Michael Popak (0:00)

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By designing glasses in house and selling directly to customers, they're able to offer prescription eyewear that's expertly crafted and unexpectedly affordable. Warby Parker glasses are made from premium materials like impact resistant polycarbonate and custom acetate. And they start at just $95, including prescription lenses. Get glasses made from the good stuff. Stop by a Warby Parker store near you. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Day 44 of the American public hostage crisis, or what we also refer to as the Trump administration. And I'm Michael Popak. New home Office studio same. Popak live. Welcome. You're here on the Midas Touch Network. I'm Michael Popak. Let's get to it. I'm unhinged, I'm unfiltered, I'm uncensored and I got a lot on my mind. I'll start with a watching guide for the joint address of congress tonight by $1 Donald Trump. He's only 44 days into his administration. What's happening with the poll numbers? What's happening with the economy? What's happening with the tariff war? Who's the special guests that were sure that are sure to be trotted out by a combination of Donald Trump and Melania Trump. We'll cover it all, including the Democrat the Democratic response and vigorous response here on POPOC Live. Then I want to give an overview of the cases. You come here for the. For the live. You stay for. You stay for the law and politics. Let's talk about all of the cases that are out, out there, including the attempts of the Trump administration to walk back some of their policies in the face of the 95 lawsuits that have been filed, the more than 40 different injunctions and temporary restraining orders that have been entered. I mean, we're averaging two lawsuits a day, five injunctions a week. We already have two Supreme Court cases. You know, they're supposed to be bragging about what they accomplish in their first hundred days, not the first hundred lawsuits in the first 44 or 45 days. Then I got to turn to tariff wars and the fact that Donald Trump has started a war he cannot win and that the American people are automatically losers as a result. Tariff war. When you hear that, just translate that into indirect tax. 1200 to $1500 in every American family. And watch the price of new cars skyrocket by $12,000, because that's one of the things that Mexico contributes to our economy. As Canada, with a certain amount of glee, tells Donald Trump, you may be smart at business, but you're dumb in terms of tariff policy. And the Ontario premier saying with glee that he's going to cut the power line, the fuel line, between Canada and the United States if Donald Trump doesn't back off on his tariffs. The victim in all of this, the American consumer, the American voter. Then, speaking of victims, we've got President Vladimir Zelensky, who's at war. That's why he dresses that way. He's not showing up all spiffy in some sort of Republican MAGA Brooks Brothers Young Republican uniform or costume. His country's at war. And so he shows up for a planned meeting in the White House. He ends up getting ambushed by JD Vance and Donald Trump in a way that left some historians to say it's as if Franklin Delano Roosevelt changed sides during World War II. Donald Trump has now joined the Axis powers against the Allies, leaving Zelensky twisting in the wind, making him come back on bended knee. I'm sure they're going to try to announce the mineral deal with Zelensky on the joint Congress addressed by Donald Trump tonight. I'll cover that and so much more on POPOC Live. Let's talk about the joint. The joint session. Sometimes people are referring to it slightly incorrectly as a State of the Union address. And it's not the State of the Union address. That is by congressional mandate, by constitutional mandate. That comes a little bit later in the term. This is Donald Trump using his, his as a, using his puppet master techniques to get the speaker of the House to invite him to give a joint address. He's got a lot of fence mending to do, he's got a lot of breach repair to do and he's got a lot of explaining to do. The American people. Just look at the poll numbers in the first 44 days of what is shaping up to be one of the greatest failures of an American presidency in modern history in the shortest amount of time. The velocity at which Donald Trump is failing is breathtaking. Of course, that all injures us as American people. But let's talk about it. 60% of the American people believe that the tariff war, which I'll talk about more at length later, will lead automatically to higher prices. And they are right. The oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett. Yep. Still alive at 94. Who knows better than him about the impact on the economy and how to make investment decisions than the oracle of Delphi, Warren Buffett. He said just the other day, tariff war, that's just an active war by another name. And that there's no fairy, no tooth fairy that pays for tariffs. It's paid for by, on the back of the American consumer in the form of an indirect tax. So that's right. Consumer confidence has fallen off the proverbial cliff. Economists are shocked by how rapidly the Americans have baked into their thought process, how bad the economy looks under Donald Trump. And so consumer confidence is down, which means we can't count on consumer spending to spend our way out of a recession. That's why under Joe Biden, remember those days when we had a roaring economy, a great 401k, an amazing job creation engine, GDP up, consumer confidence up. Sure, stubborn prices and logistical price supply issues because of COVID and the $3 trillion that had to go to restart the heart of the economy. But overall, a very well run, very well managed economy. That's over. That's over on day 44. It's over. Donald Trump has, as I've said, found a way to drive the American economy off, off the cliff. And as a result, consumers are