Trump Speedruns Deportations

Summary

Ruthless Podcast: "Trump Speedruns Deportations" – Detailed Summary

Release Date: January 28, 2025
Hosts: Josh Holmes, Comfortably Smug, Michael Duncan, John Ashbrook
Guest: Jason Smith, Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, House of Representatives

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Introduction

In the latest episode of the Ruthless Podcast, hosts Josh Holmes, Comfortably Smug, Michael Duncan, and John Ashbrook delve into President Donald Trump's aggressive deportation strategies, the ongoing battle over tax reform, and the escalating AI competition between the United States and China. The episode is a blend of serious political discourse and light-hearted banter, providing listeners with a comprehensive analysis of current conservative initiatives and challenges.

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Trump’s Immigration and Deportation Policies

The episode kicks off with a heated discussion on President Trump's recent executive orders targeting border security and immigration. Hosts express strong support for Trump's actions, emphasizing their alignment with the conservative mandate.

• Josh Holmes [00:00]: Highlights the rollout of border security measures and criticizes Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt's portrayal of migrants being transported on C130s.

• Michael Duncan [00:18]: Asserts, "Donald Trump is just shipping criminals out of this country," reinforcing the narrative against illegal immigration.

The conversation underscores the administration's commitment to reducing illegal immigration swiftly, contrasting it with previous lenient policies.

• Josh Holmes [09:03]: Reiterates, "That's exactly what we voted for," emphasizing voter support for stringent immigration measures.

The hosts discuss the international dimension, specifically Colombia's compliance under threat of tariffs, showcasing Trump's economic leverage in enforcing deportations.

• Michael Duncan [09:25]: Describes the situation as "the art of the deal," highlighting Trump's negotiation tactics.

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Guest Interview: Jason Smith on Tax Reform

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to an in-depth interview with Jason Smith, Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Smith provides insights into the Republican strategy for tax reform, focusing on protecting and extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA).

• Josh Holmes [06:50]: Introduces Jason Smith, praising him as "one of the top five most important people on the globe right now."

• John Ashbrook [60:43]: Shares his personal journey from a working-class background to his role as Chairman, stating, "Our federal courthouse in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, is called the Rush Limbaugh Federal Courthouse. Yeah, we're pretty. We're pretty conservative."

Smith emphasizes the importance of passing a comprehensive tax bill to prevent the expiration of critical provisions that benefit working families.

• John Ashbrook [73:23]: "We have to. Failure is not an option."

Discussions include:

• Child Tax Credit: Smith highlights the Republican role in establishing and expanding the Child Tax Credit, which significantly aids low to middle-income families.

• Guaranteed Deduction: Addressing the expiration of the guaranteed deduction, Smith warns of impending tax increases for 97% of taxpayers if not extended.

• Salt and Local Tax (SALT) Deduction: Smith discusses the complexities of extending the SALT deduction, especially for high-tax states like New York and California, aiming to find bipartisan solutions.

Notable Quotes:

• John Ashbrook [82:31]: "The Republican Party is the party of the working class."

• Jason Smith [71:30]: "If we do not finish our job, we will face the highest tax increase in the history of our country under a Republican House."

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AI Competition: US vs. China’s Deep Seek

The podcast shifts focus to the fierce AI race, particularly the emergence of China’s Deep Seek as a formidable competitor to American AI advancements.

• Michael Duncan [43:04]: Compares Deep Seek’s impact to Sputnik, noting its significance as a catalyst for American innovation: "Deep Seek is AI's Sputnik moment."

• Josh Holmes [52:47]: Criticizes the Chinese AI model, asserting, "every single thing is wired through the CCP."

The discussion outlines the economic and national security implications of AI dominance, stressing the need for the US to accelerate its own AI development to maintain global leadership.

• Josh Holmes [54:10]: "If it takes a lot of energy and you have more domestic energy than anywhere else in the world, isn't that an advantage?"

• Michael Duncan [55:03]: "Just deregulate, let American energy be tapped."

Notable Quotes:

• Michael Duncan [43:31]: "Sputnik was... a constant reminder that we might not be number one anymore."

• Josh Holmes [56:27]: "This is not something to be fearful about, because we get it."

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Dr. Phil and Immigration Enforcement

Injecting some lighter moments, the hosts critique media personalities like Dr. Phil being used in immigration enforcement scenarios.

• Michael Duncan [16:18]: Jokes about deportations featuring Dr. Phil, mocking the portrayal of migrants in media.

• Josh Holmes [17:05]: "Not really," in response to a satirical question about being deported, highlighting the absurdity of using entertainment figures in serious immigration matters.

This segment serves as a satirical commentary on the intersection of media and political enforcement policies.

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Pop Culture and Sports Highlights

The hosts briefly touch upon sports rivalries and cultural dynamics, particularly the tension between Eagles and Vikings fans, adding a relatable and humorous layer to the discussion.

• Michael Duncan [06:09]: Mentions personal anecdotes about the Eagles and Vikings, reflecting on team loyalties and regional pride.

• Josh Holmes [58:19]: Discusses a viral clip of a fan with a firearm celebrating, critiquing unsafe celebrations.

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Audience Engagement and Contests

Engaging with the audience, the hosts recount a successful contest predicting the number of pardons President Biden would issue, showcasing listener involvement and the podcast's interactive nature.

• Josh Holmes [25:00]: Celebrates Massey's Austin, Texas, accurate prediction of Biden’s pardons, rewarding him with podcast merchandise.

Listeners are encouraged to participate in future contests and engage with the podcast’s content through submissions and feedback.

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Conclusion

The episode wraps up with a recap of the discussions, reinforcing the podcast's commitment to providing insightful, no-holds-barred conservative analysis. Hosts reiterate their support for tax reforms, strong immigration policies, and the imperative of maintaining AI leadership against global competitors.

• Josh Holmes [97:33]: "You know, you can clear the mechanism out there, right?"

• Comfortably Smug [98:58]: "Every once in a while we let you look through the crystal ball of the future on things like AI or tax policy."

The Ruthless Podcast maintains its stance as a pivotal voice in conservative discourse, blending critical political analysis with engaging conversation.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Michael Duncan [00:18]: "Donald Trump is just shipping criminals out of this country."

• John Ashbrook [73:23]: "We have to. Failure is not an option."

• Michael Duncan [43:04]: "Deep Seek is AI's Sputnik moment."

• John Ashbrook [60:43]: "Our federal courthouse in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, is called the Rush Limbaugh Federal Courthouse. Yeah, we're pretty. We're pretty conservative."

• Jason Smith [71:30]: "If we do not finish our job, we will face the highest tax increase in the history of our country under a Republican House."

• Michael Duncan [43:31]: "Sputnik was... a constant reminder that we might not be number one anymore."

• Josh Holmes [56:27]: "This is not something to be fearful about, because we get it."

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Key Takeaways:

1. Immigration Enforcement: The podcast strongly supports Trump's swift deportation measures, highlighting their effectiveness and alignment with voter expectations.

2. Tax Reform Focus: Jason Smith emphasizes protecting and extending tax cuts that benefit the working class, warning against imminent tax hikes if reforms fail.

3. AI Race Against China: The hosts stress the critical need for the US to invest in AI to maintain global leadership, drawing parallels to historical technological competitions.

4. Engagement and Satire: Through audience interactions and satirical segments, the podcast balances serious policy discussions with relatable and humorous content.

5. Conservative Leadership: The episode underscores the transformation within the Republican Party, portraying it as a champion for working-class Americans and pragmatic economic policies.

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the Ruthless Podcast's multifaceted discussions, providing listeners with a clear understanding of the episode's key themes and insights without needing to tune in directly.

Transcript

[Josh Holmes]

You saw the rollout of all of the border related security, immigration, executive orders last week. And then you saw press Secretary Carolyn Levitt come out with a picture of migrants actually being loaded onto C130s and taken out of here, which is just.

[Michael Duncan]

Like, that's what we voted for.

[Josh Holmes]

I mean, this is exactly what we voted for.

[Michael Duncan]

Donald Trump is just shipping criminals out of this country. And you're like, but what about the Valentine's Day flowers? Get the hell out of here.

[Josh Holmes]

This is why it's a bad dude.

[Michael Duncan]

And they're like, oh, coffee's going to be expensive.

[Josh Holmes]

I don't have to tell you Americans are ready for what's next. Moving beyond the hardships of inflation and economic anxiety towards building a future, a better future for our families. Ensuring greater access to more affordable energy that powers daily lives. Reliable energy that fuels innovation and economic growth, and the abundant energy that keeps our nation safer and more secure. It's all within our grasp. We'll do this together, building a brighter future for us. Powered by America's oil and natural gas resources. You can learn more about all of [e-mail].

[John Ashbrook]

Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please.

[Comfortably Smug]

Just a catching strays over here.

[Josh Holmes]

You're in for a hell of a show.

[Michael Duncan]

Keep the faith, hold the line and own the libs.

[Jason Smith]

It's time for our main event.

[Josh Holmes]

Good Tuesday to all of you. Welcome back to the ruthless Variety Program. Happily presiding over the golden era, Mr. Trump's golden era here in Washington D.C. and throughout our land. I am Josh Holmes along with comfortably smug Michael Duncan and John Ashbrook. Left, right across your radio dial, fellas, there's a time for singing and dancing and entertaining. We like to do that here at the Variety Program. But you know, when you've got this much news, this is sort of a bread and butter shtick for us. We do this better than anybody. There's like stuff here you gotta know.

[Michael Duncan]

That's the thing is President Trump made promises when he was running for office and rapidly, I think faster than any of us could expect. He is fulfilling those promises. Yeah, work is getting done and along with that, that means there's a lot to cover and work that needs to be done and is in the process of getting done.

[Comfortably Smug]

Yeah, I think we all missed it, obviously. You know, sort of increased flurry of action, the workload. We sort of missed that as a country the last four years. You know, I also think the media appreciates it. They'd never tell you no, they do though. But there is a lot going on, a lot. Cooking.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, they like to complain about how hard they're having to work. Yeah, but they like to complain they're miserable people.

[Comfortably Smug]

There's, like, actual news to report on.

[Jason Smith]

Yeah, but Mr. Trump spent his time in office learning how he could do things better, and he improved upon it. And now we're seeing the results of all of that work that he did leading up to last Tuesday, last Monday.

[Josh Holmes]

Is that your JD hat?

[Jason Smith]

This is. So JD actually has my hat.

[Josh Holmes]

Oh, he actually.

[Jason Smith]

I had.

[Josh Holmes]

I didn't realize you actually gave that up.

[Jason Smith]

I gave him my hat. So now I had to go into the system and order a new one. Very happy to have the new one. So I encourage everybody to get in the merch store and make Michael Duncan do.

[John Ashbrook]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

What we're talking about. For those of you on the audio only, he's got a nice camouflage, ruthless hat. That. Which it might have been a one of one. And somehow Ashbrook got his hands. I didn't even know the thing existed. And then all of a sudden, now Vice President Vance, then Senator Vance joined us for a fishing trip. Next thing you know, JD's wearing one. I was like, where the hell.

[Comfortably Smug]

Okay, so the backstory there is we sort of just made, like, a couple up on spec.

[Josh Holmes]

Is that what it was like?

[Comfortably Smug]

Yeah, we sometimes we have some, like, trial runs of merch that sort of float around the office. And I think Ashbrook picked one up. I loved it because we had a great hat because we had the fishing trip coming up. And so it just happened to be that, like, JD was like, hey, can I have that hat? And you were like, yeah, absolutely. And so then, like, we had to order a ton of them because everybody wanted it.

[Josh Holmes]

I saw a clip just circulating this weekend about all of that. He was talking about how he handled debates and whatnot. That thing's got a long tail.

[Comfortably Smug]

Longtime.

[Josh Holmes]

He really enjoyed that fishing trip.

