Host (0:00)

President Trump takes his affordability message to battleground Pennsylvania. We have a woke lightning round with the craziest woke stories of the week and a fun update on the Jasmine Crockett Senate campaign. All of that and so much more today on 10 Minute Drill. Everybody get up. Get up.

Political Commentator (0:20)

The story of America is the story of an adventure. I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free.

Host (0:35)

On Tuesday night, President Trump took his affordability message to battleground Pennsylvania, a place where he won the presidential election based on his own affordability pitch, contrasting it with the record of Joe Biden.

Political Commentator (0:48)

But under Biden, real wages plummeted by $3,000 a year. Under Trump, the typical factory worker has already seen their wages increase by more than 1300 DOL. And that's in just a few months.

Host (1:05)

The message here isn't the economy is awesome. It is we inherited a giant mess and we are working towards fixing it. President Trump and his team are trying to avoid the trap that President Biden fell into, which was saying, don't believe your lying eyes. The numbers are great. Here are some charts when people were saying they're concerned about the economy, they're concerned that they can't afford anything. But the other thing that President Trump is doing here is similar to what we talked about on Tuesday of what President Trump needs to do on affordability, which is bookmark the wins, make sure that people understand what's coming.

Political Commentator (1:37)

But thanks to no tax on tips and no tax on overtime, more than a quarter of their income will be tax free.

Host (1:45)