not going to spend. And manufacturers, all the major manufacturing indexes say the same thing, that the people that make products in factories and plants, they're pulling back, expecting that consumer demand will not be there. And they're also expecting that consumer demand worldwide won't be there because of. Right, the T word tariffs. Once we get into a trade war with China and we're in it now, that means they are going to tax our goods and services. That means the American farmer, you can kiss your ability to sell your products and agricultural products and supplies in China goodbye. And we as an American people don't. Can never consume enough of the American GDP ourselves. Let me put that another way. Our country's normal competitive advantage has been destroyed by Donald Trump. Our competitive advantages, we have the ability, once we stoke the fires of our economic engine, to produce more goods and services than any country in the world. But we have to have markets to absorb it, to sell it to. I mean, we can't just eat 20% more soybeans. We can't just eat 20% more chicken feet. I don't eat any. I eat 0% chicken feet. To replace the Chinese market. The Russian market's been gone forever. And the Indian market and other places, the Canadian market, the Mexican market, and countries like Mexico and Canada will just join together with China, just join together with China to create their own trilateral trading bloc without us. That's what we're watching. Donald Trump has unified the nations of the world. He has. For that I give him credit. But it's against America, American's interest and America's economy. So the State of the Union address, sorry, the joint, joint speech to Congress today, he's up against manufacturing. Confidence down. Consumer confidence down. Stock market. Donald Trump doesn't even talk about stock market anymore. Not at all. Remember during the campaign, he talked about, when I'm elected, the roaring stock market. The reason the stock market has dropped for a day is because they don't like Kamala Harris, they don't like Joe Biden. And now, nary a comment about the stock market because since the beginning, the middle of February, it has also fallen off a cliff. And there goes everybody's 401k and retirement plans, to the extent that you have the luxury of having those, boop. Right off the cliff. So Donald Trump can't point to that as economic success, even though I thought that was the reason we sent him to the White House with all those Wall street people, you know, all those people that own those family offices and those hedge funds, they really understood Wall Street. Well, not apparently not apparently. We've gone back to the 1940s. This is like if there was a book that was written, I've referred to it before. You should go look it up by Philip Roth called the It'll come to me in a minute. I was all excited about this, this, this part, the plot against America. I knew it would come to me. And they made a movie out of it as well on hbo, which they showed, I think, right before COVID And it's about a historical fiction about what if, what, what would have happened if FDR had lost his third term to Franklin, to Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator who was American firster and very close and supportive of the Nazi regime and the Germans. We'd all be, I'd be doing this hot take right now, this popoc live in German, if that had happened. And it's, it's like that. It's as if Lindbergh became president in the form of Donald Trump. And so he's going to have to explain why the stock market has crashed, why consumer confidence is down. He's going to have to explain himself and why he's conducted tariff wars and why, all at the same time, why was it necessary? This isn't an economics class. This isn't a weekend assignment in some macroeconomics 101 in college or in community college, where. Why don't you posit into a thought experiment. This is my graduate assistant lecture about what would happen if at the same time you started a trade war with 40% of our trade partners, including Canada, where we get most of our imported energy from which powers our GDP and our manufacturing plants and factories. If you did that, at the same time you got rid of millions of federal workers who earn paychecks and consumers at the same time that you cut off federal aid in the trillions of dollars, the billions of dollars for humanitarian purposes. One of that, every one of those dollars has an American job behind it. And you do all that at the same time, what do you think would happen to the economy? Well, professor, you know, and I was like 18 years old, 19 years old. Well, professor, this is our lives he's playing with. This is our pocketbook, purse and wallet around the kitchen table issues, not Donald Trump's. So tonight, I am sure he's going to talk about we need to cut corporate taxes. Yay. Said the corporations. Boo. Said the average American. This is why the Republicans don't want to go to town hall meetings anymore back in their districts. In fact, the leadership of the Republicans have told the, have told congresspeople don't hold town hall meetings because they're getting hijacked by everyday Americans, you know, the people that voted for them, their constituency, who are yelling at them about, what are you doing? You're not lowering prices, you're raising Them. It's a tax on us. Why are you looking at Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security? Why are you cutting veterans benefits? Why are you firing veterans? Donald Trump has laid off more veterans than any president in US history already. Day 44 of the Hostage crisis. So they're cowards running away for their own constituencies. The alternative that was suggested by Republican leadership was don't do a town hall, do a. Do a telehaul, do a virtual, do a zoom meeting, do a Facebook live, do a popoc live. Come on here and justify what you're doing to your constituents that elected you and for