[Michael Duncan]

I mean, he went on. We're gonna talk about it. He went on Sunday shows again.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, we got that.

[Michael Duncan]

Another victim.

[John Ashbrook]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

We're gonna talk about poor Margaret Brennan.

[Comfortably Smug]

I don't feel bad at all.

[Josh Holmes]

I don't either.

[Comfortably Smug]

Not for a second.

[Josh Holmes]

Boy, it has to be tough to stomach. I can't imagine slinking back into the office Monday morning after that kind of a beat down. But, you know, I guess they. They don't know. A lot of shame. So, you know, maybe it's easier than it looks. And certainly from my vantage point, you'd never see me again. We're gonna talk about immigration. We're gon about the Columbia situation put a fine point on that. A lot of news. And we'll just tell you what it all means. Dr. Phil was out, which I love. We got some clips. We're going to talk about Dr. Phil and the immigration border thing. Fantastic stuff. Our Variety we're going to get into. Last week we talked about AI, the importance of the announcement that the president made with the CEOs last week about American development of AI. You quickly found out a week, not even, you know, five days later, how significant that discussion is this week with Deep Seek and Chinese and what. What that's done to the marketplace. We're gonna walk through a little of that. This is Abby Horses. Smuggy knows a great deal about it, and all of us sort of jump in on it because we like it a lot. We happen to think it's the future. And then we've got some other Variety Eagles fans, which, in my house, fellas, it's not good. It's not good. For those of you who don't know, my wife's a Philly native through and through and a huge Eagles. Eagles person, and she's converted my two sons. And I have no recourse because I'm a Vikings fan. And the year my oldest son was born, the Eagles won the damn Super Bowl. Beat the Vikings in the NFC championship. It's been downhill ever since. Nothing I can do about it.

[Jason Smith]

I don't want to give up the surprise too quickly, but we have a care package of batteries that we're sending to her to throw at the screen when the refs call. Everything. You're gonna. Patrick Mahomes.

[Josh Holmes]

You're gonna break my house.

[Jason Smith]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

That's great. Thank you. It's like buying me a drum set. Just something that makes my life more difficult. We also have the guest that everyone wants to hear from. In my view, one of the top five most important people in this entire country right now, maybe the world, if you think about it. Jason Smith, he is the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the House of Representatives. And you're like, okay, well, I don't know. I don't know. Jason Smith, I don't. You know, he doesn't do a ton of interviews. He's right in the damn tax bill.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

So if you're interested in money in your pocket, you should listen to what this guy has to say because he is the guy who is putting together the formulation for ultimately what you're going to be looking at next year and filling out your W2 and like, you know, the 1040 and all of that. He's gonna have a huge impact on it. What he has to say has a material impact on you and your families. I think we're the only ones that have a discussion like this. So like I said, this is what we do best.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah, it's a good one. It's like you said, could not be more important for every single listener.

[Josh Holmes]

Totally. All right, so let's get in the deportations thing real quick. New York Post. Colombia's President Gustavo Petro buckles under Trump's trade war threat, offers presidential plane for deportation flights. Let me just give you the backdrop and then we'll talk about it for a minute. Colombian President Gustavo Petro quickly reversed course about accepting flights which he had previously said he was not going to accept during last week's conversation. These flights were headed out of the United States with illegal immigrants bound for Colombia who had originated there. And President Petro said, nope, you're not landing here. Well, here's what happened. President Trump threatened emergency tariffs of up to 50% on the South American country for refusing to cooperate. Petro not only acquiesced to Trump's demands, he even offered up the Colombian presidential plane to help shuttle the migrants back to the country, calling it a response to, quote, the government's commitment to guarantee decent conditions.

[Michael Duncan]

That's art of the deal right there.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, one more paragraph. The government of Colombia, under the direction of Gustavo Petro, has arranged the presidential plane to be facilitated a dignified return, as they say. This is his quote, and this is what a dignified return is. Well, it's a return nevertheless, which is the only thing that we're ultimately interested in. But you saw the rollout of all of the border related security, immigration, executive orders last week. And then you saw Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt come out with a picture of migrants actually being loaded onto C130s and taken out of here, which is just.

[Michael Duncan]

Like, that's what we voted for.

[Josh Holmes]

I mean, this is exactly what we voted for. And then at the end of the week, you got in, the press was just so eager to be like, well, they're not going to take them, so all this is just like, not going to work. At which point, as you just heard from the New York Post, Trump was like, well, what if I just slapped a 50% tariff on everything that you have? What do you think about that?

[Michael Duncan]

To me, this was such a very, you know, it's a fascinating microcosm because you saw the press instantly flood the zone, jump in. They're like, oh, look, Colombia said no to Trump. Trump got owned. Oh, my God. He can't do anything about this. Everyone is in the frame of thinking and mindset of how things used to be.

[Comfortably Smug]

Right?

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah.

[Michael Duncan]

You'd expect. Oh, God. This is probably gonna become a six month process. There's gonna be some legislative issue that's needed and AOC is gonna cry in front of a plane and then it gets solved in hours.

[Jason Smith]

Yeah.

[Michael Duncan]

Trump's like, 50% tariffs until you bend the knee. Yeah, done.

[Jason Smith]

I love it so much because think about how much time Washington has talked about the immigration issue. I remember in 2005 when I was a press secretary and we were orchestrating these, like, field hearings at the border to get to the heart of the immigration issue and fix the border. Donald Trump, within days, picks up the problem and he solves it. So 20 years of people just complaining about immigration and complaining and complaining. This is a man of action. It's exactly what we voted for.

[Comfortably Smug]

Yeah. Everyone just sort of gets used to the muscle memory of the morass of D.C. yeah, totally. Especially when it comes to executive orders. It's like they get signed and there's a ceremony, but you always wonder about the follow through and, like, what happens the intervening period where there's legal challenges or things happen, or countries say, oh, they're not going to take these migrants back. And then Donald Trump's like, nope, 50% tariff. It's like everybody is playing the wishbone offense. And then Donald Trump showed up and invented the Ford.

[Josh Holmes]

He's going five.

[Comfortably Smug]

You know what I mean? And it's like, well, you. We always could do that. People just didn't do it. And it's like, because he has, you know, he's just so driven to accomplish these things and deliver on these promises from the campaign that, like, we're really going to do it and we're going to use every tool at our disposal to make sure that we follow through on it.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah. I mean, it's the Don coriel of the 1970s NFL. Right. Just a different thing going on here.

[Comfortably Smug]

I like that.

[Michael Duncan]

What I also love is you look at how quickly this unfolded. Like, everyone on the left thought this was the same way things happen. They started being like, heads up, folks. Don't you know half our flowers are imported. You're paying more for Valentine's Day. It's like, number one, Donald Trump is just shipping criminals out of this country. And you're like, but what about the Valentine's Day flowers? Get the hell out of here.

[Josh Holmes]

This is why it's a bad dude.

[Michael Duncan]

And they're like, oh, coffee's gonna be expensive.

[Comfortably Smug]

What I loved about it as a. As a poster on. On X, and I'm sure you did as well. Smug was the funniest about it is, like, the problem got solved so fast. It got solved before the left could even get out.

[Josh Holmes]

The couldn't even wrap the 450 words in the Washington Post opinion section.

[Jason Smith]

Right.

[Josh Holmes]

And they were all fully prepared to talk about the price of coffee. And then like, oh, yeah, never mind.

[Michael Duncan]

We're. They signed out to, like, some idiot story. Can you please write about what effect this will have on America, how it's going to drive up costs for the poor on their coffee? Because they always, like, they try to frame everything like that. Washington Post just had a story about how DEI hurts poor communities.

[Comfortably Smug]

I mean, and you could. You could write that lead. Any of us could. Right. Like, the lead of that story would be donald Trump, ushered into office on a wave of a bad economy and high inflation is about to make it worse.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Michael Duncan]

You know what I mean? They were so ready.

[Comfortably Smug]

That editor must be so pissed.

[Josh Holmes]

A populist brand of Native Indian and has taken over the federal government as they ushered in what could be hugely consequential economic conditions for the American people.

[Michael Duncan]

They were so ready. Dude had that up on word. And then he gets a news flash, sorry, Trump already solved it. Columbia surrendered for real.

[Josh Holmes]

But that's the way this has gone so far. And again, I think to the point that you opened up with smug, like, they've been very prepared for this stuff. And Ashbrook, you mentioned it. I mean, they have thought through what they're willing to do. So when you get The Deep State Department of State guy who spent the last 40 years in Central and South America saying, no, you can't do that because there will be retaliatory measures. They're like, get the fuck out of here. And they're like, they just go do their thing anyway.

[Jason Smith]

Because they know as well as anybody that whatever happens with coffee, whatever happens with flowers, the market for bullshit has no cap on it.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah.

[Jason Smith]

And they are 100% going to trigger a bunch of bullshit from the Washington Post and the New York Times and Politico just wringing their hands about how terrible this is when he's actually solving the problems that everybody's been asking somebody to solve for 20 years.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, well, they're getting a little daytime TV help, too. And so when we come back, you're gonna see, you will not believe who is you know, part of the enforcement mechanism walking the streets of Chicago to make sure that people come back home. You're gonna love every minute of this right after this.

[Jason Smith]

So we just got some big news from Americans for Prosperity, the most effective grassroots organization in the country. They've just launched a massive $20 million campaign to protect your hard earned money. Here's the deal. If Congress doesn't act, the Trump tax cuts will expire. That means families could pay 1,500 more in taxes next year. We all remember the benefits of those tax cuts. More money in your pocket, higher wages, and thriving mom and pop businesses across the country. But bidenomics has taken us backward. Record inflation and rising costs mean families are paying over $13,000 more per year just to make ends meet. Now is not the time for higher taxes. That's why AFP is unleashing its grassroots army to protect the tax cuts with hundreds, hundreds of local events, millions of voter contacts, and direct pressure on lawmakers. Join the fight. Visit ProtectProsperity.com to demand Congress renews and strengthens the Trump tax cut so we can reignite the American Dream. That's ProtectProsperity.com.

[Josh Holmes]

Okay, so, I mean, look, the whole pop culture thing for conservatives and Republicans just come running back for the first time in my lifetime, like, we've got the people, you know, and, like, stuff's cool with us. And never before, though, did I think you'd have, like, prominent daytime network TV people. They're involved in, like, conservative governance. They're interested in how it works, nuts and bolts. You won't believe this. Have a look at clip one, please.

[Michael Duncan]

Are you a citizen?

[Jason Smith]

My mom's a citizen.

[Michael Duncan]

Your mother's a citizen?

[Josh Holmes]

Yes.

[Michael Duncan]

That you're not?

[Jason Smith]

Nope.

[Michael Duncan]

But you've never been deported before.

[Josh Holmes]

Look, Dr. Phil.

[John Ashbrook]

Yeah.

[Michael Duncan]

How do you know me? No, I seen.

[Josh Holmes]

I seen a Dr. Phil, you know, on TV.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is an example of sanctuary cities, right? We got an illegal alien convicted of sex crimes involving children. He's walking the streets of Chicago. Again, the downfall, the problem with the sanctuary city, that people like us walking the street rather than law enforcement working with federal agents.

[Josh Holmes]

This is what we're dealing with.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah. You've been charged with sex crimes with children?

[Josh Holmes]

Not really.

[Comfortably Smug]

Not really.

[Michael Duncan]

Not really. And never been deported.

[Josh Holmes]

Well.

[Michael Duncan]

Let'S take them in process and lock them up.

[Josh Holmes]

There you go. Homan.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah, I think this is a great, you know, example of what we should do is every time you catch an illegal sex offender who has attacked kids, Dr. Phil's there waiting. It's like the dude who used to be like, why don't you grab a seat over there?

[Comfortably Smug]

Chris Hansen.

