What Trump Just Did Changes Everything!

Today I am joined by Sean Spicer, host of the Sean Spicer Show and former press secretary to President Trump. Sean, thank you so much for joining me. Always a pleasure. Always a lot going on. You still have to behave as if you are Trump's press secretary. Every day it's like drinking from a fire hydrant. I saw him Friday for a while in the Oval Office and there's just no slowing down. He's 100 miles an hour, seven days a week, and he feels very emboldened, like, let's roll domestically, foreign policy-wise, and I get it. He is in his stride. Okay. I want to get into the dichotomy of both of those. Right now, airports have been dealing with these 150-minute to 200-minute lines. President Trump says, it's time to get DHS funded. You guys are not going to win this war on ice. So then he uses a jujitsu move against them and puts ice into airports. Now I'm seeing with my own eyes and reading, lines are moving faster. You've got ice agents handing out waters to kids and families. Morale seems higher. Yet at the same time, Democrats seem hell-bent on hurting the American people, hurting the American worker as they hold out on funding. Doesn't this harm the Democrat Party as it harms the American people? It's a great question. A couple of things on this. One, I think that the Democratic Party right now, the base of it at least, is whatever they perceive as being the most anti-Trump is fine. And so in this case, somehow they think that this is good for them. The thing that's interesting to me, Stephen, is that for the longest time, when I was growing up, Democrats were the party of federal employees and workers. And here they are, and these TSA agents in particular, make, and by the way, I know those are getting the biggest amount of attention and rightfully so to some degree, but there's a lot of these folks at DHS. So the starting salary of a TSA officer is 35 grand. A mid-level one is probably 42 to 46 grand a year. You're now going on 30 days plus of no paycheck. I mean, I don't know how, and you know, people have jobs, I mean, bills to pay, car payments, house payments. As of today, there are over 400 TSA officers that have quit their job. So it's not just short term. You open this thing back tomorrow, and we're going to be 400 short, and these guys got to be trained. And frankly, beyond that, why would anyone looking forward, considering the last 12 months, want to take a job where they know that there's a decent, better than decent chance that there'll be another shutdown, and they'll go for 15, 30 days without pay, and they'll be going through this whole kabuki dance of trying to figure out how to pay their bills, and how to pay off the person that paid their bills. Because remember, you might be able to get a loan. I had to deal with this as a congressional staffer back in the 90s, during Bill Clinton's, actually. And there were loans that were available, but remember, those cost money, right? You're getting a loan. They're charging you to, so, you know, eventually you'll get your money, your salary. But in the interim, it's a ton of time that you have to waste to go get it. You have to figure out how long do you want it for? How are you going to pay it back? I mean, and this is our national security. People like, think about 9-11. The reason that TSA was stood up was because people perpetrated our airline system and got in and blew stuff up. And we vowed at that time, never forget. And we've gone a long way from there now to not only never forget, but do the opposite. So just from an election standpoint, you've got the Trump derangement people, the Trump haters, any pain that can be inflicted or perceived damage to his image. Therefore, even if it hurts people at the bottom, the working class, the government, the federal contractors, but isn't there a portion of the Democrat Party that goes, hey, I know somebody, or this affected me personally, and they could end up bleeding a bunch of support in the midterms, or is that not a thing? I think it has the potential to be a thing. My big issue, somebody said to me yesterday, they go, you know, you see all these things you just mentioned, the long lines at TSA, everything that's happening, very personal to a lot of people. And to those of us who aren't, I'm traveling at the end of this week. But the person said to me, do you realize how the media is covering this? It's almost like a spring break, like long lines at TSA. Not because of Democratic shutdown, not because Democrats refused it. And his whole point to me was, they're not even owning the blame. The narrative in the media is TSA lines are, you pointed out, an hour and a half, two hours long. I saw Atlanta yesterday at five hours. But the Democrats aren't being held responsible for it. So when the blame goes around, it's equally spread. Some of it's at Trump. When you have the media being able to not just be on your side, but an advocate of you, an extension of your party and your movement, it changes the dynamic. And that's the thing is that I believe that's what makes this wholly unique, is that when you see all this and realize that they get to do it with impunity because no one's actually pointing the finger. People