Ep. 2127 - Trump Takes A WRECKING BALL To The Federal Government!
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January 29, 2025
TLDR: Trump announces a pause on federal spending not aligning with his priorities, White House offers buyout to federal employees who don't want to enforce Trump agenda, and Karoline Leavitt makes her debut as press secretary.

In episode 2127 of the podcast titled "Trump Takes A WRECKING BALL To The Federal Government!", the discussion focuses on President Trump's recent proposals that aim to pause federal spending aligned with his stated priorities. This episode breaks down how these actions are perceived, their potential impacts on federal employees, and the ideological clash between the current administration and its critics.
Key Highlights and Core Discussion Topics
Pausing Federal Spending
- Proposal Overview: President Trump announced a pause on approximately $3 trillion in federal spending. This strategy is intended to review spending allocations, ensuring they align with presidential and congressional priorities.
- Exclusions: Mandatory spending (e.g., Medicare, Social Security) remains unaffected. The proposal particularly targets discretionary spending tied to non-essential government programs.
- Objective: The objective is to reassess financial assistance programs and other discretionary spending to eliminate what Trump refers to as "wasteful" expenditures, including funding for NGOs promoting leftist agendas.
Federal Employee Buyout Offer
- Deferred Resignation Plan: Trump’s administration has proposed a buyout option for federal employees who do not support the new agenda, allowing them to resign with financial compensation.
- Anticipated Impact: It's estimated that 5-10% of federal workers might accept this buyout, potentially saving around $100 billion.
- Response from Unions and Critics: Unions and left-leaning critics have expressed concerns this move could lead to a significant loss of experienced federal employees.
New White House Press Secretary’s Debut
- Karoline Leavitt’s First Press Conference: The episode features the introduction of the new press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who emphasized transparency and a shift towards engaging new media rather than traditional outlets.
- Policy Changes in Communication: Leavitt’s administration indicated a more aggressive stance in holding media accountable for misinformation, which contrasts with the previous administration's approach.
Legal and Constitutional Context
- Impoundment Authority: The episode delves into Trump's use of impoundment authority, which allows the president to delay or withhold spending appropriated by Congress. Historical references illustrate past presidents, such as Nixon and Johnson, utilizing similar powers.
- Ongoing Legal Challenges: Legal experts expect various challenges to arise from Trump’s spending freeze, particularly questions surrounding the constitutional limits of such executive powers.
Reactions from Political Opponents
- Democrat Response: The episode points out how Democratic politicians are framing Trump’s spending freeze as a chaotic and unconstitutional move. Criticism includes accusations of undermining citizen welfare through cuts in federal assistance.
- Media Coverage: The podcast discusses how mainstream media is reacting, often depicting the administration's actions as harmful and extreme.
Broader Implications and Reflections
- Cultural and Political Climate: The discussion reflects on the deep divides in American political culture, emphasizing how Trump's administration strategy differs significantly from past administrations.
- Future Outlook: Speculation regarding the impact of these actions not only on federal spending but also on the upcoming elections and the overall political landscape is highlighted.
Conclusion
This episode of the podcast compellingly articulates the intersection of Trump's executive actions and the challenges faced by his administration from various sectors, including the media and political opponents. The conversation provides listeners with a nuanced understanding of the administrative changes under Trump, the implications of federal spend freezes, and the ideological battles that accompany drastic political shifts.
Key Takeaways
- Trump's actions are a significant departure from established norms in federal spending management.
- The implications of his proposed buyout will potentially reshape the federal workforce.
- Karoline Leavitt’s approach marks a noteworthy shift towards engaging with alternative media outlets.
- Questions surrounding the legality of Trump's executive powers are likely to feature prominently in upcoming legal battles.
This episode serves as an essential listen for those looking to navigate the tumultuous waters of U.S. politics under President Trump's administration.
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Well, President Trump is keeping his promises. He's moving fast and he is breaking things in historic, amazing, amazing ways. So yesterday, the president of the United States via his office of management and budget put forward a proposal that would temporarily pause $3 trillion in spending from the federal government.
That temporary pause is in fact only temporary much of that spending will go for. But the idea here is to review all of the spending the federal government is doing any non mandatory basis. So there's a lot of mandatory spending in the federal budget that includes Medicare, Social Security, many aspects of Medicaid. All of those things are going to continue.
So are various payments to law enforcement bodies, to defense. All that stuff is going to continue. What this is meant to do is allow a pause for the various branches of the federal government, which are under the control of President Trump, to actually look at the spending and ensure that they are spending in accordance with the President's wishes and with the wishes of Congress. So there's a big freak out that's happening today. We'll go through it. By the left, by the media, claiming that President Trump is doing something deeply unconstitutional, fascistic. Here's the thing.
you do not get to expand the centralized power of the executive branch for full on a century controlling every aspect of Americans' lives, spending seven trillion dollars. And then when your political opponents take over and they use that power in order to cut back the amount of power the executive branch will actually be exerting in Americans' lives, you don't actually get to then claim that he is a dictator. You don't get to do that.
You break it. You bought it. You built this thing and then you can't be shocked when the person who takes over decides he's going to use the instruments that you created in order to actually downgrade the amount of impact that those instruments have on Americans every day live. So yesterday.
