Ben Shapiro (44:33)
So, you know, again, he is right about this. The NATO chief, Mark Rudy, he says this is a totally responsible decision by President Trump. You called me on Thursday that you had taken a decision, and a decision is that you want Ukraine, what it needs to have to maintain to be able to defend itself against Russia, but you don't want Europeans to pay for it, which is totally logical. And this is building on the tremendous success of the NATO summit. That, of course, is exactly, exactly right. Admiral James Stavridis, who's certainly been a very outspoken critic of the president, even he is admitting that this is the right move by President Trump. What I would like to see is a provision for the United States to send more Harpoon missiles to go after the Black Sea fleet, more high Mars surface to surface weapons that can reach deep behind Russian lines, more offensive cyber capability, and Kate, maybe some more F16 aircraft, all of which are very capable offensively. I think that is what could move Putin to the negotiating table, which is what we want on our side. So, yeah, again, President Trump living in the world of reality and responding to what is happening in the world. Okay. Meanwhile, it seems that the tariffs, President Trump's tariffs have started to have some actual impact on the inflation rate, which of course was predictable. Again, the laws of economics are not easily bucked. We were told for years that if Democrats just spent endlessly that they could continue to do that and inflation would never catch up. This was modern monetary theory, which was promoted by Senator Elizabeth Warren, for example, and it wasn't true. It just had no basis in reality. And then we got hit with 40 year highs in inflation. Well, we've also been told that because the inflation rate right now is not spiking because of, because of the tariffs. That means that maybe tariffs don't actually increase inflation. No, they do. It's just there are countervailing factors. The final inflation rate on prices is the confluence of a bunch of things. So you can have price inflation from the tariffs, but you can also have a bunch of housing that gets unstuck and the prices go down. And when you aggregate all that together, it doesn't look like a tremendous increase in inflation. However, inflation did heat up to 2.7% in June, according to the Labor Department. That is faster than May's increase of 2.4% and in line with expectations for economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal. Core inflation that excludes food and energy was 2.9%. Prices of household furnishings and supplies rose by 1% in June, according to the Wall Street Journal. Compared with May, prices of video and audio products rose 1.1%. Apparel prices rose 0.14%. Prices of new cars fell 0.3%. And that is because people are just buying fewer cars. When people buy fewer things, the price goes down month over month. Consumer prices rose 0.3% in June compared with May, as economists had expected. So this would be the reason why Jay Powell over the Federal Reserve has not been decreasing the interest rates because he's been afraid that if he does, he is going to fuel another inflation based cycle. Now a lot of those costs are being passed on directly to consumers. Obviously this is what tariffs do, right? Prices go up, you pay more for the product. Goldman Sachs economists estimate U. S consumers will end up paying 70% of tariffs. Direct costs. Walmart said in May that it would be forced to raise prices. Ralph Lauren has said it was considering raising price increases as well. Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said on Friday continued tariff threats make it harder to figure out where inflation is headed, he said. The more we keep adding things to the mix and make it harder to figure out, like are prices going to be rising or not, the more it's just throwing more dirt back into the air. And this is why the Federal Reserve is being quite cautious at this point. And again, a lot of this stuff is in the air. The EU right now is threatening retaliatory tariffs if no deal is met with the United States here. Now, again, I think that the administration, particularly Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant, is going to be negotiating a bevy of deals over the course of coming weeks to avoid in August 1st actual snap into place of large scale tariffs on many of our major trade partners. I don't think that's something that the treasury secretary wants. And I think that if the inflation rates increase and if the markets start to roil, President Trump will respond to that incentive structure as he historically has. Right. The negative take on President Trump's trade policy is the supposed taco of it. Right. The Trump always chickens out, but the actual way to read that is President Trump responds to incentives in the real world. That's not chickening out. That's called finding new data and then responding to it. However, the EU is threatening retaliation. According to Politico, the European Union is looking at targeting 72 billion euros in U.S. goods in a second round of trade countermeasures, including aircraft, cars and car parts, according to a list seen by Politico on Monday. The bulk of those exports targeted are industrial goods totaling 65.7 billion euros. 