The Charlie Kirk Show, February 20, 2026

Summary

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The Charlie Kirk Show – Real America’s Voice

February 20, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode of The Charlie Kirk Show focuses almost exclusively on the Supreme Court's landmark decision striking down President Trump's use of emergency powers (IEEPA) to impose tariffs. The show delivers rapid news analysis, expert commentary, and live reactions from hosts and guests as the political, economic, and legal implications unravel in real time. The episode moves beyond the headlines, examining both the technical details of the court's ruling and the wider impact on U.S. policy, presidential power, and the 2026 midterm political landscape.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Supreme Court Tariff Ruling: What Happened?

• Background: The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that President Trump's use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to unilaterally impose emergency tariffs is illegal.
• Majority Opinion: Authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the majority argues the IEEPA does not grant the president unlimited authority to levy tariffs without clear congressional authorization.
  • “These words...cannot bear such weight...the President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope.” — Paula Reid quoting Chief Justice Roberts [03:25]
• Dissent: Justices Kavanaugh, Thomas, and Alito argued the president should have broad authority under the law, noting several other statutes could have authorized Trump’s actions.
  • “The President’s claim of power was too large...even in the ruling they imply if these tariffs were lower, or for a more limited duration, probably would have held up stronger.” — Blake [07:29]
  • “Kavanaugh...is basically giving a roadmap here...” — Charlie Kirk on dissent’s suggestions for alternative statutes [10:25]
• Significance: First major rebuke of Trump by the conservative court, with sweeping implications for executive power and existing tariff revenues.

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2. Expert Breakdown with John Carney (Breitbart)

• Other Legal Tools: The administration has backup plans, as other statutes (e.g., Section 232 of Trade Expansion Act, Section 122 of Trade Act, Tariff Act of 1930) allow tariffs, albeit with more red tape and process.
  • “There are about six statutes that...allow the president to impose tariffs...the reason for IEEPA is fewer procedural hurdles.” — John Carney [08:55]
  • “You can’t use the magic word 'tariff'. We’ll find another way.” — John Carney [12:03]
• International Fallout: Other countries may re-raise tariffs they had lowered in response to Trump, potentially forcing Congress to grant new authority.
• Refund Chaos: As much as $170–200 billion in tariff revenue may have to be refunded; refund process will be complex and litigation-prone, likely favoring big importers who’ve filed claims.
  • “It could take years of litigation...it’s going to be a mess.” — John Carney [17:04]
  • “The United States may be required to refund billions...as acknowledged at oral argument, the refund process is likely to be a mess.” — Charlie Kirk reading Kavanaugh’s dissent [20:18]
• Winners/Losers: Large companies better positioned to reclaim tariffs; small firms likely to lose out.

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3. Political Implications with Mark Halperin

• Court as Unpredictable Actor: This ruling shows even Trump’s appointees (Gorsuch, Barrett) may side against him on major decisions, impacting confidence in the political future of other cases.
  • “This is the first time the court’s really weighed in substantively on the president's powers...justices are pretty political.” — Mark Halperin [26:46]
• Impact on 2026 Midterms: While bad for Trump in the short term, markets responded positively, and some see this as “breaking containment,” making it a kitchen-table issue.
  • "Normies just want more money in their wallet...The economy breaks containment." — Charlie Kirk [30:53]
  • “If [the economy] was positive and people felt the Trump economy was way better than the Biden economy...the president’d be getting a lot of credit.” — Mark Halperin [45:18]
• Populist Strategy: Discussion of polling shows issues like banning congressional stock trading, price transparency in healthcare, and Trump tax cuts are popular; immigration/border drops in salience once “fixed.”
  • “History would suggest that it's going to be difficult to not lose control of the House and maybe the Senate...but these are issues that break through.” — Mark Halperin [33:40–35:49]

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4. Trump’s Live Reaction: Press Conference

• Defiant Tone: Trump criticizes the court as "unpatriotic and disloyal," accuses certain justices of being swayed by "foreign interests," and vows to use “even stronger” authorities.
  • "It's my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think...these people are obnoxious, ignorant, and loud." — President Trump [65:29]
• Backup Plan: Cites alternative statutory authority (Section 232, Section 122), and immediately signs a new order for a 10% global tariff, vowing “there will no longer be doubt.”
  • "Today I will sign an order to impose a 10% global tariff under section 122 over and above our normal tariffs already being charged." — President Trump [72:00]
  • “Other alternatives will now be used...We have alternatives, great alternatives. Could be more money. We'll take in more money and we'll be a lot stronger for it.” — President Trump [72:00]
• Notable Exchange:
  • “Are you going to ask Congress to take additional action?” "I don’t have to." — [75:39]

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5. Audience Questions: Congressional Dysfunction

• Why Won’t Congress Act? Hosts blame Senate filibuster and congressional reluctance to wade into tough issues, describing Congress as a "zombie Congress."
  • “Essentially we have a Congress that is a zombie Congress because you can never get 60 senators to agree on anything.” — Charlie Kirk [64:31]
• Delegation of Power: Congress's historic tendency to delegate authority to the president is a recurring problem and has contributed to today’s confusion.

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6. Other Major Topics Briefly Touched

• UFO/Alien Files: Trump orders release of government files on UFOs/UAPs, following Obama’s comments. Discussion includes audience Q&A on belief in aliens, referencing past statements by Charlie and cultural phenomena.
  • “Based on the tremendous interest...I will be directing the secretary of war...to release government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, UAPs and UFOs.” — Trump (quoted by hosts) [60:13]
• Economic Data: GDP grew only 1.4% in the last quarter, less than expected; markets nevertheless up due to the anti-tariff ruling.
• Immigration: Continued discussion over recent ICE incidents and governmental responses.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope. In light of the breadth, history and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it.”
  — Paula Reid (quoting Chief Justice Roberts), [03:25]

• “This could be a mess. It could actually take years of litigation...the refund process is likely to be a mess.”
  — John Carney & Justice Kavanaugh (via Charlie Kirk), [17:04, 20:18]

• “This is the first time that the 6-3 conservative court has ruled against President Trump.”
  — Paula Reid, [00:24]

• “You can’t use the magic word 'tariff'. We’ll find another way.”
  — John Carney, [12:03]

• “Congress is essentially null and void. It’s a zombie Congress in a lot of ways. Not completely, but somewhat.”
  — Charlie Kirk, [64:31]

• “It's my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests...they're very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.”
  — President Trump, [65:29]

• “Other alternatives will now be used to replace the ones the court incorrectly rejected...Could be more money. We'll take in more money and we'll be a lot stronger for it.”
  — President Trump, [72:00]

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Important Timestamps

• 00:24: Breaking News – Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s emergency tariffs
• 03:25: Chief Justice Roberts’ reasoning; Immediate legal impact
• 08:55–12:03: John Carney on alternative options, legal workarounds
• 15:16–19:13: Tariff refunds and the chaos for businesses/importers
• 26:46–35:49: Mark Halperin on political fallout, populist strategies
• 65:29–72:00: President Trump’s live press conference; vows new tariffs
• 64:31: Discussion on why Congress is so dysfunctional

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Episode Flow & Tone

The tone is urgent, rapid-fire, and combative, with a mix of technical policy analysis and political reaction. Charlie Kirk and guests balance policy wonk detail (statutes, legal reasoning, economic impact) with culture-war style rhetoric (“zombie Congress,” “unpatriotic and disloyal” judges). The show frequently pivots between legal breakdowns, political analysis, live listener questions, and live news coverage—including Trump’s press conference—maintaining a dynamic, interactive energy throughout.

The episode is rich in both detail and opinion, offering listeners thorough insight into both the process and broader ramifications of a landmark Supreme Court ruling.

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Transcript

[Charlie Kirk]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

[Mark Halperin]

The Charlie Kirk show starts now.

[Paula Reid]

We have breaking news from the Supreme Court. It has reached a major decision. CNN chief legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid. The details. What's this case about, Paula? Is one of the most significant cases that the justices have decided in recent years here. The Supreme Court ruling that President Trump's use, these emergency tariffs that he has implemented are illegal. It's the most significant economic case to reach the high court in years. Sweeping implications for the economy and of course, for presidential power. And at stake here are billions of dollars in revenue that have already been collected by the government. Pamela Wolf, the other significance here, that this is the first time that the 6:3 conservative court has ruled against President Trump.

[Tim Burchett]

Hey, everybody. Tim Burchett. The Supreme Court apparently has taken up tariffs this week. And the president, when he put those on, it's really for two reasons. It protects American workers because politicians don't have the guts to do that. They've put these rules, environmental rules and everything else at the urging of foreign influence, I think, and made our products unavailable to Americans cause the cost of them and we just go out of business. You got the timber industry, you've got people lobbying, oh, don't cut the forest. Don't cut the forest. And what happens? Can't manage them. They burn down. And then guess what, those nice people in Canada can just dump all their lumber on us just right across the dadgum border. And you see that with coal. So that Chinese at coal reserves here in this country back during the Clinton administration and after meeting with Chinese officials, they turned some of our coal areas into national reserves and protection under the get that door squeak fixed. And so guess what, we gotta get our coal from over there. I do all the energy and then we're out of business. And actually under in this country before we had a federal income tax, the irs, guess what? We made all our money through tariffs. We didn't have an income tax. Could you imagine if you didn't pay tax? Income tax? You probably still have your state and local, but they'd find a way to suck it up, too. But anyway, pray for our Supreme Court that they make the right ruling. I think we're going down the right path. That's why you're seeing a lot of the labor folks siding with Trump. Now those Americans are back to work. We can make the products here. We just have to do it fairly. And it's not fair what's happening overseas.

[Paula Reid]

We've got a very fractured opinion. But initially what it says, we know it's authored the primary opinion by the Chief justice and says essentially that this ipa, this law that grants the President emergency powers, did not, it looks like by this first blush reading by justice, the Chief justice here does not give him the power to levy these tariffs that he's levied. Part of this initial opinion says the words regulate an importation. The President says that gives him the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, any product, any rate, any time. These words it says cannot bear such weight. We know we've got a dissent by Justice Kavanaugh, by Thomas and Alito, it looks like, and those were the three we thought during the arguments, if anyone would be persuaded to allow the President to move forward with these tariffs, they would be the ones to do it. So at first blush, like I said, there are multiple parts and concurrences to this opinion. But it looks like what the primary holding is going to be is that these tariffs cannot be used in the way that the President had tried to use them. Let me get you to the closing paragraph that we have in this initial opinion here. It says the President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration and scope. In light of the breadth, history and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it.

