Pope Francis dies at the age of 88, and we examine the possible successors; economic waters remain choppy as the trade wars continue; and the Supreme Court slaps some of the Trump administration’s deportations. Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/3WDjgHE Ep.2183 - - - 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: PureTalk - Switch to PureTalk and start saving today! Visit https://PureTalk.com/SHAPIRO Home Title Lock - Go to https://hometitlelock.com/shapiro and use promo code SHAPIRO to get a FREE title history report so you can find out if you’re already a victim AND 14 days of protection for FREE! And make sure to check out the Million Dollar TripleLock protection details when you get there! Exclusions apply. For details visit https://hometitlelock.com/warranty Policygenuis - Head to https://policygenius.com/SHAPIRO to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. Tax Network USA - For a complimentary consultation, call today at 1 (800) 958-1000 or visit their website at https://TNUSA.com/SHAPIRO Legacybox - Visit https://Legacybox.com/SHAPIRO to shop their $9 tape sale and get 90 days free access to Legacybox Cloud. - - - 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 happened to Pope Francis?
Join us right now at dailywire.com slash subscribe. So we were off yesterday, as I say, for travel. We'll know why in very short order, however. While we were off, the Pope passed away. That, of course, was long expected. He'd been sick for a while.
We talked about it on the show just a few weeks ago with my friend Michael Knowles, who explained how the conclave will work and what the Pope's legacy is. Pope Francis's legacy, according to the left media, is that he was leftist. That is how the left media are playing it. They played it all the way this weekend.
Chapter 2: What is Pope Francis's legacy?
The entire left media was basically united in the idea that Pope Francis was important because he isn't President Trump. Here is a compendium of various members of the media basically suggesting that his sole importance lies in the fact that he opposed many of the Trump administration agenda items.
Pope Francis has been vocal, speaking out against ways that the Trump administration has handled migrant issues to also issues across Europe.
Even before he was elected in 2016, the pope talked about this idea of building walls to keep out migrants as something that he said was unchristian. And this sort of continued over the course of his presidency.
Many on the hard right inside the church were shocked that this pope would actually borrow from Jesus Christ and living that simple life.
And again, the reason that the left-leaning media like Pope Francis is because, again, I speak as somebody who really does not have a dog in this particular fight. It's because he was a liberation theologist. He is somebody who believed in a sort of Marxism mix-up with Roman Catholicism.
And what that meant is that on economic issues, on issues ranging from migration to distribution of resources to the environment, he put heavy focus on a very left-wing perspective. Now, what people in the media like to ignore was the fact that Pope Francis actually was still traditional on issues ranging from same-sex marriage to abortion to transgenderism.
He said many of the same things that Pope Benedict had said before Pope Benedict resigned back in 2013. That is when Pope Francis took over But the media, of course, very celebratory of Pope Francis in a way they never were of Pope Benedict, specifically because he said things that sounded different than the papacy had in the past.
According to the New York Times, which of course was celebrating Pope Francis, Francis steadily steered the church in another direction, restocking its leadership with a diverse array of bishops who shared his pastoral welcoming approach as he sought to open up the church. And this is, of course, the way that the left-leaning media treats Pope Francis, is that he opened up the church.
He made it broader and more appealing to people. Now, What we are seeing in the United States, actually, in terms of the numbers, is that more young Americans are turning toward Catholicism, but it's more traditional forms, not in these sort of left-leaning forms that Catholicism seems to be taking these days, but going back to things like Latin Mass.
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Chapter 3: Who are the potential successors to Pope Francis?
He put out a series of truths in which he slammed Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, slammed him again. And then he went on a sort of truth spree, talking about how people don't understand tariffs. Quote, the businessmen who criticize tariffs are bad at business, but really bad at politics.
Chapter 4: What is the conclave process?
They don't understand or realize that I am the greatest friend that American capitalism has ever had. Well, listen, I think that he's a friend to American capitalism, but you know what the markets react to? The policy. They don't react to just the perception of who they believe the president is. They react to the policy.
And right now, again, it is unclear whether President Trump is ratcheting up tariffs to ratchet them down, whether he's just attempting to protect key industries, or whether he thinks trade is bad, like his advisor, Peter Navarro, who is, in fact, not good at this.
And if you want the markets to rise again, what you actually need to do, Mr. President, is fire Peter Navarro, who is quite bad at this, and let your Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, negotiate a bunch of great trade deals. That is the best way out of this situation. President Trump openly went after Jerome Powell again, suggesting that Jerome Powell needed to lower the interest rates.
Jerome Powell is not going to preemptively lower the interest rates in the middle of a tariff war that is likely to increase prices. President Trump calling on Powell to do this is like his get out of jail free card. I'm not going to change my policy. Maybe Jerome Powell will do it.
Jerome Powell isn't going to do that because Jerome Powell is not going to lower the interest rates in the middle of an inflationary cycle. So President Trump put out a big statement on truth. Quote, preemptive cuts in interest rates are being called for by many with energy costs way down. Food prices, including Biden's egg disaster, substantially lower than most other things trending down.
There is virtually no inflation. Again, that's true. But those are back looking numbers. The question is, looking forward, will there be inflation if you break the supply chains?