The executive office of the president, the office of management and budget, led by Matthew Vaith, who's the acting director for the moment, put out a memo saying, quote, the American people elected Donald J. Trump to be president of the United States and gave him a mandate to increase the impact of every federal taxpayer dollar. In fiscal year 2024 of the nearly $10 trillion the federal government spent more than $3 trillion was federal financial assistance such as grants and loans.
Career and political appointees in the executive branch of a duty to align federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through presidential priorities. Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending wokeness and weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government and making America healthy again.
The use of federal resources to advance a Marxist equity, transgenderism, and Green New Deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve. In other words, we got elected and now we are going to implement the priorities of the American people. This memorandum, according to the OMB, requires federal agencies to identify and review all federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities consistent with the president's policies and requirements. By the way,
This does not include assistance provided directly for individuals. Nothing in this memo in the memo itself should be construed to impact Medicare or Social Security benefits. So all the lies you're now hearing from the media suggesting that individual benefits from these mandatory social spending programs are going to be impacted by the OMB order that's false. It's a lie and it's being promoted by people who are lying to you.
According to
All activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders included but not limited to financial assistance for foreign aid. Non-governmental organizations at DEI will gender ideology and the Green New Deal. One of the great boondoggles in American and public life is, in fact, non-governmental organizations that are being paid by the federal government. Grants that are going to left-wing social organizations on a non-profit basis but are being funded by American taxpayer dollars.
No later than February 10, 2025, according to this memo, agencies shall submit to OMB detailed information on any projects, programs or activities subject to this pause. Each agency must pause, issuance of new awards, disbursement of federal funds under all open awards, other relevant agency actions. OMB may grant exceptions, allowing federal agencies to issue new awards or take other actions on a case-by-case basis. So again, the lie that this is sort of a blanket nuking of all federal spending.
Wood that at Warsaw, it is in fact not so. The reality is it is a temporary pause that can be relieved by the OMB giving the ability to give the grants. So what is this? It is a way of taking a harder look at the federal spending that has been going on and that has grown wildly out of control and in which your taxpayer dollars are being used to subsidize groups that, for example, sponsor illegal immigrants.
or go toward social engineering of the left, transgenderism. That is the explicitly stated policy of the OMB. Now, does the president have this authority? Well, the president has always had something called impoundment authority. The question is, what is the scope of that authority? So, what exactly is impoundment? Impoundment includes any executive actions with hold or delay the spending of appropriated funds is according to the Cyclopedia of Congressional Budget Law and the Congressional Research Service.
Impoundment goes all the way back to the Jefferson administration, in which Thomas Jefferson decided that he didn't want to use a particular amount of money that was allocated to the executive branch to buy a certain type of gunboat, but it was also used under the LBJ administration. According to the Congressional Research Service, President Johnson made broader use of his power to impound by ordering that a furlal of billions of dollars is spending during the Vietnam War in an effort to restrain inflationary pressures in the economy.
Richard Nixon, when he was elected president, attempted to use impoundment authority to stop a wide variety of spending programs that were pushed forward by a democratic at Congress. Eventually, the administration would announce major impoundment actions affecting a wide variety of domestic programs, including, for example, a moratorium on subsidized housing programs, community development activities, disaster assistance,
Court challenges reach the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court did not actually rule on general impoundment authority. It suggests that one particular law had been ignored by President Nixon in using impoundment, and then he couldn't do that for that one law. But the Supreme Court has actually never ruled in a broad fashion how far impoundment authority actually goes. Congress then passed something called the Impoundment Control Act over the veto of President Nixon.
The Impoundment Control Act effectively says that the president has to inform Congress of all proposed recisions and deferrals and submit specified information regarding each. And then the Comptroller General has to oversee executive compliance with the law and notify Congress if the president fails to report an impoundment or improperly classified item.
If there is a rescission of spending, the president is just not going to spend this money, then the impoundment control act provides that funds must be made available for obligation, unless both houses of Congress take action to approve the rescission request within 45 days of continuous session. So perhaps that is what President Trump is figuring right now, is that he will effectively rescind the spending. He's got a majority in both houses of Congress, and then Congress will just give him the go ahead on the rescission of the spending. Now, the truth is
that the question of a line item veto, which is effectively what impoundment acts as. It's the president being able to go through and redline a particular budget. This has been a bipartisan consensus in favor of this sort of stuff since the 1990s. In fact, in 1996, the federal government with President Clinton and a Republican Congress passed a line item veto through Congress and the Supreme Court struck it down, suggesting that it was unconstitutional.
According to Daniel Henninger, writing back in 2011, here is a list of U.S. presidents and public figures who have used or supported broad impoundment power. Abe Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton, the Bushes, John McCain, John Kerry, Al Gore, Pat Buchanan, Jeff Henserling, Russ Feingold, Joe Lieberman, Judd Gregg, both Paul Ryan and Barack Obama. So why exactly did this happen? Well, number one,
After Watergate, again, Congress kicked back against Richard Nixon using impoundment authority. That's number one. And number two, it's unclear who exactly should be in control of this authority. Should it be Congress or should it be the president? Presumably, President Trump is going to push this and then we will see how the Supreme Court rules on impoundment authority.