I, for one, am very hopeful that President Trump will do more of these events to highlight the value and benefits of the policies they've passed. Like no tax on tip, like an expanded child tax credit. Helping people make the connection between what Republicans have been doing this first year and any benefits they see, while again, maintaining compassion for concern that people have about residual challenges with affordability. And then, of course, the third part of what Republicans have to do is show creativity on that front. Yesterday we talked about the incredibly exciting announcement that Jasmine Crockett was entering the Texas Senate race. Well, right after her announcement, an incredible report dropped outlining how Republicans might have played a role luring her into this race. This from notice an Astroturf recruitment process. National Republicans propped up Jasmine Crockett to push her into a Senate race. Now, I worked at the NRSC National Republican senatorial committee in 2019 and 2020. And one of the many things we try to do to help Republicans win is meddle in Democrat primaries where we can propping up weaker candidates. So the Democrats either have to spend more money there or end up nominating weaker people that are easier for Republicans to defeat. And that is what Republicans so far have begun to do very successfully here. The NRC started including Crockett's name in polling and conducted a sustained effort to get Crockett, the party's preferred candidate to run against, into the race. Crockett's main reason for getting in the polls showed her ahead. That wasn't an accident. Now Jasmine Crockett, when she first started publicly flirting with running for Senate, was, was touting these polls, touting polls, saying Jasmine Crockett gets the most enthusiasm. And that's not surprising if you look at the rest of this field. James Tallarico is like if Pete Buttigieg became a youth pastor. He also is about as exciting as watching paint dry. And so it makes sense that Jasmine Crockett would pop in this. But they didn't just do the polling, they pushed the polling around. And this is another part of what's so clever. The NRSC robocall high propensity Dems urged them to call Jasmine Crockett's office urging her to run for Senate, then connected the caller to the office. The GOP also ran and pushed around polls suggesting she'd win. Crockett then believed the astroturfed hype and launched her bid. So now she's in the race and she is the front runner. And it's going to be very difficult for these sort of JV league, you know, woke candidates to come against Jasmine Crockett, who is not necessarily an ideological intellectual juggernaut, but she is a juggernaut in the woke totem pole of grievances, which makes it very difficult for a sort of boring, white vanilla person like James Talarico to beat her. So we are very excited about this race. But congratulations to the NRSC for their early Christmas present with Crockett jumping in the race. Earlier this week we talked about how this is a big week for health care on Capitol Hill. The Senate is preparing right now to have multiple votes, one vote on the Democrats clean three year extension of the Obamacare pandemic subsidies. Now again, Democrats are holding to that position. Chuck Schumer is saying any other bill that has reforms is dead on arrival because Chuck Schumer wants the bad version of these subsidies that have billions of dollars in fraud to pass through because they use that fraudulent money to buy more votes. Senate Republicans are working on a number of different solutions, seeing if they can package them together. We'll see where that goes. But there is a lot of anxiety about wanting to do something about expiring subsidies and whether it is an income, whether it is another version of this that would have some checks and balances on those broken subsidies. There is urgency there, even in the House of Representatives. This from Jim Jordan. During the open mic portion of the House Republican Conference meeting, Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan said that Republicans need to have a plan where they marry real healthcare reforms with an extension of the ACA subsidies. If not, Jordan said, moderates will win on a discharge petition. Jordan's remarks caught a lot of attention in the House GOP leadership. One theme is that Republicans want to have some fixes to this broken system. The scale of those fixes is the challenge. Getting a large compromise with bipartisan support seems near impossible when you look particularly at the current makeup of the United States Senate. Chuck Schumer does not want a bipartisan bill to pass because they want this issue. They want those subsidies to go up so they can hammer Republicans on them with their affordability agenda. So what creative fixes can they do? We have talked extensively here about price transparency, and another major grassroots group is now getting into that fight. Exclusive Trump urged to make reforms to lower Health Care costs this in the Daily Signal, a national grassroots nonprofit is urging Donald Trump to take swift action on a policy that it believes would directly impact affordability health care price transparency. With this letter to President Trump, Save Our States has also Launched a webpage, showyourprices.com Lower costs, more power. Show us your prices. Patients deserve to know what care will cost before they walk through the door. Just last week, the European Union announced a major fine against X of 120 million euros. X has been fined for deceptive design of its blue Checkmark, the lack of transparency of its advertising repository, the failure to provide access to public data for researchers. Now this is obviously a shakedown. Everyone can see that this is just about the EU trying to extract money from American companies. Because one thing that we have talked about here quite a bit is Europe does not have a lot of incredibly profitable tech companies and they rely on these fines and incredibly bizarre protectionist behaviors to take money from American companies to fund things that they do. The EU makes more from fines on US Tech than tax from all of public European tech. In 2024, the EU fined US tech companies 3.5 3.8 billion euros. Meanwhile, public Internet tech companies paid only 3.2 billion euros in income tax now this is extending into a massive range of similar issues. This in the Daily Signal. Europe is welcoming China while freezing out America this is an op ed from Ambassador Andrew Bemberg who outlines how Europe is using tools like the Digital Markets act to try and shut down American business and extract money from American companies, while at the same time they are welcoming in more and more Chinese investment and influence that comes with major strings attached to the Chinese Communist Party. While Brussels makes a political spectacle of policing American innovation, Europe is simultaneously deepening its technological and industrial entanglement with China. The Commission touts new enforcement actions enforcing the Digital Markets Act, a framework that has overwhelmingly targeted American firms. In practice, the EU has constructed a regulatory regime that treats US Tech companies as threats requiring exceptional scrutiny, while Chinese state influenced companies are welcomed across the continent with open arms, subsidies and long term partnerships. So again, you can understand why this would be pretty shocking and absurd. China has taken incredibly antagonistic actions against countries around the world, but the EU is welcoming them in with open arms while simultaneously attacking the companies of a ally, the United States. It doesn't make a ton of sense, but unfortunately it doesn't end with the EU. Public Policy Solutions, another organization has highlighted how countries in South America are starting to adopt similar European style protectionist policies. This in Fox Business, Besant warned. EU style regulatory nightmare creeping into Latin America and aimed squarely at the US Across Latin America, governments are lifting pages straight from Brussels playbook Digital services taxes aimed at US firms sweeping AI and data regulations, antitrust actions targeting American platforms, telecom regulators grabbing new authority. Brazil, Chile and Colombia are the most aggressive adopters and as US Firms face new barriers, China is rushing in to fill the void. Huawei now powers up to 70% of Latin America's 4G networks, runs major data centers and expanding into cloud, AI, fintech and telecom. For today we have a very special woke lightning round because we've got a lot of small woke topics we want to make sure we hit for first. Randi Weingarten, the grim reaper of school closures and Covid learning loss, wants to rewrite history on her role in that time.