whom you work, you cowards. So Donald Trump has got to have to deal with that. He's going to have to make this. The char. The char of pain is real and I feel it. He'll never say anything like that, but he'll try. But we have to bring jobs back to America. We do that through tariffs. No, we don't. We do that through free trade. We do that through globalism. Yeah. We do that through not picking a fight in the minute of a fragile economy with our trading partners and our allies. So he's going to argue for lower taxes. He's going to order, order. He's going to argue for patience with his domestic policies as that. You may not see all of the moving parts, but we do. We're smarter than you in a patronizing way. It's coming. You wait. He'll have to do some defense of Ukraine and Russia in Israeli policy. You know, I mean, you have to be sleeping under a rock to not realize that Donald Trump just did the unthinkable. He brought an ally into the Oval Office and then purposefully ambushed him in order to try to coerce him to signing an advantageous mineral deal and rare earth elements deal for America and force him to accept whatever terms Donald Trump negotiates with his arch enemy, Putin. I mean, Zelensky's arch enemy, Putin. Zelensky's at war. Putin is an imperial dictator. What are we doing currying favor with Putin and cutting the legs and the balls out from under Zelensky after we've given him $65 billion? It's half of the aid. The rest came from the coalition of the willing of Europeans who are now stepping into the breach and holding emergency meetings in order to support Zelensky. Zelensky, realizing he needs America, is now gonna have to go kiss the backside of Donald Trump, signed that mineral deal and then offer to, under the strong leadership of President Trump, aim for peace. And he's now Offered a peace deal to try to get back into the Oval Office. Ridiculous. Diplomacy by embarrassment, diplomacy by shame. You know, I'm shamed. I'm ashamed by what I'm watching with this presidency out of control. And Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State. Yeah. Who used to work in one of my law firms, by the way. We never saw him. It was a no show, no work job, if you know what I mean. After he became speaker of the House in Florida, Marco Rubio, he should resign. The fact that he allowed that, the fact that he supported that with Zelensky. Supported that. Yes, with his tweet, his social media post. Proud of President Trump, standing up. Standing up to who? How about standing up to Russia? How about standing up to Putin, not standing up to our allies? That was, that was a, that was so a terrible example of, of, of the, the antithesis of diplomacy that I think that Marco Rubio and I, and I call for his resignation. Yeah. American diplomacy just went back to the, to the Stone Ages under Marco Rubio, which I predicted. I mean, look, I've known Marco Rubio from Florida. I knew he was going to be a meat puppet because Donald Trump's his own Secretary of State. He just sits there and stares down at his shoelaces when he's embarrassed, and he should be embarrassed now. So what else are we going to see during this joint address of Congress? Well, then we've got the, the human, the human theatrical pieces. Right. The human pawns who are trotted out by the party. We're going to have the family of Corey Comparatore, who was the firefighter who was accidentally shot and killed at Butler, Pennsylvania, when the gunman aimed at Donald Trump and his family there. We're going to have apparently a mom whose daughter was killed by undocumented. Somebody who's undocumented. Where are the mothers of mass school shootings by Americans? I'm going to say this one more time. I probably won't. I'll be saying it a lot with this administration. The vast majority of violent crime in America is committed by Americans against other Americans. You know, blue passport, holding a good old fashioned, generally white Americans, you know, at least at the mass shooting levels. Mass casualty events are generally not undocumented. They don't go into schools and shoot. So where are the mourning families for the school shootings, for the shootings in churches, for the shootings in malls, in food courts, in movie theaters, in supermarkets, in synagogues, in mosques? Where are they? Where are the mourners from the guy, an American citizen who ran over people in New Orleans. No, we have to make a cheap political point. So we tried out this poor grieving mother. Not blaming her. She wants to, you know, she wants to bring attention to this matter. I get it. But she's a political pawn. Let's face it. We have that going on. And then we're going to trot out Melania. Did anybody see that outfit she wore the other day? That. That man suit she decided to wear to go to Congress and then chastise the Democrats for not showing up for her big new revenge porn? I mean, I mean, listen, I'm all for being against revenge porn. See how I turn that around? I'm all against revenge porn and the AI and deep fakes. And I get it. And yes, you should bring it down. And yes, it should be bipartisan, but this is the number one thing that Melania could come up with. Revenge porn. And she's going to have, I don't know, revenge porn people there that she can point to and so people can clap for it. And then she chastised Democrats for not getting behind her. I don't know. The last time I saw her in office, it was cyber bullying. And that. Which is mainly her own husband, look to your right and tell the guy to stop cyber bullying, I guess is the right thing to do. And now we got to do revenge porn. Okay, so we're going to do that. And then you're going to see the Democrats and the Democratic House members. Women wearing pink. I like that. It's to show power and persistence. Sometimes they wear white as a nod to the suffragist movement to get the women the right to vote. Today it's pink. So look for lots of pink in that room. You'll have a few Supreme Court