And the idea that, by the way, all of this spending is a good idea is obviously Asinine. Yesterday, Carolyn Lovett, because we will see, is an absolute star. She is the new White House press secretary. She, of course, was a representative for the Trump campaign as well. She's 27 years old and she is terrific. The upgrade from Korean Jean-Pierre to Carolyn Lovett is extraordinary. In any case, Carolyn Lovett, yesterday, she held her first press conference.
at the White House and she said, listen, turns out there's a lot of money that we can cut, including, for example, $50 million that was slated to go to the Gaza Strip to pay for condoms.
Doge and OMB have actually found that there was $37 million that was about to go out the door to the World Health Organization, which is an organization, as you all know, that President Trump with the swipe of his pen in that executive order is no longer wants the United States to be a part of. So that wouldn't be in line with the President's agenda. Doge and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.
Okay, now, people on the left are saying, ah, no, no, no, that was just for sexual health in Gaza. Okay, I just have a question. Why are we paying for sexual health in Gaza? I was made aware by the left that there is a supposed genocide in Gaza, but they're stopping people from producing people in Gaza. By the way, the population of Gaza has actually increased, not insubstantially, during the Gaza war. What are those condoms actually used for in Gaza, by the way? Believe it or not, it turns out that the Hamas nicks in Gaza have come up with extraordinary new uses for condoms, including blowing them up with helium, using them as balloons and attaching
actual flammatories to them to set fires in Israel. And that is not even a joke. It's a thing that they've been doing.
And if you just look at the cost on that, that'd buy something like 25 million condoms for use in Gaza. I don't know if they're doing over in Gaza, but I'm not sure why we would be paying for that. Well, folks, the federal government spends your money in ways that you don't like. It also keeps tabs on you. Did you know that multiple companies maintain living profiles based on your internet activity? Everything you do online is recorded and sold to big tech companies, advertisers and yes, government agencies. The organizations behind this are called data brokers, companies that generate billions.
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Now, one of the things that the Trump administration is running into, and this is clear, every time they make an action, executive order goes down, there is what we call malicious compliance. I talked a little bit about this yesterday. Malicious compliance is where you opposing the president's agenda, pick a bad example of where the president's agenda should not apply and you apply it there.
So, for example, in the Department of Defense, if there is an executive action that goes out banning DEI in the Department of Defense, some low-level staffer will, quote, unquote, maliciously comply by saying that now nobody can teach about the Tuskegee Airmen. And it turns out that that's not a trumpet at all. And Department of Defense had Pete Haggseth immediately rescinds that particular stupid application.
of the executive order. A malicious compliance has become a way for so-called debustators, meaning career employees in the executive branch who don't like President Trump or his agenda to try to thwart that agenda with bad headlines. And one example of that came yesterday when there was a temporary shutdown of the Medicaid enrollment website.
Now, do you think that President Trump wants the bad headline of shutting down the Medicaid enrollment website when you put forward this OMB executive action? Do you think that's actually what? Of course not, of course not. And actually within hours, President Trump and the White House immediately addressed this. Carolyn Lovett put out a tweet, well, the White House is aware of the Medicaid website portal outage. We have confirmed no payments have been affected. They're still being processed and sent. They expect the portal will be back online shortly.
Now again, one of the things that's happening here is you have members of the deep state who are coordinating with the media to do things like this and then claim that the end of the world is not. So you'll hear lots of headlines over the course of this week about how various nonprofit programs will have to shut down in lieu of the federal aid.
because if they don't get that aid today, then well, they're going to have to shut. That's not the way the grants work. Typically, grants are annual. That means that people budget for longer than a week. You don't get a check from the government every month. If you're a nonprofit governmental organization, typically it comes in a lump sum at the beginning of the year. But people are going to play it as though everyone is going to die this week if the temporary pause goes forward.
Earlier in the day, political reported that Trump's freeze on federal aiding grants is still reverberating as the gears of government churn out the real world impact of the administration's broad order.
But again, what you are saying mostly is just malicious compliance here from various people inside the so-called deep state attempts to sort of humiliate the Trump administration. The Medicaid portal story, which was the biggest story yesterday in the mainstream media, was just silly. It was up and running again within hours. And clearly what happened is that there was somebody who's in the Medicaid system who decided
that pretending that they were complying with Trump's order, they were going to shut down the website to create something humiliating for President Trump. Now, meanwhile, a lot of this is going to end up in the courts, as I suggested. The question of just far, just how far impoundment control goes is an open legal question. A federal judge, according to CNBC, has paused until next week the Trump administration ordered it would have frozen the issuance of existing federal grants and loans until agencies have vetted them.
The judge, name is Lauren Ali Khan, ruled during a hearing conducted on Zoom that they would have to prevent the shutdowns and the freezing orders. Ali Khan said her administrative state would expire 5 p.m. Eastern time Monday, unless she decides to grant a temporary restraining order as requested by plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit earlier in the day challenging the Trump's administration's actions. Now, again, one of the things that is very strange about the way that our judicial system has been, has been working
during Trump 1 and Trump 2, is you'll have a local district judge, like a low-level district judge issue a nationwide injunction on a federal policy. I'm not sure exactly how that is supposed to work legally. The DOJ objects to Ali Khan's administrative stay against the OMB. Ali Khan's stay only affects the disbursement of government funds that have already been authorized, not money that was being sought.