[Josh Holmes]

Chris Hansen.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah. Now we're sending Dr. Phil and also shout out Dr. Phil for getting hooked up like that to have Tom Ho and be like, you want to go on a raid, bro? I would love to go on a raid, Tom. I want to be there. When you kick indoors and drag, you leave.

[Josh Holmes]

Can the variety program do a ride along on that? Yeah, that would be.

[Michael Duncan]

I don't even need cameras just for fun.

[Josh Holmes]

But, you know, there's a couple of things that I love about him. One is, like, Dr. Phil's doing Dr. Phil's thing, right. He's trying to let this guy talk. And this guy, like, quickly, quickly assesses that, like, talking is not going to do any good here for him.

[Comfortably Smug]

I've seen your show.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah.

[Comfortably Smug]

Talking does me no favor.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah, yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

Dr. Phil's like, oh, yeah. And then just, like, lets it sit to see if the guy will fill the space like he ultimately did. The second part that I love is you got Homan walking around like Elliot Ness.

[Jason Smith]

Yeah, exactly.

[Josh Holmes]

It's so nice to have one dude in charge of this stuff.

[Jason Smith]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

Where he's, like, actually marching the beat and he's like, book him, Dano.

[Jason Smith]

Exactly.

[Michael Duncan]

When you said it right there, it just struck me the difference between the Biden administration and the Trump administration and the Biden administration, things are going wrong. They were always arguing over whose fault is. No, we appointed Kamal Dazar of this or. No, it's not that guy. It's someone else's job here. You know, where the buck stops, who's in charge of it proudly because they want to execute on their job. Homan's there, front center, because he's like, I was told to do a job of get these illegals out of here, and you see me, I'm doing it right now.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah. I'm gonna show you how it's done.

[John Ashbrook]

Great.

[Michael Duncan]

Great to see that.

[Josh Holmes]

Meanwhile, they're like, yeah, Kamala's the border czar.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

Or actually, she's investigating the root causes. The root causes, which turns out is her. She's the root cause.

[Michael Duncan]

Who'd have known? You don't need to figure out the root causes to put him in a cop car and get him out.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, she's. I mean, it's just. It's incredible. So anyway, this is all going on in Chicago and cities across this country where they're actually taking criminals off the street. I mean, that guy, child sex predator, yeah. Are you kidding me? How is that ever a question? How is that not a top priority? Are there that many? I mean, it's Chicago, so maybe. But like in, across this country, are there that many higher priorities than getting sex predators off the streets?

[Michael Duncan]

That should be, that should be up there.

[Jason Smith]

It seems like a no brainer.

[Josh Holmes]

Like if you're, if you're just like a, if you're a run of the mill sex predator, you know, where you're just sort of sitting in suburbia. You got to imagine your timeline is real short. Like they're going to get your ass in the brig pretty quickly.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

At least I hope so. Although, you know, the DAs, the Soros, it depends if you're in a Soros jurisdiction.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah, but if it's Dr. Phil knocking on the door, bro, it's a rap.

[Josh Holmes]

It's a rap if Phil shows up, right? No question.

[Jason Smith]

Especially if he's standing next to the modern day John Wayne, Tom Homan.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah.

[Jason Smith]

And he's like, listen, you're out. But I guess my point him into a plane like, like what Tom Homan is doing is exactly. I mean, we talked about this. It's exactly what people want. It's it. Our country has hungered for this sort of leadership and no nonsense for so long.

[Michael Duncan]

We've been told it has to go through this committee, this process. Oh, well, they got stopped because of this and oh, they got a Soros prosecutor. For so long Americans have been in a mindset of like, well, it's not possible. Nothing's possible.

[Comfortably Smug]

What I wonder is like if this guy doing the sex crimes, the illegal alien doing the sex crimes, who apparently has a ton of time to watch Dr. Phil on television.

[John Ashbrook]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

He's like, hey man, I never miss.

[Comfortably Smug]

So he might not be gainfully employed, but who knows? But like, if he doesn't reach the threshold of like, people that would be deported by Democrats.

[Josh Holmes]

Right?

[Comfortably Smug]

Like, who are the Democrats deporting? No, this is my.

[Michael Duncan]

No.

[Josh Holmes]

One. This is my point. I think the answer is no one. But my point is like, you're run of the mill average sex offender. I'd like to think we still take care of that relatively quickly.

[Comfortably Smug]

Yeah, I would hope. But sex offenders under. Under the radar.

[Josh Holmes]

But the fact that this guy is an illegal immigran complicated in a Democratic. This is the progressive prism that they live in. The fact that he's a sex predator, well, that's up on children. Has complicated this guy's imprisonment for them. But they're like, now how do we handle it?

[Michael Duncan]

I Saw, you know, Bill Malluchin had a ride along where ICE was just kicking indoors and rounding up all these people. Like, you were hearing stories of, like, this person attacked children 17 times and is still in the country because Chicago's been set as a sanctuary city. Like, Democrats have done a horrible thing where they make the victims feel like the perpetrators, where they're like, no, no, no, you don't understand. This guy came here illegally, committed a crime right there, and has committed 17 crimes, at least that we know about. Since then, he's the guy we should feel bad for. It's gotten so twisted.

[Josh Holmes]

Americans are sick of controversy. The fact that this is something that we're like, whoa, I can't believe they're doing it.

[Michael Duncan]

And I think that's the thing, is we finally figured out if we want to take our country back, if we want this country to work, if we want to be safer. Our families. You just stop listening to the nut jobs.

[Josh Holmes]

Just.

[Michael Duncan]

It's over.

[Josh Holmes]

Put the blinders on.

[Michael Duncan]

They had their time to do their nuttiness, and we all figured out just made the country far worse. Don't even listen to them.

[Josh Holmes]

So they still. There's a handful of these illegal immigrants that think that they can, like, protest their way out of this situation. Right. Which I do find completely hilarious. They're like, well, maybe if we make enough noise, picket signs and whatnot, they won't come for us. Well, we'll see about that. Clip two, please, for our audio only listener. What you're looking at is a crowd of people with Mexican flags protesting ICE enforcement efforts in Dallas, Texas. I don't know what they're hoping to have happen here. Probably the luckiest people in show business that it was week one and they had the Chicago enforcement division working and not Dallas.

[Jason Smith]

Right, Right.

[Michael Duncan]

I mean, this seems like a prime opportunity. Tom Holman right now is watching that tape, memorizing faces. Put me on a plane to Dallas.

[Comfortably Smug]

It's also weird. Like, I don't know, I'm not their PR rep or anything. Maybe they need to get in contact with George Soros or whoever's funding this protest. But, like, would it hurt you to throw in a couple American flags?

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

They don't even try.

[Comfortably Smug]

Just pretend now.

[Josh Holmes]

They're like, no, it's Mexico. That's what we're doing here in Dallas. Yeah, it really is. That's the point. It's gotten bad optics. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you consider the same funders of all these operations had, like, you know, straight Palestinian headdresses, immediately after October 7th, like, I'm not sure that political sensibility is top of the list of things that they've got going on. Anyway, all right, so we got to make acknowledgment. So several weeks ago, after the Hunter Biden pardon, we had a contest. Some of you may have forgotten about this. We didn't here at the Variety Program, least of all Wolf and Spaghetti follow this stuff very, very closely. Our contest at the time after Hunter Biden was what is a number of pardons that Biden's going to get up to? And he was at, like, 400. And we thought that was just completely outrageous, you know, because it included his family, like, all kinds of different stuff. And we're like, I don't know, like a thousand. Like, I mean, who knows?

[Michael Duncan]

But little did we know.

[Josh Holmes]

So we asked all of you, what's the number that you think that he can get to on the pardons? We had a ton of responses on this, some with great specificity, as it turns out. Axios reported there was 4200. Wow. On the button.

[Jason Smith]

Big number.

[Josh Holmes]

4200. Well, guess what? Massey's Austin, Texas, in that moment when there were only 400, like, four number predicted. 4200 on the bundle.

[Michael Duncan]

Dead on.

[Jason Smith]

What a legend.

[John Ashbrook]

Oh.

[Josh Holmes]

So, I mean, we said there's 100 bucks of merch in it for you, and. And you're going to get that. You got to email us at hello, Ruthless, podcast dot com. You know, we'll do some verification to make sure you're the right person, but hats off.

[Michael Duncan]

Massey's Austin, tex. Nailed it. 200 right on it.

[Josh Holmes]

Nailed it. What an incredible guess. Hey, look, that's why we throw these things out there. These people are smart now. They're smart.

[Jason Smith]

I feel like he's got to play the lotto.

[Michael Duncan]

All right.

[Jason Smith]

After that, he's got a hot hand.

[Josh Holmes]

I seriously. We asked a question last Thursday, which was at the sort of back end of a week full of executive orders. And we said, if you're president or, you know, if you can just chime in, what executive order would you like to see next? And again, fantastic comments. Love every single one of them. You gotta like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Remember, you got to do this, take this seriously. Stop for a minute. Like and subscribe.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

If you got to put the bell on while you're at it, get all that stuff out of the way so you get your stuff can be read here because you don't want anything else other than the voice reading your voice here. On the Variety program. And that's where we start, sir.

[Jason Smith]

Okay, this first one comes from Nai Yisrael, and he writes. Longtime listener, first time opining. I've got an idea that fits perfectly with Trump's common sense approach to governing. Let's make all federal benefit programs exclusive to full US Citizens. States that don't comply will lose their federal support. I find it appalling that people can come here and jump into the U.S. safety net before contributing in a meaningful way to our country. By cutting off the benefits that bring people in and keep them here. Mass deportation will happen voluntarily without costing taxpayers a dime. We are under no obligation to provide a safety net for the entire.

[Josh Holmes]

Gosh, it just makes sense to me. That is. That is entirely right. And I think they're going about the business doing that, to be honest. In contrast to the 2020 Democratic primary, when all the hands were up about free health care and Social Security and everything else, that's really what they're. That's still their position. That's still a Democrat. They just don't want to talk about it.

[Michael Duncan]

They don't want to talk about it anymore.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, that is what it is. All right, Dunks, what do we got?

[Comfortably Smug]

This one's from Mad Maduro. Proposed executive order. Given recent developments with regard to bringing nuclear facilities online to meet America's growing energy needs and to further encourage the development of modular nuclear and other technologies necessary to effectuate the new golden age of America, the construction, development, and operation of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. Furthermore, pursuant to 40 U.S.C. section 3102, this facility shall now be called the Biden Obama Luminous Fun Time Radioactive Latrine.

[Josh Holmes]

That is some good research.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah.

[Comfortably Smug]

Must be some sort of lawyer. He did some lawyering.

[Josh Holmes]

There was lawyer and there was code talk.

[Jason Smith]

Yeah, I love it.

[Comfortably Smug]

I love it.

[Josh Holmes]

That's great stuff. All right, Smuggles, what do we got?

[Michael Duncan]

Comment 3 is from Ty B. And they write serious EO. Large cities and metropolitan areas must have roadways and infrastructure audited for quality and safety. Two years failed audit results in all federal government funding suspended until audit is passed. Yeah, that's unserious. Executive order. Passengers and luggage must be weighed when checking in a bag for a flight and charged according to total weight. That's not a bad idea. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

You can get. You get a handle on the fats in the process.

[Michael Duncan]

It says PGA Tour. I like this. PGA Tour. Must implement a shot clock, shorts and side betting during rounds. Golf ball shall not exceed $24 per dozen.

[Josh Holmes]

Ty if you're interested in some kind of a job within the administration, I feel like this is a gentleman all the way through. You're talking about doing something about the fats, improving your. Your visual Sunday afternoon quality of PGA.

[Michael Duncan]

Consumption and side betting.

[Josh Holmes]

And then is side betting to, like, amp up a little adrenal dopamine in the process and at the end, capping golf ball prices.

[Comfortably Smug]

I love all of it. I need to know before that unserious EO about the passengers and luggage being weighed. I would like to buy whoever. You know, the stock of whoever makes those drugs. You know, the. What's it called? Ozempic.