justices, they don't all go anymore. They're busy making terrible, terrible decisions against the American people. Just today, as long as we're on that topic, the United States Supreme Court decided to side against the Environmental Protection Agency. And they are for raw sewage being dumped into your water supply. Yes, you heard me right. The United States Supreme Court in What else? A 5 to 4 decision decided that the EPA couldn't regulate the way they had under the Clean Water Act. Raw sewage being pumped into your water supply and into fresh water because they ruled that they created a whole new thing and a after effect or an effect permit. Like you can't look to the effects of the pollution in issuing the permit. Well, how do you stop pollution if you don't look to the effects of it? This is what Happens when nine people get together and five of them are fake pseudoscientists and environmentalists that just want to side with the president. So now I got to worry about what's in my glass of water and so do you. Thank you, United States Supreme Court for not protecting our water supply. And so we're then going to see at the end a retort, a rebuttal by the Democrats. And I love the choice, the choice here by the Democratic leadership. It's going to be Alyssa Slotkin. Alyssa Slotkin is a senator, first term senator out of Michigan who won in a state that went Trump. So she countered Trump, counter program, Trump. She's a former CIA analyst. So she, I'm sure she's going to talk a lot about, or should talk a lot about how the intelligence community, the FBI, the CIA, the things about cybersecurity are being hollowed out. We're less secure under this president than any other president in our lifetime. She worked for, she was bipartisan and CIA analyst. She worked for both Obama and for, I think, I believe, the Bush administration. And she's going to start as Democrats are getting off the mat now and figuring out how to find their voice and to oppose this administration. I don't care what the New York Times says. The New York Times said in its, in its editorial today, if you, I don't know if you caught it, they said, oh, Republicans are fumbling their message playing into the hands of the Republic. I'm sorry, can I start that again? The Democrats are fumbling their message. They're playing into the hands of the Republicans. They're going to, they're going to probably achieve, you know, what they don't want, which is midterm elections going in the favor of the Republicans. I don't, I don't buy that for a minute. That is a false narrative. That is, that is playing into the hands that was planted there by, by Russian trolls, I assure you, masquerading as New York Times opinion writers and editorial writers. Yeah, I think we're doing just fine. I think the hand that we've been dealt's a tough one in the House. Hakeem Jeffries is effectively the co leader of the House. You haven't heard about any new laws being passed in Congress because they're being opposed successfully by the Democrats. You haven't heard any about any crazy new investigations against Democrats because the Democrats have stopped it. And they're doing a great job of cross examining witnesses that can be used in the courts around the country. So we have that going on and now the messaging is starting. Democratic National Committee is filing lawsuits against the Trump administration to stop them from firing independent boards like the Federal Election Commission. And then we've got the Midas Touch Network, which is again, for the second week in a row, the number one YouTube network in the country. Midas Touch Brothers podcast, number one in all genres. We're number 10, by the way. Legal AF. Just shout out to Legal AF and it's all, all kidding aside, that's all because of you. That's all because you're building this network with our bare hands, something like that. We're doing it together. It's a community built. It's people power, it's legal a efforts. It's Midas mighty altogether. And we appreciate and we are humbled by your commitment, your act, your being so active, your engagement and not, and not on easy topics. You know, I know that legalif and POPOC Live can get complicated. I try to make it informative, you know, infotainment in my best way, but it can be a hard slog sometimes. But you're here for it and we're here for you. There are many ways to support the Midas Touch Network and Legal AF. Hit the subscribe button as Legal AF gets to 5 million and we get to 500,000 in our first six months. Well, on our way to 1 million before our one year anniversary on Legal AF MTN. Take a minute. You can do it now. Hit the subscribe button. We're going to go over 500,000 in the next few days. Hopefully you are the 500,000 person on Legal AF. That's 1, 2. We got shows like this, my new podcast, Legal POPOC Live. We got Legal AF, the podcast Legal AF, the YouTube channel. Right? These are all ways. We got pro democracy sponsors. And then I've got, as people now know, a brand new law firm devoted to justice and obtaining justice for people at the highest levels at the most catastrophic moments in your life. I'm one guy. I've got. 