, we had a hearing on the fetanyhl crisis, and over one hundred thousand Americans died last year of drug overdoses. It is an enormous crisis and we've got to stop it. The vast majority of it is coming across our southern border. It's coming from China, it's coming from Mexican drug cartels. A significant part of it is coming from Canada as well, and so I think what the President is do doing
is he's acting on the mandate from the voters. The voters want a secure border, and he's acting on it. And I got to say a lot of the pundits that they got very upset at these threatened tariffs. I'll note this is exactly the strategy President Trump employed in his first term and his first term when he threatened twenty five percent tariffs against Mexico. I expressed real concerns that if he implemented those tariffs, it would hurt Texas
and hurt America. It would, but what we saw is that Mexico blinked that in the face of the threat, it proved to be leveraged. So this time around, I was not dismayed by the threat because we'd seen that it produced success, and it produced success again, although this time it produced success even faster than you and I had predicted.
One other question on this, and that is moving forward, what message does this send to other countries that we may be going into negotiations with Things are changing quickly. This isn't just a success on the standpoint of our northern southern border. This is going to have huge ramifications for other countries. The thing they can mess with us.
Yeah, Look, there is a credibility of deterrence. One of the real differences. When Joe Biden was president. Our enemies were not afraid of him. They didn't fear him, Our allies didn't trust him. Nobody thought he was a credible threat. And that's one of the reasons why our enemies walked all over us all over the country. That when you have weakness in the commander in chief, it makes America
at much greater peril. With Donald Trump, our enemies are terrified of and even our friends and allies they understand that when he makes a threat, he'll follow through on that threat.
And that.
Credibility is incredibly valuable. If America is going to be fighting and negotiating to advance American interest, it is important for other countries to understand that the president will follow through on what he says he will. And I think this past week really underscores it. And you put it on top of what happened last week with Columbia, where Columbia said we're not going to take illegal aliens that are coming back to Columbia from America, and Trump immediately
did the same thing. He announced twenty five percent tariffs. He said he'd ratchet it up to fifty percent shortly thereafter, and Columbia caved within eight hours. That credibility. The next time we're in a showdown with a foreign country, they're going to understand that President Trump is not bluffing.
And this brings us back to national security and an international issue, and it deals with Iran. And I want to move to that because Donald Trump says that he was asked in the Oval office. In fact, I just want to play it about these real threats from Iran on his life. And this is what he said in response.
Why so, if you're I'm happy to sign it. If it's Iran and their proseeas who threaten to retaliate against you and your team, like killing you guys or taking out.
A fall, well they haven't done that, and that would be a terrible thing for them to do, not because of me. If they did that, they would be obliterated. That would be the end. I've left instructions. If they do it, they get obliterated, there won't be anything left and they shouldn't be able to do it. And Biden should have said that, but he never did. I don't know what lack of intelligence perhaps, but he never said it.
If that happens to a leader or close to a leader, Frankly, if you had other people involved also, you would call for total obliteration of a state that data. That would include Iran. So I'm signing this and it's a very powerful document, but hopefully we're not going to have to use it.
That was a pretty interesting and I would also say historic moment in this presidency the second term. He's making it very clear not only can we block i Ranian oil sales as he was talking about and ratching that up, but if they come after me or my people like it, first of all, they take me out, their whole country's gone.
Yeah.
Look, and I think that was exactly the right thing to say. But I think it's also important to understand, you know, as we start this second Trump term, there are a lot of people that are trying to read their own policy agendas onto the Trump administration. When it comes to foreign policy, You and I on this podcast have talked a lot about how Republican foreign policy is divided really into two camps. You have the isolationists who want to withdraw back behind our borders and ignore the
rest of the world. And you have the interventionists, who I think have never seen a country they didn't want to invade, and a lot of people when they think of Republican foreign policy, they think in a very binary term, you're either an isolationist or you're an interventionist. Now, I've long rejected both of those camps. I think both of them are wrong. I describe myself as a non interventionist hawk. What that means is I think we should be exceptionally
reluctant to use US military force. I don't want to send our sons and daughters into combat unless absolutely necessary. The only reason to do so should be to protect the vital national security interests of the United States, to keep American safe. That means we should be incredibly reluctant to invade other countries. It's worth noting in eight years,
the biggest country Ronald Reagan ever invaded was Grenada. But there are some people who have been saying in this second Trump term that trumpup's foreign policy is isolationist, that he's just withdrawing from everything, And it's worth noting that was not Trump's policy the first term. He killed General Solomony, the leader in Iran, who was responsible for murdering over six hundred American servicemen and women. Killing General Solomony was
exactly the right thing to do. And I got to say President Trump's foreign policy the first term very much was the coterminous with my philosophy of being a non interventionist talk and that's not entirely an accident. I spent thousands of hours talking with President Trump and urging him to make the foreign policy decisions that he did. This is exactly right when it comes to Iran. A nuclear Iran I think is an existential threat to Israel. I
think it is a enormous threat to America. And an Iran threatening to murder the president of the United States Trump is right. The way you respond to that is with absolute credit deterrence that they will be obliterated. And for everyone that wants to read isolationism onto President Trump, I think today illustrates that is not where he is.