[Josh Holmes]

Oh, yeah. Oh. Before we do the fat.

[Comfortably Smug]

Yeah. Before the EO fat tax.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah.

[Comfortably Smug]

Comes into effect, you got to buy as much stock in Ozempic as possible.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah. It's a transport fat tax. You know, it's not just. You're not just taxed because you're fat, and it's taxed. If you're fat and you're fly.

[Comfortably Smug]

A shot clock would be awesome. And the side bets, if you could side bet MPGA Tour.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, It'd be good.

[Comfortably Smug]

I'd watch all of it.

[Josh Holmes]

It would be good.

[Jason Smith]

How would you do the fat tax? Do you just, like, have a scale right there at the head of the jetway?

[Michael Duncan]

And the same way as when you start spot, instead of just putting the bag up there, they say, too.

[Josh Holmes]

And now, like, look, you could do something like. You know how the NFL has got the blue tent around the injury?

[Comfortably Smug]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

You know, so protect them out of privacy.

[Comfortably Smug]

Have some dignity.

[Josh Holmes]

You could get. You don't want that.

[Michael Duncan]

Nope.

[Josh Holmes]

Nope.

[Jason Smith]

Well, maybe if you have open. Maybe if you have enough.

[Josh Holmes]

Should be like cattle.

[Michael Duncan]

Is there any shame if you have.

[Jason Smith]

Enough sky miles, maybe you can avoid the blue tent. That's sort of like, along with the diamond medallion.

[Josh Holmes]

Oh, there's a spending. A spending incentive.

[Jason Smith]

Wow.

[Josh Holmes]

That could maybe get you around the.

[Jason Smith]

Fact it's a capitalist society.

[Comfortably Smug]

I don't even feel like you'd need more infrastructure. Like, you could actually just weigh the bag like you would normally weigh it. And then, you know, when you go through tsa, they already see all your business. You know, you get into that machine and it scans you. All they have to do is be able to put a little weight at the bottom of that thing. Then it weighs you.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah.

[Comfortably Smug]

And then, you know, when you collect your belongings, you find out how much more you owe and, you know, you.

[Jason Smith]

Know, there are some dudes out there who are so happy that they're three bills plus. They would just be like, yes, watch this. I'm gonna stand on the scale and they're just gonna pull out the cap.

[Josh Holmes]

I score. I score. It's an interesting concept. You know, it may improve flight travel. I've always wondered, you know, have you guys been on those planes where you sit down and somebody that sat there previously has got the extender now?

[Comfortably Smug]

Oh, the belt extender. Yeah, yeah, I've seen that.

[Josh Holmes]

Have you ever seen one of these things?

[Comfortably Smug]

I have seen it.

[Josh Holmes]

These are things have flummoxed me. So basically, it's like the massive seatbelt that they have for you in a regular coach seat is not enough. And so they have a full extender that plugs in on both sides that you could literally just be Andre the Giant and get this thing around you. And I've always wondered, like, before you commission that set of belts, like, it. It doesn't concern you at all. Like, you're. You're in the weight monitoring business at some level. And like, that's never been a part of the calculus as to whether this plane can fly.

[Michael Duncan]

Happening back in Coachella, it's terrifying.

[Josh Holmes]

Like, is there a smug.

[Michael Duncan]

It's really happening.

[Josh Holmes]

But is there a thing like, they only have 5? If you get over like 5 extenders, then you're gonna have to.

[Michael Duncan]

They can keep adding extenders.

[Josh Holmes]

No, no.

[Comfortably Smug]

I mean, like, how many extenders are in use on one airplane before that thing's gonna be over?

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, yeah. It's like, because, you know, I mean, if you look, if you're 52, you've all been on those flights where you're like £52 for your carry, for your checked luggage, and they're like, well, you got to take something out. And then you got this whole thing that's happening with people moving stuff from bag to bag to try to get under, but they don't do that for the person.

[Michael Duncan]

Right.

[Josh Holmes]

So, like, you get this like 89 pound gal who rolls up with a bag that's 51 pounds and they put her through hell and gone. Meanwhile, you got like a 700 pound hippo.

[Comfortably Smug]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

That walks up and checks a 35 pound bag. No problem.

[Jason Smith]

Very good point.

[Comfortably Smug]

You know, I think we put it out to the community. I know that there's multiple pilots who listen to this show.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, we have a.

[Comfortably Smug]

Let us know. I think, you know, as the plane gets bigger for commercial travel, it's less of a concern. You know, when you get beyond the Cessnas and whatnot.

[Josh Holmes]

Sure.

[Comfortably Smug]

And most of the planes, I think, are pretty overpowered. You know, as is for some of the short domestic flights. But I'd be curious on some of like the long haul ones, you know, where people are taking lots of like.

[Josh Holmes]

A couple of 600 pounders. I mean it feels like maybe the maybe might dip a wing or something. I don't know.

[Comfortably Smug]

Hope not.

[Josh Holmes]

I don't know. Anyway, it's worth looking into. Thanks for the suggestion. Ty B. Listen, if you're a fan of this variety program, you know that we were very early on into how JD Vance just totally dismantles an opposition and he was caricatured by the left when he was first named by Donald Trump as something like weird or like incapable of like somehow he wasn't qualified for it. And then like those of us who actually watched and didn't read and knew him from before were like, man, he's guy's going to do a lot of damage and these guys around underestimate the hell out of him. Then came the debate. Everybody like was aware of that. Well, hadn't stopped.

[Comfortably Smug]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

And I, at some level I'm surprised that anchors still have one on ones if they're going to take an adversarial position because like what he does to these people is remarkable.

[Jason Smith]

Hmm.

[Josh Holmes]

It's Must see tv. Next up in the cage was Margaret Brennan at CBS on Sunday. Can we play a clip? Let's play a clip to start this, please. Clip three, if you don't mind.

[Comfortably Smug]

Oh, well, this is a country founded by immigrants.

[Josh Holmes]

Well, this is a country, this is.

[Jason Smith]

A very unique country and it was founded by some immigrants and some settlers. But just because we were founded by immigrants doesn't mean that 240 years later that we have to have the dumbest immigration policy in the world.

[Comfortably Smug]

Yeah. We also mentioned this on the show last week as well. Right. It's like for far too long our immigration policy has been determined by like this sort of glib shorthand of bumper stickery. America was founded by immigrants. And you know, there's a, there's a poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty. So our hands are tied, we can't change anything. And it's like that's not the way the world works.

[Jason Smith]

For 20 years, every Republican's talking point was, well, we are a nation of immigrants, but we're also a nation of laws. And it's just like nothing but pocket protectors. And JD Vance in one interview, I mean like, God love him, he's been doing it for months and months and months, but in one interview completely dismantled that Talking point. And any Republicans need to ever apologize for anything. You shouldn't have a stupid immigration policy.

[Michael Duncan]

And you'd have thought she'd have learned from the debate. She had already tried coming at JD when he was having his debate and he was demolishing Tim Walls, and she kept trying to cut him off and being like, no, actually, that app. Yes, it existed in 1990, the CBP app.

[Comfortably Smug]

And I'm really glad you brought that out up, smug, because I noticed there were a couple of people online who were kind of criticizing the decision to go into this interview with Margaret Brennan and cbs, you know, because why would you give, why would you give these people airtime, especially when they treated you so horribly at the debate? Hey, it's like, don't, don't underestimate J.D. vance. Like, they know what they're doing.

[Josh Holmes]

It's also the best way to win.

[Comfortably Smug]

Because it's a fair fight. Now, like, when you're in a debate and you're up there and they can cut your mic and they can talk over you and they can frame up your answer around the next question they ask, that ain't a fair fight. The moderator is actually in a stronger position. But One on one, J.D. vance was going to be fine.

[Josh Holmes]

And also, I'd just say this, this goes forward because you're going to see some of this out of Trump. You're going to see this out of Trump administration officials. And you're like, why are they talking to these people who are just trying to sabotage all of their efforts? It's a good question. You look at it and you're like, you gotta just ignore all this stuff. But, like, ultimately, they have the better set of arguments here, one that the majority of the American people have actually bought into. But you have to remember that for a lot of the center left in this country, I'm not talking about the progressive left, which is just like an untouchable absurdity, but a lot of the center left, they just don't have access to information whatsoever. They pick up a New York Times, they pick up the Washington Post, they watch CBS Evening News. They think that's the reality. It's not that they're done seeking information. It's just the only information that ever comes is like this slanted far left nonsense, right? So when you put JD on with Margaret Brennan in a show that you're already watching on Sunday morning, and he just completely dismantles every single one of her arguments I met, I bet that there are some number of people who, like, voted for Joe Biden twice probably thought JD Was like, still a crazy person who was like, oh, it makes.

[Comfortably Smug]

A lot of sense.

[Michael Duncan]

Right?

[Comfortably Smug]

Yeah.

[Jason Smith]

Right. Completely unconflicted about the fact pattern, and he is not gonna take it. And I think that that's a reason why so many people are attracted to what Trump and J.D. vance are doing. I mean, just look at the state of Nevada, full of immigrants. Okay.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah.

[Jason Smith]

And what we learned yesterday is that the state of Nevada now has more Republicans than Democrats, first time in 20 years. And a lot of credit on that goes to President Trump, J.D. vance, Governor Joe Lombardo. But I think that people are really catching on to this style because they're like, finally, leadership in America.

[Josh Holmes]

Somebody's saying something that's real and resonates rather than, like, dancing behind talking points and trying to pretend they care about something they don't.

[Jason Smith]

Right? That's exactly right.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah. Well, anyway, it was beautiful. Let's. One more clip on this, if you don't mind. Clip four.

[Jason Smith]

Well, Margaret, I don't agree that all these immigrants or all these refugees have been properly vetted. In fact, we know that there are cases of people who allegedly were properly vetted and then were literally planning terrorist attacks on our country that happened during the campaign, if you may remember so.

[Josh Holmes]

Clearly, not all of these foreign nationals.

[Michael Duncan]

But there are 30,000 people in the pipeline.

[John Ashbrook]

Afghan refugees.

[Jason Smith]

My primary standard as the vice president, Margaret, is to look after the American people. And now that we know that we have vetting problems with a lot of these refugee programs, we absolutely cannot unleash thousands of unvetted people into our country.

[Josh Holmes]

These people are vetted.

[Michael Duncan]

These people are vetted.

[Josh Holmes]

Just like the guy who planned a.

[Jason Smith]

Terrorist attack in Oklahoma a few months ago. He was allegedly properly vetted, and many people in the media and the Democratic Party said that he was properly vetted.

[Josh Holmes]

Clearly, he wasn't.

[Jason Smith]

I don't want my children to share a neighborhood with people who are not properly vetted. And because I don't want it for my kids, I'm not going to force any other American citizens kids to do that either.

[Josh Holmes]

No.

[Michael Duncan]

And that was a very particular case. It wasn't clear if he was radicalized.

[John Ashbrook]

When he got here or while he was living.

[Josh Holmes]

I don't really.

[Jason Smith]

I don't want that person in my country. And I think most Americans agree with me.

[Comfortably Smug]

It's just unbelievable.

[Josh Holmes]

I don't really care. Margaret is now a new thing.

[Comfortably Smug]

Excuse me, point of order. We're not clear exactly when he was radicalized, and somehow that makes it okay. And why would it be different? Like, what the fuck?

[Josh Holmes]

Well, no, but why would it be different? Yeah, I mean, she. What's so amazing for people like Johnny appreciates this instinctively is for those of us who've done this for 20 years and you kind of like watch the way, you know, the way that they're going to handle it. But she's handling it in like a mid-2000s way. Right, right. Where she's challenging the assumptions that are made without the logic.

[Comfortably Smug]

Semantics to her point of view.