like me and you, the people who watch your show, my show, get it. But for the average person that's coming home and turning on the television at night to watch the news or turning in the morning, they just see, oh, there's long lines, you know, much because a lot of people are traveling because it's spring break. Gotcha. OK, interesting. Well, I live in a bubble. This is why I need people outside of it. The Trump administration is getting serious signals today that Mojtaba Khamenei from Russia is now signaling to foreign ministers and those left in the Iranian government that they have his blessing to negotiate with President Trump and end to the war as long as the terms are favorable. Israel has been somewhat kept in the dark so that the United States can get this done, so that peace agreements aren't disrupted. Where do you see this going? This is kind of a pivotal moment. Yeah, I don't see favorable. Like here's the deal that they've known since before President Trump author authorized that first strike that you can't enrich uranium to make a nuclear bomb. That's not favorable terms. Those are just non-negotiable terms. And I don't know. I don't have to be blunt. I don't have a lot of confidence in this. I feel like, one, I'm not sure this guy has the authority to make a deal. He's the Speaker of the Parliament. Two, I don't believe him. I think at some point if you're getting shelled, you'll say whatever you have to say. It's like being tortured where they say that at some point the person just says whatever they need to say. And three, I don't think that they actually are willing to do what we need them to do to actually find a peace settlement, which is to give up any hope of having a nuclear weapon. Okay, because I know they started off with the, you know, we get to make money off of the straight-a-whore moves. We want reparations for all of the military equipment blown up. We want, you know, we want a guarantee that you'll never attack us ever again in the future regardless of our behavior. Now it seems to be, let's put this to an end, we'll agree to, you know, no missiles for five years. I don't know. Like, they lie so much. If somebody says, I only want to go five years until I get missiles again, you're basically just buying time. And then part of what President Trump wanted to do was to decimate their ability to attack us or their neighbors. So the idea that you're already negotiating how quick you can reconstitute the weapon systems is not a good sign. I think that we are in the driver's seat on this. We have the authority, the capabilities to just absolutely pummel them. And I think the president's right that let's just get back on offense and make them say, uncle. There's no terms. This isn't a negotiation. This is a settlement, a peace settlement. I read just before getting on with you that Saudi Arabia is pressuring President Trump to inflict more damage on Iran. They say that this is the time to change the story for the Middle East. Many Middle Eastern countries are having the same opinion as you. I don't I don't believe that this is a good faith negotiation. Be careful. But domestically, you've got the bond market pressuring the president. You've got funding pressuring. You've got gas prices to the American wallet. There's a lot of pressure going on. Your thoughts on the foreign influence saying keep going and the domestic influence saying we can't handle much more financially. Well, I think it is telling that some of these GCC states in the Gulf are looking to have us finish it. They understand the threat that Iran poses. Iran fired a missile to Diego Garcia in Mez, but it showed that they could get about twenty five hundred kilometers. That's a huge threat to the rest of Europe. And I think that the idea that Iran's neighbors are saying finish the job, take these guys out tells you what a serious threat that they were. Number two, domestically, I think obviously we're very, you know, selfish, sometimes politically people, meaning like we drive down the street, we see gas prices go up and we're like, hey, get the gas prices down, do whatever it takes. Forget the fact that it's in pursuit of a much safer world. So I think that the president feels the pressure. He understands if this wasn't an election year, Stephen, I don't know that we'd be having this conversation. I think he does understand how tenuous the House and the Senate are because they have slim majorities. So he's very attuned to what it's going to take to keep those majorities. And they have plenty of money. That's I mean, the RNC and the Trump campaign and Trump's super back. So I think that he's aware of it. And if we get into May, this is going to be a big different story. But right now, he's got, in my opinion, three to four weeks to really change the dynamic and put Iran to bed. That's what I was going to ask you. So the original time assessment was four to six weeks. Right now, as of filming this, I believe we're 24 days in. So, you know, Trump Trump used to say, I come in on time and under budget. Right. But if he can if he can be under that six weeks and gas prices can start coming back down, does this positively affect the potential outcome for Republicans in