In any case, this will end up at the Supreme Court level, and that will determine presumably exactly how far impoundments can go. Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, is out there shouting about how supposedly lawless this is, saying it's a constitutional crisis. Let's just get this straight. When it's Joe Biden unilaterally declaring that he can relieve billions of dollars in student loan debt, which, by the way, is not allocated by Congress.
then the Democratic Party is totally fine with it. When President Trump says, I'm not going to spend the money that you sent here until it actually complies with the will of the American people, apparently that's a constitutional threat to the order, says Chuck Schumer, this disastrous and a minority leader. The Trump administration is robbing Peter to pay the billionaires. American families make no mistake about it. The money being taken from them will be spent, but not on them.
of going to support for your community. It's going to the ultra wealthy and the mega corporations. This is cruelty. This is lawlessness. This is a heist done on a national scale. No matter how much he may believe he does, the president does not have the authority to ignore the law. And we're going to fight this in every way that we can.
By the way, I love the Democrats definition of a heist. So according to Democrats, a heist is not when you steal American taxpayer dollars to pay the bills of the gender studies major at Wellesley. That's not a heist. What is a heist is when the president of the United States refuses to spend taxpayer dollars on nonsense.
That is somehow stealing from you the taxpayer. So spending your money on crap, that's not stealing from you. Not spending your money on crap. That's stealing from you. According to Chuck Schumer, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters quote, I think this is a normal practice at the beginning of the administration until they have an opportunity to review how the money's being spent. We'll see what the extent of it is.
And what they intend to do in a more fulsome way for now, I think it's just kind of a preliminary step. I think most administrations take now. This is going to raise a broader issues of what the powers of the presidency ought to be. So the power of the purse famously is held by Congress under the Constitution of the United States. How far does the executive have the ability to prevent the disbursement of those funds? Well, according to the Constitution of the United States, the president
has to make sure that the laws are faithfully executed. But what exactly does that mean? Faithfully executed. It has an independent constitutional authority, presumably to say, I'm not going to spend this money if I think that it violates the Constitution, and then it all gets hashed out by the Supreme Court. But this kind of leaves in a gray area of the law that the Supreme Court has never really ruled on.
The reality is that thanks to the vast growth of the federal bureaucracy, there is a reason why the government ratchet only works in one direction when it comes to the size of spending. Until the president has something like impoundment power or a line item veto, government spending is just going to increase because the only way that actual government work gets done is by passing these giant omnibus packages to get enough people on board to actually pass them. And it's always easier to spend than it is to cut.
Congress has yet to actually issue, in my lifetime, a serious cut to federal spending. They've cut the trajectory of the growth of federal spending. They've yet to issue an actual serious real cut to federal spending. Again, there is a reason why there has been a bipartisan level of support for things like a line item veto, historically speaking.
So, you know, we will see how the Supreme Court rules on all this. The media, of course, are trying to play this up. It's going to be chaos. Everyone will die, just like everyone died of net neutrality during the first Trump term. Here's Dana Bash over at CNN. And she's panicked, obviously.
I frankly think this is what we predicted when those of us who campaigned saying President Trump would cause chaos would do so, and here we are. Yeah, and look, I think that he would agree with you. Chaos is what he wants, which is why he's doing this. The question is, what comes after that?
Well, this idea that the Trump wants chaos, I don't understand why it's why it's suddenly considered normal or non chaos to spend trillions of dollars on absolute sheer trash.
And this is the gap that exists between normie America and non-normie America, the media elites on the coasts. For them, normal is spending trillions of dollars on absolute nonsense. For normies, it turns out that not spending the dollars on the nonsense, that would be more normal than spending the dollars on the nonsense. Stephen Miller.
who is a very aggressive defender of the president's agenda. And let me just say at this point, I have never seen an administration that has more able defenders of its agenda than the Trump administration. It really is an amazing thing. Well, the new Trump administration is giving the media some restless nights, but here's the thing. Restless things don't have to be a part of your life tossing, turning, waking up with a sore back. I used to think that's how sleep worked. And then I discovered Helix sleep. Let me tell you, it's a game changer. What makes Helix different?
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I'm old enough to remember the Bush administration when George W. Bush somehow seemed to think that it was beneath him and beneath the Republicans to actually defend their agenda aggressively, that it was somehow not Marcus of Queensbury rules. Trump administration people do not have these same hang ups. They go with the media and then they refuse to accept the premise of the question and they fight back. Here was Stephen Miller, for example, with Jake Tapper on the spending freeze.
i just want to make sure i understand so anybody out there that provides school lunches anybody out there there's no there's zero impact on public benefit programs full stop is o and b is made clear and i just want to but i want to really drill down in the state because it's so important there's two million employees in the federal government
overwhelmingly the career federal service in this country is far left left wing i don't know american people i don't know that to be a fact well i'll give you a great example we looked at u s a i d as an example that's ninety eight percent ninety eight percent of the workforce
either uh... donated to kamala hair so they're left wing canada just as an example okay but it is just an entire workforce is having a quick wait wait a while did you just say that saying someone voted for kamala hair is demonizing them so according to your suggestion is that there's a bias but you use the word demonizing you just said that i'm demonizing somebody by saying they voted for kamala hair is let's get back on that i just i'm i'm on track okay let me stay on track what i'm saying to you is this there are two million employees in the federal government right
They're overwhelmingly left of center. The American people, I got to finish the sentence. I got to finish the sentence. The American people voted for dramatic change implemented by Donald Trump. So it is essential for him to get control of government, to establish a whole of government process for Donald Trump's political appointees to review discretionary grants of spending for pet projects that are not directed by Congress.
