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10 Minute Drill
Monday Rundown: Previewing Trumps’s China Trip; Iran bark and bite; Dem meltdown over Virginia maps
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A look ahead at everything coming this crazy week!
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President Trump has harsh words for Iran. Will it lead to more armed conflict? President Trump's heading to China later this week in what will be the most consequential trip of his term. We're looking at major crypto legislation happening in the Senate and fallout in Virginia after the Supreme Court of Virginia overturned Democrats gerrymandering nuclear option. You'll never guess what crazy ideas Democrats have to get even. We're going to unpack that a little bit today in our Special Monday rundown. 10 minute drill. Everybody get up. Get up. The story of America is the story of an adventure.
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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.
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First. On Sunday night, President Trump reacted to Iran's response to his latest offer to set up talks for peace. He said it was unacceptable and he also told Axios it was totally inappropriate. Right now, we're in a position where the United States and Iran have been exchanging initial proposals to potentially sit down and speak for peace. The problem is Iran is once again clearly simply trying to run out the clock. They have no interest in good faith discussions, and they're trying to see if they can hold out long enough for President Trump to simply give up, take his ball and go home. But he had harsh words for Iran earlier on Sunday, suggesting he may be preparing for more armed conflict. But as we talked about a little bit last week, President Trump knows both the markets and oil prices do not like armed conflict. So if he does it, it will likely be quick and it will likely be decisive. We've also heard the United Kingdom is sending in destroyers to help patrol the Strait of Hormuz and keep it open. But Iran has continued to say they will not yield on the issue of who controls the Strait. They've also said they will not yield on handing up nuclear materials. So President Trump has few cards left to play apart from armed engagement and getting back in there. We will see what happens this week. But that sets up our second biggest topic of the week, which is President Trump's trip to China. China has tried to portray themselves a helpful resource in this conversation, trying to back channel with Iran, even as we've heard reports they were sending arms and materials to Iran to help them in their fight against the United States. However, China gets a considerable amount amount of their oil from the Strait of Hormuz. So Xi Jinping has tried to portray himself as somebody who could help bring peace about here. But one challenge for the United States has been the main voices who have wanted to try and help out in the region have been people like China, Pakistan and Qatar who are not necessarily the most reliable partners. However, we will see what happens this week. This is, as I said at the outset, one of President Trump's most important trips of his term. China is the ball game right now. Everywhere we look, we see both our European partners, South American partners, most recently Brazil, using China style protectionist policies against the United States on everything from tech to energy. And we're seeing it more and more as China is getting cozier and cozier with all of these allies. And so as we talk to China this week, we will see how President Trump portrays this publicly. He represents a very close relationship, talks about his ties with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but we will see if he is able to get any new concessions in our ongoing trade agreements. On Friday, we released a special episode breaking down the massive bombshell decision from the Virginia Supreme Court to overturn the Democrats referendum and gerrymander nuclear option. What we talked about at that time was the fact that this should have been obvious to Virginia Democrats. They were warned more than a year ago when they held the vote in the special session before the election that they had held it too late. They had the ability to begin this process earlier. Nobody really knows why they didn't. But they broke the very clear text of the law that requires them to vote in a special session before an election. The problem is they held that vote in the legislature after early voting had begun for the election, which means there was not an intervening election in between. Clear text of the law. It isn't the only thing that they broke in the law. As we outlined several weeks ago, there's about a 10 part test for amending the Virginia Constitution laid out in their state laws. They violated about half of them. And this is the only one that the Virginia Supreme Court needed to look at to overturn this because of how brazen it was. Democrats are burning the house down, coming up with all sorts of crazy ideas to try and change this. One that was reported in the New York Times yesterday was the idea of changing the age limit in the Virginia supreme court down to 54 to force the retirement of six of those seven justices so they could bring in new justices and vote to support the referendum over overturning this decision we had last week. It's one of the craziest decisions we've ever heard and one of the insane unintended consequences would be they would force into retirement two incredibly popular black judges, including the first female, the first black female Supreme Court justice in the history of Virginia who currently serves as the chief, they would be forcing her to retire in order to pass a map that would help people like Dan Helmer, multi time loser, get a safe seat in Congress. I don't think it's worth it. And