Senator Chris Van Hollen has an intimate coffee with suspected MS-13 deportee Kilmar Abrego Garcia; President Trump sets his sights on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell; and Ukraine-Russia negotiations break down again. Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/3WDjgHE Ep.2182 - - - Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings - - - DailyWire+: We’re leading the charge again and launching a full-scale push for justice. Go to https://PardonDerek.com right now and sign the petition. Now is the time to join the fight. Watch the hit movies, documentaries, and series reshaping our culture. Go to https://dailywire.com/subscribe today. Get your Ben Shapiro merch here: https://bit.ly/3TAu2cw - - - Today's Sponsors: Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine that searches the internet to deliver fast, unbiased, high-quality answers, with sources and in-line citations. Ask Perplexity anything here: https://pplx.ai/benshapiro PureTalk - Switch to PureTalk and start saving today! Visit https://PureTalk.com/SHAPIRO Lifelock - Join now and save up to 40% your first year. Call 1 (800) LifeLock and use promo code BEN or go to https://LifeLock.com/BEN for 40% off. Terms apply. IFCJ - Bring comfort and relief to Israel and her people by donating at https://BenForTheFellowship.org Helix Sleep - Go to https://helixsleep.com/ben for an exclusive offer. - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3cXUn53 Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3QtuibJ Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3TTirqd Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPyBiB
Chapter 1: What is the controversy involving Senator Chris Van Hollen and Kilmar Abrego Garcia?
That would be the tactic that you use if you are a Democrat, unless you are these Democrats, in which case you apparently have your head so far up your own butt that you can actually spot polyps in your own colon. That is the only explanation that I have here for why Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled down to El Salvador to try and broker a meeting with Kilmer Abrego Garcia.
Kilmer Abrego Garcia is an illegal immigrant into the United States. He had been found to be a proper target of deportation all the way back in 2019, but there was a withholding order placed on him because he claimed that if he were returned to El Salvador, he might be killed. The federal government suspected back in 2019 that he was in fact a member of MS-13.
It turns out that in 2021, his wife filed charges against him. She filed a police report at the very least claiming that he had engaged in serious domestic abuse. The Trump administration then deported him despite the withholding order. But there's no doubt that this particular human being is no saint. There are a wide variety of police reports that have him being brought up on charges
on a wide variety of topics that would lead to his deportation. There are accusations of everything ranging from human trafficking to drug trafficking to association with MS-13. In short, Kilmer Abrego Garcia is not a person who is a particularly sympathetic victim.
So if you're trying to separate off the victim from the actual activity of the Trump administration, what you do is you ignore the victim and you focus in on the activity of the Trump administration. That's the smart play. The smart play is to say, that the Trump administration is violating the law and that's a threat to the Constitution. That'd be the smart play here.
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Chapter 2: What legal issues surround the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia?
And it's not as though Democrats can't do it. They can. Literally yesterday, the Federal Appeals Panel for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals released an opinion from Judge Harvey Wilkinson, who is a pretty conservative judge. This is not some sort of far left Obama appointee judge. He was appointed by Ronald Reagan.
At one point, he was considered a possibility to be on the Supreme Court during the Bush administration. Wilkinson released an order yesterday that is absolutely brutal with regard to the government's treatment of Kilmer Abrego Garcia. According to the order, quote, the government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not.
Regardless, he is still entitled to due process. If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order. Moreover, the government has conceded that Abrego Garcia was wrongly or mistakenly deported. Why should it not make what was wrong right?
And then this particular panel, again, the opinion by Judge Harvey Wilkinson says, the Supreme Court's decision does not allow the government to do essentially nothing. It requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador.
Facilitation does not permit the admittedly erroneous deportation of an individual to the one country's prisons that the withholding order forbids, and further, to do so in disregard of a court order that the government not so subtly spurns. Facilitation does not sanction the abrogation of habeas corpus through the transfer of custody to foreign detention centers in the manner attempted here.
Allowing all of this would facilitate foreign detention more than it would domestic return. It would reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans with diverse views and persuasions have always stood. And the order goes on from there, blasting the Trump administration, talking about how the executive branch seemed to be violating respect for the judiciary.
Quote, the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against each other in a conflict that promises to diminish both. This is a losing proposition all around. The judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy to which by dint of custom and detachment, we can only sparingly reply.
The executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions, right? So Democrats should be jumping all over this. This would be the way to do it. And in fact, President Trump himself knows that this is a vulnerability, which is why President Trump yesterday was asked in the Oval Office.
He was doing a meeting with the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgio Maloney, and he was asked by the press about Abrego Garcia. He said, listen, I'm not any part of this Abrego Garcia imprisonment story. I really have nothing to do with it.