Okay. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Again, the level of defense this administration is putting forward for its agenda is unprecedented. It's unprecedented in my lifetime and maybe ever. It's an amazing, amazing thing to watch. That wasn't the only big thing that President Trump did yesterday. He also offered a buyout to millions of federal employees. Basically said, listen, if you don't wish to work for me, great. Here's the check. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
According to NBC News, President Trump's administration is offering federal workers the chance to take a deferred resignation, which would mean they agreed to resign right now, but they get paid through September. A senior administration official told NBC News they expect 5 to 10 percent of the federal workforce to quit, which they estimate could lead to around $100 billion in savings. All full-time federal employees are eligible except for members of the military, employees of the U.S. Postal Service, positions related to immigration enforcement, and national security, and other jobs excluded by the agencies.
White House press secretary Levitt said in a statement quote, American taxpayers pay for the salaries of federal government employees and therefore deserve employees working on their behalf who actually show up to work in our wonderful federal buildings also paid for by taxpayers. If they don't want to work in the office and contribute to making America great again, they're free to choose a different line of work. The Trump administration will provide a very generous payout of eight months. That is correct and that is good. There's an email that was sent out to all federal employees, including a draft resignation letter for them to sign.
It's a quote, if you choose to remain in your current position, we thank you for your renewed focus on serving the American people to the best of your abilities and look forward to working together as part of an improved federal workforce. At this time, it cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency, but should your position be eliminated, you'll be treated with dignity and will be afforded the protections in place for such positions. If they resign under the program, quote, you'll retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30th, 2025.
So basically show up to work or you can leave. You can also leave. Naturally, the left is fighting mad about this because they are afraid that a bunch of people will take the buyout. AFGE, national president Everett Kelly, ripped into the Trump email saying, quote, it should not be viewed as voluntary. Quote, the number of civil servants hasn't meaningfully changed since the 70s, but there are more Americans than ever who rely on government services purging the federal government of dedicated career civil servants will have a vast unintended consequence that will cause chaos. Okay, I have a question. Why is that chaos?
Seriously, if you don't want it, get out. If you don't want to be involved in a performance culture or return to the office, enhance standards of conduct, that's what the Trump administration is calling for, then here is your payout and you can get out. Hey, that is the email that was put out by the office of personnel management. And again, and bring it really easy for people to resign. All you have to do is type the word resign into the subject line of the email and hit send. That's it.
They're basically saying, listen, we could fire you or you could leave. Okay, but if you're going to come into work, you come to work for the administration, which is, of course, the way to do this. President Trump is also moving to fire Democratic members of two independent federal commissions, which is good. The EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which they left wing dominated organization established in the 1960s and 70s.
Jocelyn Samuels and Charlotte Burrows, formerly the chair, have been dismissed. He also fired the head of the National Labor Relations Board, the worst government board in America. I know the NLRB. We comply. I have to say this. By law, we comply with all legal standards when it comes to labor. Also, the NLRB is trash and the National Labor Relations Act is garbage.
I know this because they literally tried to haul me up on charges for suggesting that I would fire employees who tried to dictate the editorial coverage of our company, which is not covered by the National Labor Relations Act. I was joking about it by the way and they still sent us an investigative letter. That's what the NLRB is.
So Trump has now fired the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwyn Wilcox. I would hope that the NLRB is completely disestablished. Trump also removed the EEOCs at General Counselor, Carly Jobride, who oversaw civil actions against employers on a range of issues, including discrimination claims from LGBTQ plus minus divided by assigned and pregnant workers. He also terminated. Jennifer Abruzzo, the NLRBs General Counsel. Good. Good. These are career
left-wing employees, and it is worthwhile for them not to have jobs. Period. End of story. Again, Trump is moving fast. He's moving fast. And left is panicked because he's not using any authorities that were not available to Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Remember, guys, you built this. You don't like Trump using executive authorities in this way? Well, maybe Barack Obama shouldn't have dictated that he would use a pen and a phone if he couldn't get Congress to do his work. Maybe Joe Biden shouldn't have tried to use OSHA to cram down vaccine mandates on 80 million Americans.
Something we had to sue him at Daily Wire to stop. Maybe Joe Biden shouldn't have tried to end around the Supreme Court by relieving student loan debt to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. You guys built this entire system. It used to be that the federal government was small and had significant checks and balances between Congress, the legislative branch.
and the presidency and the Supreme Court. You guys obliterated those. And now you're real sad, because it turns out that President Trump is going to use the levers of power that you put in place in order to crank back the level of government spending, in order to crank back the level of government regulation and control. You break it, you bought it. Tough badougies, folks. I'm sorry this is happening to you. I'm sorry that you built the system that is now being used against you. But maybe you shouldn't have built it that way if you didn't want it.
By the way, I have to say I'm loving this. I am. It is great because no matter how the Supreme Court rules on impoundment, we're going to find out what the actual story is on impoundment.
No matter how the Supreme Court rules on these high rings and firings, we're going to find out the actual powers of the presidency are. And I think that's a good thing. Clarity is a good thing. For too long, we've lived in this gray area where the combination of media, Democratic Congress, the President of the United States, Democrats have been able to cram down faster and faster government spending programs in the name of the people without any checks and any balances. That day is now over. And I think it's excellent. Meanwhile, President Trump
issued a historic executive order yesterday as well, protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation. I'm in a clear victory here on behalf of the Daily Wire. The Daily Wire, there's no company in America. We don't need our own horns on this as much as we should. There is no company in America that has fought harder and fought longer and fought more on the issue of the evils of transgender ideology and child mutilation than our company. We have dedicated our company to this issue for years, for literally years.