[Michael Duncan]

There's no thinking behind it because she's not trying to make a point, she's just trying to be a problem and disrupt. What's your point you're making here, Margaret? What are you trying to say?

[Comfortably Smug]

Because if she was right and he was radicalized later when he was here, well, all the more reason to do a little bit more vetting and not trust the homework that the Biden administration did on all of these migrants. Right. Like, if she's right, she proves his point. If she's not right, he's still also right. Her point. Her point makes no fucking sense.

[Jason Smith]

One of the best memes I saw on Sunday, immediately after the interview was this picture that somebody put of JD Vance in. In. In like a suit and a tie, and he's like, frankly, Margaret, I don't give a damn.

[Comfortably Smug]

That's great.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, it's really, really good. Well, anyway, keep up the good work, JD and your entire staff. Just I like Rol Sunday for all I care. I would love to keep seeing those clips. All right, so economic news. It's a little bit of variety. We'll classify it as variety because it's not like our core bread and butter. But we talked about this last week very quickly. Everything we talked about in terms of AI, the importance of President Trump's announcement to the world that there is a significant import in this country for developing American AI versus foreign adversaries. Six days later becomes a critical discussion when it comes out that Deep Seek, which is a China based AI OpenAI product, comes out. Now, this is according to Fortune, Mark and Driessen, a friend of the program, friend of yours, Smug, warns the Chinese chat GPT rival deep seek is AI's Sputnik moment. All right, so let me just. The markets reacted horribly from a domestic standpoint. Everybody sort of freaked out about this. You saw some big tech giants lose huge market cap over this announcement. And everybody's sort of wondering, like, what's up with that? Let's get your. Take Smug and go from there. Sure.

[Michael Duncan]

A couple Things first, I'd say I think Mark may come makes the most cogent point. And I think the best way for folks to think about this. I know when, you know, you start hearing the buzzword AI in the news, it's hard to conceptualize what they're even talking about. For most folks you say AI, they think it's just like a Google on steroids. But when Mark says that this is a Sputnik moment, he's referring for our younger folks who don't know who attended public school.

[Josh Holmes]

Oh, boy, you know what? I'm to take immediate offense.

[Michael Duncan]

Sputnik was a satellite that the Russians put up. And the effect that it had on America is it put a fire under America's butt. And we won the space race. It became, you know, every American realized they could see, you know, at night, in the night sky, you see a satellite fly over. You know, it's the right thing.

[Comfortably Smug]

It was a constant reminder that we might not be number one anymore.

[Michael Duncan]

That's the thing.

[Comfortably Smug]

And that is the thing is it stuck in the psyche of every American until we won that space race.

[Josh Holmes]

That's why that choice of words is.

[Michael Duncan]

And so I think that's a good way for folks to conceptualize what this exactly means. There's a lot of discussion when it comes more specifically to deep seq of okay, it was done so cheaply. The number that's being thrown around is five, six million dollars. That also, you know, if you want to get to nuts and bolts, there was already an existing model that Chinese hedge fund was using. And they used the leader of the hedge fund, used profits towards expanding their computer model to do general knowledge AGI instead of just pick me a stock that goes up. I think the main takeaway here when you talk about why did so many tech companies lose such value is a lot of investors were like, okay, we've been being told that by Google and Facebook, these companies are spending billions and billions of dollars on Nvidia chips, and that's needed to build a large language model that can power one of these AIs. And. And investors were like, well, if this model China did for five, six million dollars, then what's all this expenditure for.

[Josh Holmes]

What the cost of the overhead is that they've been financing.

[Michael Duncan]

And so I think if I had to say that was just like a single day freak out. It's not like all of a sudden we realize that China has won, the world is over, and the markets are toast. I think what the takeaway from this should be is, is it's not like America's got this massive lead over China and we don't need to think about this. And when you saw those folks visit the White House and we hear President Trump speak about AI, it's because it's incredibly important. It's because this is like the race for the atom bomb right now, because the amount of impact it will have on society and productivity. The first country to capture this technology, harness this technology is going to have such a lead on the rest of the world. We're talking about it is going to cut poverty in half. You look at projections of what this does for productivity in this country. What the, what would happen to the American economy would be like on rocket fuel.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, fellas, all we were discussing this prior to coming on air. And look, I think one of the, one of the reasons why you put it in last week's show about the AI announcement by President Trump. Trump was because Democratic leadership in Washington have basically limited your knowledge to, of AI to like, any sort of what they saw as a derogatory image of a politician. They loved that they didn't want you to see. And they talked about deep fakes and AI and like, all that. And they were like, that's, that's what it is. Right. Which is not what it is. Like, that's like literally. It's literally Google or paint by numbers. I mean, it's like the easiest thing. Nothing to do with what the basis of AI is. And the lack of understanding by most Americans have contributed to this culture of wariness about what AI means. And we said last week, and I mean it like, this is the new frontier. This is the next generation of, of not warfare so much as information warfare that America just simply has to win.

[Comfortably Smug]

Yeah. I mean, if I could put it in perspective here, we've been talking a lot about Panama, the Panama Canal.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah.

[Comfortably Smug]

And Donald Trump wants to get it back. Well, one of the reasons why he wants to get it back is because the Chinese, through their Belt and Road initiative, are doing a bunch of infrastructure around the Panama Canal. The Panama government basically, you know, signed deals with China to do that. Well, this is the digital version of that. China is building an open source AI model in order to give it to the rest of the world. And we don't want to lose this fight for who's going to control the future of AI because all these other countries decide to go with China's model rather than ours.

[Josh Holmes]

And let me, let me tell you why that makes it. You're like, oh, China versus The United States or whatever. So whatever you think of China, maybe you're just agnostic to China. Like if they're doing it better, let them do it. There is the economic piece, which is critically important to our domestic economy and all of that, which is something you should concern your yourself with. But there's also a value cylinder here in a national security cylinder. And in the value cylinder it is absolutely opaque. And then ultimately all of the algorithms that are run on these open source AI information chambers where they're ingesting every piece of information around the world and spitting out, you know, an answer basically to the question, those have assumptions built into them in the United States for however critical self critical you can be of your own country, has a basic democratic value system that allows things like our First Amendment, you know, it has like basic human protection, human rights and liberties built into it, or else you'd get into a lot of trouble producing it domestically. That's why, like, you know, a lot of our companies, whether, you know, it's Meta or Google or whatever, they're ultimately accountable to the, to the people of the United States because they do business here, they're headquartered here. They have to operate within the confines of the Bill of Rights. They don't have to do that in China. Not only do they not have to do it, it's an advantage. They see it as a net advantage where they can push an agenda. So you worry about things like TikTok. The reason that that's thoughtful criticism is because they don't have these kind of things and they can serve up algorithms that in the most nefarious purposes could be just trying to indoctrinate a new generation of Americans to a point of view they don't share here in the Western world. But if you take that to an AI standpoint, you're talking about changing the world. And that is very much akin to a Cold war footing an arms race. The only difference is that we're talking about an information arms race where ultimately our government has to accept the payload and we don't have to accept the payload. We don't have to do it. We can do things like the President did last week, which is announce their firm support for the development of American AI. We're like firmly in this race and I think ultimately one, the United States will win because our Western allies understand that China's not in it for them.

[Jason Smith]

Right, right. And the information that they provide to the rest of the world is always a little bit or a lot wrong. Right. Like in America, you have to be transparent about what you're spending, you have to be transparent about what you're doing. And so to get to one of the points I think you were making smug is like, like the idea that they only spent $6 million to develop this is probably wrong. Like there was, there was.

[Michael Duncan]

There's a lot of questions brought up in the development of it. But I think a really important thing that also makes it, I guess more relatable and understandable to folks is they are essentially attempting the model that China has gotten so successful at. Because you know, if you, if you open your phone, you see on your Google search it says now powered by AI and, and on Facebook and even grocery shopping now if you use the app, it says like, okay, we're using AI to determine your write your emails. So the back end of that is typically they're licensing it from like OpenAI or Google's got Gemini their own model, or Facebook's got Llama their own model. But what this company has been doing, Deepseek, is they beat all their competitors on price in China. They put a bunch of them out of business by being like, we're offering it at like pennies on the dollar to offer that backend their AI to do the decision making for other companies like you know, their local Amazon to be able to have their backend AI, we'll just use deep seats. We'll charge you 10 cents compared to a dollar that the other guy is charging. And the president of China Xi was very pleased to see this and has been meeting very frequently with the founder of this company, the hedge fund manager of this company.

[Josh Holmes]

So well, he should. He's got a huge stake in. It turns out that every single thing is wired through the ccp. So think how hard to piche on price when you have an entire state actor.

[Michael Duncan]

That's the thing. If they want to run that same model back and just flood the world with a cheap Chinese good to make the market completely theirs.

[Josh Holmes]

And there is no, look, there is no coincidence that all of this rolled out six days after the President United States, for the first time in American history made a definitive statement about our intent to develop American AI beyond the likes of which the world could understand. We did that for the first time. I mean, Joe Biden, even if he had that event lined up, couldn't have pulled it off. You know what I mean?

[Comfortably Smug]

Like, like what do you imagine what his little note card would have to say for him to be able to describe what AI is?

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, could so, you know, like whatever. However, this Made its way to market, whether it was through a Goldman analyst or whatever. Like, the intent was very, very clear in that China was like, no, no, we're here too. We can do it cheaper. Tank the stock prices of a whole bunch of people who are investing in AI and told, you know, I think for obvious reasons, all of their shareholders that they were making this baseline investment in things that, you know, maybe it's not as expensive as. As we were led to believe. I think all that shit's the important part that you need to take away from it is like, this isn't something to be fearful about, because we get it.

[Michael Duncan]

That's the thing.

[Josh Holmes]

You got Sacks inside, you got Elon inside, you got guys like Mark Andreessen who are very plugged in. We're talking about this. Zuckerberg has been working on this. If you want to know what's going to happen to the world, listen to what that guy says two years ahead of time, because he is like a 10 of 10 in terms of predicting the future. Like, we're good shape. It's just a matter of whether or not you can sort of coalesce marketplaces to understand the new reality that this president is going to protect the American consumer and he's going to allow us to innovate things like energy.

[Michael Duncan]

That's the thing is I think another important takeaway from this is especially under Biden, the tech community was treated as like. Like they're criminals, like antagonists, like, what can we do to try to like wrap these people up? They were debanking a bunch of people. They were putting in regulations, and it's very easy for folks to understand of the energy regulations of Biden administration had crippled American domestic energy production. And that was a choice that they made. And they want to do that if we take the exact opposite tack. Because the AI industry needs a lot of energy to run all these models, all these computers working together. It takes a lot of energy. Just deregulate, Let American energy be tapped.

[Josh Holmes]

If it takes a lot of energy and you have more domestic energy than anywhere else in the world, isn't that an advantage?

[Michael Duncan]

That's an advantage.

[Josh Holmes]

So maybe enable, maybe turn that switch on.

[Michael Duncan]

That's the thing. Just let our country have a chance.

[Josh Holmes]

It's just incredible to me, if you think about the way the President Biden, even before President Biden, with the Democrats in Congress in a liberal worldview domestically, is that they spent the last eight years talking about things like how do we curb speech that we disagree with? How do you, how you're limiting the power of the future to like, being concerned about words that hurt your feelings.

[Michael Duncan]

You know, that was.

[Josh Holmes]

In contrast, you're now dealing with an administration that's like, no, no, we're all in on the next thing that's going to make, you know, the 2025 Internet seem like a model T. I was.

[Michael Duncan]

Seeing a lot of AI researchers and computer scientists discussing this as they were fiddling with Deep Seq, the Chinese AI is there. Like, what's really fascinating to me is there's no, like, specific except for like Tiananmen Square and things like that. There's not like speech sensitivity guardrails.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah.

[Michael Duncan]

And.

[Josh Holmes]

Well, how could you. If your whole goal is to. To open source all information to provide.

