Trump's Big Speech

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pretty much every time that I am encountered with a
presidential Joint Session of Congress speech, I hate watching it.
I really hate watching those speeches because you can read
the whole speech probably in about fifteen minutes, but then

(00:22):
it takes actually like two hours to get through the
actual speech because there's so many applause breaks. So I'm
engaging in that exercise in my analysis of President Trump's
speech yesterday, and there's a couple of things about the
speech that I sort of want to note. I wound up,

(00:43):
I read through the whole thing, and first of all,
the behavior of the Democrats is just not going to
look It's not going to reflect well or age well
for them because they hate Trump so much that they
can't at least do the kind of like I understand,

(01:06):
the two political parties don't like each other. I understand
these kinds of speeches by presidents are you know, nationally
televised campaign stump speeches, effectively their victory laps, and the
one side is talking up quite a bit about the

(01:27):
things it's doing or wanting to do, or criticizing the
other side in ways that the other side doesn't agree with.
But they also trot out things that are you know,
good or try. They bring guests to these State of
the Union type speeches that are sort of heartwarming stories,
and you gotta find if you're the side in the minority,

(01:53):
you're not ever gonna win one of these speeches where
it's the president talking the president high up his side.
If you're the side in the opposition, you're never gonna win.
The key is just don't lose, don't look like an idiot.
And the Democrats did several things that made them look
like an idiot. So, first of all, Representative Al Green

(02:16):
gets himself thrown out by standing up and yelling and
interrupting the president's speech so much so that Mike Johnson
basically directed security to escort him out. Then the Democrats
are holding these little like Plackhart placard things that say

(02:39):
not true on them, little signs that say, you know,
Elon Musk steals blah blah blah, like this is a
baseball game or like it's a or holding out these
little signs like they're at a silent auction, they're at
a live auction, or something like, well, what are we
doing here? This is an address by an American president

(03:03):
to a joint session of Congress. So I think the
Democrats just came off again. There's no way for the
Democrats to win a speech like this. You never win,
but it's definitely possible for your conduct to make you lose.

(03:27):
More like the one time Barack Obama gave a joint
address to Congress and there was that one Republican member
of the House who stood up and yelled, you lie
at him, and he just sort of looked like an idiot,
and it just made the Republicans look worse. I sort
of think Democrats had that kind of a moment, if

(03:49):
not a little worse. There was just nothing good that
was gonna come out of it for them by behaving
the way they did, and for them too sort of.
You know, they had a lot of the female members
of Congress had their pink coordinated outfits, which it's unclear

(04:11):
what it was even standing for other than abortion, I guess,
a topic that Trump didn't mention the entire night. They
just sort of looked bizarre and dumb, and just their
unwillingness to applaud stuff, even like you know, bipartisan warm

(04:34):
fuzzy things. You know, the kid who was made an
honorary Secret Service member, blah blah blah. You know, their
their unwillingness to applaud even for just good things is
you know, it doesn't look good. And it brings me

(04:55):
to kinda the almost the impossible position, that almost the
impossible problem that Democrats face. Democrats, to keep themselves being
able to sleep at night, have to tell themselves that
the problem is their messaging. It's not the message, it's
the medium, not the message. That you know, if we

(05:19):
just get another leader like Barack Obama or someone like that,
then we can still win, we can still rise to
prominence in American politics. It's not what we believe, it's
how we transmit it that we just you know, Joe

(05:39):
Biden was only so effective a messenger of our position.
Kamala Harris was not an effective messenger of our politics.
Our politics are still popular, our politics are still good,
and all we need is just to find the right messenger. Now,

(06:02):
I will let me admit a couple of things. I
think both parties have issues that they do very well
in and issues that they do poorly in. Problem is

(06:22):
that Democrats are holding on to a lot of positions
where they are unwilling to change and are doing really poorly,
and Trump is able to position himself with basically like

(06:44):
seventy thirty favorable positions. Okay, as an example, let me
just affirm for you guys this reality. Donald Trump is
going to keep talking about transgender issues till Kingdom come.
He's going to keep talking about how he's keeping men
out of women's sports till Kingdom come, and the Democrats

(07:07):
are stuck. Democrats have proclaimed that the transgender cause is
like the human rights cause of our day. They're acting
like it's Martin Luther King Junior's you know, this is
the successor to Martin Luther King Junior's cause, is the
cause for transgenderism. Democrats really said stuff like that, believe

(07:28):
stuff like that. So now they're stuck with that position.
And all of a sudden, we've all come to this
realization in America that, hey, the pro trans argument and
all that it entails, biological men in women's prisons, biological
men playing women's sports, has you know, thirty percent favorability.