I mean, going back well before what is a woman, the groundbreaking documentary made by our own Matt Walsh that totally shifted the debate on transgenderism and transgender ideology. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when I was assaulted on national television by a transgender identifying person. Hey, for the great sin of suggesting that a biological male is in fact a biological male.
That was in 2015. That is going back 10 years. So I've been on this battle for a very, very long time. I believe that the very famous exchange that I had with a student at a university talking about why isn't she 60 when she claimed that boys could be girls. And I said, so why can't you be trans age? Why can't you be 60? I believe that was in 2014. I've been fighting this battle for as long as this battle has been going on. So has our company generally. There's no company in America that's done more on this.
We were happy to push people like Abigail Schreier when Abigail was pushing her book, Irreversible Damage, which really was a groundbreaking book. We helped to promote that book heavily. There's not an aspect of this fight in which we have not engaged as a company. And so thank you to President Trump for putting the capstone on that now in your national ban on this sort of stuff from Congress.
But according to the executive action from the White House, it is now ordered across the country today. Medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child's sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our nation's history and a must end. Countless children soon regret they've been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy. They'll never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding.
Moreover, these vulnerable youths' medical bills may arise throughout their lifetimes as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and tragically sterilization. Accordingly, as the policy of the United States, it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support these so-called transition of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures. Good for the White House. And by the way, thanks to our allies in this fight, ranging from Charlie Kirk at TPUSA.
He of course worked with us on the documentary identity crisis that was available on X and I was available at daily wire plus.
There are so many people who have been part of this fight. This is a giant victory for the right and a complete reversal of the trend of social leftism from where it was even five years ago. That is a long-going battle for this company. We should take a victory lap on it for sure. All right. In just one second, we'll get to President Trump on illegal immigration and the left fighting him first. Let's be real mainstream media and just broken. It is corrupt. They do not report the news. They curate it to fit their agenda. Americans were done with it. That's why the daily where exists. We're not here to follow the narrative. We're here to crush it.
Our reporters go where the truth is no matter how inconvenient it may be for the powerful and we're not stopping there. We're creating the entertainment Hollywood won't. Gold movies, fearless documentaries, shows that fight back against the cultural rot. Here's the thing none of this happens without you. The fight for truth and culture starts with your support. Join the movement today at dailywire.com slash subscribe to sit on the sidelines be part of the revolution.
Well, meanwhile, yesterday a star was born over at the White House, the brand new White House press secretary. Carolyn Levitt is 27 years old. She took to the podium yesterday and she announced a massive sea change in how the White House is actually going to be treating the media. First, she said that there would in fact be a brand new important focus on new media that
Instead of legacy media being given all sorts of special attention, the new media would be given all sorts of attention. One of the members of the new media was there that, of course, is our own. Mary Margaret Olhan, she is our senior White House reporter. She was in the room. Mary Margaret, thanks for joining the show. Hey, Ben, it's great to be here. So let's talk about the mood in the room. Obviously, it was very, very packed. There are a lot of new media figures. It was different from the past. Talk about what it was like in there.
Yeah, so it was incredibly crowded. I was not expecting that many members of the press to be there. At one point, I had someone pressed into my back and very close to me in the front as well. There were so many members of the press there and they were excited for this new transparency of the Trump administration, which we really did not see during the Biden administration. As Caroline talked about during the briefing, there were very few press briefings and very little access to more than the very top legacy members of the press.
So yesterday during the briefing, we saw Breitbart get called on. We saw the Daily Caller get called on. We even saw TPUSA's new White House correspondent get called on. And Caroline talked about how there's going to be an effort to include members of the new media in the briefings, including giving them a seat on the side. So there's going to be a rotating seat that we hope to have access to as a member of the new media. And we'll be able to participate in the briefings in a much more legit way than
new media has been able to in the past. Because as you know, Ben, this is typically given to members of the legacy press. Often the people in the front rows are the only ones that get questions on that CNN, the Associated Press, Fox, these very established legacy media outlets. So that's really exciting for us. And Caroline made a very strong statement at the beginning of this briefing saying we are going to be transparent. We're going to be allowing new media access.
In fact, we do have a clip here of Caroline Levitt. She's asked a question by the legacy media asking about standards of truth inside the White House, and here she was slamming the legacy media.
Since you brought up truth seek, I would like to point out, while I vow to provide the truth from this podium, we ask that all of you in this room hold yourselves to that same standard. We know for a fact there have been lies that have been pushed by many legacy media outlets in this country about this president, about his family, and we will not accept that. We will call you out when we feel that your reporting is wrong or there is misinformation about this White House. So yes,
I will hold myself to the truth and I expect everyone in this room to do the same. So, Mary Margaret, obviously there's a sea change in how the media are being treated at the White House. Did you have any responses from the legacy media to the fact that they are now being treated equally and with equal status to new media like Daily Wire, for example?