[Mark Halperin]

The administration has other tools in its toolbox. It can actually impose tariffs under other statutes.

[Charlie Kirk]

So this night is, is hardly over.

[Mark Halperin]

Every day there's a battle for your mind raging information coming from every angle

[Charlie Kirk]

but the will to deceive.

[Mark Halperin]

Fear not.

[Charlie Kirk]

You found the place for truth, the voice of a generation that still has

[Mark Halperin]

the will to believe in the greatest country in the history of the world.

[Charlie Kirk]

This is the Charlie Kirk Show. Buckle up. Here we go. All right. Welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show. It is February 20, 2026, here at the Bitcoin.com studio, your one stop shop to buy, sell and trade bitcoin. Check them out bitcoin.com and today's lead is sometimes you have to come up with a lead and sometimes the lead

[Blake]

finds, sometimes it is thrust upon you with great anticipation.

[Charlie Kirk]

And that is, of course, the tariff decision that has come down from the Supreme Court. Now, we spent the morning poring over this. We've got Jonathan Carney from Breitbart, who's kind of the resident tariff expert. He's going to be joining us any moment now, so I'm told. But this was a blockbuster decision that we had been waiting for. Now just to set the terms, this was any tariff that had been established by President Trump under what's called the ieepa, which is essentially an emergency power that the President has been given by the Congress. And he. But it's never really been used to do tariffs. Now, its predecessor, what was it called?

[Blake]

It was like the Trading with the Enemy.

[Charlie Kirk]

Trading with the Enemy act was used one time in a limited fashion, 10% tariffs by President Nixon. So it's not completely without precedent, but that law had been replaced by the ieepa, and it had never been used by president in the way that President Trump was using. They have struck down President Trump's ability to do it, but there's so many wrinkles.

[Blake]

So this is. We should just. Just to set the stage here, this is mainly the. This is the Liberation Day tariffs that were announced with great fanfare and some

[Charlie Kirk]

of the reciprocal tariffs. Yeah. About.

[Blake]

About 10 months ago, as well as other terror. The reciprocal tariffs. He did also a lot of what he was doing where, you know, you'd see the President goes on truth social and reacts to something and says there will be a 100% tariff on Canada or China until this has changed. A lot of those really aggressive tariffs that he would announce on short notice that's coming through this bill, the iepa, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

[Mark Halperin]

Yes.

[Blake]

And what the Supreme Court ruled today, and it is a 6 to 3 ruling. So that involved, of the justices who'd be considered more on the right, that we lost Roberts, we lost Gorsuch, we lost Amy Coney Barrett. So that's two of President Trump's three picks, in fact. And they said in essence that basically the President's claim of power was too large, that the bill is not intended by Congress to allow the President to declare any emergency and thereby impose any tariff. So they imply, even in the ruling that if it had been. If it had been more concrete, if he'd said these tariffs are maybe lower or for a more limited duration temporary, probably would have held up stronger. They seem to take issue with what they say is the President claiming almost total unlimited authority, you might say, over the ability to regulate international trade.

[Charlie Kirk]

And I think we have John Carney. Yes, we do. We have him. John, welcome to the show. I know you got a busy morning. You're in hot demand this morning with the tariff ruling. We've kind of set the stage here. While we're waiting for you, the question then becomes what happens next? I've seen rumors that President Trump has a backup plan. Okay. So he can't do tariffs under iepa. We could disagree with that. We could agree with that. What happens next?

[John Carney]

So there are a number of plans. There's actually about six statutes that just on the face of themselves, allow the President to impose tariffs. The reason why they wanted to do it under ipa, though, is there's a lot more procedural hurdles to these ones. So a lot of them, you have to do multi month studies, usually by the Commerce Department. Sometimes they have time limits. They can only be imposed for a little bit. So it'll be more complex. I've proposed something I call iasis, which is a licensing regime that would actually link the ability of other countries to export to the US to a license fee that would totally be allowed under ipa. So this is another thing that they can do under IPA that the administration hasn't yet fully considered. A big question to me is, what do the other countries do? Remember, a lot of them have lowered their own trade barriers, lowered their own tariffs in response to our threatening to raise tariffs. So the question is, do they go back on this? If they do, I think that actually will provide a reason for Congress to actually give this authority to the US President. That's the cleanest way to resolve all this. Congress needs to enact presidential tariff authority tomorrow, frankly.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, I think that's interesting. So you're saying you could enact a license fee, which would essentially accomplish the exact same goal here. It would just be under a different name. And that's kind of one of the pushbacks that Kavanaugh, who wrote the dissent here, which is really fascinating, he basically says, although I firmly disagree with the court's holdings because he was the dissenter, the decision might not substantially constrain a President's ability to order tariffs going forward. That is because numerous other federal statutes authorize the President to impose tariffs and might justify most, if not all, of the tariffs at issue in this case. And then he goes on to list, which was I found interesting because he's basically giving a roadmap here. Those statutes include, for example, the Trade Expansion act of 1962, Section 232, the Trade act of 1974, Sections 122 and 201, and the Tariff act of 1930, Section 338. In essence, the court today concludes that the President checked the wrong statutory box by relying on IPA rather than another statute to impose these tariffs. Okay, I guess if we're going to go by the letter of the law, not by the spirit of it, this is probably in some ways you could consider the correct decision. But it's also bizarre and sort of Insane, John. Because there's other reasons to believe that he could ban all imports. The court is concluding he could just go to China. He could do that. Yeah, we're gonna ban all imports from China, but we can't tariff you a penny.

[Blake]

In fact, he seems to have more authority to do that. It seems if he was just saying, I am banning entire industries from coming into America, he could, right?

[John Carney]

Yes, absolutely. That's a big problem. Kavanaugh actually points this out that there's. That the majority decision basically says Trump is allowed to ban whatever he wants, but he can't oppose a $1 tariff. That really doesn't make sense. I don't think it's correct as a matter of law. I think that the Kavanaugh Alito Thomas had the right view of the law in this, but it is the law now. You know, this is what the Supreme Court says. So the administration will look to all of these other powers and believe me, they already were. Everybody heard the way that oral arguments went. So this decision hasn't come to a. As a surprise to anyone. In fact, a lot of people. I mean, I would say the consensus was that the tariffs, at least all of the tariffs weren't going to survive. If there's any surprise. It's just how this is pretty, you know, just says the President can't do this at all. There's a pretty blanket slap down of the tariffs. But like I said, even under ipa, they could ban things, they could put license fees on things. So you can't use the magic word tariff. You know, we'll find another way to protect American industry.

[Charlie Kirk]

John, I'm not sure if I can keep you for another segment or not, but I'm good to stay on for. Okay, more because. Because there's. There's more questions here about revenue. What happens with the nearly $300 billion in tariff revenue? I. It seems to me like, you know, this is a. This is a giant mess in that sense. And so. So I want to keep you on to just hang right there. Thank you for staying with us a little bit longer here. I want to tell you guys about Strong Cell. Wait, do I have it? We got them. We got them. Aha. They just keep. We have a whole.

[Blake]

We have a whole crate here. I like to imagine just endlessly replenishes like a video game box.

[Charlie Kirk]

So Strong Cell, take it for four to six weeks. That's what I'm telling you guys. Please trust me on this. Four to six weeks. You're going to get an initial kick because it has nadh, which is what powers all your cells. But four to six weeks, that's.

[Blake]

This is our first week of just drinking them on the show. So if we continue this. I've been taking watch this space a month from now.

[Charlie Kirk]

Watch, watch, watch what I can do in four to six.

[Blake]

Watch my hair may grow back a month from now.

[Charlie Kirk]

Studio's laughing at you.

[Mark Halperin]

But

[Charlie Kirk]

if you are trying to take this product for male pattern baldness, please don't. That's not what it's about. But if you have brain fog, fatigue, chronic illness, this will literally help you. You just have to take this stuff through an iv. You don't have to do that anymore. They found a way to get nadh right to your cells. Go to strongcell.com use promo code Charlie for 20% off and it's risk free for 90 days. You get your money back if you don't feel anything. StrongCell.com, we'. All right, welcome back. We've got John Carney from Breitbart, major authority in hot demand. I called him early, though, and I got him as soon as this came down. I said, john, I need you. And you're like, I think I can make that work. All right, so what happens? The revenue?

[John Carney]

I. I will say, you know, you. I'm very happy that you reached out right away because you did get me. You were first right after my own. My own boss, Alex Marlowe at Breitbart.

[Charlie Kirk]

Well, listen, he's gotta wait. He's gotta wait. We have business to attend to. So tell us about the revenue. Where's it going?

[John Carney]

So that remains to be seen. So we won't get any more revenue from the IPA tariffs? That's done. Those are coming off the books immediately. What happens to the, say, call it somewhere between 150 and 200 billion dollars that have been collected under these tariffs. So that's only, by the way, part of the revenue we've collected under tariffs.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, I was going to say say that number again, John, because it's about 300 billion all in. How much was under IPA?

[John Carney]

Probably between 170 and 200. Call it 170 as a good estimate. So some of that may have to be refunded, but we don't know that yet. The Supreme Court's decision is actually totally silent on what happens next. Kavanaugh is pretty critical of that. He's like, this could be a mess. It could actually take years of litigation because you'll have to prove that you paid the tariff that you paid the tariff, that was a naive tariff and not a different tariff. And there will be other considerations. It's not clear, you know, that the money is going to go away right away. And so that money won't come out of the US Treasury, I'd say, for quite a while if I were a business entitled to the tariffs. What you did is you basically made sure you had records showing exactly which tariffs you paid so that you could then come to the court later and say, please refund these. But it is gonna be a mess.