(07:56):
So Trump is positioning himself in a position where he
has seventy percent favorability. Likewise, on the border, all right,
a lot of what Trump was saying about the border
is undeniable. A lot of the stuff Trump Trump talked
about in his speech was undeniable. One that like twenty

(08:20):
one million people came into the country under Joe Biden.
That's true, and it's not good. Two that the number
of attempted illegal border crossings has decreased to essentially nothing
within a month, month and a half, a month and

(08:44):
a half after taking office, attempts at illegal border crossings
have reduced themselves to nothing because the word got out
that Trump was in charge and that he wasn't taking
he was not messing around and attempted more illegal border
crossings have basically reduced down to a trickle. It's that

(09:09):
that outcome of being tough on illegal immigration in order
to cut off the flow. That's like a sixty six
thirty three position. Okay, that's like a sixty six percent
favorability position. A lot of what Trump was saying about,
you know, Trump talking really tough about and bringing to

(09:34):
the State of the Union, address the families of people
who were victimized by people who shouldn't have been in
the country in the first place, and were only in
the country because of lax immigration policy. Lake and Riley's
family et cetera. Democrats look terrible in comparison to it.

(09:56):
They can't express of you on immigration like what Trump
has expressed because of their ideological commitments. So that's another
massive advantage Trump has with regards to this other disputed issue.
So Trump has like a couple of these issues, you know,

(10:20):
tax cuts. Trump wants to make his tax cuts permanent.
They were his tax cuts, his tax cuts that he
passed in his first administration. Democrats have to decide are
we going to begrudgingly make those tax cuts permanent or
do we vote against it and look like idiots? You know? Again,

(10:42):
another like sixty six to thirty three Trump advantage position. Meanwhile,
there's a lot of stuff Trump believes that I think
don't necessarily have massive popular sort that aren't maybe majority

(11:03):
popular positions. I don't know that any of Trump's views
on tariffs necessarily have a majority support. I don't know
that necessarily everything with how Trump has handled the Ukraine
situation has necessarily majority support. But he doesn't have like
that much opposition. I'd say the numbers are maybe like

(11:28):
people aren't loving the tariff thing. Maybe it's like fifty
five to forty five. I think maybe people aren't crazy
about every decision he's made with regards to Ukraine so far.
Although it seems like the blow up from last Friday,

(11:49):
the meeting with Zelensky, that that maybe that's not the
end of the story, and you know that this is
a thing about foreign policy. I mean, maybe I do
another segment about this later on in the show. I
think people get so worked up about the making of
the pizza of foreign policy and don't focus enough on

(12:09):
what is the actual end pizza that comes out. Okay, yeah,
you may not like how I'm kneeding the dough right now,
but the end result pizza is delicious, Like foreign policy
has to be judged based on the end result pizza. Okay.
Trump and Zelensky got into a shouting match, all right.
Is that going to change the ultimate outcome of things

(12:31):
with Ukraine? Maybe not. Apparently, Zelenski writes this letter where
he says, we are very grateful and we're willing to
sign this deal. You know, Trump was reporting about this
letter that Zelenski sent, so I don't know, it seems
like but again, if Trump isn't in a very popular

(12:55):
position with regards to Ukraine, and I don't even know
that he is very unpopular with regards how he's dealing
with your crane. His unpopularity is maybe at the level
of like fifty to forty five. I think every Republican
practically other than a few like Beltway mindset folks who
are like diehard Ukraine supporters, is okay, and let saying,

(13:18):
let's give Trump some grace here and see how he
makes what he can do here. His all of Trump's
negatives are like fifty to forty five negatives and most
of Trump's many of Trump's positives are seventy to thirty positives.