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We got a brand new order just came out today. I already talked about the United states Supreme Court 1, but we got a new order by Judge Rudy Contreras. It's a companion case that I talked about a couple of days ago on Legal AF in which the. Pardon me. In which the head. There's two aspects. It's like, Janice, it's like twin faces of our Merit Service Protection Board. One of them is the Merit Service Protection Board and Civil Service Protection. And the other one is the Office of the Special Counsel. They go together like hand and glove, like a foot in a sock or shoe in a sock. And they were created in 1978 by Jimmy Carter and the Congress at the time to reform the civil service process. That's the way you're supposed to do it. Go through Congress, reform civil Service don't have Elon Musk fire everybody. And so in that process, they created these two offices, an independent board of three people called the Merit Service Protection Board, now headed by Kathy Harris, and a special counsel to sort of prosecute these issues, if you will, but not in a criminal sense, which is now headed by the office of Special Counsel head Hampton Dellinger, who I happen to know because his father was my constitutional law professor way back when at Duke, Duke Law School. Those two things go together. They're independent, they are bipartisanly created. They're supposed to be. They are not supposed to be to the subject of the whims of whoever's in the office and not partisan attacks. In fact, their jobs are to protect federal workers from partisan attacks and illegal firings. And they both got illegally fired back to back over 48 hours. Two different judges, Amy Berman Jackson, both in the District of Columbia, Amy Berman Jackson and Rudy Contreras both ruled almost identically. I mean, Rudy Contreras had the benefit of seeing amy Berman Jackson's 35 page order, but they both ruled that both of these positions have to be immediately reinstated. That Donald Trump without can't fire them because he doesn't like the whites of their eyes or doesn't like their partisan jib. He has to keep them in place unless they've done something wrong. Only for cause, the statute says, can they be fired. Now, Donald Trump's response to that is, I'm the executive branch, they're in the executive branch. I get to fire whoever I want. And if the statute says something differently, it violates Article 2 of the Constitution and the separation of powers. Let's take it up to the Supreme Court. And that's where we're going because both judges analyze the the prevailing precedent at the United States Supreme Court and both ruled identically that there's a Humphreys exeter case from 1935 and there's a 2020 case called Celia Law. And both of those cases, they believe stand for the proposition dispositive here that if it's a independent entity that's not exercising tremendous amount of executive power and was created in a bipartisan fashion, you can't can them without cause and they need to be reinstated. Now, these were done on summary judgment, meaning we don't even need a trial. Trial's over. Judge as the trier of fact granted summary judgment to both Hampton Dellinger and to Kathy Harris and has forced both judges have forced them to be rehired. In fact, Hampton Dellinger, in today's reporting, he's got a renewed lease on life as the office of the Special Counsel because he's now moved to block the firing of 5,000 probationary employees at USAID, the aid works organization that Donald Trump just tried a mothball. See, that is, I wrote to the internal people here at Midas. That is a profile of courage. When you just got like, the governor called and gave you a reprieve while you were in the electric chair. You pop out of the electric chair and you go on a spending spree. That's Hampton Dellinger. He's like, I got a job to do. He put on his Superman cape, popped out of the telephone booth and saved 5,000 jobs. I mean, for as long as he's in, I think he's got to do his job. I agree with that. For as long as you are, you are. Until you're not. And the Supreme Court's going to have to decide this. These cases will join together, consolidated. I am sure they will go up on appeal to the United States Supreme Court. Supreme Court's waiting for these cases. About the issue of whether. What are the limits of Article 2 presidential power in a unitary president model, what are they? The problem at the United States Supreme Court is we've got like four automatic pro president. I mean, the office of the president. But therefore, Trump votes Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas. Two of them. Kavanaugh, Gorsuch served in the executive branch. They're very pro president, any president, small p president. So you got four votes right there to, like, let him do it. If Congress said you can't fire, but for calls, that violates the Article 2 of the powers of the presidency, the question is, where do you get the fifth vote from? Is it Roberts? Now, some people will automatically say, well, Roberts, just last week, he denied the appeal related to Hampton Dellinger. So he's going to side with Hampton Dellinger, right? No, not necessarily. It was an administrative stay. Not on the merits. It was just to give the courts, the trial courts, more time to get to a point of a preliminary or permanent injunction, which is now where they're at, so that the Supreme Court has power. See, the Supreme Court courts have limited jurisdiction, and they really don't have jurisdiction except in extraordinary circumstances. When it is a temporary restraining order. The lowest level of restraint. Well, the lowest level of restraint is an administrative stay, then a temporary restraining order, then a preliminary injunction, then a permanent injunction. So in that food chain, you only get jurisdiction if you're an appellate court. When you get to preliminary or permanent injunction and Boom, we're there now. So I expect this is going to be litigated in the next two weeks and we'll continue to, I'll continue to look at it on Legal AF and on POPOC Live. So the question is, where does that fifth vote come from, Amy, Coney, Barrett or Roberts? Or do they stick to their guns, stay in the middle and side with the democratically appointed wing of the Supreme Court, which is Ketanji, Brown, Jackson, Sotomayor and Kagan, and start hemming and reigning and cabiting in and cabineting in Donald Trump? We'll have to see. I'll continue to follow it all right here on POPOC Live. Other things that are interesting, I talked about the SCOTUS allowing raw sewage to be in your drinking water for those that are tuning in late. We talked about the probationary workers and employees. And just the big picture, I never thought in my entire career