[Charlie Kirk]

So we've got that. What number is that, guys? I want that. That's the. The refund quote from Kavanaugh. Yeah, get me that. Get me that. Well, this is. So, by the way, there's. I believe this is. Wharton School has done this. Yeah, Wharton UPENN has done that. This graph is an estimate of IPA revenue, and it has it at about 164.7 billion. A monthly revenue of $20.8 billion. And they have it cumulative through January. So it's about. It maybe is about a month delayed. So you're probably right. About 171, 75 on the.

[John Carney]

I want to say I just did that off the top of my head. So the fact that the Wharton School came in almost at the same number, I feel pretty good about that.

[Charlie Kirk]

That's pretty good, John. So you think this is going to be litigated. And apparently Wharton School School is saying that importers generally have 180 days after goods are liquidated to protest and request refunds from U.S. customs and Border Protection. So this is a mess. Right.

[John Carney]

So the process is. People paid the tariffs. They had to have submitted a. Basically a piece of paper saying, I don't think I should have paid that tariff. One unfortunate thing about that is, look, the really big importers, big companies, Wal Mart, the international companies that import stuff into the US They've already filed that paperwork. It's really actually going to be the small guys who really get kind of messed around with here because they probably didn't file the paperwork and. Or some of them didn't. Luckily, look, you get 180 days. So some of the tariffs that have been paid will still be eligible for refunds. But we. Again, we don't know what the refund process will look like. As far as I know, we've never had anything this big where, you know, $150 billion, $170 billion is potentially being refunded to the people who, you know, who paid the tariffs in the first place.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, it's. It's it. I think Kavanaugh refers to it as a mess. Just.

[Blake]

He does. He does.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah.

[Blake]

And he even flags. You know, there's issues. A lot of importers probably already pass costs on to consumers at some point here, but now, you know, they can double dip from that. What does it do to all of our trade dealers with other countries that were premised on these tariffs? Do those stick around? He really just. The truth is, it seems we don't know what is going to be unleashed by this.

[Charlie Kirk]

This is.

[John Carney]

I will say that if other countries start to start to say, no, no, now we're taking back, we're going to raise our tariffs again, we're going to raise our trade barriers, that will at least be a moral victory for Donald Trump because he'll be able to say, they did this because I imposed the tariffs. Now they're taking it away because the Supreme Court took away the tariffs. And that should be persuasive to Congress to actually absolutely come back because remember, the court here did not say the president could not do this under the Constitution. They said that the statute didn't authorize it. So Congress could, with one word, insert tariffs into ipa, just one word, amendment, and Trump would have the power to do it.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah. It's literally because in some of the oral arguments, as you mentioned, they just said, well, it doesn't say tariffs. So that's the whole point. Even though, like, in the spirit of the law, it certainly indicates that he would be. Now, so just to read exactly what Kavanaugh said, I got the quote here. In the meantime, however, the interim effects of this court's decision could be substantial. The United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others. So, you know, their whole argument was that Americans absorb these taxes. That is probably not 100% true. It's probably about an 80, 20 import to American consumers, 20%. But if let's assume that they were right about that, then Americans are basically going to get double tax because of this, this court decision, which is hilarious. Yeah. She goes, as acknowledged at oral argument, the refund process is likely to be a mess. Last word to you, John.

[John Carney]

And it will. A lot of this money is actually going to leave the US Altogether because a huge amount of imports are actually done through foreign companies and their US Affiliates. So it's actually going to be payments going to foreigners as well, which is really unfortunate. It'll be a drag on the economy. And like, like, like Justice Cavanaugh said, it's going to be a mess going forward, but I imagine that we'll get very soon. Trump announcing the new tariffs because they've been working on this. They have contingency.

[Charlie Kirk]

Exactly. Trump has a backup plan, everybody. He has a backup plan. I would also say that we have just gotten word that he has a 12:45 Eastern press conference that we're gonna be looking for on this tariff decision. So 1245, stay right here. We'll have it on Real America's Voice. John, I know you gotta go. You've got, you got Marlo probably screaming at you already. So tell him hi for us. Thank you for making it here. We know you got a busy morning. Jonathan Carney Breitbart, Economics Editor. There you go. All right. So we got an email.

[Blake]

Kathy asked is the possibility of refunding tariffs to the importers. A lot of them have passed costs on to consumers. Do the consumers get a refund also?

[Charlie Kirk]

The answer is no, no, no. We know it's consumers. The man gets screwed. This is, here's the thing. Kavanaugh went through trial by fire. The whole, what was her name? Betsy?

[Blake]

What was Christine Blasey Ford.

[Charlie Kirk]

Christine Blaz, two front doors. She, the whole thing. You know that where he went through a trial by fire, the guys got steel down his spine. Now. Everybody doubted him at first. Meanwhile, Gorsuch and acb, two other Trump appointees going against the president. Listen, you could make the argument that perhaps this was textually the right decision by the letter of the law. But it's, there's a, there's a measure of insanity to it because you could just ban all the imports. You can't tear it from a single penny. So anyways, we'll be right back. Mark Halperin joins us.

[Terrence Bates]

Terrence Bates here with your Real America's Voice news break. We appreciate you being here with us. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessen in Dallas today to discuss the economy and by extension, tariffs. Now, the latter part of that, the tariffs, it's a bit of a sore subject this morning after the Supreme Court's ruling today striking down President Trump's tariff policies. Ralph's Grant Stinchfield joining me from the economic club of Dallas, where the secretary is going to be speaking. Grant, good afternoon. I suspect the secretary will get lots of questions about the tariffs.

[Grant Stinchfield]

Yeah, you know, in many respects, this was supposed to be a victory, too. We're talking about the Trump accounts. And now he will certainly face questions about what do we do with all this tariff money. Now you're going to hear the mainstream media predict this doom and gloom scenario. Now, by no means is this good news for President Trump that that is not the case at all. But this administration is so creative, they will have a plan for this. There's talk that if they end up having to give refunds back, and I'm not sure that's even going to be the case here, it could take over a year for that to happen. But I think you're going to see this administration get very, very creative. I think you're going to hear Scott Bessen today talk about that and some of the options that President Trump has to keep these tariffs in place because let's face it, this was leverage against not only our allies, but our enemies as well. And so I think you'll see some of the tariffs will be able to stay. Some of the tariffs will be, will be thrown out now because of the Supreme Court unless they can rework the situation as to how they issue these tariffs and under what prospect they issue the tariffs. Terrence. So I wouldn't get all crazed that this is going to be awful yet, but certainly a disappointment from those three conservatives, supposedly conservative Supreme Court Justices Gorsuch, Amy Coney, Coney Barrett and John Roberts. What are they thinking? Man, they really made a mess of things here for the American people.

[Charlie Kirk]

Right.

[Terrence Bates]

And the economic news isn't all bad. I'm just reading an article now where the US gross domestic product grew 1.4% during the last quarter of last year. It was a little bit slower than expected. Still good news. Grant, always good to see you, my friend. We'll be checking in with you throughout the day as the secretary draws closer. That's a quick check of your headlines.

[Charlie Kirk]

The great Reset stops here.

[Mark Halperin]

The Charlie Kirkman Show.

[Blake]

All right.

[Charlie Kirk]

Welcome back to the Charlie Kirk show. Joining us now is Mark Halperin, a great, great political analyst and commentator and a friend of the show. Mark, welcome back to the show. Lots to discuss this morning. Lots to discuss with the, you know, the Supreme Court's ruling on President Trump's use of tariffs. I have all this other stuff I was planning on talking to you about and then this came across the wire. Give us the political implications. I know there's questions about can he still do tariffs, can he use other mechanisms? What do we do with the revenue that came in? What happens with that? Does it go to a lower court, et cetera, et cetera. Politically, what does it mean?

[Mark Halperin]

Well, first of all, let me just stipulate I miss you guys haven't heard. Haven't heard from you in a while. Good to hear from you.

[Charlie Kirk]

Well, listen, I'll call you every week, Mark. I'll call you. We'll have you on. We'll just make a standing invite.

[Mark Halperin]

Good, I'd like that. So my first thought just trying to be in the mind of the President is he's going to be super annoyed at the chief Justice. But he didn't pick the chief justice. He inherited him. But two of the three justices the president put on the court voted against him, Gorsuch and Coney Barrett. So my suspicion is the president probably will vent that on truth Social. But the larger issue, more than, as you pointed out, all the mechanical things involving terrorists, which are super important, is this is the first time the court's really weighed in substantively on the president's powers. They've done some procedural things, but they've ruled against him. And there's a ton of pending cases in other areas, not about tariffs, where if the same justices or even a 5, 4 vote against him decide they're not afraid to vote against Donald Trump. Right. Everybody likes to pretend these are legal decisions. They're political almost always it's really disheartening because they should be legal. But justices are pretty political, not just the current ones, not just the ones picked by Republicans or the ones picked by Democrats. So if I were the president's political team, I'd be worried that there in the future when some of these other cases come up, that they may be on the short end of five to four or six to three decisions that will really be impactful for what the president can do.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, I agree with that. And it also one of the thoughts I had this morning was, you know, we hear about Democrats wanting to pack the courts wanting to call it a lawless court. And here you go, them doing exactly the opposite of what the president was lobbying for. Will that inspire any trust? I don't think so. They'll still pack the court. Go ahead, Blake.

