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Trump Arrives in China, JD Targets Fraud, Greenpeace Loses BIG | 10 Minute Drill
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President Trump in China, what you need to know about what he's doing today. JD Vance kicks off the crusade against waste, fraud and abuse in government and a plea from Sheldon Whitehouse to keep his lights on. All that and so much 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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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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Yesterday, President Trump arrived in China to much fanfare. Now, it's always fun to watch state visits like this and see how other countries roll out the red carpet and have these incredible processions with chanting, music, things like that at the airport to greet foreign leaders when they land. And China is very good at putting on a good show and putting on a good face for the world. And by the time you hear this episode, President Trump will have held his high profile major summit with Xi Jinping, where they have a number of issues to discuss. But one thing that's valuable to note is China put out a short list of their red lines for the discussions days before they actually happen. The four red lines in China, US Relations, they must not be challenged. Number one, the Taiwan question. Number two, democracy and human rights. Number three, paths and political systems. Number four, China's development. Right now, some of these are specific. The Taiwan question. Secretary Rubio already said they're going to talk about Taiwan. That's an issue that China has been threatening for a long time and does have major global implications. Because if China were to blockade or attack Taiwan, the entire world's chip trade and a lot of other technology trades would be locked down in a major economic crisis. But they also have vague terms in there. Again, let's look at that. Paths and political systems. Nobody knows what that means, but this is giving Xi and the Chinese the wiggle room to be able to say, we don't wanna talk about that, we do wanna talk about this, and try and set the terms that are friendly to them. But as a lot of people have discussed, both leaders enter this feeling like they have a whole lot of leverage over the other one. And I think it's notable, I don't know that President Trump has ever walked into a room and not felt like he had more leverage than another person. But I also think it's interesting in these red lines that they cite the democracy and human rights. Now, it's important to note that China actually has concentration camps and they have carried out ethnic genocide against the Uyghurs and have carried out oppression against their own people. And there's been a lot of smart people the last couple days who have been trying to contextualize and help everyone understand that while the world talks about China simply as a competitor to the United States, President Trump is going into this with both eyes open about their incredibly adversarial record. For example, here is Michael Sobolic from the Hudson Institute.
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This is what the Chinese Communist Party always does. They try to project themselves to the rest of the world as a normal government in a normal country. They're not. The CCP is illegitimate and they're afraid of their own people, which is why they won't let the Chinese people actually speak for themselves.
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And then former Ambassador Sam Brownback, who also served as a senator and the governor of Kansas, also gave a lot of good context just to help people remember how terrible this Chinese regime has always been.
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This is a. This is an evil regime. They've killed more of their own people than any other regime in the history of mankind. And we've been treating them like a normal country.
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So as President Trump goes into this, he knows that history, he knows just how evil they've been, but he's also looking to find opportunities for common ground that will actually help the American people. For example, he brought with him over a dozen CEOs of major American companies, and he's laid out that his goal is to pitch Xi Jinping on opening China up to US Business. And that's why he's brought in all these US Business leaders. As we talked about a little bit yesterday, one of the concerns in America is that President Trump will simultaneously open up more of America to Chinese business, which is not something that many people feel comfortable with because of all the ramifications that come with that, whether it be national security or just the larger economic issues. But in this, when you look at the economies, China might have a very long history, but US Has a stronger, larger economy and a much firmer grasp of issues. Yesterday, JD Vance kicked off his efforts to fight waste, fraud, and abuse in government. Now, I have talked about this as what I believe is one of the most important things Republicans can do to unify and to make a compelling message to the country of why they deserve to stay in power because we've uncovered so much waste, fraud, and abuse throughout government. And Democrats are already promising that if they get back in power, not only will they work to allow more fraud, but they will put infrastructure in place to protect the fraud that exists. And One thing that J.D. vance talked about yesterday that I thought was Particularly important is the ultimatum for states if they do not take this more seriously.
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There are going to be some, I'm sure some politicians who say what you're doing here is harming the Medicaid program. We're trying to save the Medicaid program from dysfunctional state bureaucrats. Today we are sending across 50 Medicaid programs. We are sending letters that will require them to show that they are effectively and aggressively prosecuting Medicaid fraud in their states. And if they do not, if they do not aggressively prosecute Medicaid fraud, we are going to turn off the money that goes to these anti fraud units.
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Now that point there from JD Is critically important because people need to understand this waste, fraud and abuse isn't simply money monopoly money going out the window. There's a human cost to it and it's manifested in a number of ways. One of them is the fact that these services all perform worse when they're overburdened by waste, fraud and abuse. If you look at California's medi cal system, there's people who can't get care because they're competing against fraud. But also in places like Minneapolis, we talked about the fact that there are fake businesses set up for home health care that people have registered to get support from, but because they're a fraudulent non existent business, those patients never got the care they needed and died in their homes. So there is a major human cost to this. But one of the most shocking things that we've seen in these last couple years is as Republicans have been out trying to find waste, fraud and abuse throughout government to try and make programs work better and to try and make our tax dollars go a little bit further. The reaction from Democrats of one, accusing everyone of murder if they cut waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid, but also doing everything in their power to protect that gravy train that's tied to so many of their constituencies. It's been shocking, but this is very, very valuable from JD Vance and we expect this to be a midterm message for Republicans through November. As we've talked about the redistricting fights around the country and the fact that Democrats continue to step on rakes at every opportunity. One dynamic that's been really important to watch that we've covered quite a bit on 10 minute drill is the fact that Democrats are deeply unpopular. They are holding their coalition together by hatred of President Trump, but that's not actually making them more popular. And don't take my word for it. Here's Harry Entin.