Yeah, that's a great point. And we talked about this, and let's go back to this kind of American first policy and looking at where our dollars are going. If there's anything that we're seeing a trend and a theme coming out of the first two weeks of the of the Trump administration is that they're saying, we're going to stand up for your tax dollars. We're going to make sure they're not being abused or send to people that
are actively working against the United States of America. If you're new to this show, we really did a lot on deep dives on the money that goes to UNRA and where this money was going not just against our interests, but we're going towards people that were clearly terrorists. We talked about it, we exposed it on this show. I would encourage people go back and find those episodes and
listen to them. If you haven't subscribed the show, this is when you hit that button right now because this is something we talk about Wayne advance, and now months after we talked about it, President Trump has signed an executive order withdrawing from anti American UN organizations. This is incredible.
Well, this is a president and a commander in chief who is standing up for America and standing up to anti American institutions. The UN Human Rights Council has been viciously anti American, viciously anti Israel. UNRA look was complicit in funding Hamas terrorist. In fact, they had actual Hamas terrorists on their payroll. And so the President rightly withdrew America from the UN Human Rights Council, but also cut off funding American funding for UNRA. That was exactly the
right thing to do. He was asked about that today at the White House, and listen to what President Trump said on this.
In light of numerous actions taken by a number of bodies of the United Nations which exhibit a deep anti American bias, we have an executive order prepared for your attention that would withdraw the United States from the UN Human Rights Council, would withdraw the United States from the UNRWA, which is a refugee organization, and would also review American involvement in UNESCO, which has also exhibited anti American bias.
More generally, the executive order calls for a review of American involvement and funding in the UN in light of the wild disparities and levels of funding among different countries that, as you've expressed previously, as deeply unfair to the United States.
So I've always.
Felt that the UN has tremendous potential. It's not living up to that potential right now. It really isn't hasn't for a long time. There are great hopes for it, but it's not being well run, to be honest, and they're not doing the job. A lot of these conflicts that we're work in on should be settled, or at least we should have some help in settling, and we
never seem to get help. That should be the primary purpose of the UN, the United Nations, and again it's got great potential and based on the potential, will continue to go along with it. But they've got to get their act together.
What would they need to be prey good.
That well, they've got to be fair to countries that preserve fairness. They have some countries as you know.
That are outliers that are very bad and they're being almost preferred as countries to those that do their job and doing a good job, and they have to really, they're going to end up losing a lot of countries.
They're going to end up losing their credibility like other organizations, and then they're going to be nothing. The potential of the United Nations, and not everybody is with man is the potential of the United Nations is fantastic if properly run. So we'll see what happens.
I mean, you hear him. He's telling the world, you mess with with us, you screw with us, and you and you have organizations that are corrupt like this, don't expect America to stay involved, no matter what the president has been beforehand.
Yeah.
Look, we're not going to foot the bill. We're not going to write the checks to fund people that are actively undermining Americans, that are undermining our allies. And this is this is creating an incentive. It's creating an incentive number one, for our allies to stand with America, that there's upside to standing with the United States. But at number two, it's creating real disincentives for our enemies to move against us because there are real consequences, negative consequences,
And that's what a president should do. And I got a note, Ben, every single thing Donald Trump is doing is one hundred and eighty degrees the opposite of what Joe Biden did. Joe Biden undermined our allies and showed weakness and appeasement to our enemies. And it's why the foreign policy and national security scene became such an utter mess, utter chaos, wars across the globe because weakness doesn't work,
and this is President Trump demonstrating strength. That's what we want and expect in our president.
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two Patriot. You're gonna get a free month of service with a promo code Verdict. Switch to Patriot Mobile today, make a difference with every call you make, with every text you send. Patriotmobile dot com slash verdict or nine seven two Patriot. Finally, this one was a big one Senator and it got a lot of attention. I'm glad that it got a lot of attention people that listen to the show, and conservatives out there said, okay, let's
let everybody know where your tax dours is going. After Elon Mussin doge yet again blowing the whistle they're gonna, I mean, they got to be exhausted because they're finding so much waste, fraud, in abuse in our government. And a perfect example of this is US A I D. And some of the abuse that they found walk us through it.