[Blake]

Well, I, I just real quickly, I concern the other way that we know the president was very invested in this tariff case. I don't know that it would be an exaggeration to say it was his top personal brand, his top priority. He's really fulminated on truth and in other venues about the importance of this case. Should there be any concern among people that the president might up rhetoric on. Actually, I don't need to listen to the Supreme Court on this sort of thing. Would do you think there's any hazard

[Mark Halperin]

of that, I mean, I know that's talked about a lot, particularly on the left and amongst others. I just don't think so. I just don't see any indication. There have been a few things like some of the immigration orders, like the planes that were in the air on the way to Venezuela, where people have sort of tried to suggest that that was lawless and violation of a court order. It's a close. That's close call, but I don't think so. I'll tell you, though, the other political thing, that's where this decision is in the President's interest. And I don't mean like to give short shrift to your question, but I hope I sufficiently answered it. But before the Supreme Court decision, there were three big pieces of economic news that were going to, I think, really do harm to the markets. And four, if you count what was happening in the last day with oil markets because of worries about Iran. First was yesterday this firm, Blue Owl Capital, made some decision about investors and money that really were spooking people and getting people to talk about. Is this the first sign like we saw in 2007 leading into the economic crash of 2008. Then this morning we had two horrible economic numbers for the country and for the president politically. A lower than expected GDP number by a lot, a higher than expected inflation number. I will never know what the stock market would have done today had that, had we not had the Supreme Court decision on terrorists. But as I look down now, the Dow's up, and the Dow is likely to end really far up because although this is bad news politically for the President, the markets love this decision. And so if you talk about the implications politically for the president, if he, if, if he hadn't had this decision, he'd be going into the State of the Union with a lot of negative negativity about the economy. Now, a lot of people, at least in the markets, are going to be positive about the economy into the weekend and into next week because they don't want the tariffs. And a lot of Republican politicians are going to be happy, too, because they don't want the tariffs.

[Charlie Kirk]

Well, and that's a good point, Mark, because we always have to kind of, I think in our mind, we have to bifurcate between normie and politically plugged in. Right? Politically plugged in. They're really into the DC of it all. They're into the tug of war, the political jockeying. The normies just want more money in their wall, in their wallet. They just want to. They just want to make sure. That they got a job. They just want to make sure they can go to their soccer practice for their kids. That's the, those are the storylines. And I've sort of learned to think about it as what breaks containment. Right. The economy breaks containment. This is what I knew about the halftime show that we did. It broke containment because, you know, I'm getting hit up.

[Mark Halperin]

You guys, you guys did a halftime show.

[Charlie Kirk]

We did a halftime show. It's this whole thing, Mark. I'll tell you about it.

[Mark Halperin]

I heard a bit of. I heard a bit about it. Some guy wore shorts.

[Charlie Kirk]

Sorry, they're called jorts, just to be clear. Jean shorts. It's a whole thing. Anyways, when you, you can see these things when they break containment. Now the economy is just one of those things because it's a lived experience that breaks containment. It has this, I think downstream effect, knock on effect politically. And yeah, there could be unintended consequences that are positive for the President. I think we need to keep that in mind. It's also important while we don't know what's going to happen to the tariff revenue that's already been collected, which is in the hundreds of billions of dollars that's going to be kicked down to a lower, lower court and we're going to find out what happens that hold other.

[Blake]

He'll take another year.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But one of the things that I wanted to get to you was this incredible tweet that you had earlier. We covered it on the show, but I'm so glad you get to put added layers to this. You were talking about pollster and strategist Tony Fabrizio. Charlie Love. Tony. He comes in with 25 slides. A bunch of the cabinet. Are there about 75, 100 people. You even mentioned that. What they ate.

[Blake]

I love that. That felt like a very Mark detail to me there had their, their chicken. It was great Buffet.

[Charlie Kirk]

So he's going into what men moderate and true independence are the true persuadable voters. And you said housing affordability. You also talked about these key. And I saw the through line here, Mark. These are populist sort of. You get, you get a scalp issue. Right. You said messages that break through. Banning stock trading for Congress, transparency on health insurance data, including the pricing and claims reimbursement, lowering prescription drug costs and the Trump tax cuts. These are all issues where you get to go, we got the bad guy. And that is very populist and it's a conservative tinge populist where it's. We're not anti business. We're anti fat cat. We're ant oligarchy, we're anti corruption. Right. And so I thought that this was a very interesting through line that is a way for you to sort of bridge this conservative populist divide. Your take.

[Mark Halperin]

Well, I like the way you framed it. I think it's just right. History, as I said at this meeting, and again, this was the President's sort of political high command briefing the chiefs, chiefs of staff, the cabinet members, their chiefs of staff, their other senior aides. They have history against them. History would suggest that, that it's going to be difficult to not lose control of the House and maybe the Senate and the President's poll numbers currently are horrible. And so this is a group of political advisors who are battle tested. They're not, they're not a bunch of chickens with their heads cuts off. And they're coming in there to make the best case to this team about what to talk about where they can have a comeback. There's some tactical things. They could raise more money than the Democrats. They can try to make mischief in Democratic primaries to nominate people who are less electable. They can do opposition research on some of these Democratic candidates. But in the end, they're swimming against two big tides, history and the President's approval rating. At the same time. There's a long time to go and they're going to look to see, to see what they can do again, particularly raising money. The one thing they said at the meeting that I think has not gotten as much attention as I thought it would is they said in the meeting these are the right issues to talk about. The ones you listed about health insurance and about the Trump tax cuts, et cetera. They said that's what the data shows. That's what you all should talk about when you're out campaigning, when you're on media, when you're on programs like this. They said there's going to be a whole other campaign that's run by our best athlete, Donald John Trump. He'll talk about whatever he wants.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yes.

[Mark Halperin]

Don't think there's one campaign where the President's leading. There's one campaign he does and then there's the parallel campaign that the kids, all the folks in the room say we need to do. And president's going to talk about the 2020 election. He's going to talk about Joe Biden. He's going to talk about, you know, Liberace's hair. He's going to talk about where he likes to eat when he's in Dayton, Ohio. They said you just can't worry about that. Don't, don't. That's not the role model. The way the president does it, he'll do his thing. But they're hoping that these issues, which test very well, very popular with voters, as you said, they're populist, they play well with maga, but they play well with the center voter too. They're hoping that that's the message that they can drive through their advertising and through the surrogate activity during the fall.

[Blake]

Do you think, Mark, that we might actually see action on some of those items? One of those ones that stood out, banning stock trading for Congress? I've been hearing about proposals along those lines. Since the big crash in 08, people have been talking about members of Congress getting rich off that sort of thing. I guess the problem is the people getting rich off of this are the members of Congress. But is there a serious proposal to

[Mark Halperin]

take action, vote against their self interest? There is. And as you suggest, Blake's been around forever. Maybe it'll pass this year. One of the big questions that's going to come out of the State of the Union on Tuesday is are Democrats willing to vote for stuff that they believe in that they think be good for their constituents, but it will give the President a political win. Things like on housing, there's a big housing bill in the House and the Senate. Both pass separate bills are different but, but there's some overlap. Are Democrats going to vote on final passage so Donald Trump can have a signing ceremony and say he did something to make housing more affordable? Would they vote for the stock ban and the president sign it where he gets the front of the parade and gets credit? We're going to have to see. And on the stock trade thing, we'll have to see if Republicans want to vote for it because plenty of Republicans have opposed that as well.

[Charlie Kirk]

Well, yeah. So you're asking the fundamental Patriot question. Do Democrats love America more than they hate Donald Trump?

[Mark Halperin]

Yeah, it's a huge question and that's a huge question. And to some Republican House members like their vacation homes more than they like doing what the voters want regarding transparency.

[Charlie Kirk]

On listen, we are equal opportunity offenders when it comes to corrupt Republicans, RINO Republicans. And listen, this is central to Charlie's legacy. He wanted a Republican Party that was as conservative as its voters, that loved its country as much as its voters. And so these are questions that we're going to see come to the fore and we're going to be pounding that drum. And I love the way you framed it. Here's the other thing you said the border, closing the border doesn't rate that well. It's. And I remember this from Trump 1.0. Once we kind of got the border a little bit under control and all the craziness was done, it stopped even coming up in headlines. You know, it's like we had this huge fight over the wall and then it kind of fell off the map. It's a weird issue with that.

[Mark Halperin]

Yeah, you guys are too young to remember Janet Jackson, but she had a song called what have you done for me lately? And that's what the research shows. It's just, yeah, glad you closed the border, but that's done. So now what are we doing next? And so you'll hear people talk about it. It won't be absent from the rhetoric. The president certainly. But it's not a silver bullet. It's not something that they think should be at the centerpiece of making the argument for the midterm elections.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah. Well done. We're gonna keep you for one more quick segment, Mark, Hang right there. We'll be right back. More with Mark Halper in two way tv, editor in chief of that. And also next up on the Megan Kelly network. Check out Mark and all of his amazing political reporting on both of those places. Follow him on X. We're going to be right back. Don't go anywhere. All right, Mark, just real quick here, there's a EJ and Tony tweet who you might remember. EJ and Tony was up for a spot in the admin here. He said growth came in at just 1.4%, but here's why. Government purchases tanked almost 5.1%, pulling the headline number down almost a full percentage point. This is good news and another sign the economy is being re privatized. Is this COPE spin or do you see any truth in that?

[Mark Halperin]

There's some truth to that. There's also some truth to the president's spin from earlier today, even before the numbers came out, which he's really not supposed to do that the government shutdown, which he blames on the Democrats, also ate into the gdp. But again, I've talked to a lot of economic experts since the numbers came out and you know, they're not great. It's arguably the worst single day of economic data since Trump returned to office. And you can always look at the data. People at CNBC were remarkably un upset by it. But you can always look at the data and poke holes in it. But overall, no, the number was expected to Be higher even with those caveats.

[Charlie Kirk]

Got it. All right, now, two questions. We're going to get into ICE fallout. The Minneapolis fallout and the de escalation by Tom Homan. What, what are the ramifications ongoing? Is it something voters are going to forget? Secondly, Iran. So you can take the potential kinetic activities in Iran first or second. And the ICE Minneapolis de escalation question, first or second?

[Mark Halperin]

I think the main implication of ICE is that I think Trish McLaughlin will probably replace Blake on the show. Would be my guest. Hey, don't you think.

[Charlie Kirk]

Wow. Don't you think that's a really, you know, just Blake, I, you know, back to it.

[Mark Halperin]

Blake wants to go back to a quiet life of anonymity.

[Charlie Kirk]

YouTube will like Trisha much better. I, I just mark, I, I, I

[Blake]

reached out to you to start bringing you on the show and you carry the knife in my back.

[Mark Halperin]

I'm, no, no, I'm trying to bring you back to your, your quiet life that you used to love so much. All of a sudden it's like you get, get on camera and all of a sudden it's like, Trish McLaughlin out of my way.

