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Paging Elon and DOGE: AOC Caught Using Tax Dollars for Dance Lessons & Avoiding a Democrat Shutdown
00:10:32
Did Congresswoman AOC use tax dollars to fund dance classes? Trump and Republicans navigate Democrat government shutdown threats. Bernie and the Democrats’ class warfare blows up in their faces. Does President Trump have the ability to...
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Host
Did Congresswoman Aoc get caught using taxpayer dollars to pay for dance classes? President Trump wants to deport pro Hamas protesters on college campuses. We've got shutdown theater. We've got a Ukraine ceasefire deal. All that and more today on 10 Minute Drill. Everybody get up. Get up. The story of America is the story of an adventure.
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Donald Trump
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.
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Political Analyst
The nonprofit highlighted several troubling expenses that came out of her member representational allowance. And she's saying that she used her allowance to make two payments. One of $3,700 to Juan D. Gonzalez and another of $850 to Bamboozo Dance Co Inc.
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Host
This comes from nonprofit watchdog Americans for Public Trust, who filed a complaint since saying just that. Now, Congresswoman Aoc has pushed back, saying that this wasn't her tax or her allowance, that is the taxpayer dollars. This was campaign funds. But this often gets muddled. And some of the most trouble that you see members of Congress get into is when they're not careful about what they use campaign cash for and what they use taxpayer dollars for. So this will be an interesting one to watch, but it happens. This complaint happens at the same time as Congresswoman Aoc is leading the resistance to the government funding bill. On Tuesday night, House Republicans, despite their incredibly narrow majority, passed a bill to fund the government and sent it over to the Senate. This happened despite some feeble pushback from Democrats. But I think the biggest problem for Democrats is they wanted to use this continuing resolution as their biggest piece of leverage this year to try and impact some change to government with reconciliation, the tool that allows the majority in the House and Senate to pass budgetary bills by a simple majority. Republicans can ignore a lot of Democrats complaints over these next six to nine months. However, they had hoped to use the continuing resolution as a moment of power when Republicans have this narrow majority to extract some consequences.
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Donald Trump
Here we are on the brink of a government shutdown, which will be entirely of the Democrats making if it happens. They need to put the partisan politics aside. This is not a win for the Trump administration. This is a win for the American people. I mean, when the government shuts down, you have government employees who are no longer paid. You have services that begin to lag.
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Host
Their biggest challenge is, as we discussed in our last episode, the last two weeks, for Democrats, this really important time, they've been focused on, one, this food fight over the bipartisan center of Al Green, and two, the Meghan Markleization of their party with these quirky tiktoks. You know, let's take a quick look at those again, because they're hilarious.
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Donald Trump
Yo, this is the ranking rizzler on appropriation, so Sigma Main character Energy.
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Host
But AOC is currently threatening Senate Democrats that they will see political pain if they vote to advance this continuing resolution bill and fund the government. Democrats are using all sorts of scare tactics that we hear quite often that Republicans are trying to cut Medicaid and cut Medicare, Social Security, veterans benefits. But Speaker Johnson's team makes the case that none of those cuts are in this continuing resolution, that those are all scare tactics. This is a clean continuing resolution. And one of the biggest challenges that Democrats are gonna have is they've spent the last three months arguing that every government worker is necessary and important. We can't make any cuts anywhere. But at the same time, they're voting literally to shut down the federal government, which will furlough tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of federal workers. So I think they've got a really tough case to make there to the American people. And I think if they vote to shut down the government, there will likely be a political price to pay on top of the price they're already paying. With a 31% approval rating, they have recently shifted their attacks to Republicans being too cozy and too supportive of billionaires. But there are a lot of reasons that that attack from them really won't hold water. First and foremost, as we've talked about here before, most of the Democrat agenda in these last few years has been dictated by outside groups that are largely funded, you guessed it, by these billionaire tycoon types. Everyone from George Soros to Swiss billionaire Hans Jorg Wys and Arabella Advisors Dark Money Network to people like Bill Gates and the Rockefeller brothers, who have funded groups to pressure Democrats to take increasingly extreme positions. The second point that I would make there, though, is Democrats made their donors incredibly wealthy using these spending bills like the inflation Reduction Act. The AP had an incredible story about how one group of donors who came from a solar company went from millionaires to billionaires based on our tax dollars, our subsidies. So as Democrats try and argue Republic Republicans want to make billionaires more wealthy. Democrats just did that. They made an entire class of Democrat donors from millionaires into billionaires with our tax dollars. The third point that I would make is one of the figureheads they're rallying around