Well, there was a lot of murmuring in the press room, but in general, it seems like people were open to the changes. They understood that this was going to happen. And look, you know, this was not completely out of the blue. Donald Trump Jr. came on Michael Mulchow earlier this year and talked about how the White House wanted to shake things up. We've heard that from members of the press team throughout the campaign, but this was an effort they really wanted to promote.
Of course, you know, there might be some grumblings going forward, but in general, just one seat on the side for new media, that's a great thing. And I think that's going to allow much better access, but also, you know, there's effort to allow influencers and podcasters and people with big profiles into the briefing room to help people understand what's going on.
As Caroline talked about, there has been such a shift in trust in media. Young people are getting their media from very different sources, and we saw that throughout the presidential election. We saw that in the way they consumed media from people like yourself, Ben, at the Daily Wire, rather than Fox News shows, or typical places that you might expect that people would get their media. So this is a change, and it's fitting to the media landscape right now, and I'm excited to see how it goes.
My name is Mary Margaret, all of our senior White House reporter. Congratulations on actually now being an accepted member of the White House Press Corps. I really appreciate Mary Margaret. Thank you so much.
All righty. Well, as we say, Caroline Levitt was a star yesterday. She had a bunch of exchanges with members largely of legacy media that did not go particularly well for the members of the legacy media. Again, I've not seen a robust press response by a Republican administration this way. Certainly in my lifetime, you probably have to go back to the Reagan administration to see anything like it. And I'm not even sure how good that was considering the back then you had three major
TV networks and only a couple of major newspapers. And now you actually have alternative media available. Here was Caroline Lovett's question about whether the administration would be deporting only criminals or whether it would be deporting all illegal immigrants. Here was Caroline Lovett slapping around a member of the media.
The 3500 arrests ISIS made so far since President Trump came back into office. Can you just tell us the numbers? How many have a criminal record versus those who are just in the country illegally? All of them because they illegally broke our nation's laws and therefore they are criminals as far as this administration goes. I know the last administration didn't see it that way so it's a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal but that's exactly what they are.
Man, she is good at this. She's very, very good at this. Again, she is an aggressive defender of the president's agenda. She was also questioned by the legacy media about inflation. So the media finally decided that inflation matters, but only once Trump is president. So they asked her about the price of eggs and she went off.
Really glad you brought this up. Because there is a lot of reporting out there that is putting the onus on this White House for the increased cost of eggs. I would like to point out to each and every one of you that in 2024, when Joe Biden was in the Oval Office or upstairs in the residence sleeping, I'm not so sure, egg prices increased 65%
In this country, we also have seen the cost of everything, not just eggs. Bacon, groceries, gasoline have increased because of the inflationary policies of the last administration. As far as the egg shortage, what's also contributing to that is that the Biden administration and the Department of Agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country. Therefore, a lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage.
Again, this administration is not being run like prior Republican administration. Speaking of which, the Trump administration has now ramped up deportations after a fairly slow start. One of the reasons that the deportation numbers have been lower for Trump is because the number of people arriving on the Southern border has absolutely cratered under Donald Trump. People are not showing up on the Southern border. Many of the supposed deportations that were undertaken
By for example, the Obama administration, we're actually called turn backs at the border. People who would arrive and the administration would simply say, you can't get in. Nobody's even bothering to show up at the southern border knowing that Donald Trump is immediately going to turn everyone away, that CBP, that ICE are not going to allow people to use the
border of the United States as a sort of porous Swiss cheese zone where he can move through at will. But according to the Wall Street Journal, ICE made nearly 1,200 arrests on Sunday and just under 1,000 on Saturday, marking an uptick after arrest numbers in President Trump's first few days were roughly in line with daily averages seen under the Biden administration.
The media are predictably upset about all of this. Stephen Miller again was on with Jake Tapper on CNN. And Jake Tapper was asking who exactly is going to pick the fruit and pick the vegetables. And Stephen Miller is like, Jake, the number of illegal immigrants who actually are in the fields picking fruits and veggies is pretty low.
So how do you, how does President Trump make sure that the effort to deport people who are not in this country legally doesn't end up hurting Americans who want safe borders absolutely but also don't want to see even more higher prices and groceries?
Well, I'm sure it's not your position, Jake, you just asked him the question, that we should supply America's food with exploitative illegal alien labor. I obviously don't think that's what you're implying. Only 1% of alien workers in the entire country work in agriculture. The top destination for illegal aliens are large cities like New York, like Los Angeles.
and small uh... industrial towns of course all across the heartland at least as we've seen with the by the flood mm-hmm none of those illegal aliens are doing farm work those thirty thousand legal aliens that you buy them dumped into yeah i'm talking about the ones that are but i'm but i'm but i'm not but i'm explaining this is important to understand now you're kind of changing those
i mean i don't know i will i will go i will give me thirty minutes all goes deep as you want this i don't like we'll have your audience i don't want to have a threat i'm talking about the ones that could that the work in the agriculture industry what i mean i'm excited about the ones in the cities i swear i'll do that i'll do the whole answer the illegal aliens that joe biden brought into our country are not full stop doing farm work they are not the illegal aliens he brought in from venice wayla from haiti from nicker wagwa they are not doing farm work their inner cities collecting welfare
Everybody knows that this is true, this is obviously true, and the agricultural conversation has been a misdirect for a very long time. As Stephen Miller points out, we do have temporary farm work that is available for people who cross into the United States legally, that is an actual program under President Trump. But the reality is that for the left, they actually just want unlimited immigration. This is what Sonny Hostin, the idiotic id of the Democratic Party, has to say she's on the view yesterday saying, actually, you know what, you're not a criminal for crossing the border illegally.