[Michael Duncan]

Answers and like so many AI companies in the US have during the Biden regime, you know, had to deal with. Okay, if, if we don't tell, have the model say, you know, this line on the current thing of whether trans rights or incorporate dei. Yeah, or incorporate dei, then there's going to be hell to pay. You know, like, like for so long, tech companies have had to live afraid of what the Biden administration would do. And now the Trump administration is the exact opposite. He said, you know, he wants a golden age. The golden age has begun. They're gonna let America just flourish.

[Josh Holmes]

Listen, I think it's a real opportunity. I'm not scared about this at all. I feel like we've got the best innovators anywhere on the planet.

[Comfortably Smug]

I mean, could you pick a better time to have a guy like Elon Musk who literally started a company that catches rockets, gets out of the air.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah.

[Comfortably Smug]

Like, inside our government?

[John Ashbrook]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

Well, like just Jamie Dimon said, he's our. He's our Einstein.

[Comfortably Smug]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

Like, this is, this is our. We're watching our Einstein.

[Comfortably Smug]

I like our odds work.

[Josh Holmes]

I like our odds. You know, and you got Zuck and everybody. Like, look, we. I feel good about that. Yeah, I feel good about those. I have no fear about all of it. A little bit of a recap here in the Variety section. The football situation. It's not exactly what the Variety program wanted to see in the Super Bowl. I understand we got a lot of Philly fans. I got a lot of them in my house. Unfortunately, they're very happy. Nearly like burned down their city. Can we, can we play clip five here? Spaghetti. Oh, Jesus. That was definitely a gun. So this is, this is a party post victory over the Washington commanders, where you clearly visible, if you're a YouTube watcher, is a gentleman pulling out what looks like a Glock, some kind of a nine millimeter. And firing three shots directly into the air like we're in Kabul.

[Michael Duncan]

And, and, and the reaction was, I think he shot a gun. All right, well, get me in the camera.

[Josh Holmes]

And then go birds. And then go birds. Like, I gotta tell you, fellas, those bullets are coming down somewhere.

[Michael Duncan]

That's the thing.

[Josh Holmes]

They don't erase in the atmosphere.

[Michael Duncan]

I mean, I could not be. I mean, I know our next guest is happy that the chiefs are there, but I'm so sick of the chiefs. I'm so sick of the chiefs. I'm done with them.

[Josh Holmes]

I know it. I know it. But, you know, it's just like it is what it is. We just have to do deal with it. Another year of disappointment for the fellas.

[Michael Duncan]

That's right, another year.

[Josh Holmes]

Well, next year it's going to be all purple.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

All purple with the Vikings.

[Comfortably Smug]

I don't know.

[Josh Holmes]

No, I don't.

[Comfortably Smug]

Don't get your hopes up.

[Josh Holmes]

I can't even say with a straight face. But we do have a great guest. And this guy, you're going to want to pay attention to each and every sentence that comes out of his mouth because your future, my future, the American economy's future, probably the global economy's future, relies on everything this guy has to say. Jason Smith. Well, this is an interview that we've been eagerly anticipating. Someone we follow very, very closely. I think you can make an argument one of the top five most important people on the globe right now when you consider what his responsibilities are. The Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith. How are you, sir?

[John Ashbrook]

It's great to be with you.

[Josh Holmes]

This is fantastic. You're here in studio.

[John Ashbrook]

I mean, there's no better place to be in Washington, D.C. so we're gonna.

[Josh Holmes]

Get down to business and we'll talk about tax reform and all the incredible things that you're responsible for here over the next year. But, you know, let's get a little. Get to know you a little bit, my boy. Yeah, look, I think in many ways the change in the Republican Party itself is reflected upon your chairmanship in many ways. And that you are a working class guy from the center of this country, the kind of people that put President Trump in office, not typically who, you know, historians think of as somebody who's like running the largest, most significant tax writing committee in history. But your colleagues chose you to do it. The speaker has great faith in you to do it. And you've been executing upon this for two years. You now have all the responsibility Responsibility of it. I mean, am I right about that?

[John Ashbrook]

We're busy.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, but you think, I mean, the constituency, you sort of reflect back an awful lot of what the change in the Republican Party is.

[John Ashbrook]

So it's very interesting. I revert back to two years ago when I was wanting to become the Ways and Means Chairman. The very first slide that I presented to the House Steering Committee when I was giving my pitch was a slide that said the Republican Party is the party of the working class and that we needed to make sure that the policies and the Ways and Means Committee address who we represent. And those are small business owners, farmers, working class families. I grew up in my congressional district, I'm seventh generation in my district and grew up in very working class family. My dad was in, was a preacher and an auto mechanic. My mother was a factory worker. I lived most of my life in a single wide trailer and then we upgraded to a double wide.

[Josh Holmes]

Those were heady days.

[John Ashbrook]

They were heady days. But you know, the farm that I live on, I purchased my first year in law school when my granddad died because his, his, him and his brothers didn't want to keep the property and I wanted to keep it in the family. And so I literally bought the farm by convincing a local banker before Dodd Frank was in existence that if you loan me enough money while I'm a first year law student with zero income, I will sell enough timber off the property every year to make the payments until I graduate law school and become gainfully employed.

[Josh Holmes]

It was like all on spec. It was like, I know I could.

[John Ashbrook]

Do this and I couldn't do it today under Dodd Frank, but I was able to keep our family farm 20 years ago. And so I, that's home. I raise, I raise beef cattle, white buffalo, I have sheep, donkeys, all named after Democrats.

[Michael Duncan]

Amazing.

[John Ashbrook]

So it's, it's, it's, it's where I go to, to get away. And it's, there's nothing better than like building fence, clean and brush working cattle. Sometimes it's easier to be around the cattle than some of the people in.

[Josh Holmes]

Washington almost all the time. I mean, you can clear the mechanism out there, right? And also I'm sure it gives you a ton of perspective when you're dealing like with big tax code type things and how it impacts the American people when you're living out there.

[John Ashbrook]

It does. The district that I represent is the heart of working class Americans. It is the ninth poorest congressional district out of 435. It is also the sixth most conservative out of 435. And so, by definition, the Republican Party is the party of the working class. I mean, our federal courthouse in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, is called the Rush Limbaugh Federal Courthouse. Yeah, we're pretty. We're pretty conservative, but it's so similar to Appalachia, where the Ozark Hills. I always tell people, you know, J.D. vance may be a hillbilly from Appalachia, I'm a hillbilly from the Ozarks, which is very similar. And it's why my very first committee hearing that I held as chairman of Ways and Means wasn't in Washington. I did it in Petersburg, West Virginia, at a lumber yard. It was called State of America's Economy, Appalachia. I wanted something very similar to the people who I represent in Missouri. And Appalachia is about as close as you can. And so we heard from, you know, real working families, coal miners, small business owners, and I still believe that that's the best committee hearing we've had.

[Josh Holmes]

Oh. I mean, it's a hell of a way to start. It is reflective of the change in the Republican Party, no question. I mean, a working class coalition that came together last November gave you all the majority. President Trump, the White House and the Senate. It's hard to argue with. I mean, we've definitely changed as a party. We're definitely representing that center of the country. I wonder, I mean, you had to have seen this transformation where you grew up, right? I mean, a lot of these rural places started out very blue and then just sort of started trending. And then all, you know, 2016 was a big line of demarcation in a lot of ways, where they became very red. Yours may have been a little ahead of that in some ways, but, like, were you into politics growing up? Like, did you watch all this stuff? How much did it affected that?

[John Ashbrook]

So I wasn't. I was raised in a family where my dad's family were all Republicans and my mom's was all Democrats. Democrats as of a Southern Democrat style. Yeah, they're now all Republicans now, but they. They raised me to vote for the person I thought I was a Democrat growing up, until I started looking at the platforms and I'm like, there's no way. This is terrible. And so that's what I think the majority of the people of. Of Missouri has been. Missouri used to be a swing state.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, very much so.

[John Ashbrook]

Obama barely lost the state to McCain, if that tells you anything. And we usually went the direction of the winner, but it's not a swing state. Any longer. Our congressional district is the most red congressional district in the entire state. And it used to be the most blue.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah. Wow. And that's kind of what I'm talking about. That shift, unmistakable state after state. I mean, it's not unique to Missouri, maybe higher margins in some ways, but that has been the case almost everywhere over the last 10 years, fellas.

[Michael Duncan]

Well, I mean, I think number one that is critical is for so long, and I think part of the reason the Trump movement took off so much is it was almost like the forgotten man in America, the silent majority, folks who felt that they were left behind. But when you have elected officials such as yourself who are representative of that group of the working class, seeing folks like that speaking for them draws them into the process of wanting to get out and vote, of wanting to be a part of this because they feel like one of us is now there. And that's critical, I think, especially to get things done is because now it's not these people in Washington are telling me this information. It's, oh, we've sent one of our own to Washington. That must have been a tremendous resource for you to, like, move the ball on this commitment.

[John Ashbrook]

It's been super important to be able to just represent the people who I serve and who I represent in. In the Ways and Means tax issues. I've been very supportive of. Of tax provision that some people get a little nervous about, such as the child tax credit. But our vice president's very supportive of the child tax credit.

[Josh Holmes]

So he's facing stuff.

[John Ashbrook]

Absolutely. The Republican Party created the child tax credit in 1996. It wasn't the Democrats, it was us. And so we need to own that. We are the party of families.

[Josh Holmes]

No question about that. Let's.

[John Ashbrook]

Let's encourage that.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, no, I.

[Jason Smith]

Look, it's really well said, Johnny, I gotta tell you. I mean, I love your background. I mean, there are guys who come to Washington and they literally don't want to talk about their humble upbringing, if you can believe that. I mean, there are guys who grew up in a trailer and they won't tell anybody because they spent so much time trying to be a part of the club. They want to forget about that pass. And I think it's such a mistake. And the fact that you say that right up front and that that informs who you are and what it is that you're doing gives everybody a lot of confidence that you're going to continue to carry those concerns all the way into the Ways and Means Committee. I mean, think about it from A single wide trailer to the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. You could make a movie about that.

[Michael Duncan]

Only in America.

[Josh Holmes]

America, yeah.

[John Ashbrook]

Any. But anybody can do that. I tell people with a quality education and determination there, the sky is the limit. My parents were the first to ever graduate high school. I was the first to graduate college in my family. My grandparents never even had running water. On the farm that I own, I actually had to drill the well in law school to have the first running water. I, I literally, at Christmas or anytime I worked on the family farm to wash my hands, I had to pump water outside in a cistern, and there was no indoor plumbing. And I didn't know that that was so unusual. But I'm so thankful. I'm so thankful and proud how I was raised. And it makes me a better representative because there's people like that still in our congressional district. When people ask me, what's the proudest thing that you've been able to accomplish as chairman, we reauthorized Title 4B. It's a huge child welfare program in the Ways and Means Committee that was signed into law this year. And there was numerous provisions that help. Help children who have been taken away from their families. But there's a provision in there that. That required that children cannot be taken away strictly on poverty. They shouldn't be taken away on poverty. Like, it's more important to keep that family intact than to put them in the system. Just because some people may think that they're being neglected, when in fact they're not. It's just that they live in poverty.

[Michael Duncan]

Right.

[Jason Smith]

Because family is actually wealth. And people in Washington, the elites, they.

[Josh Holmes]

May not see it that way, categorize.

[Jason Smith]

It may not look the same on a balance sheet, but family is wealth.

[Michael Duncan]

That's right.

[Jason Smith]

And having people together is just. I mean, that's a great thing that you did.

[Comfortably Smug]

You mentioned the child tax credit. I'm wondering if there's. There's other examples you have, you know, that impact, you know, working families in your district that you'd like to see reflected in what we do next when it comes to tax reform. Obviously, the, you know, President Trump's tax cuts were incredibly impactful for working families.