the midterms? I know he said six weeks, but I'd give him a little bit more. I'd give more like 10 to 12. I've talked to some experts on my show. I had one on two days ago, I guess, who said to me that the up, you know, remember when we attacked Iran, like gas prices didn't just jump like that next day. It took a little while. It's a slow up and a slow down. So I think, look, I think that the benefit, as long as he doesn't go too long. That's why I was saying may end of May. So that buys him another six, seven weeks. If we get into summer travel season, driving around and people are paying a lot more, I think that's going to be a problem because people are like I'm one of those frugal guys that looks every time I go down the street at my two gas stations and see what the price is and whether or not it's up or down and whether I should fill up. People start to do a lot of that in the summer, and so, you know, there'll be a shift politically where people will say, you know, it's we need to change the trajectory, meaning that I if people are not happy economically, that's when they want to change shifts and say, you know what, let's let the other team on the field, let's see if they can do it. So I believe that he's got some time, but he doesn't have all the time in the world. And we get into the summer and people are driving and there is biting into the wallet for what they had budgeted or planned for. Then we're going to have a political problem. I agree with you. I do. I do think it's going to take a little bit of time for that to come back down because you've got a thousand ships in the Persian Gulf that are stuck. We're behind by like 200 million barrels of barrels of oil globally. It's not a small amount of thing. You watch this channel because I tell you the truth about what's going on in the country with President Trump and Congress. So I want to share some important facts under President Biden. The dollar lost 30 percent of its buying power under President Trump. Congress has continued to spend and run up the national debt. This has made gold and silver rise quickly. Well, two big things are happening with gold right now. JPMorgan Chase Bank is predicting it could rise to sixty three hundred dollars an ounce by the end of this year. Also, for the first time in decades, foreign countries hold more gold than they do U.S. treasuries. This means the world economy sees gold as more valuable than the U.S. dollar. Silver has also had a historic increase in value. Both metals recently had a pullback. This is good for buyers and the asset because it needed room to breathe. The truth is gold and silver are rising in purchasing power while the U.S. dollar is sinking. This isn't to scare you, but to tell you the reality of what we are living through. Monetary gold has 25 years of experience. They can educate you, help you with an IRA and answer any questions you have. Call 800-608-1770 or visit stephenlovesgold.com for a free guide. You may even qualify for up to $5,000 in free silver. Reach out to them today. I guess what I was referencing is if, if they can start working on peace agreements and we're not spending a billion dollars a day on bombs, uh, that, that takes some pressure off, but it doesn't necessarily take pressure off the American wallet. So the American wallet maybe matters more for the midterms than the billion dollars a day in bombing. Yeah. I mean, look, I think that we're just piling on the, the billions that we're dropping on bombs. Um, as far as what you and I see every day, like I said, I don't, I don't know about you, but you know, when I go down the street here, I've got a gas station on one side and one on the other, I look at the prices. And then when I go to the supermarket, I get a general sense of, you know, what vegetables are running as strawberries and lemons and things like that. I'm like, wow, it's up from last week or it's down. Yeah. And then, you know how the, I mean, that's my gut is how things are going. And for a lot of people, I think that gas price says a lot about how their budgets do it. Yeah, no, I, I, I completely agree with that. I mean, when, when I was covering the Biden years, I remember the stickers of Biden and Kamala Harris. I did that right. Very funny. Well, now they've got president Trump, I ran up your gas price. Right. And those stickers are now starting to go out. So I do think these gas prices are going to be something that they've, they've got to factor in. Do you think going into the midterms that the economy is, is still going to be the number, the number one factor, what people are feeling in their wallet as they decide who to vote for? A hundred percent. If you feel that things are going well for you, you know, like I said, you keep the team on the field. If you feel like things are not good for you or your family, that you're not saving, that you're not able to put stuff away. That's when you're like, let me sub the guy out. Let me change my member of Congress. And that's the other key thing here, Stephen, is that it's not president Trump on the ballot. He has a lot of runway politically with the MAGA base and they'll get out and they'll do stuff. He has shown, it has shown that it's very difficult for