I also want to make the point that an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal because he or she is undocumented. That is a civil offense. So to call people illegal is in and of itself, I think xenophobic and racist. I do.
applause from the morons in the audience of the view. Actually, it is a criminal offense across the United States border illegally. That is a criminal offense, actually. But again, all of this is part and parcel of what appears to be a really kind of lackluster pushback from the Democratic Party against President Trump. One of the reasons that they're having such trouble is because they can't actually decide on what the narrative is. Trump wants chaos. Okay, well, we just had chaos for four years. It's not chaos to say that we shouldn't spend trillions of dollars on stupid nonsense.
Oh my God. I can't believe Trump's saying that people have to come into work. Really? That's going to be your line? Okay. So, you know, they go back to the well every so often. You have a non-Jurad Haradas, the worst commentator over at MSNBC, suggesting that the Trump agenda is to make America white again, which is weird since he has the most multiracial Republican coalition of my lifetime.
As you're seeing in the reporting just now, what they actually do behind the scenes, they trust will not really get out. And it's part of a different agenda they have, which is really to make America white again, which is part of their attack on everything from birthright citizenship to any number of programs, aid, freezing, various forms of aid that real people depend on. They have an agenda to make it harder
for regular people to live in this country and for immigrants to have to live and worry about whether they have their papers. We are going to become a kind of checker papers society in the blink of an eye. And there's no mandate for that. But that is what folks like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and others around the president actually want. They want to change the very fabric of this country, something for which there is not that same mandate.
Okay, that's kind of weird since again, there's no evidence whatsoever that Donald Trump is trying to cleanse the country of people who are not white, like no evidence that that is the case. And he won something insane. He won almost a majority of his banning vote in the last election cycle. So yeah, good luck with that particular argument. The reality is that the only way for Democrats to take on President Trump is to do what John Fetterman is doing. The Senator from Pennsylvania, who is in fact a solid Democrat, right? He is a socialist, leaning Democrat in terms of these economic programs,
But what he's doing is smart. He's saying, listen, Trump is doing what he campaigned on. I'm sure there are areas where we disagree. And when we disagree, I'll smack him. But I'm not just going to start screaming at the moon. Here's John Federman yesterday on the view.
do you anticipate that there's going to be changes that we should be prepped for that week we're not thinking about and honestly i haven't been surprised by anything now i mean uh... he's been doing essentially what he actually campaign on that he announced he is gonna pardon the j six individuals he is gonna absolutely go after the border uh... so there's a lot of things that he's already ran on i mean criticized a lot of it and i don't agree with everything either but
It's undeniable he actually ran on that and been really upfront. He's like, I am your refugition and he's kind of making those moves. Hey, again, he is being rational about all of this. If Democrats could appear rational, that would certainly help, but it doesn't appear rational when the Senate Democrats decide to filibuster a bill that would have stopped American funding for the corrupt anti-Semitic International Criminal Court.
54 people in the Senate voted in favor of basically putting sanctions on the ICC, which they deeply corrupt evil institution that would in fact target Americans and American soldiers. There's no reason why the United States should be either subsidizing or not punishing people associated with the ICC. 42 Democrats had supported this in a house and a couple of Democrats supported it in the Senate, but Chuck Schumer
The supposed show mayor of Jews, right? This is what he says. This is the guardian of Jews, Chuck Schumer, who's a disgusting perverse individual in terms of his politics. The Senate Minority Leader, he said, quote, the bill before us is poorly drafted and deeply problematic. We'll have many unintended consequences that undermine its primary goal. Okay, again, the reason that Democrats are voting in favor of the ICC is because they are just beholden to the radical left, Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, ripped them yesterday over all of this.
The other issues we all know on the floor these days is nominations. And as you all know, the Democrats made a big deal and blocked the nomination of John Radcliffe to CIA last week. Ultimately, he ended up getting 74 votes on the floor. And that's going to be the case. I mean, they can block these votes, but these folks, we're going to continue to press on and get them confirmed. And they can do this the hard way or the easy way. They want to continue to obstruct and delay.
We're going to continue to grind and grind and grind and we'll do that through the weekend if necessary. Okay, by the way, Democrats are in a state of panic. Senator Gary Peters from Michigan.
who would be a very vulnerable seat for the Democrats has decided he is not going to run for reelection in the Senate, in Michigan, in 2026. So that 2026 Senate map is starting to look kind of not terrible for Republicans, who's supposed to be a bad year for Republicans 2026, but it turns out that there are a bunch of seats that are up that are really, really narrowly Democrat. That includes, for example, John Ossoff and Georgia, that seat is going to flip. That takes Republicans to 54.
You could easily see a world in which Gary Peter seat flips and suddenly Republicans have 55. In New Hampshire, Jean Shaheem, she is running. New Hampshire is moving toward battleground status. That'll take Republicans to 56. Again, the map does not look particularly amazing for Democrats looking forward in the next election cycle.
So, Gary Peters stepping out as a bad sign for them. Okay, meanwhile, in a moment, we're gonna get to Jim Acosta. Have we seen the last of him? Apparently, he's leaving CNN and we shed a tear for Jim Acosta. If you're not a member, become member, use Coach Bura, check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.
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