[Josh Holmes]

Across this country and also just totally mischaracterized by.

[Comfortably Smug]

Totally mischaracterized raised incomes by $5,000 for your average American and family. You know, the richest 1% in this country actually paid more in taxes as a result of Donald Trump's tax cuts that were supposed to be a giveaway to the rich as the Left said. So I'm curious, you know, what are the other opportunities you think we have this time around?

[John Ashbrook]

I think one of the, one of the provisions that's expiring at the end of this year is the guarantee deduction. It gets slashed into half. And 97% of the people who I represent, that's how they use to file their taxes, is the guaranteed deduction. If that gets slashed in half, that's a tax increase on every one of them. And these are working families. 91% of all Americans use the guarantee deduction. That's a big number. Only 9%. Only 9% of Americans use taxes. Where they itemize.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, you're itemizing and you know, typically that's done with very sophisticated, usually pretty wealthy people who are itemizing large charitable giving and that kind of thing. For the rest of us, it's this.

[John Ashbrook]

Is it, that's it. And so I like to point out that when you look at Trump's tax cuts in 2017, they tried to say it was for the wealthy and it didn't help the working class or the poor. Let me just tell you a fact. A family of four who make $60,000 or less, they paid zero in federal taxes under Trump tax cuts. My average median income in our congressional districts right in the low 40s. So that, that deeply affected the people who I represented by doubling the child tax credit from 1,000 to 2,000, doubling the guaranteed deduction. Those provisions alone really, really affect working class families.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, yeah, no question. Well, as long as we're talking tax reform, we might as well get into.

[John Ashbrook]

The meat of this.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah.

[Josh Holmes]

Look, in this town, you do a great job of talking about the impact that this has on the end user, the taxpayer. But, you know, you also are chairman of the most prestigious committee in the House of Representatives where there's a cottage industry, literally larger than a cottage, that is just constantly talking about process and talking about, you know, how are you going to go about doing these things. And it's just like one bill or two bills or whatever. I've heard you talk about your preference for a one bill. I'm wondering if, when you're formulating your opinion on how we ought to do this, how much of that is because you understand the importance of getting the tax piece done in good time in 2025 to not only just assure Americans that their taxes aren't going up, but markets, the larger American economy and somewhat the global economy.

[John Ashbrook]

One big beautiful bill is exactly what we're pushing every moment, every day. Let me tell you, if we do not finish our job, we will face the highest tax increase in the history of our country under a Republican House. Republican Senate and a Republican White House can't have it. And that cannot happen. Failure is not an option. I. I go to sleep thinking about tax policy. I think about tax policy while I'm sleeping. I think about it when I wake up, and.

[Josh Holmes]

So enjoyable night. Oh, it's so enjoyable.

[John Ashbrook]

That's probably why no one will date me.

[Josh Holmes]

So, I mean, I got to say.

[Michael Duncan]

It'S better you lose sleepover than me.

[Josh Holmes]

I was just thinking of the marginal tax rates.

[John Ashbrook]

That's exactly what people want whenever you go. Go to dinner. But I. It is. It is so crucial that the decisions we make right now are the right decisions. And history tends to repeat itself all the time. And I said early on that the last time two reconciliation bills were ever signed into law in the Same year was 1997, and I was wrong. 1997, we did pass two reconciliation bills, but it was on the same day, and it was under the same reconciliation. They bundled it together. So the last time that two different budget resolutions and reconciliation bills were signed into law in the Same year was 1986. And so. So I know the Republican House better than most. I've been here a while. I know my colleagues, and I'll tell you, it's a tough dynamic. To get one over the finish line is gonna require all hands on deck.

[Josh Holmes]

And you're talking about razor thin margins here anyway. I mean, regardless of everybody's intent, I mean, you can't lose anybody.

[John Ashbrook]

In a few weeks, it will be 217 to 215.

[Josh Holmes]

It's wild.

[John Ashbrook]

Right now, we're at 218 to 215. If one person dies, that's troubling. And think about it. I hate to say this, but if you look at the average Congresses, there's typically four people that die every Congress.

[Josh Holmes]

Wow.

[John Ashbrook]

And so don't assume we will always have a majority. And besides that, look, at 2017, if you talk to President Trump, one of the regrets that he may have had from TCJ was the fact we didn't do it soon enough.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah.

[John Ashbrook]

We did health care first. And I would argue that we waited too long as well. We passed it. It came into law like the week of Christmas in 2017. And ten and a half months later, we lost the House of Representatives.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah. It didn't have a time to sort of set into the marketplace. People didn't understand what they were getting out of it.

[John Ashbrook]

The economic tailwinds was not making effect, there are 26 million small businesses, businesses right now that are making their decisions of how to invest, whether to hire new employees, what directions are going to move their company. But they have the uncertainty of will their tax rate be 43.4% or will it be 23.4% with the 199, a small business deduction just going away.

[Michael Duncan]

I have a friend who is, who said this to me in conversation about a week ago that he has to place orders for goods that he's selling this year. He's got a small mom and pop shop in a strip mall. And he says, I don't know how to base these orders because I don't know if taxes are going up and my margins are gone. People are scared.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it goes to your point, Chairman. I mean, this is something that needs to be a no doubter by the time you get to the end of this year. I mean, people are planning all the way through. And the earlier you can get it done, obviously, the better economic impact.

[John Ashbrook]

One big, beautiful bill will.

[Comfortably Smug]

He's on message.

[Michael Duncan]

I love it.

[John Ashbrook]

It is, is the quickest, best approach to deliver as many wins that we can for the American people. It needs to have border, it needs to. It needs to have energy, it needs to have spending cuts, it needs to have the tax cuts. Let's get this done. If we keep our head down, work together, stay united, we could have this done by Memorial Day. There's no question that we can. And we need to deliver that for the American people. They're counting on us. Like they. The reason why we have the White House, the House and the Senate is because of President Trump. And President Trump campaigned on these priorities. Securing the border, making US Energy dominant, making sure permanency to his expiring tax provisions.

[Josh Holmes]

And then, yeah, the economic security message was central and a great contrast with the Biden administration that presided over record inflation and the rest.

[John Ashbrook]

Americans are struggling. They've seen inflation go up 21% in the last four years. And so it's cost more to just put food on their table, clothes on their backs, or gasoline in their cars. They need relief and they need certainty. And that's what Congress can do. If we stick together and work together, we have a smaller majority in the House of Representatives than the United States Senate has. And so usually the Senate is the problem. The obstacle is going to be the House. We have 218 senators in the House of Representatives because one person can kill the bill.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, well, we were talking about this a little bit earlier One of the things that sort of consternates us, maybe we're a little old school in this regard, but you hear out of some of your colleagues in the House, well, you know, all these tax cuts need to be paid for. Right. Whereas if you know, our view largely is that you either believe in a smaller government or, you know, people keep their own money, it's not the government's money.

[Jason Smith]

That's right. No, that's exactly right. Nobody needs to tell you that people work very, very hard for what they earn. And what's wild to me is that you have a handful of Republicans. I won't name names because you've got to work with all these guys in a very small margin.

[John Ashbrook]

We love them all.

[Josh Holmes]

We love every one of them except the diplomat.

[Jason Smith]

But all of a sudden you have a handful of Republicans who think that money that belongs to someone else is somehow their pay for. And now they want to raise taxes on small businesses. And so I wonder, do you feel like you can prevail upon those guys to sort of return to the conservative roots and want to give, let people keep more of what they earn, Let the small businesses keep more of what they earn?

[John Ashbrook]

You know, we have to. Last week I presented to the House Republicans, Republicans for the numerous time, I don't even know how many on, on the big beautiful bill, but what I was trying to hit on there was the revenue.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, the revenue goes up.

[John Ashbrook]

Yeah. As Republicans, we always say that we don't have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem in Washington. And if you look at the revenue to GDP for the last 50 years, it's right at 17, 17% revenue right now is 17.1% in the most recent year. So we don't have a revenue problem. Where the spending has been typically for the last 50 years, it was around 20, 20%. So we did spend more than revenue coming in. However, in the last five years it's 26% to GDP. And so so we know how we know the amount of revenues that's coming in under this tax code. There is no reason why you would pay for just extending current tax policy because our revenues are enough. The only way you would pay for it or allow them to expire is if you believe we have a revenue problem and that that we need to increase tax. And I haven't found a colleague that will say that we have a revenue problem. I challenged them.

[Josh Holmes]

They'll talk a lot about pay for.

[John Ashbrook]

It, but nobody will admit that that's absolutely the case. And so this is what we're working on, what we're navigating. I think that when you look at new tax cuts that you need to, you need to consider that. Yeah. Because that could affect the revenue that's coming in. But we know that this is current tax policy. We know what's working. We know how it's grown the economy. I mean, joint tax and cbo. So wrong. Oh, so wrong on revenue today.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah.

[John Ashbrook]

The revenue estimates, they're static. Yeah. It's just like I get a little wound up when we start talking about just like, you know, if you look at. It was projected that we would be at one and a half trillion dollars in deficit in revenues if we passed tcga. In fact, if you look at the years from what their projections were to what they are now, we had 1.6 trillion above their projections. That's a $3 trillion miss.

[Josh Holmes]

And they still get to score it the same way, though.

[John Ashbrook]

It just happened to be Republican tax policy. But if you look at the IRA, they scored it at 271 billion. And six and eight months later, they scored it at 700 billion. I mean, how do you get it? But it was Democrat tax Democrats.

[Josh Holmes]

It's funny how that works because, well, there's, as always, you know, there is more static because it's just raising tax.

[John Ashbrook]

They're going to give me terrible scores on everything now.

[Josh Holmes]

But I mean, I think, look, I think this is. The point is if you look at this stuff and I remember doing tax policy, Johnny and I were out in the hall and several different tax reforms trying to convince reporters that, you know, it turns out if you do things that are good for the economy and businesses and individuals react to it and increase GDP significantly, you're. Your revenue goes up as a result of that and the economy starts to boom. And pretty soon all of those static estimates that you have are meaningless because every time we've done it and the economy responds to it and you end up with more revenue than they project you absolutely do.

[John Ashbrook]

We have record revenues right now. We have record corporate tax receipts right now.

[Josh Holmes]

Think about that.

[John Ashbrook]

A 21% tax rate instead of a 35% tax rate.

[Josh Holmes]

Maybe it's because corporations are, are interested in doing business now with a 20%.

[John Ashbrook]

They're investing, they're growing, and they're coming back. There has not been one inversion of a US company since passage of TCJ. And when Obama was in office, there was 28 inversions. It shows our tax policy worked. Trillions of dollars came back to the United States. We need to make sure that's protected.

[Josh Holmes]

So let me just add, just structurally, I assume most of this as you're looking at it, is to ensure that we're protecting what we won in 2017 in terms of making sure those 2017 tax cuts don't expire and Americans don't have massive tax increases. And then obviously you heard the things on the, on the campaign trail that the President talked about. No tax on tips and things like that that are, you know, additive. And as you said, those are kind of trade offs that we're have to figure out how to incorporate. Clearly you're going to do your level best to get as much in that, if not all of it in that as you can. But this isn't like just throwing the baby out with a bathwater. You basically are working off a product. Correct?

[John Ashbrook]

I think it's pretty simple. You know, the President made it clear on the campaign trail, make permanent my expiring tax provisions and tcj, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security. What we would have to do there, you can't touch Social Security and reconciliation, but we can still provide tax relief for seniors. There is, there is numerous ways that we can use the code to help provide the tax relief that the President campaigned on. Also he wants to lower tax rates for companies that produce and manufacture in the United States. These are things that we have been researching for months now. I set up 10 different tax teams back in April, planning for a unified Republican. Last April, planning for a Republican unified government. House, Senate and White House. People thought I was crazy that, oh, there's no way that Republicans could have all three. And our tax teams went to more than 20 states, did over 120 different meetings across this country with real small business owners, real big businesses, real working families, real farmers and, and looked at the entire tax code, just not what's expiring, but the entire tax code because we're going to be touching things that was not just in TCJ as well because they need to be touched. We need to take away bad tax policy and replace it with good Republican tax policy. That would fit great in a big beautiful bill.