and now spans almost 35 years. I know I don't look a day over 58, but I just turned 59. I never thought I would, I would be talking about 100 lawsuits almost in the first 44 days of an administration. Remember day 44 of the American Voter and Value Hostage Crisis. But we do, we have 100 lawsuits. We're averaging over two a day, which is what I thought. I thought it'd be three a day by now and five a week or six a week of preliminary junctions, temporary restraining orders. And now we're moving into the Supreme Court phase of Donald Trump. Quickly, quickly. I think we're going to have half a dozen if not more Supreme Court cases to talk about about the Trump presidency and its out of control power grab in the next, I would say 40 days, 60 days, somewhere in there. And where do you go for that? You go right here to the Midas Touch Network and Legal af. Have I mentioned that we need subscribers? Take a minute, help us out. I'll, it's sort of like remember the old, I think they still do it, pbs, Public Broadcasting System, they'd always have those. I used to like him as a kid. They don't have those, those fundraisers that would go on and they would have these, you know, people on these fake phones, you know, and you'd get a tote bag if you donated. And like, if you, if you want us to stop asking for money, donate now, you know. So if you want me to stop mentioning subscribers, go subscribe. All right. That's where we are on that. Let me turn in in the next, in the, in the next and last segment Let me turn to tariff wars and what it means for the economy. Putting on my Wall street hat. And then I want to end it on Ukraine and Zelinsky and what it means for the American value system that's been taken hostage by Donald Trump MAGA and, and J.D. vance and other people in his office in its administration. But we've reached that time again. We got to take a brief break for our sponsors. They are so important to keeping the lights on. Generally at this organization, we're people powered. We don't have outside investors. It's you, me, the subscribers, YouTube and our outside investors. That's really it. That's how this whole thing rolls and runs. And so let's take a break. They know what we're gonna say. They're in favor of it. They know what our audience is all about demographically and in terms of political leanings, and they're here for it. We're getting more sponsors now than we ever have before, you know, since November 5th. A testament, yes, to Jordy Marcellus, but also a testament to you and to the, of course, the rise of the Midas Touch Network and Legal af. You know, all rising tide lifts all boats. We're right up alongside our Big Brother podcast on Legal af. So let's go to our next break. Look, let me tell you, if there's a sure fire way to wake up feeling fresh after a night of drinking, it's with Pre alcohol zbiotics. Pre Alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. And here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's this byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for your rough next day. Pre alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make pre alcohol your first drink of the night. 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They have the best deals for your yard, up to half off on select plants and other deals and listeners to our show. Get get 15 off their first purchase when using the code legal AF at checkout. That's an additional 15 off at fast growingtrees.com using the code legal AF at checkout fast growing trees.com code legal AF. Now's the perfect time to plant. Use legal AF to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. Welcome back. We're in the home stretch of Popoc Live every Tuesday night at 8pm here, 8pm Eastern Time here on the Midas Touch Network. Tariff wars, it's not a war of our choosing. Donald Trump started the war for no reason. And now other countries like Canada, Mexico and China are going to end it. What I'm afraid of, it's going to end the American economy to go along with it. Why do you start a tariff war? I have no good reason. I'm a free trade person. I understand that the number one economic advantage that we have against the rest of the world world is that we can produce more goods and services once our economic engine is stoked than any other country. Why would we possibly give that economic advantage up and make our country insular and make our manufacturers and our plants and our factories and our service providers look only inward for consumption? Donald Trump said in a callous way, almost like Marie Antoinette, who, you know, farmers, get ready to be selling your products only in America. Good luck. Yeah, good luck. I mean, good luck and good riddance. Say goodbye to the, the farm belt, the corn belt, the soybean belt, the chicken belt. You know, we had a, we were manufacturing until just yesterday, we were manufacturing enough excess to supply the rest of the world. And now Donald Trump has decided, because he wants to kick China in the nuts about fentanyl and Canada in the nuts about fentanyl where they don't have a drug overdose problem on the Canadian border and go after Mexico to act like a tough guy. What's been the impact, it's an indirect tax on the American consumer. As Warren Buffett so eloquently put it, this is not a tariff war. This is an act of war and somebody's got to pay the tariff. There's no, there's no tariff. Ferry, it gets paid. Ferry. It gets paid by the American consumer in the way of an indirect tax. It could be the largest tax increase on the history of America. Twelve hundred dollars on every family. While Donald Trump talks tonight, I presume, about the need to cut corporate taxes. Sure. We have trillions and trillions of dollars of debt. The Chinese basically own our treasury market and our debt market. And now is the time to cut taxes, bring jobs home. Bring jobs home from where? Jobs are already here. We have one of the lowest, lowest unemployment rates in