He says, with these costs trending down so nicely, just what I predicted they would do, there can be almost no inflation, but there can be a slowing of the economy unless Mr. Too Late Powell, a major loser, lowers interest rates now. Europe has already lowered seven times.
Powell has always been too late, except when it came to the election period, when he lowered in order to help sleepy Joe Biden later commonly get elected. How did that work out? Now, I agree with him on that last part. I criticized Jerome Powell for lowering the interest rates just before the election, which I saw as at least partially political.
The reason, by the way, that Europe is lowering its interest rates right now is because it wants to dump a bunch of spending money into its own flailing economy. The European economy is falling into stagnation, and so they want to try to inflate their own economy.
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Chapter 5: How is the economy reacting post-Pope Francis?
However, where China does have an advantage when it comes to fighting a trade war, for example, which is a centralized government policy, is that China is a centralized government. When I say they are a centralized government, I mean they are not subject to elections. So China can fight a trade war, impoverish its own citizens. Hell, if its own citizens die, China's done that before.
The Great Leap Forward killed 40 million people. China is no stranger to human rights violations against its own people. So if the question is who's going to break first in a game of chicken between the Chinese Communist Party and the Trump administration, which, again, is subject to the outside will of the American people, we're going to have midterm elections in a year and a half here.
I mean, this is why you better have your ducks in a row before you do something like that. According to the Wall Street Journal, the idea that you can break trade and not break the capital flow side is a fantasy, said Stephen Blitz, chief U.S. economist at Global Data TS Lombard. Markets settled down in recent days as Trump pulled back from a maximalist stance on tariffs.
Volatility soared after the president unspooled his fluid and unpredictable trade policy on April 2nd. A brutal bond market sell-off unfolded with 30-year yields notching their largest weekly increase since 1987, despite decent bond auctions. The sell-off occurred against the backdrop of a weakening dollar, which normally strengthens during bouts of stress.
People invest in what they think is going to bring at least a solid return in bonds. That's not happening. People are moving away from bonds, they're moving away from the dollar, and they're moving away from stocks, which demonstrates lack of faith in the current economic policy or in the economy of the United States. The president can still course correct here. Make deals. We were promised deals.
Make the deals. Seriously, we need like deals now. Okay, well, that's what we need in the market. What we need are those excellent trade deals President Trump was talking about. And by the way, we need the headlines on the trade deals because the reality is that our trade relationships, let's say Mexico or Canada, they weren't so bad. You know why they weren't so bad already?
They weren't so bad already because President Trump already negotiated the USMCA with Mexico and Canada. There's a lot of danger here for the Trump administration, not just in a sinking economy, but in the impact that could have on the Republican brand in the midterms and in the future.
After the last election cycle, most analysts basically declared the Democratic Party in cardiac arrest situation. The EKG looked pretty terrible for the Democratic Party. If you want to inject electricity into the Democratic Party, you want to paddle the Democratic Party back to life, a bad economy will do it.
Harry Enten at CNN talked about the possible collapse of the Republican brand if the economy continues to go the way it's going.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of the U.S.-China trade war?
And then many of them have been going around and mouthing off about it in public. That includes Dan Caldwell, Dan Caldwell, was a member of the Defense Department, a top member of the Defense Department. He was appointed by people inside the Office of Personnel Management. The Office of Personnel Management is staffed by people who are very sympathetic to this point of view, apparently.
Caldwell was fired after allegations that he was leaking to the press, presumably people with whom he has friends like Tucker Carlson on whose podcast he appeared recently. And that is the kind of generalized suspicion. I don't know if that's true or not.
Dan Caldwell went on Tucker's podcast on Monday and said he was not responsible for leaks that were used as, quote, justification for a purge that has caused turmoil at the Pentagon and prompted calls for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to resign. And it is not quite a wonder as to who actually is calling for his resignation on the right.
It's people who don't like the sort of Trumpian peace through strength argument and are much more friendly to the sort of paleo conservative isolationist wing of the Republican Party. Caldwell said, quote, I was out there advancing things a lot of people in the foreign policy establishment didn't want. It doesn't justify what's happening to me, but let's just be honest.
That's the nature of the games played in D.C. So he's claiming to Tucker Carlson that he's basically ousted by, quote, unquote, the neocons, which is weird because he isn't naming who did the ousting precisely. He thinks his views contributed to his ouster.
What's weird about that is, of course, there were a couple of other people who were fired from the Pentagon who actually don't hold those exact same views. Now, Caldwell himself is making very strong isolationist arguments, and he accuses there of being people who are just desperate for another war in the Middle East, which, again, is simplistic thinking.
The idea that, for example, if you wish for Israel to take out Iran's nuclear facilities, this means you want another war in the Middle East. That's just wrong on its face.
The idea that you want another war in the Middle East if you want to stop the Houthis from, you know, stopping all traffic in the Red Sea, which is something that Peter Hegseth has expressed support for, that that means that you're a warmonger. That is an Obama-level foreign policy.
The press attacks on Pete Hegseth, though, because, again, they agree with the Obama-level foreign policy is a horseshoe theory here. The New York Times and Dan Kald will largely agree on foreign policy in a wide variety of ways.
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