him to translate that to a member of Congress. I think they've got, I mean, they, I don't think, they have hundreds of millions of dollars socked away. And that's to me, the big X factor of this election is the idea that he can go in and blanket a, you know, a handful of districts and face it. We're talking about 25 or so members of Congress, five or six senators. That's a lot of money in a very few states. Yeah. I think, I think if we can wrap up the, the war, get the gas prices down, he spends the summer campaigning, like Susie Wiles said, they hold this big national RNC. The people are feeling the domestic. I, I, I'm a little bit more optimistic that way. Let me, let me get your thoughts on this. So president Trump ran on less foreign policy and more domestic policy, but he's been bogged down almost since day one with all these different foreign wars and, and threats. Is there, is there a way I guess for him to focus more domestically? I feel like he's done a lot domestically, but optics wise, I don't know that the American people feel that he's done as much domestically as he has done on foreign issues. Your, your thoughts on that balance. I think your analysis is spot on for a lot of people when they tune in, they'll see Venezuela or what, you know, what's happening in, in Iran. They did a great event in Memphis this week talking about taking crime down. I would urge your point about Susie Wiles comments, the chief of staff there at the white house, the more that they can get out and be touting successes. For example, they had this really cool event in DC a couple of months back on Trump accounts. These things are absolutely transformational. Every kid born in the United States, every kid is getting a thousand dollars put into an index fund account with their name on it. Their parents, parents, employers can put five grand a year into this thing. And the best part is the government has nothing to do with it. Doesn't can't touch it. So unlike social security, it builds generational wealth. If you put five grand in a year and then convert it to a Roth IRA, you'd have like $3.9 million this. And so it's not a government pro I mean, I love the entire concept. The problem is, is that if you didn't attend that event that I went to with like 400 people or maybe watch CNBC that day, I don't think you saw it. They need to go out and sell a lot of, of all the things they're doing. There's a lot of great things that have happened in the first year of Trump. I think they go, Peter Navarro used to say that everything's at Trump time. You know, I think, you know, just cause of how fast it goes. And I think he's right. So they need the cabinet, they need the president and they need members of Congress to be going out there singing from the rooftops. Here's what we've accomplished. Here's what's done. Here's how it's making your life better. There's so many of these things that he has done that have made the country stronger and better. And therefore I think, um, that, um, that they just need to go out and do a better job of selling it. And the funny thing is, let me just tell you this is interesting because you and I are in this business. I've talked to Robert Cahaley is a phenomenal pollster and Brett Buchanan of Signal, another phenomenal pollster. And to a T, both of them have said to me, um, that one of the biggest problems that we are having, and this stems back to the New Jersey, Virginia elections is that we are not meeting voters where they are. They are not watching CNN or the evening news. They're watching Stephen Gardner. They're watching Sean Spicer. They're watching, you know, Joe Rogan. President Trump did a phenomenal job during the campaign of going out and doing the Nell Poise and Joe Rogan and, uh, Theo Vaughn and Patrick, but David, and it was sort of like a roadmap. Hey, see what he's doing. Do that. Our side, largely because it's consultant driven, still goes out and tries to buy a thousand points of cable news or TV and be like, wow, look at that. We're re we're reaching out. And we do in the last few weeks, the president and his team should insist. And Mike Johnson should do this with the house Republican conference. You must do five independent media shows this week. You might like, they're not reaching voters where they are anymore. And the thing that's so upsetting to me is that pollster after pollster comes to the same conclusion that most of our base isn't getting information from traditional legacies, especially left-wing legacies. Alex anymore. And they're just not that they, I don't know if the consultants just don't want them to do it cause they don't make a cut, but they need to get the message real quick. I I've been, I've been saying this because someone like you, someone like myself, I'm going to ask completely different questions than Brett bear. Yeah. Then Jesse waters, then Laura Ingram, uh, you know, so I think it was actually one of his superpowers and, and it was RFK jr. Who actually said whoever can get the most eyes on podcasts is going to win. This is the new TV, right? And then Trump ended up doing, doing that because of Barron and others recommending that I think he should get back out there and do it. It also gives him