one thing that we saw on Sunday was a number of concerns in the state of Virginia saying, wait a sec, we have not been involved in this conversation at all. We don't like this idea. We don't want to go there. But what we do know is if Democrats were to try any kind of Hail Mary activity to change the outcome of what the Supreme Court in Virginia decided, they need to do it very quickly. We also know they've appealed to the United States Supreme Court. But as we talked about on Friday in their appeal, in the first two lines of that, they misspelled Virginia and they misspelled Senator. So they likely are using the same lawyers who got them into all this trouble in the first place. One thing when we know is Jay Jones, the Attorney General behind this, is not the brightest bulb. And so Virginia Democrats continue to struggle with a path forward here. But what this means for the rest of the country is incredibly consequential. Cook Political Report has changed their House seat ratings. 2 solid Democrat 185 solid Republican 187 likely Democrat 11 likely Republican 17 likely lean Democrat 12 lean Republican 5. Toss up just 18. What this means is at that outset, Republicans currently will go into the midterms with a slight advantage because of the makeup of those congressional maps. But nobody is taking that for granted. Republicans will still have a very tough fight in those midterms just because the way that history works. Another issue that we're going to be covering this week, the Senate Banking Committee is going to be marking up what's the most consequential crypto legislation that we have seen yet. This is the market structure bill called the Clarity Act. And it's called the Clarity act because the goal is to give clarity to the entire legal structure around crypto. And it really has a lot of important things in. As I've said before on 10 minute trail, I'm not the biggest expert in crypto, but I can understand why this is important because it has all the laws for how crypto is governed and regulated. If you're somebody who's concerned about crypto being used for illicit finance, for being used for anything sort of international related, this is what governs it. To ensure that doesn't happen, it puts the safeguards in place, it puts regulatory powers in place. It's been an incredible sort of process of getting the crypto community and, you know, senators, both Republicans and Democrats, working together, together on this. But what we've seen from the beginning is the big banks, the same ones we've been talking about for a long time, who hate crypto because they can't control it, have been trying to derail it every step of the way. And so we'll see between now and Thursday if they're able to have any impact in shutting this thing down. Jamie Dimon himself has explicitly said he thinks crypto is a Ponzi scheme. He doesn't like it. But one of the reasons that banks don't like it is because if there's crypto and stable coins and other sort of things like that, they're not. Banks are not able to get all the fees that they live off of and make billions of dollars off of. So it's easy to them in fighting this. But they burned a lot of bridges with both Republicans and Democrats up to this point in this bill negotiation. So we'll see where this goes, but we're gonna be watching for that markup on Thursday. One thing we're gonna examine this week is Spencer Pratt, the candidate for mayor in California, in Los Angeles. He is a reality TV star, but he is surging at the exact right moment. Now, he still is a very long shot because Los Angeles is a very liberal place and he's running as a Republican. But he's had a series of viral ads that we're gonna go through in our Tuesday ep just to talk a little bit about why he might be breaking through. One theme that we've Talked about on 10 Minute Drill is if you live in a big blue city, you're essentially trapped by terrible governance, whether it's Chicago with failing schools, because the schools are failing, because they're putting resources into all sorts of political causes. If you live in New York, you can't get your trash picked up because your socialist mayor is out trying to make government run grocery stores. If you live in a blue city or state, you often find yourself trapped by terrible policies and terrible governance. Spencer Pratt's argument is it doesn't have to be this way. And you look at Karen Bass, the current mayor of Los Angeles, who was in Ghana when the LA wildfires broke out. The LA wildfires are one of the worst cases of simple mismanagement we've ever seen in governing history. Spencer Pratt has a very good case to make that LA an important city and an important state. Shouldn't have to live like this. So we'll dive into this a little bit more with some of his ads. But I've been really fascinated by this phenomenon of him breaking at the right time. But in another piece of California news, the Democrat Socialists of America have endorsed billionaire Tom Dyer for the California governor's race. And if it blows your mind that Democrat Socialists are endorsing a billionaire who began his career working for Goldman Sachs, who has a lot to do with investing in building ICE facilities and things like that, you are not alone. We're going to talk about that and more about that crazy race throughout this week. There is lots going on on Capitol Hill. It is a crazy time. It's a crazy time in Washington, a crazy time in our country. We will be covering it all this week. We're going to have episodes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday to try and keep you up with everything that's going on. But please leave us a comment on YouTube, leave us a comment on Apple or Spotify if there's something we're missing, if there's something you'd like us to cover more, if or if there's something you think that we're covering, well, we appreciate it. We appreciate you guys. And we will see you throughout this week.