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Chapter 3: How has President Trump responded to the Abrego Garcia case?
And again, they're in an environment where they should be making hay while the sun shines with regards to the Trump administration, because there are a bunch of issues where the Trump administration is particularly vulnerable. One of those issues obviously remains with regard to the economy.
Democrats, you know, I'm not sure exactly what they are doing, but then again, I rarely know what Democrats are doing because they love big government and I dislike big government. But you know what else? I hate big cell phone bills. Peartalk, the cell phone company I use for business every day, is finally challenging the wireless industry and their overpriced cell phone bills. That is correct.
Peartalk says, I don't think so, to $100 a month cell phone plans. That's just wasteful. It's irresponsible. Instead, they're offering America's most dependable 5G network at America's most sensible prices. Listen to this. Unlimited talk, text 15 gigs of data, plus mobile hotspot for just 35 bucks a month. The best part? Right now, you'll get a free one-year membership to Daily Wire Plus.
Access the entire library of Daily Wire Plus movies and documentaries. Enjoy uncensored, ad-free daily shows. Child My Producer is on our live chat. As always, your free leftist tier is Tumblr. And with Pure Talk's U.S. customer service team, you can switch hassle-free in as little as 10 minutes. You don't need Doge to cut the fat from your wireless bill. You need Pure Talk.
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Chapter 4: What is the current economic outlook and the impact of tariffs?
Cook spoke to other senior officials in the White House as well. He refrained from publicly criticizing the president or his policies on national TV, as many other executives have over the past several weeks. And by the end of the week, the Trump administration agreed to exempt from import duties electronic products Apple produces in China.
That also granted reprieve to other firms like HP and Dell. Trump did so despite the recommendations of senior White House aide Peter Navarro, who wanted all of those tariffs to remain in place. And so Apple stock was sort of held up by all of that. The problem is that these tariffs are going to bite.
So you either have to be willing to take the pain or you have to be willing to blow giant holes in it. There really is no third choice. China, for its for its part, by the way, continues to take a very strong stance against the United States. President Xi Jinping, dictator of China, he has spent the last week visiting various countries in Southeast Asia in an attempt to draw them closer to him.
One of the things that President Trump would have to do if he wished to actually win a trade war with China is not just cut China off from US markets, but get other countries to make common cause with the United States in cutting China off from their markets. You actually have to isolate China.
Otherwise, if you have countries that are triangulating with China, well, then China is hurt and the United States is hurt, but neither is sort of crippled in a serious enough fashion to stop Chinese growth and Chinese ambition. So Xi has now visited Vietnam, visited Malaysia, visiting Cambodia, and all of these are also manufacturing hubs and distribution hubs.
So what you easily could have is a situation in which China draws closer to these countries, manufactures, sends to Vietnam, Vietnam slaps a Vietnam label on it, comes to the United States anyway, and thus sanctions are avoided. This has always been a very real problem with international trade schemes and tariffs placed on one country.
How do you stop that sort of stuff from happening, especially because China is willing to cheat on all of these sorts of matters? So what would we actually need to do to reshore? Well, the answer is we would need time and we need to do it gradually.
And most of all, what we'd really need to do is get rid of the regulatory schemes in the United States that make it difficult for people to build in the United States. Now, all this talk about tariffs, how other countries have treated us unfairly. We have treated ourselves unfairly. We have treated our own manufacturers unfairly.
We've made it very difficult for people to do business in the manufacturing sector in the United States. Good piece in the Wall Street Journal today by Sham Sankar and Julia Diamond. Sham Sankar, of course, has been a guest on this program. He's chief technology officer of Palantir Technologies. Diamond is a partner at Allen & Company.
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Chapter 5: What role does Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve play in the economy?
So the Ukrainians seem to be doing their best at this point to try and give President Trump what he wants. So there was a lot of talk a few weeks ago about Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, visiting the United States and signing a rare earth mineral deal. You remember, that's why he was there in late February. And then it turned into this face-off between President Trump, J.D.
Vance, and Zelensky in the Oval that got really ugly. And Zelensky ended up being ejected from the White House and all the rest. You remember all of that. That was all originally over this rare earth minerals deal. And right now, the United States is desperate for a new supply of rare earth minerals because China is cutting off the supply.
It's one of the main spigots that China has to control the United States economy and harm the U.S. economy. Well, yesterday, President Trump announced that, in fact, the rare earth minerals deal was back on the table, that Ukraine would be signing it sometime next week. Here he was in the Oval.