[Josh Holmes]

I like the sound. I mean, look, I think core to what you're talking about certainly was the case with TCJA and what you were talking about with the President's promises on Social Security. A big piece of this, just the economic security piece. Clearly seniors with inflation a huge concern. But really everybody, how much do you look at the tax code as an opportunity? Not just for like the short term tax relief component which is very, very important. But you're also incentivizing people to do like some financial planning here, make sure their retirement is taken care of. Like this is a piece that I don't think many people understand is a critical component to what it is that you guys do when you look at how to help your average American family.

[John Ashbrook]

Very critical. One of the big examples that jumped to mind is the death tax. The death tax gets slashed in half if we do nothing and it has a huge impact. I represent a very poor congressional district. Agriculture is the, the lifeblood of our area. And those family farms, it doesn't take much whenever you're land rich but cash poor to be over that exemption level as a farmer. And the worst thing you need is have a death in your family and you're going to have to that take out a second mortgage on your farm ground just for Uncle Sam. Those are real things that affect real Americans. You just look at and you guys.

[Josh Holmes]

In 17, I think you, you took it all the way up to like.

[John Ashbrook]

13 or it's right around 13 to 14,000 right now, which I guess, I.

[Josh Holmes]

Mean, well at least if, if I'm.

[John Ashbrook]

13, 14 million right now.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, right. So I mean you're basically protecting your district at that point.

[John Ashbrook]

So you look at an average Cotton Farm is 1500 acres. Farm ground in the boot hill of Missouri is about $10,000 an acre. And so 1500 acres at 10,000, you're over the exemption. And that's not counting your equipment like a cotton picker or a combine. These are real expenses. But that's the investment and that's what they've continued to grow for that family for years. But they may have to pay 40 plus percent tax upon death.

[Josh Holmes]

So I mean, look, these are all kind of different categories of things. You get Trump's promises, you're building off 2017 and then, you know, I feel for you on this, but the, you got the salt crew that you gotta deal with all the time.

[John Ashbrook]

We love the salt crew.

[Josh Holmes]

I'm sure he does. Not a big issue in Missouri, I.

[John Ashbrook]

Think, I think the average salt deduction in Missouri is like $1,211.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, right. So like for those of you who don't know what we're talking about here, I mean this is the state and local tax deduction. It applies to people who may very well be great red blooded Americans, but they happen to live in very liberal states with huge tax implications. And so they get hit because they can't deduct their state and local taxes. From their federal returns as they became accustomed to. So they would just continue to raise state and local taxes. This became an issue that was addressed in 2017. But we still have a majority that's built on a lot of folks from New York, California, places like that that you're going to have to kind of.

[John Ashbrook]

Deal with that in a razor thin majority. We have to deal with everyone, every single person. And this is a significant issue for my colleagues from New York, California and New Jersey. And we've been working with them aggressively and we got to, we got to thread the needle. We got to find a good compromise. The $10,000 salt cap that was put, was put in in 2017 created about $800 billion considered for pay force to help lower the individual rates for, for everyone because every individual rate was lowered. That expires to too. And so if we do not extend the Trump tax cuts, it'll be an unlimited cap on salt. So the people who hate salt will be giving the folks in New York and California, New Jersey, unlimited salt. And so it's super important that we all work together and find that, like, good common ground that's, that's in the middle and, and we'll get there. There.

[Comfortably Smug]

See, I like what he's doing there. I like what he's doing there.

[Josh Holmes]

No, it's just like this guy gets.

[Comfortably Smug]

You know, it's, it's like, look, if you don't work with me.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, right. You could, you could be really bad. Because I do have a point of view.

[Michael Duncan]

Yeah.

[John Ashbrook]

No, but failure is working with everyone.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah. Failure is not an option. To your point. I mean, this is. Look, this is not a time for rigid ideology when you're talking about thousands of dollars coming out of your average American. I mean, this is about figuring out how to protect the American people that put you there in the first place.

[John Ashbrook]

It is, it's so important. There's 207 million taxpayers in the United States. 207 million. There's a lot more people than that, but 207 million taxpayers, on average, if we allow these tax cuts to just expire, they will face a 22% tax increase, and they've already faced a 21% inflation tax over the last four years. You talk about cratering the economy. You talk about making sure that Republicans are never elected again.

[Josh Holmes]

Yep.

[John Ashbrook]

This is a great way to do it, is by not passing this bill. That's why I think about tax policy during the day, while I'm sleeping, when I wake up. So in one big, one big, beautiful. So my, my Roommate is Senator Mullen. I actually, he's my landlord. So I wake up making sure he hears one big beautiful bill every day.

[Comfortably Smug]

I've got one note, I've got one note on this. When you finally do all of this work and get everybody at the table and you got the New Yorks and the Californias and you fix the salt thing and, you know, no tax on tips. You get it back to the President and you say, Mr. President, I got a surprise for you.

[John Ashbrook]

No surprises for the President.

[Comfortably Smug]

You told me one big beautiful bill. I have brought you the most beautiful. And just one up. And I'll be like, oh, that's even better.

[Josh Holmes]

Give it some gold trim. Really emboss, that thing.

[John Ashbrook]

The President loves to talk tax policy. He does. And he. You never know when he's just gonna call you on your cell phone and you better answer. It's not good to miss it. But he really cares about delivering on these economic policies. It's in regards to salt. He's like, jason, fix it. Figure it out. And that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna fix it. We're gonna thread that needle and we're going to be able to create one very good, big, beautiful bill.

[Josh Holmes]

I gotta ask you this before we go because I think it's so hilarious. Having done this for 20 years and been a part of a lot of different tax debates, I always get a kick out of Democrats and the way that they approach these things. And it's. Anything that a Republican does is always a tax cut for the rich, no matter what, Right? And they're like, what we ought to do is raise taxes on the rich and we ought to focus on them paying their fair share. It's like a broken record. It's been doing 20 years, same talking point, no alteration every single time. And then every time in practice when they get into like what they would do, it's just increasing marginal individual rates and pass through LLCs as if any like ultra wealthy person. And I only bring this up because it's so rare that we get somebody who's like as steeped in the tax code as you are. You must get a kickback.

[John Ashbrook]

It's because it makes you fall asleep.

[Josh Holmes]

But that's the thing that always kills me is that they're always their answer to tax. Tax cuts or tax hikes on the rich is never actually anybody who's rich. You know, it's always individual. Like, how many W2 example, how many W2 earners, you know that are like the filthy rich, right? It just doesn't exist.

[John Ashbrook]

Well, this is the prime example. If you look at all the expiring provisions of TCGA, 70 are individual.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah.

[John Ashbrook]

70 of all the expirations are individual. And of that 70%, two thirds are focused on people who make less than $400,000 a year. That affects real Americans. And I, when I hear them talk about everyone pay their fair share. Millionaires, billionaires pay their fair share. I always ask, what is the fair share? Is it a hundred percent of what they make? Like what?

[Josh Holmes]

Meanwhile, the guys.

[John Ashbrook]

But if you took all the, the, all the money from every billionaire in the United States, you would fund government for like, eight months. Like, it just, it's, it's almost impossible.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah. Meanwhile, you're like, what, what is the rich and the guys from New York are all hiding their people behind? I don't know, somebody else. Listen, I can't thank you enough for coming in and sharing, imparting some of this wisdom with us. Obviously, you are the man in the hot seat and delivering here for the whole country. And listen, we got a lot of faith and trust in what you guys are doing. Your team is terrific. Keep telling us what we need to know as we go along, because I think I heard you the other day say this is gonna be really hard. And I agree it's gonna be really hard. But it is a no fail operation.

[John Ashbrook]

Failure is not an option. But it is going to be the hardest thing that we do this Congress, and it's gonna require all hands on deck, everyone working together until we get the votes and have it across the finish line.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah.

[John Ashbrook]

And we'll do it.

[Josh Holmes]

Yep. We'll get it done. Jason Smith, everybody.

[Jason Smith]

I mean, he's just brilliant. And there is no better person to be in charge of writing this than someone from a poor district in the Midwest.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, I mean, he's, that's what he said. Like, at the top. He's perfect. He's indicative of the change within the Republican Party and the way that he looks at economic incentives to represent this country. And I think we see that happening in the tax. So it's nice to see somebody, by the way, who has that sort of, like, Midwestern sensibility about them that also understand that, like, the goal of the government is not to just get more revenue from American taxpayers. Right. I mean, you hear it. We talked about this a little bit with them where it's like, oh, a new thing in the Republic. You gotta pay for tax cuts. Okay, all right, so let me get this straight. What I want is to make sure. That we never decrease the size of government. I just want to make sure that we have more funding for that operation because that's what that is. Don't let any conservative ever tell you that. That's not the debate when they're like, well, I'm fiscally conservative, so I want you to pay for tax cuts. What that means is that they're very comfortable with the size and the scope of this government. They just want to make sure that they reduce the annual deficit by having you pay more to fund the liabilities that we have as this country. That's what that is. This guy gets that joke and he's selling it. I think he's making forward progress on it, don't you guys?

[Michael Duncan]

I mean, that's the thing is everything he said was common sense. He gets it. He knows what the stakes are. I think he gets the job done.

[Comfortably Smug]

Well, yeah. And he has to have that sort of mentality because we got a razor thin majority and he's got a lot of constituencies with divergent opinions on a lot of different component parts of this overall deal. But I think he's got the right personality to deliver on it.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah, it seems like it, you know, Right. I mean, like, Serious guy unquestionably knows his stuff. Unquestionably. But is not like inherently a divisive figure who's looking to pick fights with people. Like, he's taken input. He's trying to twist dials to reflect people's intentions because he's got to run the table. You know, it's like that old game of hearts where you need all the hearts at the end. Yeah. Like he's got to shoot the moon on the thing.

[Jason Smith]

That's right. He's got to do it.

[Josh Holmes]

But we ought to have him shoot the moon because as he said, failure is not an option.

[Michael Duncan]

That's right.

[Josh Holmes]

Great, great stuff here on the Variety program. You're not going to get this stuff anywhere else. You just don't get it.

[Michael Duncan]

Nope.

[Josh Holmes]

You know. You know, I have a lot of grab assery and everything else, but, like, that's some stuff.

[Comfortably Smug]

Every once in a while we let you look through the crystal ball of the future on things like AI or tax policy. And we're a serious program.

[Josh Holmes]

Yeah. Well, I mean, we have smarts.

[Comfortably Smug]

We're smart.

[Josh Holmes]

We have some smarts.

[John Ashbrook]

Not dumb.

[Josh Holmes]

Not dumb. Not like they say.

[Comfortably Smug]

Not like they say.

[Josh Holmes]

Fellas, I think we did it.

[Michael Duncan]

I think so. Absolute banger of an episode. Gentlemen, again, thank you so much, Chairman Smith, for all that knowledge. I learned so much and thank you, dear listener. Remember, like and subscribe if you have not yet. So until next time, minions, keep the faith, hold the line and own the libs. We'll see you Thursday. Stay Ruthless.

[Josh Holmes]

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[Comfortably Smug]

But not your carrier, just switch to T Mobile.

[Josh Holmes]

You can keep your phone, keep your.

[Comfortably Smug]

Number and we'll help pay it off up to $800 per line.

[Josh Holmes]

You can also use our savings calculator.

[Jason Smith]

To compare our plans and streaming benefits.

[Josh Holmes]

Against Verizon and AT&T.

[John Ashbrook]

So switch and keep your phone, keep.

[Comfortably Smug]

Your number and keep more of your moolah.

[Josh Holmes]

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