Well, I gotta say Elon Musk is doing a fantastic job. He is working around the clock at at DOGE and and really focused on on reining in government spending and reining in the absolute abuse, the abuse that you would never see in a private company, but but yet in government is is commonplace. And it is a result of politicians funding their their their own political hobbyhorse, their own
political pet project. And and so I got to say, what one of the areas that that that Doge in the new White House has done is freeze funding at us A I D. And And Democrats in the media have been losing their minds over this, have been lighting their hair on fire. In fact, a bunch of Democrats went to the USA I D offices to storm the offices this week, which was really pretty ridiculous. But but but they're really they're very very upset about it.
They're now set, by the way about the abuse of the money in the fraud. Then they're just they're just upset that they've lost their power. Right, Well, they're upset that the abuse is stopping. But you know, when reporters have asked me about it, I've said, listen, uh, the president got a mandate from the American people. And part of the mandate is to stop the out of control spending in debt and usai D engages in all sorts of abuse.
Let me give you some of the examples. USI ai D spent one point five million dollars for advancing DEI in Serbia's workplaces. They spent two million dollars for sex changes in Guatemala. They spent six million dollars for tourism in Egypt. They paid for quote hundreds of thousands of meals that went to al Qaeda affiliated fighters in They gave funding for the production of opium, the primary ingredient
in heroin in Afghanistan, which benefited the Taliban. Yeah, they spent one million dollars to help disabled people in Tajikistan become quote climate leaders. They spent one million dollars for Hamas linked charity. And they spent fifteen million dollars for contraceptives and condoms in Taliban controlled Afghanistan. This is all nonsense. This is a waste, and there's a reason Elon Musk
is going after it. There's a reason President Trump is going after it, and there's a reason Democrats in the press are horrified that this gravy train is stopping.
It is a gravy train, and it's a very very big one that's costing taxpayers massive amounts of money. Elon Musk said early on that he thought there was probably like ten percent waste in our government. He's now changing those numbers. I want to get your reaction. He's saying it could be well above twenty percent.
Yeah, there's massive waste, and it is by design. Understand, it's not just that they picked things out of a hat. These are all ideological. This is the agenda of the radical left. They're funding the agenda of the radical left. But it shouldn't be the taxpayers paying for this nonsense. And let me give you an example of one of the ones that I found frankly funniest. AOC Alexandria Keja Cortez went off on Elon Musk this week, and listen to what she says. Her argument is that Elon Musk
is a dummy. Give a listen, This dude.
Is probably one of the most unintelligent billionaires I have ever met or seen are witnessed, which you know, you can probably even glean that from watching these people on TV. Anyways, all of that is to say is that they don't do their homework. Clearly like they're putting nineteen year olds in at the Treasury. This dude is not smart, and the danger in not in the lack of intelligence and
the lack of expertise that Elon has. I mean, this guy is one of the most morally vacant but also just least knowledgeable about these systems that we really know of. But the point is is that what that means is that they're going to hit a button. Inevitably, they are going to hit a button and things can go silent.
I mean, this is one of those moments where you actually get to watch that, you know what, the sausage being made in her brain's making it up and pausing as she goes to try to figure out a way to hit a guy that's having massive success at saving taxpayers dollars.
Look, I gotta say I laughed out loud when I listened to that and watch that. It should be a Saturday Night Live skit. Of course, Saturdayight Live wouldn't actually make fun of liberals, so they wouldn't show it. But listen, you can criticize Elon Musk on all sorts of fronts but the one front you can't criticize him on is being a dummy. I've spent a ton of time with Elon. Listen, I've been blessed, Ben. I have known a lot of brilliant people. I've known antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and
Chief Justice William Renquist. I have known brilliant, brilliant scientists and world leaders. And I believe Elon Musk, this is, without exaggeration, is the most brilliant man I've ever met. And I've spent a lot of time with Elon. If you think about the distribution of intelligence, you assume roughly eight billion people on planet Earth. Intelligence is distributed along a bell curve. Someone is at the bleeding edge of that bell curve, and I think Elon Musk is that person.
And I mean I've sat with him for two three, three and a half hours talking with him, and it's fascinating watching his brain work. Because the guy, it's not even that he thinks outside the box. He doesn't know there is a box. And and so listening to AOC say he's unintelligent, I got to say, it reminded me of a scene from from my favorite movie with this one and so give a listen to what AOC was saying. And she was really she was channeling Vissini. Give a listen.
Yeah, that's smart. Let me put it this way.
Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Yes, morons really, so that's AOC. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Elon Musk morons, AOC. She knows what's right.
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