Transcript
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These are questions that take cultures thousands of years to answer. During Answer the Call, I take questions from people just like you about their problems, opportunities, challenges, or when they simply need advice. How do I balance all of this Grief, responsibility? How do you repair this kind of damage? My daughter, Mikayla guides the conversations as we hopefully help people navigate their lives. Everyone has their own destiny. Everyone. President Trump met with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday. He's meeting with Zelensky and European leaders at the White House today. The Ukraine war, which has been going on for 11 years, maybe you've forgotten, it's been going on forever. It might finally end in a peace deal. Except that the aforementioned Alaska summit raised more questions than answers. President Trump warmly embraced Putin on the tarmac. But then the summit did not end in the ceasefire that Trump went in demanding, and the summit ended abruptly. Everyone actually left before lunch. But before they all left, the two leaders held a press conference in which they sounded as upbeat as they could be. Putin and Trump once again praised each other. And Putin claimed that they'd reached an agreement before Trump said that they didn't. And now everyone is confused. But the fact that everyone's confused should not be confusing, as it apparently is to the entire media and the political class, because everyone's scratching their heads. What did the summit mean? Why? What is that? What happened? I don't even know what to think about it. If you've paid any attention at all to the president over the past decade, you will notice that, unlike most politicians, confusion is precisely the context in which Trump loves to negotiate. Michael? I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. The designer babies have officially arrived. I've been hearing about potential designer babies in the future since I was a kid, since biology class in the seventh grade. They're here. You can pick everything about your kid. This has really dark implications for all your other kids, but you can pick everything. Full genome sequencing, it'll only cost you 2,500 bucks. You gonna do it? What's it mean? We'll get into that with the founder in a moment. First, I want to tell you about Chevron.
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Speaking of dinosaur juice, we turn up to Alaska. The much anticipated Trump, Putin meeting face to face on US soil. Liberals are furious about this. And Trump's consistent critics on the right, they're inconsistent in their support of Trump, but they're consistent in just always trying to take cheap jabs. They're furious, too. Why? Here are the reasons. Here's what happened. Here's the. Too long, didn't read brief of the Alaska summit. President Trump went in saying, we need a ceasefire if there are gonna be further negotiations. He. He left without the ceasefire, but saying there are future negotiations. Trump is not threatening any further sanctions on Russia. There are already sanctions on Russia. He's not threatening further sanctions on Russia and he seemed friendly to Putin. That's on the one side. That's what the libs are furious about. Then there's something kind of strange, which is that Trump seems to be insisting on security guarantees for Ukraine, so that any deal to end the war in Ukraine will involve security guarantees like we have with NATO, with NATO, if a NATO member is attacked. Article 5 of NATO says that all the other NATO countries are going to go in and defend that country as if it were attack on their own countries. So we're going to have security guarantees in Ukraine, but Ukraine's not going to be in NATO, but we're going to act as though it is in NATO. And Putin's kind of happy because he didn't insist on a ceasefire. But. But what. What is happening here? Okay, first I wanna take on the critics, people saying that this is a terrible strategy. Trump shouldn't have invited Putin to America, to Alaska, which is right next to Russia. Trump shouldn't have warmly embraced him. He shouldn't have literally rolled out the red carpet. He shouldn't have spoken in a diplomatic way. He shouldn't. He shouldn't. He shouldn't. Okay. I said earlier, the war has been going on for 11 years. We've been adversaries with Russia for 80 years. At this point, my first question to all of Trump's critics and whiners and complainers. What is the evidence that the opposite strategy has worked? What is the evidence? Trump rolled out the red carpet. Obama would never have done that. McCain not McCain. Biden never would have done that. McCain also talked tough on Russia. So. And so would never have done that. Okay, did the Obama strategy work? We'll get to the Obama strategy in a second. I don't think it worked. Did the Biden strategy work? I don't think so. The definition of madness is pursuing the same thing again and again and again and expecting different results. Even get down to the clarity versus confusion point. There were clear goals for this meeting. We need a ceasefire, we