[Charlie Kirk]

We've unleashed a monster in Blake. Nev. This is true. Well, yeah, Trisha's, Trish is leaving the dhs.

[Mark Halperin]

Trisha's on the, on those on the market.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah.

[Mark Halperin]

So that's one.

[Charlie Kirk]

I texted Trish. She said that that plan had been in place before and that she, she actually stayed on longer than she was anticipating just to make sure that the Minneapolis thing was handled. Well.

[Mark Halperin]

Yeah, that joke inside, we just wish Trisha the best. She's a great person. I think that the, the main impact of it is the Democrats are fired up. I don't know how the government normally I can make up a scenario to end a government shutdown, partial or full. I don't know how this one ends because the Democrats are so fired up in Washington and around the country. And again, one of the criticisms you guys have heard me make many times of the left is Trump derangement syndrome and just anger about President Trump. They don't understand the other side. They don't. Listen, folks come on two ways. Sometimes they do, but in general, they're not, they're not sensitive to it. So I always say to folks in maga, you get so frustrated that the left doesn't understand why you support Donald Trump. You all need to understand they're really upset about those two people being killed. Really upset. And they're upset about in a different way than President Trump says He's upset about it. They're upset about it because they think it's a manifestation of a lawless policy that's still largely in place, even though, even with the withdrawal from Minnesota. So they're going to raise money off of it. They already are. They're going to have their base fired up for the midterms. They're going to be on the right side of some immigration issues. Most of the things that Republicans are criticizing in the proposal put forward by Senator Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are popular. They're not unpopular. Democrats have gone from being the party on the wrong side of immigration related issues to being party mostly not entirely on the right side of immigration related issues. So that's a big political fallout and I don't know where it's going to go. And I think to a large extent, whatever impact it has on the midterms, the story will be told to a degree by how this partial government shutdown has.

[Charlie Kirk]

So there's. You talk about how we don't understand each other. I understand why they would see those images and get fired up about them. There just seems to be zero acknowledgment of how we got here that, you know, 10 to 15 million illegals stormed the border and we just basically said to hell with our immigration laws for four years. Zero understanding about that, huh? And zero understanding that sanctuary cities refused to cooperate. Although I would say Tom Homan has, has made some, some progress there in Minneapolis and Minnesota, broadly. But. Okay, I digress. Go there.

[Mark Halperin]

There's no, there's also a little appreciation for the fact that they want people whose families are docs, who are docs themselves, who are under threat while they're trying to do their jobs and not protected by local law enforcement, to just go up there and walk around and let people try to run them over or shoot at them or, or harass them while they're having dinner. So no doubt that. But, but again, this is the sort of trap that both sides, red and blue, fall into. You're pointing out things that are true, but you're pointing those out instead of saying, I guess maybe I don't have the full appreciation for why they're so upset about those two people being killed. Because if I did, maybe I'd, I'd say, well, let me read Senator Schumer's proposals and see if any of those things would keep anybody else from being killed. So again, just part of my job is to try to explain red to blue and blue to red. They're really upset in a profound way that transcends their failure to close the border or appreciate that the border was open and that's what led to this.

[Blake]

It does strike me, it does feel like politically, as your tweet showed, there's this big difficulty in the president and the Republicans harvesting wins off of some of their biggest successes. As you said, the border shuts down, no one cares right away. We seem to have net outflow of illegal immigrants and it's like people forget about it. And I'm thinking about. Also apparently we're at some of the lowest. We might have the lowest murder rate since the 1950s. That's a very big shift from Cassie.

[Charlie Kirk]

1900.

[Blake]

Yeah. Massive drops in all of the. In like in major crimes in big cities. And it coincided with that push from the president. And he doesn't seem to be reaping much political benefit from that either.

[Mark Halperin]

Well, I think if you look at sort of below the radar of the numbers of the president, mostly it's the economy. I think if the economy was positive and people felt the Trump economy was way better than the Biden economy, which they don't think, some polls show they think the Biden economy was better, then I think the president be getting a lot of credit, about 80%, the 20%. You know, he's lost immigration because largely of Minnesota. And, and I'm not convinced people aren't seeing. Well, people are.

[Charlie Kirk]

I'm not convinced he's lost the issue wholesale.

[Mark Halperin]

Not forever. Not forever. No, not forever. But. But the numbers are clear. His, his standing on. Do you approve or disapprove of the president's immigration policy? The numbers slip dramatically. Dramatically. So that's just a reality of where he is. He's not being, he's not being able to offset the low numbers on the economy with high numbers on inflation, on immigration.

[President Donald Trump]

All right.

[Charlie Kirk]

All right, Iran, 60 seconds. Yeah, yeah, we got.

[Mark Halperin]

You know, people should be thinking about this not as a binary attack or don't attack. It's attack big, attack little or don't attack. And he could attack tomorrow. He could. My sense right now is he'll wait 10 days or so to give the Iranians a chance, maybe one more chance to prove they're serious about negotiating. But if they don't come back within a week or so with a pretty serious, not a, not a stallball, but a serious proposal to deal at least with their nuclear capability. I don't know yet about missiles. But if they don't come back with a serious proposal, I do think there'll be a substantial attack and I think no ground troops, no nation building, but there'll be a substantial attack to try to degrade not just their nuclear and missile capability, but to undermine the regime.

[Charlie Kirk]

I think. Yeah, I would anticipate ahead of the Snake operation, similar to Venezuela, if they're going to do it. Mark Halperin, two Way TV thank you, sir. Excellent announcement.

[Mark Halperin]

Great to see you gentlemen. Thank you.

[Charlie Kirk]

We will see you next time.

[Mark Halperin]

Forward to being back. Okay.

[Charlie Kirk]

We'll be right back.

[Terrence Bates]

Welcome to this Real America's VOICE news break. I'm Terrence Bates. We're going to be taking to the White House in short order where President Trump is scheduled to speak here any minute. Here's a live look at the podium as the reporters are already in place and awaiting the president arrival. It's been a busy morning at the White House for the president. He had a breakfast earlier this morning with a number of governors who were in town for the governor's conference. That meeting apparently not attended by many Democrat governors. However, the president did go ahead with the luncheon and talk about a number of issues. Another issue that the president will likely address the moment he takes the podium is the fact that the U.S. supreme Court just ruled against him tariff policy. That, of course, is a huge deal for the president if tariffs are, in his own words, one of his favorite words. And it's a policy that he's used to deal with a number of hotspots around the world. So the moment the president arrives, we'll of course take you there live and allow you to hear his remarks. In the meantime, the commander in peace, as I like to call him, may be inching a bit closer to war with Iran as a second American aircraft carrier is moving into place for a potential attack on Iran. It appears the president still trying his hand at diplomacy, however,

[President Donald Trump]

and now is the time for Iran to join us on a path that will complete what we're doing. And if they join us, that'll be great. If they don't join us, that'll be great, too. But it'll be a very different path. They cannot continue to threaten the stability of the entire region. And, and they must make a deal or if that doesn't happen, I maybe can understand. If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. But bad things will happen if it doesn't.

[Terrence Bates]

Iran's ambassador to the United nations says his country isn't seeking, quote, tension or war and will not initiate a war. However, any US Aggression will be responded to, quote, decisively and proportionately. Again that's coming from Iranian officials. Recent talks between the two sides have netted little movement, meaning the two sides could be preparing for an escalation. President Trump is ordering the Pentagon and other agencies to release files on UFOs and Alien and extraterrestrial life. The Pentagon has been tracking reports of unidentified aerial phenomenon, or what's often referred to as UAPs, for decades now. President Trump's announcement comes just days after former President Barack Obama told a podcaster that aliens are real. Obama later walked back his statement, saying that he never saw evidence of contact between humans and extraterrestrial life, especially not during his time as president. President Trump, however, now accusing his predecessor of releasing classified information.

[President Donald Trump]

Well, he gave classified information. He's not supposed to be doing that.

[Charlie Kirk]

So aliens are real?

[President Donald Trump]

Well, I don't know if they're real or not. I can tell you he gave classified information. He's not supposed to be doing that. He made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information. No, I don't. I don't have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.

[Terrence Bates]

47 goes on to say that he may go on to get President Obama out of trouble by declassifying any documents on aliens. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is expected to sign a new legislation renaming, Excuse me, Palm Beach International Airport after President Trump. The proposal passed the Florida legislature on Thursday. Details on how much it's going to cost are still being worked out. The price tag is reportedly going to be upwards of five and a half million dollars for a rebranding campaign. State Republicans argue the name change is fitting as it's going to honor the first president who resides in Florida. That would be Donald J. Trump. The new name of the airport is going to be President Donald J. Trump International Airport. The airport code could change from PBI to djt. The Trump family has reportedly filed trademarks for djt, as well as Donald J. Trump International Airport and President Donald J. Trump International, meaning the Trump family could benefit financially from the name change. All right, let's take you back to Washington, D.C. now, where we're expecting President Trump to arrive in the White House press briefing room at any moment. Now, that is going to happen, and we, of course, will take you there. The president, of course, will likely address the U.S. supreme Court's position on his tariff policy. A ruling just came out basically striking down the president's tariff policy. That is going to be a huge story throughout the day, and we'll be following it for you here on Real America's Voice.

[Charlie Kirk]

All right, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show. Hour two is underway. It's Friday and hour two means it's an ask us anything hour. If you want to put. Want to be a part of this, you can join at members.charlie kirk.commembers.charlie kirk.Com and yes, we are at the Bitcoin.com studios here in Phoenix, Arizona, your one stop shop for buying, selling, trading, researching bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. So check it out today, Bitcoin.com are. They are the sponsor of our studio. We love them. So. All right, members.charlie kirk.com. let's get underway. Our first question, I think we have a written. Oh, we're doing a written.

[Blake]

One written question from Brandon. Who asked. Did Charlie. Oh, we have them. Oh, never mind. Okay, Brandon, unmute yourself and what's your question?

[Charlie Kirk]

Hey, guys.

[Blake]

So with aliens in the news, I figured I'd ask if Charlie believed in aliens and if you guys believe in aliens.

[Charlie Kirk]

Hmm.