history. We have the highest job efficiency rate in American history. Where Are we bringing the jobs home from. Most jobs are remote today. You know, I don't know if Donald Trump fell asleep like Rip Van Winkle during COVID but, you know, it changed life as we know it. Sure. Financial services, banks and others want to have all their employees back five days a week. You know, five times. What is it called, you know, seven times five or whatever it is. But the rest of the world woke up and it changed. You know, like when the meteor hit the planet Earth and the dinosaurs disappear. See, I fell asleep a little bit during world history, but tariff war as Canada stands up, I never, I never thought I would see a day after Trudeau sort of lost the confidence of the Canadian people where I think the voters in Canada want their vote back. I think Trudeau could end up winning again if he ran. I don't want to see him leave the world stage. He's doing a great job punching a bully in the face. I mean, I have an internal and external smile every time I see Justin Trudeau take the podium. And I love when he says things like, I know I don't do a good Justin Trudeau. I know that Donald Trump claims to be some sort of smart businessman, but his tariff policies are just plain dumb. And when you hear us booing in Canada, we're not booing for you Americans. We're booing for the policies. We're booing for Trump. And we're not going to allow you to make us a second class country in our own country. We're not going to allow you to belittle us and insult our national pride. We're not going to let you turn us into the 51st state. It'll never happen. Instead, we are going to with a smile on our face. This is now Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario. We're going to cut your fuel supply. Click. The sound you hear is Michigan, Minnesota and New York going dark because that's where they got a lot of their, their imported electric and power supply and power grid from Canada. Let me try this again. Canada supplies an overwhelming amount of imported fuel, electric power grid that fuels our plants and factories. We need Canada to make our products. Get it. It's that simple, Trump. And by cutting it and fighting a war with them over a phony drug crisis at the Canadian border. Anybody that's been to the Canadian border knows there's no drug crisis there. And a phony border problem. There's no border problem in Canada. Has he been to the Canadian border? I have. I've driven over it, driven through it, and Flown over it and checked out through it. They don't. This is not a problem. Mexico, slightly different story, but that was before Claudia Scheinbaum got serious about it. And now let her run autonomous from an autonomous standpoint and an independent standpoint. In a sovereign standpoint, let her run her own country. Right. Who are we? We're in no moral position to tell other countries how to run their countries. So Canada now has said, you want to pick a fight with us, we'll pick a fight with you. Donald Trump fights back today and says, oh, Governor Trudeau, I mean, third grade trolling, low grade trolling, really, Governor Trudeau, if you do that to us, we'll double ours. Okay. I mean, all they're doing is chasing Canada, Mexico and China, putting them together in a block, a trading bloc I never thought I'd see before, and uniting the rest of the world economically against America. So the Europeans have to join together in secret meetings because they got to support Zelensky. I'll talk about in a minute. And they got to support them each other from an economic standpoint. The European Union was falling apart under democratic policies. We just reinvigorated it. We just brought them back together again. If I'm the UK I vote again on Brexit and rejoin the European Union to oppose Donald Trump. There's an idea. So how's the first 44 days going for you? As the American consumer says, I don't like tariff wars. I don't understand tariff wars. They're going to raise my prices. And Donald Trump's going to look us in the eye today and lie to us and tell us he knows what he's doing. He can no longer be trusted nor his administration with being stewards of our economy. Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary, said today, you can't look to the stock market as an indicator of the economy. Really? The guy next to you, the guy you know over there, potus Trump, he said time and time again, you always look to the stock market it. And look what he's done to it. It's in shambles. Let me turn now to the time we have remaining to Ukraine and Zelensky. I never thought I would. I start a lot of my segments with, I never thought I'd see the day, but I never thought I'd see the day where we would invite a trusted ally of democracy whose country was attacked by an imperial dictator, with millions of people dying, with many aspects of the country and infrastructure reduced to rubble, including during. During winter, with an adversary in Putin who has attacked Purposefully, civilian populations in hospitals and orphanages and schools. That I would see Donald Trump, American president and Vice President, side with Putin against our ally during a time of war I can't put any finer point on is the equivalent of FDR changing sides during World War II and siding with the Axis powers. They have cut. Got Zelensky's nuts out from under him, his legs out from under him. His bargaining position as strengthened both the military position of our adversary, our arch enemy, Russia, Putin, and the geopolitical position that he has to negotiate a deal. Now, what's left for Zelensky but to crawl back on bended knee. I'm not sure you can do that. To crawl back on his knees. Sorry. And beg for forgiveness for doing nothing wrong except the entire administration should resign over how they treated Zelensky. And I got some crazy weirdo memes that makes Zelensky look like a midget. And, you know, he insulted America. He didn't insult. He's. He