6.4 billion euros in agricultural products would also be hit if EU countries back the new retaliatory tariffs, and that includes bourbon whiskey. Despite intense lobbying from France and Ireland to shield the drinks sector from President Trump's reprisals. The biggest line item is aircraft and aircraft parts, with tariffs set to target almost 11 billion euros of U.S. exports, which of course would mostly strike Boeing. So again, everybody is ready to go weapons up. And so it's not as though things couldn't go wrong here. They, they could. I mean, this is why we need to come to some trade deals and write fast. The goal here should be free our trade with our allies, and it should be to box in places like China. And, and this is also why it's a mistake right now to target Fed Chair Jerome Powell. You can agree that he's always late, but the reality is that he should not be lowering the interest rates while the inflation rate ticked up this month. That is, that would be a mistake. But according to Axios, President Trump's war on the Federal Reserve is taking a more concrete, legally actionable form, putting the central bank's independence in the crosshairs. For months, President Trump's exasperation with Fed Chair Jerome Powell over not cutting interest rates has taken the form of increasingly angry comments and social media posts. Now Trump appointees are trying to lay out legal predicates to fire Powell for cause. Specifically at the Fed's $2.5 billion headquarters renovation project has included changes not approved by a federal planning authority or that Powell lied to Congress about the project. That was the subtext of a memo from the Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vogt. Hal denied to Congress last month, the project contains several luxury features. Votes Letters suggested the Fed had changed plans that had already been blessed by the National Capital Planning Commission in 2021. Some members of the NCPC, the National Capital Planning Commission, have been quick to toe the White House's line on the Fed project. The new NCPC chair Will Scharve said in an NCPC meeting last week the Fed project includes serious deviations from plans the NCPC had approved. It looks like a Taj Mahal near the National Mall, said fellow Trump appointed commissioner Michael Blair. Now, again, I think that this is a gigantic mistake in the markets. This would be a big mistake in the markets. Firing Jerome Powell over a construction project at the Federal Reserve as though what Jerome Powell's chief goal is is to build Mar a Lago at the Federal Reserve. What to? To what end? Why would he do that? In order to enrich the building? I mean, unless he's connected with the contractors in some way, which I have no evidence of, and I'm not going to speculate that that's what he's doing. Because again, I don't like to speculate in the absence of evidence is like, what would the motivation be here? I'm making a big, beautiful federal building that I'm not going to be occupying in a year because Jerome Powell's term expires. That makes no sense. If the president were to fire Jerome Powell, that would be a mistake. Not because I think Jerome Powell's great at his job. I don't. But because that would send a signal to markets that President Trump is intervening in the interest rate discussion directly in order to facilitate certain numbers, certain things he wants to do that are not necessarily in consonance with the Federal Reserve's actual mission at this point. So again, things could go wrong. I've said for a long time the biggest threat to the Trump administration is not his immigration policy or his foreign policy or his domestic policy, other than these things called tariffs that could theoretically, really, really harm his economic policy. It's all about the economy. If the economy stays good, Trump will be popular. If the economy goes wrong, Trump will not be popular. It is, in fact, that simple. And he's doing a lot of great things with regards to cutting the size and scope of government. So yesterday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for President Trump to shrink the Education Department. Of course, this is how they should have ruled. They ruled 6 to 3 that the Trump administration can start mass layoffs at the Education Department, halting a lower court ruling that had blocked the White House's plans. And again, the President of the United States is the head of the federal executive branch. The Education Department is underneath him. He, of course, should be able to fire who he wants inside the executive branch. The order, according to the Wall Street Journal, clears the way for education secretary Linda McMahon to. To weaken the department from within. She has said she is leading the agency's final mission while acknowledging that eliminating it altogether would require the approval of Congress, something that political observers say is unlikely. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the court's decision, quote, hands the executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them. Carry them out. That's ridiculous. I'm sorry. That's just ridiculous. The. The Congress does not have the ability to run the executive branch in terms of how the law is actually implemented. That is a struggle between Congress and the executive branch. And the executive branch can fire whomever they please. The notion that Sonia Sotomayor gets to sit there and tell the executive branch that it must rehire x number of people in order to effectuate this law is like that. That. No. The answer is no. That's not how this works. The Supreme Court majority said differently. There's an unsigned order. Again, the three liberal justices were the ones who dissented. Not a shock. The lower court rulings had forced the Education Department to pause its plans to scale back. And so there's been a lot of back and forth with these particular employees. But this is the right decision by the Supreme Court. And by the way, when you talk about the brokenness. Right. Who I mentioned a little bit early, you know, people who think the institutions are broken. Our education system is completely broken, totally broken. It needs to be revamped on a dramatic scale. I mean, just an indicator of how broken our education system is. So the National Education association is so far to the left. I mean, so incredible. And they. They hold so Many American students as hostages to their bizarre agenda. Believe it or not, the Anti Defamation League, of which I am no fan, I think the ADL does a lot of terrible work. I think some of the things they do are good and I think a lot of the things they do are politically motivated by leftist principles. However, the NEA is so far to the left, it will not even use the ADL. The left wing ADL's material on anti Semitism and Holocaust education. That's how far to the radical left the NEA is. The ADL isn't far enough to the radical left. For the nea, there's a member backed measure to stop the NEA from using the ADL's Holocaust education. Now listen, I can argue with the ADL's standards for Holocaust education what they're actually teaching. I would do. So from a right wing perspective, the reason the NEA is trying to stop that is because they actually just don't like Jews. In a general way. The NEA is so far to the radical left, they've signed on to the Zorn Mamdani radicalization of the Democratic Party. In a letter signed by 378 Jewish organizations, the group said the NEA measure would effectively boycott ADL's widely respected anti bias and Holocaust education curriculum. Again, this is not a defense of the adl. It's pointing out how insane the NEA is. Why? Well, because the NEA is saying that you can't have this sort of education because of Gaza. That's how wild. So when the Trump administration announces that it is going to break apart the education system that is essentially just federal and state subsidies to unions like the nea, all I can do is cheer. And meanwhile, the administration continues to find new ways of effectuating its immigration agenda. According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration has declared that immigrants who arrived in the United States illegally are no longer eligible for a bond hearing as they fight deportation proceedings in court. In a July 8 memo, Todd Lyons, acting director of ICE, told officers such immigrants should be detained for the duration of their removal proceedings, which could take months or years. Which of course makes sense. Typically, illegal immigrants have been allowed to request a bond hearing before an immigration judge. But Lyons said no, because what we're going to do is there will be a bond hearing. If anybody's released, they just disappear. Obviously, in rare exceptions, immigrants may be released on parole, but that decision will be up to an immigration officer, not a judge, he wrote. The provision is based on a section of immigration law that says unauthorized immigrants shall be detained after their arrest, Lyons wrote that the policy is expected to face legal challenges. Of course. Of course. The sweeping new detention policy comes days after Congress passed a spending package that will allocate $45 billion over the next four years to lock up illegal immigrants for civil deportation proceedings. Now, again, the goal here is to make it harder to be an illegal immigrant in the United States absconding from American law, right? To stop people from being arrested. Then they go for a bond hearing, then a friendly judge just decides to jailbreak everybody, and then they end up back in Chicago hiding from ICE Again. That is the idea. Mark Recording, executive director of the center for Immigration Studies, says detention is absolutely the best way to approach this. If you can do it, you're pretty much guaranteed to be able to remove the person if there's a negative finding, if he's in detention. Now, of course, the, the left is going nuts over all of this. You know, Gavin Newsom for. Again, it is amazing to me that Gavin Newsom thinks he's a presidential candidate, but apparently he does. Gavin Newsom, he. He's trying to make the case that illegal immigration on a wide scale is necessary to the American economy.