need this, we need that. And we didn't get them. And yet we are. Trump is kind of doubling back and we are getting more negotiations and Zelensky's coming to the White House. And what? Well, sure. You got really clear red lines under Barack Obama. Obama was the president of the red line. Remember, he drew the red line and then his enemies crossed the red line, and then he didn't do anything about it, and he looked ridiculous and America looked weak. But there was a lot of clarity in Obama's negotiations with Trump. It is confusing. I'm a big Trump supporter, but it's very confusing. People don't know what to make of this. I think the takeaway is just that Trump loves to negotiate from confusion. I'll give you a clear example of this. Look at how Trump is negotiating all the trade deals. Think of all the chaos that's ensued, the volatility to the bond markets, to the stock market generally. Look at Liberation Day. He institutes these blanket tariffs on the entire world. And what does he base the tariffs on? Does he base the tariffs on really clear economic factors that have a really clear relationship to the health of our trade relationship? Things like, I don't know, a nation illegally subsidizing its steel industry, like China did, or a nation stealing intellectual property, like China does, or a nation devaluing its currency, like China does, manipulating its currency? No, Trump tied the tariffs to trade deficits, maybe the most dubious economic indicator. Because trade deficits can be bad, trade deficits can be neutral, trade deficits can be good. It's totally unclear. And for certain nations that just can't possibly produce things that we're going to buy in large quantities, the trade deficits don't really mean much of anything. What's our trade deficit with Mauritius? What's our trade deficit with some tiny little countries? Why does that matter? Some people said, Trump's a madman, he's economically illiterate, he has no idea what he's doing. And yet, look, at the conclusion of all those trade deals, the bond market recovered just fine, the stock market recovered just fine. We didn't get the massive inflation that all the panic ends were predicting. And we got really good trade deals. We got a great trade deal with Europe, which was not even primarily about the trade. It was mostly about the zillions of dollars of investment that they were promising to us all in exchange for basically nothing. Good trade deals with the United Kingdom, good trade deals all over the world, China all over the world. I think that those two facts are not disconnected. I think the fact that Trump's negotiations were extremely confusing, and he focused in on the most dubious and obscure economic marker, namely deficits, I think that was part of the point because it meant that his adherents thought he was a crazy person or he didn't know what he wanted, and they certainly didn't know what he wanted, and it just gave him the upper hand. I think that's how he does this. And you can say, well, I disagree with that strategy. I don't like that strategy. But it's clearly his strategy. He loves negotiating from confusion. And so if he makes a bunch of demands and dangles out a bunch of promises, some of which conflict, and he's talking to Putin in one way, and he's talking to Zelensky in the other way, and he's talking to Europe in another way, and then he just brings them all together. I think Trump's idea is, if I win them all over to my side, then I'll be able to work it out in the end, and not everybody's gonna get what they want, but I'll be able to work something out. I think that's clearly what's going on. And for all of Trump's critics, the consistent malcontents on the right, and especially for his critics on the left, I would just say, look, he's been pursuing this kind of strategy for 10 years. It's worked the vast majority of the time, almost all the time. What's your evidence that it's not gonna work now? Is this another. The walls are closing in. The sky's falling. Oh, no. This is it. They've got him now. It's Mueller time. Give me a break. Now. They did hold this press. It was weird. I mean, they ended the thing early. They didn't go to lunch. They still held this press conference. There was a very, very telling moment at the press conference as to how things are gonna go moving forward. Hold on one second. I have a lot to say. But first, go to leaffilter.com it's summer. You've been enjoying the sunshine. And then what? Your gutters are quietly filling with debris. This summer, you can relax knowing that your home is protected. With Leaffilter, America's number one gutter protection company, you will avoid costly damage. You'll never have to clean your gutters again. Do you know how many times I've cleaned my gutters in my house zero times and I realized oh yikes, this is not good and this can lead to foundation problems and this is really really bad. I need a better solution now. 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But here is the triumphant press conference between Putin and Trump today when President Trump saying that if he was the president back then, there will be no war.