[Blake]

All right.

[Charlie Kirk]

So the problem is I'm searching our old data.

[Blake]

That's impossible because illegal aliens.

[Charlie Kirk]

Aliens only gives. Exactly. Maybe if I search UFOs.

[Blake]

We're working on getting a video where said we'll be revealing. So we'll filibuster a bit here. Danny does tell us he was around Charlie a lot. He believes Charlie thought they were possibly demonic elements. Obviously Charlie was a Christian. He believes in supernatural forces. So you could have angels, you could have demons, and they might be measurable in the, in this world in some way. I, Charlie definitely was open to UFOs. There was, I remember a clip that went viral. Remember when he was flying on that plane?

[Charlie Kirk]

Yes.

[Blake]

And they saw kind of the. That foo fighter.

[President Donald Trump]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

Is that the clip again?

[Blake]

Excellent.

[Charlie Kirk]

I remember. So Charlie was convinced that there was anomalies that you couldn't explain and that one of the options could be aliens. But he was also very much like, like, you know, this could be foreign actors. It could be our own military. I don't think he made up his mind yet. Charlie and I spoke a lot about C.S. lewis and what C.S. lewis said about aliens and that it wouldn't change our Christian faith or wouldn't challenge our Christian faith at all. And we were grateful to CS Lewis for putting that forward. I personally happen to believe that there are probably aliens.

[Blake]

My guess is it's going to be painful to say, but it's probably like Obama's where there's, there's so much universe out there. It feels like it would it would genuinely defy probability to say there is no life of any kind in any of the literally hundreds of billions of galaxies that are out there with trillions, quadrillions, quintillions of stars and planets around them, but we haven't seen any of it out there. And our knowledge of physics is such that will. Will probably. We'll probably never be able to run into them.

[Charlie Kirk]

So there is some, like. Really? Okay, so listen, I. I like Joe Rogan, and I've listened to a bunch of his episodes when it comes to where he has experts on about extraterrestrial life and Roswell, and I do find a lot of it really compelling. I think different people. What's happened is the whole research behind Aliens has been fairly siphoned off. It's been blocked from sharing their expertise, sharing their research, and that's for a variety of reasons. So I don't think we make a ton of progress on it. But the Roswell site, the 1947 crash site, they are very compelling. Blake's sitting here shaking his head tonight, and I'll tell you why. Because there's actual people exist today that have held in their hands these compound structures. I'm not super articulate, but they cannot figure out how you would machine something that was found in 1947. So I find that very compelling. You couldn't even machine it without breaking the machine. You couldn't, let alone stack 18 layers like they found on some of these substances that they found. So I actually think there's some compelling evidence out there.

[Blake]

I'll react to that, but I want to make sure we get Charlie's point. So first, Charlie had this tweet. I was flying back from Wisconsin on a friend's plane and got called up to the cockpit. The pilots were very confused at what they were seeing. Something was above them and was not showing on radar. I'm sure there is a logical explanation here, but watch this video and tell me what I am missing. This video got 7 million views, and this is an excerpt from it. Let's play 652.

[Mark Halperin]

Is this the most profound you've ever seen it?

[Charlie Kirk]

Yes. It's just like over and over and

[Mark Halperin]

over again and no logical explanation. The only logical explanation would be a satellite, but I don't know the satellites because the circle in the same place.

[Charlie Kirk]

Did they come again?

[Blake]

You almost see three of them.

[Charlie Kirk]

They're lower on the horizon now.

[Paula Reid]

Like, they're in formation now.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, exactly. There. Like one coming up behind.

[Tim Burchett]

Yeah, there's two of them right there.

[Mark Halperin]

And they're way ahead of us. Could they be surveillance?

[Charlie Kirk]

I mean, yeah, my conspiracy.

[Mark Halperin]

And there's nothing on your radar?

[Tim Burchett]

200 miles.

[Mark Halperin]

But how many miles do you think that's away from us?

[Charlie Kirk]

Like a whole trip. So that's why I'm like, it must be extremely high.

[Mark Halperin]

So since Wisconsin, you've seen it?

[Grant Stinchfield]

No.

[John Carney]

Wow.

[Mark Halperin]

Do you think the US government knows about it?

[Charlie Kirk]

I mean, I have no idea.

[Mark Halperin]

But what kind of thing wouldn't be caught on radar? How high does your radar go?

[Grant Stinchfield]

I mean, 50, 60,000.

[Charlie Kirk]

Wow.

[Tim Burchett]

All right, thanks, guys.

[Blake]

That was fun. I remember the discussion with words.

[Charlie Kirk]

It did, it did.

[Blake]

And I was, as always, I'm skeptic. I am the black. I'm just like, Charlie, it's. It's probably not aliens. And so I wanted to answer that on the, you know, where people are saying, oh, they found materials. The interesting phenomenon when you get, when you really dig into this is Harry Reid was a top Democrat, a top guy in the government for a long time from Nevada. And he was actually a bit of a UFO enthusiast, as was, I believe Hillary's campaign manager, Podesta. I believe he also. I'm going off memory here, definitely Reid, though. And he was into this stuff. And so he kind of threw bits into bills like, oh, yeah, let's have the Pentagon investigate this. And so the reason you're getting more military stuff that we're. Oh, we're getting these guys who come out and they say there's evidence of aliens. We found this stuff we can't explain. I actually consider it, it's a marker of the way America's gone downhill because we've. We just kind of let loopy UFO believer guys into the government and they started spamming and weird stuff. You weren't getting this at peak America in the 1960s when we were putting a man on the moon, we didn't have Werner von Braun coming out going, oh, I have seen the aliens.

[Charlie Kirk]

There was an interesting thing I saw on X where it was back in the 1950s and the CIA was doing some surveillance operations. And this was actually uncovered where the CIA said, well, let's just go plant some UFO stories to cover up for the surveillance activities that we were doing. So we know that that happens as well, but.

[Blake]

Or on the other hand.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah.

[Blake]

And also the military today might be. You use fake alien stuff to figure out who is stable enough to be trusted with information. So you just give them the fake aliens and if they immediately start leaking or going nuts, you this.

[Charlie Kirk]

I'm sure this is what inspired it was Obama's alien comment. But then Trump said, well, Obama was talking about classified information. Information. That's a big no, no. But maybe I'll just let him off the hook and release some stuff. Then he comes out with this truth. Social says based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the secretary of war and other relevant departments and agencies to begin the process of identifying, releasing government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomenon, UAPs and unidentified flying object UFOs. I'm not exactly sure what the difference is. And any and other information connected to these highly complex but extremely interesting and important matters. God bless America.

[Blake]

I like this old tweet. If these guys existed, we better not find out cuz we'll definitely start sending them money.

[Charlie Kirk]

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[President Donald Trump]

All right.

[Charlie Kirk]

We are keeping our eyes on that Trump tariff press conference. We're going to be watching it for you guys. As soon as it goes live, we'll take it. We'll throw to it. Private student loan debt in the United states totals about $300 billion. And 45 billion of that is labeled as distressed or defaulted to. It's far too much. So many people are living in terrible financial straits simply because they took on too much debt for a degree that didn't matter. To study things that couldn't get them a job. Absolutely awful situation. A lot of young people find themselves in that position. If that is you or if you know somebody that is struggling under the burden of private student loan debt, please contact the good [e-mail] or give them a call. 888-yrefi34 or yrefi.com that's letter Y followed by refi.com these are great, great people. Really, truly salt of the earth people that started this company to help young students get out from under the burden of private student loan debt. You will save thousands. They'll guarantee interest rates that are affordable under 6%. And they're going to custom tailor a solution that matches your ability to pay. That's the key. And the credit doesn't matter. They don't care if you have bad credit. They'll even let you skip a payment every six months up to 12 times. Nobody else is going to let you do that again. Call them 888-Y-REFI34. 888-Y-REFI 34. Or log on to why refi.com may not be available in all 50 states, but if it's available in your state, you need to check them out. All right, let's get to our next question. Who we got up? Blake.

[Blake]

Oh, do we have Anthony next? All right, Anthony's back.

[Charlie Kirk]

Anthony, welcome back to the show. What's up, guys? Thank you. I think this makes it four weeks in a row. We just take you, man. Some, some people ask good questions.

[Blake]

So some people take.

[Charlie Kirk]

Appreciate that.

[Blake]

Great questions. But this is a shout out, guys. Come to anyone out there who's listening to this.

[Charlie Kirk]

Members, Charlie, Kirk, show up.

[Blake]

You can ask us whatever you want.

[Charlie Kirk]

Go for it, Anthony.

[John Carney]

Now, I won't ask you whatever you

[Charlie Kirk]

want want, Blake, but I do have a question. So regarding this tariff stuff that's happened today,

[Mark Halperin]

Andrew, I got it.

[Charlie Kirk]

Why does it look like Congress refused,

[John Carney]

refuses to work with Trump?

[Charlie Kirk]

It seems like even the Republicans, and I don't mean all of them, but there's a good chunk of them that

[John Carney]

refuse to work with him. Like, are we, like, serious?

[Charlie Kirk]

Don't they want the country to do well or they just want their own pockets to do well? So I. So Blake actually has a really good point on this. It relates to our conversations around the filibuster. So essentially we have a Congress that is a zombie Congress because you can never get anybody, 60 senators to agree on anything. So it doesn't matter if it passes the House with a simple majority, it gets the Senate and dies. So the point is we are relying on bills that were passed decades ago that have never been updated, that are not current with our current situations, that haven't been updated because of AI or any of these kind of licensing issues that are Current, currently, we're struggling with. So Congress is essentially null and void. It's a zombie Congress in a lot of ways. Not completely, but somewhat. Anthony. Actually, we're just seeing that President Trump has taken the podium. Hang right there. We're gonna take President Trump. This is obviously a big breaking news story, so we're gonna take it here. President Trump addressing tariffs.