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You would have thought that the Democrats lead would expand on the generic congressional ballot.
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It didn't happen.
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Look, in March, Democrats were up by six points. Look at this. Now Democrats are up by three points. And I want you to note the yellow lettering. No clear leader.
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Now, one big reason that Democrats aren't gaining on the congressional ballot is not nobody can tell you what Democrats want to do differently. They can tell you these guys really don't like Donald Trump. They can tell you Hakeem Jeffries looks really angry when he holds a baseball bat, but nobody knows what they actually want to do. And so one other thing that Harry Anton got into is the fact that Democrats don't have any kind of advantage in who voters trust more on the economy, largely because voters look at Democrats and say, you destroyed the economy under Joe Biden or we don't know what you would do differently to improve things based on what we're concerned about now. So that is something to continue to watch through the midterms. If any Democrat were to come up and say, I've got a plan for affordability, people would want to hear it. But instead, their entire campaign apparatus is focused on we hate Donald Trump and we hope that's enough for you to vote for us in November. One of the most fascinating legal cases of the last few years has to do with Greenpeace. You may remember, and we've talked about before, on 10 minute drill in 2019, Energy Transfer, a large energy organization suede Greenpeace over their role in protests around the Dakota Access Pipeline. Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace and other activist groups over the coordinated and sometimes violent campaign waged against the Dakota Access pipeline. After six years of litigation and a three week trial, 12 North Dakota jurors unanimously found Greenpeace liable for conspiracy, defamation, defamation per se and tortious interference. The damages exceeded $666 million across three Greenpeace defendants with more than 130 million tagged to Greenpeace International. Al. Now, we've watched this case closely because one that is more damages than Greenpeace has to ever pay off. But also Greenpeace thought that they would do an end run and try and get European courts to fight against this lawsuit and find them not liable, which is one of the most absurd things I have ever heard. You do damage here in America, you're going to get held liable for it here in America. And no sort of fancy European guys in tight suits are gonna come here and be able to say they can't be held accountable for this. But the courts, the Supreme Court of North Dakota has stood behind that fact. Greenpeace's attempts to swindle US Courts just got harpooned. This is an op ed from Jason Isaac of American Energy Institute, who wrote this. The North Dakota Supreme Court just drew a bright line for the rule of law, US Sovereignty, and the energy infrastructure that keeps our country running. On May 7, the court ruled 4 to 1 that Greenpeace International cannot use a Dutch court to nullify what a unanimous American jury had already decided. So, again, I think it's very interesting that Greenpeace thought that they could get some Dutch lawyers to come in in their clogs on a bicycle, leaving their windmills and tulips behind to say, america, you cannot do this to us. It was never going to work out, but I think it's hilarious that they tried. Greenpeace, you get what you paid for. Later today in the United States Senate Banking Committee, there will be a vote on the Clarity Act. Now, we laid this out a little bit on Monday. I'm not a crypto expert, but. But I keep talking about this because I believe this is probably the most important piece of crypto legislation that will ever come up, because it's what sets the basic market structure for how crypto can work in our larger financial system. And I think it's become pretty clear that crypto is not going away. But part of the reason I like this story is it's kind of in a classic Washington palace intrigue dynamic of, as we've talked about, big banks who hate innovation and hate anything that they can't charge a transaction fee on, they've tried to derail this at every opportunity. Even on Mother's Day, they sent out a long essay to bankers around the country saying, we need you to rally against this and rally against crypto. Even though they skipped the negotiations they were invited to by the White House to try and get the compromise piece of legislation here together. So the banks have acted perpetually in bad faith, the same way that they did when we had the open banking fight that we talked about last year, which is still ongoing, but where banks continuously acted in bad faith because their goal here is simply to derail any kind of innovation that could cut into their bottom line here. So everyone's gonna be watching this markup really closely to see what happens in the Senate Banking Committee. But people are hopeful it will go forward because of all the compromise work that's been done to get this right. A growing dynamic on the political left has been this conversation that they need to either stop talking about climate change because it's a political liability or change the way they talk about it. We covered earlier this week the New York Times declaring climate change is over. New York Times, Forget climate change. Democrats need to talk about other issues. And then later this week in Semaphore, less climate Talk, more growth. U.S. progressives take a lesson from Canada. Now, again, it's important to remember what is driving this. And that's the fact that under Joe Biden, Democrats made the climate alarmism movement incredibly politically toxic because. Because they tried to tell Americans they need to spend more money on electric cars to change the climate. They need to spend more money on appliances that they can't afford that work significantly less effectively in order to save the planet. Meanwhile, they had nothing to show for actually saving the planet. It was essentially a giant money laundering operation. However, one person is essentially playing the role of the last Japanese soldiers on the island after the war is over. And that man is Sheldon Whitehouse who released a very long video saying Democrats can't give up the fight on climate change.
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Top 10 reasons Democrats need to talk about climate change.
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And we're not gonna show you more of that because Sheldon Whitehouse is deeply, deeply boring. And he also shooting it from below his chin. He needs an Instagram wife who can help him know about angles, things like that. But needless to say, it's very boring. But what you need to understand is to Sheldon Whitehouse who's made a lot of money with his votes that have diverted funds to his wife's nonprofit that have enriched his own family. The main reason that Sheldon Whitehouse wants the left to continue the fight on climate change is because those all white beach clubs ain't cheap. That is all the time we have today. Thank you so much for joining us on 10 Minute Drill. Please like subscribe, leave us a review, tell your friends and have a great weekend.