right now is Bernie Sanders, who spent years railing against millionaires and billionaires. But if you followed closely, due to the capitalism that he's railing against, and book sales, again, railing against millionaires and billionaires. He became a millionaire, and he has suddenly stopped complaining about millionaires and billionaires. And just focus on the billionaires. This wasn't highlighted by Republicans. This came from the Hillary Clinton campaign, who spent a lot of time highlighting the fact that he is a hypocrite on these issues. So, again, if Democrats think that they can save their brand by tying Republicans to billionaires, they've got a really, really tall order in landing that. The next topic we're going to talk about today is a really complicated one, and it deals with a pro Hamas protester named Mahmoud Khalil, who President Trump has ordered for deportation. A lot of his defenders are arguing that it violates his free speech rights as a green card holder here in America. But the Trump administration is arguing that they have the authority through the State Department to deport him on the grounds that he presents a threat to our foreign policy. There are a few really important things here that I think are worth analyzing. One, as Democrats tie themselves really closely to this person, we're finding out more and more about some of the extreme things that he said, which many have interpreted as threats to our own national security. Groups that he's aligned with have called for eradicating the West. They have said that violence is the only answer. And I think when people hear that, it's very hard to say with the complex immigration system we have, with so many great people wanting to get into our country to achieve the American dream, that we should give green cards and allow people like this, who are actually calling for violence against Americans to be able to stay here. But I think Andy McCarthy made a really compelling argument about whether or not these activities are actually protected speech. Things like occupying campus buildings, things like preventing students from being able to get to campus, and in so many cases, threatening Jewish students by protesting and sort of pushing them into hiding places on campus, that it's very, very chilling to see. That's not political speech. It's extortion. American citizens who engaged in such behavior would not have a First Amendment defense. They'd likely face prosecution. And in fact, dozens of the agitators who were arrested in connection with these activities may still face other legal consequences. A group named Speech first that defends free speech on college campuses has made the argument that if your protests are shouting down someone else's free speech, you're no longer doing protected free speech. And that violates so many, both state laws in certain states, but also college campus laws. In so many places. And so it's really important to understand that. But the other key piece here, that Bill Melusion from Fox tweeted that others have made, that I think is really, really important, is Democrats are getting the law wrong on this when they argue that he can't be deported because he hasn't committed a crime. The that Marco Rubio is leaning on from the State Department is one that's been actually held up in court before, that if someone prevents a threat to our foreign policy, they can be deported. This happened in 1995 when a Mexican national came to America and was deported because the Secretary of State made the argument that he was a threat to our ongoing foreign policy with Mexico. That held up the court, said that that was a valid reason to deport somebody. And that's what the Trump administration is leaning on. But again, the politics of this are very complicated for Democrats. If you have called for the eradication of the west, if you've supported an organization that has held Americans captive, I think you're gonna have a tough time really demanding a lot of sympathy for somebody like this. We wanna take a quick look at the economy. President Trump is making a case that everyone needs to just wait a little bit as these markets freak out and panic over tariffs. His argument and his administration's argument is look at what happened in the first four years of his presidency and trust him. They're also pointing to three economic indicators that I actually do think are really important. First, we did see a slight cooling of inflation in February, which is a very positive indicator. Two, gas prices have continuously trended down, which is something that really does affect the everyday lives of Americans. One thing that really hindered President Biden is when gas prices kept rising and rising and they blamed it on him. Third, egg prices have actually gone down in the last week. Brooke Rollins pointed that out, and I think that's a valuable point for them. It will be a bit of a difficult period for these tariffs to in with the markets. I think we all understand that he's asking for a little bit of time and a little bit of trust, even as a lot of people who are even President Trump's supporters are arguing that we should work first on extending the Trump tax cuts and then focus on tariffs. And I think we'll see where that goes. Last topic today, the State Department has announced a potential ceasefire deal between Russia and Ukraine that Ukraine has accepted. We will see if Russia comes to the table for that. But by accepting that ceasefire deal, America is resuming support to Ukraine, both in arms, but also in intelligence. And that's something that is really important to Ukraine's ability on the battlefield out there. And so all eyes are now on Russia, who is the original aggressor here to come to the table and see if we can come towards peace. And if they don't, President Trump will likely take a much tougher hand on them because his goal here, as he has stated, has been peace above all else. That's all we've Got today on 10 Minute Drill. Please subscribe on YouTube. Share with your friends. Make sure everyone knows that this is the best place to get all the news of the day in 10 minutes or less. Thanks for joining us.