[President Donald Trump]

Frankly, disgrace to our nation. Those justices, they're an automatic no. No matter how good a case you have, it's a no. You can't knock their loyalty. It's one thing you can do with some of our people. Others think they're being politically correct, which has happened before, far too often with certain members of this court. And it's happened so often with this court. What a shame having to do with voting in particular, when in fact, they're just being fools and lapdogs for the Rhinos and the radical left Democrats. And not that this should have anything at all to do with it. They're very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution. It's my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think. It's a small movement. I won by millions of votes. We won in a landslide. With all the cheating that went on, there was a lot of it. We still wanted a landslide too big to rig. But these people are obnoxious, ignorant, and loud. They're very loud. And I think certain justices are afraid of that. They don't want to do the right thing. They're afraid of it. This was an important case to me, more as a symbol of economic national security, and also, I would say, just for our country itself. So important because we're doing so well as a country, we've never done so well. The good news is that there are methods, practices, statutes, and authorities, as recognized by the entire court in this terrible decision and also as recognized by Congress, which they refer to, that are even stronger than the IPA tariffs available to me as President of the United States. And in actuality, I was very modest in my ask of other countries and businesses because I wanted to do. And very important, I wanted to be very well behaved because I wanted to do anything. I didn't want to do anything that would affect the decision of the court because I understand the court. I understand how they are very easily swayed. I want to be a good boy. I have very effectively utilized tariffs over the past year to make America great again. Our stock market has just recently broken 50,000 on the Dow and simultaneously, and even More amazingly, broken 70, broken 7,000 on the S&P2 numbers that everybody thought upon our landslide election victory could not be attained. Think of that. Nobody thought it was possible to do it within four years, and we did it in one year. They said, you'll never be able. You'll go back and you read the geniuses, read their statements. All of the Nobel Prize winners in economics, they said, no, you couldn't do it in four years. Well, we didn't do it in four years. We did it in one year. We broke every record in the book, and we're continuing to do so. Tariffs have likewise been used to end five of the eight wars that I settled. I settled eight wars, whether you like it or not, including India, Pakistan. Big ones. Nuclear. Could have been nuclear. Prime Minister of Pakistan said yesterday at the great meeting that we had the peace board. He said yesterday that President Trump could have saved 35 million lives by getting us to stop fighting. They were getting ready to do some bad things, but they've given us great national security. These tariffs have, and together with our strong borders, reduced fentanyl coming into our country by 30% when I use them as a penalty against countries illegally sending this poison into our country to poison our youth. All of those tariffs remain. They all remain. I don't know if you know that or not. They all remain. We're still getting them, and we will. After the decision. I guess there's nobody left to appeal to. But again, those three people, such respect. I've had a lot of respect for them anyway, but. Such great respect. But other alternatives will now be used to replace the ones that the court incorrectly rejected. We have alternatives, great alternatives. Could be more money. We'll take in more money and we'll be a lot stronger for it. We're taking in hundreds of billions of dollars. We'll continue to do so. To show you how ridiculous the opinion is, however, the court said that I'm not allowed to charge even $1.

[Charlie Kirk]

Talk meets action. All right, President Trump is continuing in his press conference reacting to the tariff ruling from the Supreme Court. And I think saying a lot of what we said. Yeah, it's basically regurgitating our hour one, which is good for us. Let me just quickly tell you about all family pharmacy, then we'll get back to it. A lot of Americans, your healthcare is reactive, means you get sick first, then you order what you need, you go to the doctor. Sometimes there's delays, sometimes you can't get it right away. This is where all family pharmacy is different. It's not a typical pharmacy. It's family owned patriots own. This place works with licensed doctor and is built around the simple idea that you should have the power to determine your own health outcomes that you should be able to prepare ahead of time. With all family pharmacy you can order prescription medications before you are sick, keep them at home and have them ready when you need them most. So that's antibiotics, antivirals, Tamiflu, Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, mebendazole. There I got it. Methylene blue and even your daily maintenance medications. This isn't about. This is about access, preparation and personal responsibility. We love these guys. Choose freedom. Choose the right pharmacy and you can go to allfamilypharmacy.com Kirk use Coke code Kirk10 to save 10% on your next order here. I want to hear a few more minutes of this and then we'll finish up with Anthony's question.

[President Donald Trump]

To protect our country from those countries and businesses that were ripping us off. You took a look at the deficits that we had with some of these countries. It was disgraceful what they got away with for many, many decades. But now we know because this decision affirms all those things that some people weren't sure about. In order to protect, and it says so in order to protect our country, a president can actually charge more tariffs than I was charging in the past period of a year under the various tariff authorities. So we can use other of the statutes, other of the tariff authorities which have also been confirmed and are fully allowed. Therefore, effective immediately, all national security tariffs under section 232 and existing section 301 tariffs, they're existing, they're there, remain in place, fully in place and in full force and effect. Today I will sign an order to impose a 10% global tariff under section 122 over and above our normal tariffs already being charged. And we're also initiating several Section 301 and other investigations to protect our country from unfair trading practices of other countries and companies. Thank you for your attention to this matter. And I say quite simply, which I've said for a long time, make America great again. And interestingly, we've already made it great. So I don't have to use that. But I don't think we'll ever give up on maga. MAGA is always going to be with us. If you have a few questions, you can let us know. But just to end so we're going forward, we will be able to take in More money. And there will no longer be doubt because there was always doubt. I know the people that brought the lawsuit and, you know, they're sleazebags, major sleazebags, but I know them and they're foreign country centric. They were sending things into our country, and the people representing them knew full well, but they were sending things into our country and they were beneficial to other countries, but very, very bad for us. And I stopped it and we'll just keep it going. So we have more of a. We have a totally firm decision now. And I don't think the court meant it because the court doesn't show great spirit toward our country, in my opinion. A lot of bad decisions, but there are usually ways around it. This is something we could have done. As Justice Kavanaugh said, we could have done this originally, but we're doing it now. And the numbers could be far greater than the hundreds of billions we've already taken in yet. Yeah, please.

[Charlie Kirk]

Thank you very much, Mr. President.

[Blake]

I'm very curious.

[Paula Reid]

Thank you so much, Mr. President. Justice Thomas and Alito, as you know, are the most conservative constitutional justices. Do you think that you'll get to appoint two more justices later this term with similar ideologies? And what type of vetting process will they go through to ensure the uphold?

[President Donald Trump]

I don't know. But they're great justices. That's all I could say. And I hope they're going to be around a long time. I hope they're going to stay healthy. They're great people. They're great. And Justice Alito, too, to add to the group. These are great. These are great men with a great love of our country and a great understanding of the law.

[Paula Reid]

Are you going to ask Congress to take additional action on tariffs now?

[Charlie Kirk]

All right, so a defiant President Trump saying that we're going to raise even more money and he could. He's got all these other tools and he's going to. I mean, that's kind of what I. He said.

[Blake]

The court said, I have stronger authorities than the tariffs I've been doing. And so he looks like he'll take that path, but we'll obviously keep seeing that. I'm sure there will be a lot of developments on that the rest of the day over the weekend.

[Charlie Kirk]

By the way, just right before we came back, he was asked about, is he gonna go to Congress, Blake? And he said, I don't have to. So that was just before.

[Blake]

And that closes out. We want to close out Anthony's question before we cut to that, which was he Asked why are Republicans not working with him? As you said, I think Congress has gotten so used to being a sort of zombie Congress. The filibuster's been there so long, they're used to not really having to consider that their positions might become laws.

[Charlie Kirk]

Well, it's interesting because the Constitution does give the right to tax to the Congress, but then Congress can pass laws which delegates certain authorities and powers to the executive branch, which it's done in 1930s, 1960s, 1970s.

[Blake]

Congress loves to give powers to the president rather than exercise them themselves. And it's one of the biggest problems with Congress. They, they fear power. They fear using the power given to them by the founders.

[Charlie Kirk]

It's also just harder. It's like herding cats in Congress. I mean, we had. You saw some of our conversation. If you watched Thought Crime last night, which, by the way, was an amazing episode, we'll have it on the podcast on Saturday. You know, you've got guys like Thomas Massie or Don Bacon that are gonna be nos for whatever reason, and they'll say it's on principle. Maybe they got a beef with the president. Whatever. We could debate that another time. It's just harder, especially when you have slim majorities and then you've got this filibuster proof 60 vote threshold in the Senate. And so President Trump and any executive for that matter, is reliant upon statutes that have been passed by previous Congresses. So. All right, next question. We got John.

[Blake]

This is John. John, thanks for waiting around and being patient. Unmute yourself. What do you have to ask?

[Mark Halperin]

Good morning, Andrew and Blake.

[Charlie Kirk]

Good morning, John.

[Mark Halperin]

Blessings. Yeah, blessings from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

[Charlie Kirk]

Thank you. Blessings to you too, brother. What's up? Yes.

[Mark Halperin]

So this week is the fifth year passing of Rush Limbaugh. And I was reading a Rush Limbaugh letter this week, and I came across this article, and basically it gets into the topic of smart versus educated. And I thought, especially in light of Charlie and college as a scam, I'd like to get your take on what is smart and in your opinion, what is educated.

[Charlie Kirk]

Blake, you want to start with, man,

[Blake]

there's so many ways you could go with that, because you could almost say, do you view educated positively or negatively? Because we have so much credentialism in the US you can get a PhD in this country without being as literate as one should be going to school.

[Charlie Kirk]

There's online PhD, there's.

[Blake]

They've had these crises. I think it was at UC San Diego, where their remedial math course of high school level Math was too difficult, so they had to introduce middle school level math for college students. And many of the students in Those classes had 4.0s in their high school coursework. There's a girl I believe in Rhode island who is suing, or maybe no, Connecticut. It was in Connecticut. She's suing her old high school because they graduated her with honors and she cannot read. She made it through high school entirely using text to speech.

[Charlie Kirk]

She sued her on her phone, her educators. So failing her.

[Blake]

You can go that direction. You can say education. Its degree collection has become increasingly meaningless. But there's also true education, as Charlie would say. Bringing forth, I believe, is leading forth. Leading forth. And true education is when you don't prioritize credentials. You don't prioritize jumping through hoops. You prioritize the cultivation of the mind. And that doesn't come from shelling out money for a degree. It doesn't come from grinding out a test. It comes from actually identifying what it is useful for a mind to know and cultivating that ability. And that more than any time in the past century, I would say, is reliant on your self direction far more than whatever you could learn in a school.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, and I would, I would use different words, actually, as opposed to smart and educated. I know what Rush was getting at, but I would say wise versus smart and educated because there's a lot of people with a lot of raw horsepower intelligence that are dumber than Doornell because they don't know what the truth is. And so you talk about education, you

[Blake]

could imagine three things you might imagine. Smart, educated, and wise. And there are three different ways to go.