time to explain. It doesn't have to be a five minute segment or a 10 minute phone call. He actually has time to develop his vision for the future, why he did certain things, why he's moving the chess pieces this way. I, I would love to have him on my show, but even if not, I mean, when he did a X space with Elon Musk, it got a billion listens. I mean, that's a, that's insane. Like, so why not do that? Elon's on board, he's spending money, do it, do another one and let him ask the questions that the regular American people want or that the business community wants. Or so I, I, I think it would be huge. And honestly, I don't think that president Trump wanted to do this Iran situation. I feel like he felt like he had to, because we were just coming off the state of the union. I felt like, man, things turned the corner. The energy was good. People were optimistic and then this happened and I think we can get back from it. But, um, just that state of the union, communicating what he had done well and what the Democrats had done badly. I think people were like, Oh, wait a minute. Yeah. My life is more expensive because of them or my life was more dangerous because of them. Or I didn't see, you know, a positive future. So hopefully they get out and they're, they're able to communicate all of that. I totally agree. But here's the one thing I'll say, it's not all on him. He can't do every, if you're a member of Congress and you're running in Virginia's eighth congressional district here, you need to go do that. You can't just have president Trump carry the water every day. And that's where I think too many of these members of Congress are getting used to him just being, because he's got this bully pulpit, it's large megaphone. Oh, well, Trump will take care of everything. He can get you pretty far down the finish line, but not all the way over it. Okay. You've got a book coming out. True Trump 2.0. Tell me in my audience about the book. Well, it's great. On Friday, I got to show the president the cover. He wrote the foreword, which was super generous of him. I thought to myself in the first couple of days of Trump, and I actually literally talked to the president about this on Friday because I said, Mr. President, we were talking about some of these accomplishments. And we started to tell me a little bit more about the book, because obviously we communicated about on the phone. Here I am showing him the cover. And I said, look, the reason that you are going to be so consequential and historic in the second term is that the four years in between were essential. You had time to think about what you would do differently and better, who you would bring into a cabinet, who you would keep out of a cabinet, what priorities. And I truly mean that. I said, I know you didn't want to lose the election in 2020, but it was a godsend because most presidents, in fact, only one other one, Cleveland, are back to back sequentially, right? So January 20th becomes the 21st. The chief of staff, the press secretary, I'll stay. Whatever you are working on the day before, you keep working on. When you have four years out of office, he and his team and a bunch of outside groups like America First Policy Institute, Heritage Foundation, thought to themselves, what do we do when we get back into power? What's thing number one? What's thing number two? What's thing number three? How we do it? Where's the opposition going to come from? I always tell people, Stephen, I don't mean to always put it in sports metaphors, but it's it's the most apt. If you played soccer or baseball and you play a team at the beginning of the season and then play the same team at the end of the season, when you play them again, you will say, OK, I know where that guy's going to go. I know how that person hits. I know this play that's coming down the right side of the field. You you are better the second time, hopefully, because you've played them the first, you know how they're going to play the game. You know who is strong for you. You know who is weak. You know how the other team did by having time to sit out for four years and stop and reflect. He came back into office more focused, more disciplined, more ready to take on the fights. And I lay this all out, the Maha agenda, the border, all of this stuff. It's not by accident. And so if you go read Trump 2.0 and like I said, President Trump wrote the entire forward because he he got the idea that like, wow, like no one's ever approached it this way. Everyone wants to analyze what you got done. But the big question in my mind is the why. Why is it happening? And that's what I think is super important. OK, well, that sounds great. Well, I'm going to put a direct link to your show as well as the new book. I appreciate you coming on. You have great insight. I mean, you're you're rubbing shoulders with the president. I've made 1500 videos about him, but never met him. So it's nice to, you know, we'll get that on the agenda. Oh, yeah. I need to get out there to D.C. That would be a highlight of my life. So, well, I'll put those direct links down below and we'll have you on again in the future. Thank you, Stephen. I'll see you on my show coming up later this week. Thank you.