Well, we have a minerals deal, which I guess is going to be signed on Thursday, Scott, next Thursday. soon. And I assume they're going to live up to the deal, so we'll see. But we have a deal on that.
Now, that's great. The only way the benefits of that deal materialize is if Ukraine survives. A deal with a country that no longer exists because Russia has walked all the way through it is not a deal at all. And ain't going to be no drilling for rare earth minerals in a war zone. That's just not something that's going to happen.
And so the precondition to the United States seeing the benefit of the bargain would be some sort of peace or at least a ceasefire brokered between Ukraine and Vladimir Putin. The problem, of course, is that Vladimir Putin has shown zero willingness to this point to come to the table. This is just the fact. Vladimir Putin is lying.
When he says that he wants peace or that he wants a ceasefire, there has been literally zero evidence that this is the case. And I understand that Steve Witkoff, the supposedly amazing negotiator, is brokering something in Ukraine. I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that Steve Witkoff can negotiate his way on foreign policy out of a paper bag. Seriously, what is he doing?
It's got to be humiliating to the White House. President Trump came into office saying that within 24 hours, he was going to broker a peace treaty or some sort of ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.
And no one believed that that was a literal thing, but they thought that it was achievable fairly quickly, especially because President Trump himself had laid out how he was going to do it in broad strokes. And the answer was going to be get the Ukrainians to the table by saying that our support does not last forever. We're not going to do this interminably.
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Chapter 6: Can the President fire the Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell?
The beneficence of Vladimir Putin, who is, in fact, a brutal dictator who throws people off the third story of buildings like you can't do that and then somehow assume that Vladimir, what would Putin's interest be in coming to the table, seeing the aid from the United States to Ukraine going away, regardless of whether he comes to the table? He may as well just stick it out.
Meanwhile, conflict is still continuing around the world. Israel is still under attack. Missile fire has resumed on multiple fronts, Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, all enemies openly seeking Israel's destruction. Here in the United States, we don't really imagine what it would be like living under the constant threat of terrorism and rocket attacks day after day.
But that is the harsh reality in Israel today. Parents taking their children to school, suddenly having to fall to the ground and lie on top of their small kids, desperately trying to comfort them as sirens blare throughout neighborhoods. The horrific events of October 7th made painfully clear the next attack against Israel is not theoretical. It is happening right now.
We may have precious little time to prepare for what comes next. We must act now before it's too late. That's precisely why I partner with the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews to help provide immediate life-saving aid and essential security measures. Your urgently needed gift today will directly help provide critical security essentials that save lives.
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Chapter 7: What are the latest developments in Ukraine-Russia negotiations and rare earth mineral deals?
Like, where's the threat here? Here's the secretary of state yesterday.
I think it's important to remind everybody that the Ukraine war is a terrible thing, but it's not our war. We didn't start it. The United States has been helping Ukraine over the last three years, and we want it to end. But it's not our war. I want everyone to understand that.
And the reason why I make that point is the president has spent 87 days at the highest level of his government repeatedly taking efforts to bring this war to an end. We are now reaching a point where we need to decide and determine whether this is even possible or not, which is why we're engaging both sides.
OK, well, if it's not possible and we walk away, that is, in fact, enabling the Russians. Let's just be clear about that. If the United States walks totally away from both negotiations and any sort of military support for Ukraine, which side does that help? We're not helping the Russians. So who like we're not sending the military aid.
We're not like what exactly is the threat to get the Russians to the table? Peace through strength requires the credible threat of use of economic force.
military force or any other sort of diplomatic action if you just walk away who does that benefit russia's sitting there going this is great like we're just we've been intransigent and then the threat from the united states is well if you don't if you don't make a deal if you russia if you won't make a deal then we are walking away from the deal-making table russia doesn't want to make a deal what do they care that makes them happier than anything and the europeans aren't going to step into the breach and you can't trust the europeans to do anything right
So listen, maybe the Europeans do. Maybe that's the end product here, is that the United States walks away and the Europeans have to step up. And maybe they should. Maybe they should. But if that's the case, we should just recognize this war is going to last a much longer time.
If the goal is to get to the end of the war, if that's the actual goal, less killing, end of the war, if you want the rare earth minerals deal to actually materialize into, you know, rare earth minerals, then what you would want is the United States applying our unique capacity in the world to get Russia to the table. That's what you would want.
And I'm waiting to see the incredible diplomatic leisure domain of Steve Woodcoff and team in this particular area because I have yet to see it. Meanwhile, our White House correspondent, Mary Margaret Olihan, had an opportunity to actually go visit the unveiling of the RFK files with Tulsi Gabbard, the DNI. Here's what that looked like.
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