[Charlie Kirk]

Wisdom is, is a much different word. It echoes something deeper and more profound if you have the truth. So in order to know and to lead forth, what we're talking about, the base root words of what education, how we derive that word. To lead forth, you have to know where you're going. Otherwise it's the blind leading the blind. So where are we going? You have to know the truth. Capital T, truth. You have to understand the good, the true and the beautiful, the eternal things, the things that are worth knowing. And then you can cultivate critical thinking skills that help you get to that truth. Right. And so this is why Charlie loved Hillsdale College, because it's a learning institution, a higher learning institution. That is a classical education that leads forth to somewhere good, that leads forth to critical thinking, deeper knowledge, deeper, more profound wisdoms. And so, you know, this is why I also love Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. It's why we studied the classics. So I would say wise wisdom is in far too little supply. A lot of smart people that are very, very dumb and that make poor decisions. And there's a lot of very credentialed people that make poor decisions. They become educated beyond their intelligence or beyond their wisdom. So that's how I would break it down.

[Mark Halperin]

So I would say a couple things too. First, as a believer, I think if we read in proverbs, it really contrasts wisdom versus knowledge. So reading proverbs, I think is very helpful to answer this question. The second thing, just to read a little bit from this article and just one sentence, really. In this sentence, Rush is talking about the educated class and basically says they are committed believers, but they are not thinkers yet. They consider themselves the smartest people in the room. And I think we all, we all

[Charlie Kirk]

know some of those people.

[President Donald Trump]

That.

[Charlie Kirk]

That's beautiful. That's beautiful from Rush because what he's talking about is the disconnect between the elites and the credentialed class and the wisdom of the people. We the people. And rash as this show is always gonna put our faith in the wisdom, the collective wisdom of the real Americans that make this country great. And there's more virtue in a lot in a plumber than there is in a Harvard educated PhD student oftentimes. All right, I'm gonna tell you guys about Strong Cell. Thank you, thank you. God bless you. Strong Cell. We took it hour one. You gotta try it for four to six weeks. You're gonna really notice it in four to six weeks. So if you have brain fog, fatigue, lack of energy, constant illness, then you have to try Strong Cell, their proprietary delivery of an enzyme, an amazing enzyme called NADH is all the rage with all the supplement guys and the biohackers. Charlie loved it. Nadh is very fragile, though, and they created a way to get it through just a two ounce vial. It's very delicious, very easy to take. Now you can try it completely risk free, 90 day money back guarantee. And if you use Charlie at checkout promo code Charlie at checkout, you'll get 20% off. So go to strongcell.com use Charlie at checkout for 20% off. We'll be right back. All right, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show. Next up, we are Ask us anything. President Trump has continued with his press conference. We'll let you know if he says anything new. But I believe we have. Ann. Welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show. Please unmute yourself. Hi. How you doing, guys doing? Doing great. Good. I Had a couple of questions. One of them was about whether you could give us any update on the redistricting efforts and where that leaves us in the midterms in terms of like which states are doing it and where is it likely to happen. And then the other thing I wondered about was I know you've had, I think it's Mike Lee on talking about the talking filibuster. And I wondered if we had any info on how likely it is for Thune to do that because he doesn't seem inclined to do it. And if he did do it, what would that really do to help us with the SAVE Act? And then also, can you give us an idea if there are any moderate enough senators other than, I guess, what's his name from Pennsylvania? Fetterman.

[Blake]

Fetterman, yes.

[Charlie Kirk]

Right, right. Yeah. Who might actually be pushed by the public if they were interested in this 8020 issue. You know, could contacting any of them or Thune make a difference? So that's what I was wondering about today. Thanks. So the update, your first question was an update on the redistricting fight. Well, we've got a couple updates there. We had. Remind me of his name, the gentleman in Virginia.

[Blake]

Oh, he has Senator Glenn Sturtevant.

[Charlie Kirk]

Sturtevant, Virginia. Yeah.

[Blake]

So he discussed their plan in Virginia to make it a 101 Democrat state that they've been trying to ram through. That's gotten really interesting just in the past 24 hours because a not the Supreme Court, but an intermediate court ruling basically said this referendum does seem to be illegal and they should not continue early voting efforts on it. And so you're actually getting individual counties in Virginia. They're kind of creating a state level constitutional crisis because they're saying they're not going to be proceeding with early voting while other counties are. It's really becoming a mess there. I'm not sure which way that will go, but it's really illustrating maybe there is a shot that this could be blocked that would be very important for preserving a few seats in this next.

[Charlie Kirk]

Well, and a judge rules on Tuesday that new congressional map in Missouri that favors Republicans is legal. So that's score one for Republicans. South Carolina is moving forward with some plans to redistrict. So I would give the slight edge to Republicans right now. We had a gentleman named Larry Schweiker on the show earlier and he's been keeping track of that. It might be time to have him back on the show, as a matter of fact. In fact, he's keeping close tabs on this story and I think that we would, we would still have the slight edge here. It'll depend on what happens in Virginia. It'll depend on what happens in Colorado if they move forward with their maps. Slight edge to Republicans though, just on a pure who's got more out of. Out of this. Right. So we'll see. It's. It's kind of tbd. And again, we look at our friends over in Indiana for failing to move forward with that.

[Blake]

Apparently we're still going for them.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, we have accountability on that because they it was a ridiculous decision, but it is what it is. And then you mentioned the talking filibuster with I think you were mentioning Mike Lee, how we had Mike Lee on

[Blake]

this week Will Thune act and she asked is it good to contact them? It's always good to contact your lawmakers.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah. We should get thunes numbers you the

[Blake]

best way to do it. Yeah. You call they sometimes you might even it might not even make sense that they react to these things because rationally a few dozen or a few hundred people calling in that doesn't represent tens of millions, but they do react to those things. Politics is about numbers but also intensity. People who are more intense and more passionate and more vocal get more of what they want.

[Charlie Kirk]

Always be respectful. Always be respectful. I will tell you that that is a. Is a key part. And we've got Senator Thune's DC number here. It's 2022-2423-2120-2224-2321. So please contact the DC number. And then we've got I guess we've got a graphic up here with other offices. We've got an Aberdeen, a Rapid City Sioux Fall, Washington D.C. office. The Washington D.C. call the D.C. office.

[Blake]

Especially if you're not if you call you can feel call South Dakota office. If you are South Dakota. I think that would be the fairest approach. But the DC one, that that's where the senator is most of the time. That's where he's most likely to hear from his staffers. Oh man, we're getting blown up about this.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yep, exactly.

[Blake]

I want those phones myself.

[Charlie Kirk]

He has signed on to the SAVE Act. The question is, is he going to do the necessary work to get it over the finish line? If we have Fetterman that is on board with it. That's not enough, obviously. But what the talking filibuster would do is it kind of takes it back to what Mike Lee describes as the original intent of the debate. Right. We often refer to the Senate. As you know, the what's the line they always use? It's the highest debate body in the world or something like that. And it really isn't because they don't debate anything. Cuz they can't get to 60 votes on anything. So they just. It's all procedural and parliamentary tactics to block real debate. Mike Lee is saying, listen, we can debate and you can debate as long as you want. Send your people up there until you exhaust your octogenarian senators and septuagenarian senators and they can't debate anymore. And then we'll have a vote and then 51 votes will take it or 50 plus one with Vice President Vance. So that's the spirit of it. I actually love it. And it's just a question of whether or not Thune will do it. There are some concerns with the talking filibuster. I've spoken with senators about this. There is concerns that the Democrats could game it anyways and essentially break a single bill into its different parts in the amendment process and essentially repeat a talking filibuster over and over and over again. In theory you could stay there indefinitely. So there's concerns about the way it would be implemented. I think that will go back to Senator Thune and if he's going to put guardrails on a talking filibuster and how it can be implemented. But President Trump has been very clear we will have the Save act one way or the other. I'm not exactly sure what he means if that's an executive order or if he's going to do it by some other means. Worse, we'll see. He is dead serious about getting the Save act, whether passed through Congress or the policies implemented in some other way. I think it's existential. I think it's ridiculous that you do not need a government issued ID and to prove your citizenship to vote in a federal election. So I'm 1,000% behind it. It's common sense. I think that's why you see that 83% of Americans already support it. I don't know what the problem is other than Democrats want to cheat, frankly. So that's, that's where we're at on the save. I don't know if we got to all your questions, but I believe we got to most.

[Blake]

We got to. We have a few more. I think we should go. We could go for a little bit because we were there. So we have a written in question. Let's do. No, let's do this one. Sorry.

[Charlie Kirk]

Crap.

[Blake]

I'm in the wrong window here. Let's do the one from Sam here. He says, have you guys seen. I've heard about the. The Goo. The Alyssa Goo one or Eileen Goo. Yeah, about Alicia. Lou, I'm going to mix up these names.

[Charlie Kirk]

Eileen Goo is the freestyle skier from America that competes for the ccp.

[Blake]

And then Alicia Liu is.

[Charlie Kirk]

Just won the gold medal yesterday. And it was wonderful because she was. She. Listen, I've been told that Alyssa Liu is a Wokie. She's a far lefty. But she has not disrespected the country at all. Her dad fled the ccp China. He partook in the Tiananmen Square massacre protests. It was student led protests. 1989. He flees to America. They have been surveilled by the ccp. The FBI has told him they've been under surveillance, trying to intimidate his daughter Alyssa Liu from. From skating for the US Team. She did it anyways and she got gold. The first time a woman's got gold in figure skating in 24 years.

[Blake]

Let's have the clip at the other end. We can go over a few minutes.

[Charlie Kirk]

All right. We got to say goodbye to real America's voice. President Trump's still talking. We'll see you guys tomorrow. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.