is a president at war, an ally at war. Sure, we've given him $65 billion, but the rest of the world has given him the other $65 billion to fight against the Russians, to fight them to still when that country is four times larger. And we've been doing it for a reason, because democracy is important in that region, because we have to, we have to defend against the Iron Curtain or it's going to come down against countries like Poland. We have to reinvigorate NATO, not act like it's irrelevant. So that, and I have friends in Poland that are like, you know, like, biting their fingernails, white knuckling this. Are we next with, you know, with this president in control. So Zelensky had no choice after he met with the Europeans, after he met with the Democrats, after he met with, with, with people that told him that you're going to have to go groveling back to the, to the President of the United States. And now they're going to cut that mineral deal. Maybe announced tonight after my show. They're going to cut that mineral deal. That's going to talk about raping a victim. The country has been destroyed by Russia and the fighting. They've lost whole, and had amputated whole sections of their country, you know, that have been, that have been grabbed by the imperial power, grab by Putin. And now on top of it, he's got to sign a favorable rare earth and minerals deal with the United States instead of putting it up to the highest bidder to help them rebuild the country because he's prone because he's prostrate in front of. Prostrate in front of Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is kicking a person when they're down and taking advantage of it. And so when I hear the announcement, I just, they just bound and gag. Zelensky. You know, somebody, again, that if this was a Congress controlled by the Democrats tonight, and we saw Democrats, a Democratic speaker of the House and Hakeem Jeffries sitting behind the president instead of, of Mike Johnson, then we'd be cooking with an impeachment proceeding. I could think of a dozen impeachment articles right now that would be drawn up by the Democrats. And if we had the Senate convicted by the Senate, he'd be out of office after day 44. All right, double it. 88. He'd be convicted and removed in the first hundred days. It would, you know, Donald Trump likes being a lot of, you know, being responsible for a lot of firsts. First president to be twice impeached. First convicted felon to become a president again. First multiply indicted president. First president to ever be a judge, to be a sex offender, a sex abuser. First. First president to ever be a judge, to be a fraud in his business dealings. We got all that going for him. This would be another first, first to impeachment and conviction in the first hundred days. So I look at the joint session of Congress through these jaundiced eyes and I'm glad you're here. As a prelude, as a, this was a little bit of a pregame show for what to watch. Midas Touch will do some work afterwards. We'll do some interviews afterwards. I'll be back tomorrow doing some hot takes on Legal AF, the YouTube channel. Did I mention we need subscribers over there and on the Midas Touch network where I do all of my work. And don't forget, I've got a brand new law firm dedicated to justice. I was asked for years to handle cases in the catastrophic arena. Joined together with some amazing, amazing trial lawyers that have a brand called Big Auto. Don't be fooled by the name. They do more than that. But they are looking at catastrophic injury death cases. And I'm here to help and support the families. I'm representing, for instance, two, two families. One in a tractor trailer pedestrian fatality and the other representing the family of flight attendant who died in the tragic Blackhawk helicopter crash in the American Airlines jet over the Potomac. And so those are the types of cases that we'll be working on. Www.thepopochfirm.com 1877-popak af so until my Next POPOC Live Till my next legal af the podcast Wednesdays and Saturdays 8pm eas right here on the Midas Touch Network and all my hot takes on Michael Popak. I am reporting. I am honored and blessed to be here with you. We are people powered. Shout out to the Midas Mighty and the Legal A effers. I'm Michael Popock and I got some big news for our audience. Most of you know me as the co founder of Midas touches Legal AF and the Legal AF YouTube channel or as a 35 year national trial lawyer now building a what we started together on Legal af. I've launched a new law firm, the POPOC Firm, dedicated to obtaining justice through compassionate and zealous legal representation at the POPOC Firing event by securing the highest dollar recoveries. I've been tirelessly fighting for justice for the last 35 years, so my own law firm, organically building on my Legal AF work just feels right. And I've handpicked a team of top tier trial fighters and settlement Experts throughout all 50 states known as Big Auto Injury Attorneys who have the know how to beat heartless insurance companies, corporations, government entities and their attorneys. Big Auto's attorneys working with my firm are rock stars in their respective states and collectively responsible for billions of dollars in recoveries. So if you were a loved one, had been on the wrong side of a catastrophic auto motor vehicle rideshare or truck accident, suffered a personal injury, or been the victim of medical malpractice, employment, harassment or discrimination, or suffered a violation of your civil and constitutional rights, then contact the POPOC Firm today at 1-877- POPOCAF or by visiting my website at www.thepopocfirm.com and fill out a free case evaluation form. And if we determine that you have a case and you sign with us, we don't get paid unless you do the POPOC Firm fighting for your justice every step of the way. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. 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