(13:38):
He knows it. That's why his like overall approval ratings
right now are better than they ever were at any
point in the first administration. He's at like a forty
eight percent approval rating with only forty three percent negative.
He's above water on approval rating, which he basically wan

(14:00):
wasn't for his entire first administration. You know, even with tariffs. Okay,
Trump spent a lot of time in this speech actually
talking about tariffs, which you realize is like, Okay, this
is the stuff that actually really animates him and revs

(14:21):
his engine. And I think, you know, as someone who's
not you know, just because you have a microphone in
your face doesn't mean that you know everything about everything.
And in fact, I will readily admit I don't know
everything about everything, and economics is one of my areas
where I often lack expertise. And the interplay of tariffs

(14:46):
and how that all works. I'm gonna confess I'm not
like some grand economics expert. But I think Trump's one
of the things Trump's sort of asserting, it's a little
hard to dispute it too much, is because I'm going
to put tariffs on imports from foreign countries. It's going

(15:11):
to incentivize American businesses to set up shop in America,
and that is a long term good thing. I mean,
I don't think it's a coincidence that Apple announced this
huge five hundred billion dollar American worker investment shortly after

(15:34):
Trump takes office, Shortly after Trump's do you know all
these tariffs with China. I mean, that's the kind of
thing that's going to spur more investment into into America.
Now there's some stuff. I mean, Trump is sort of
like warning people that there might be an adjustment period
with some of this. He clearly this is the one

(15:57):
thing that could be a fatal flaw for Trump is
if food prices don't go down, is if basically if
costs don't stabilize or go down, that could be a
real achilles heel for Trump, and that could grow over time.
I mean, he's only been in office like a month
and a half. Democrats are already starting to yell about it.

(16:18):
Anything he does that's not going to result in food
prices going down, Democrats yell about now. Trump talked specifically
about even like the price of eggs in America, which
are ludicrous, and anyone who's buying eggs for a large family,
as our family is, knows about this problem. Costs of goods,

(16:39):
costs of living, costs of groceries, costs of food especially
could be Trump's achilles heel as we come up to
the twenty twenty six midterms. But if food costs stabilize,
if inflation sort of levels out, maybe if something can

(17:02):
happen to get you know, stuff like eggs, you know,
get the supply chain more stabilized. A lot of the
reason why eggs are so expensive right now is because
the USDA ordered one hundred like something like tens hundreds
of millions of poultry to be killed because of disease
or suspected disease or something. So wave too few chickens,
not enough eggs to meet demand, prices go up. Maybe

(17:26):
if that situation stabilizes, Republicans are going to have a
lot of things to point to come twenty twenty six
that are again seventy thirty type issues for them, like
seventy percent favorability issues for them. And I don't know

(17:47):
where Democrats are going to go. And that's the problem
for Democrats. It's not just you know, the problem for
Democrats is it's not just the messenger, it's the message
in no small a part. When we return, I'm going
to talk about all the women who wore pink and
what exactly were they there representing? Next on the John
Gewardy Show, there was a group of Democrat women who

(18:12):
showed up for the joint addressed to Congress last night,
all dressed in pink outfits, pink blazers, pink sweaters over
their you know, blouses, et cetera. What were they there
standing for? Were they what? And this is a big

(18:36):
problem Democrats are facing Trump because he's leveraging this seventy
to thirty position about transgenderism and the bad impact of
transgenderism specifically on women's sports and women's privacy. Trump is

(19:02):
sort of almost retaking this. I don't know if he's
totally there yet, And certainly this isn't necessarily being reflected
in the vote. I mean, if only women voted, Kamala
Harris would have won in the landslide. If only men voted,
you know, Trump would have won the landslide. But he's

(19:24):
got another issue where it forces you to actually ask
the question, You're all these Democrat women, Democrat legislators wearing pink.
How are they standing up for women here? What issues
do Democrats actually stand up for women? Because they don't
care about women's sports. Clearly, they don't care about protecting

(19:50):
women's shelters from having biological men be housed in them.
They don't care about women's prisons. You know, I talked
with Sally Marino on the show a couple of weeks
ago about this horrific case they were dealing with at
the California Correctional Facility, the women's correctional facility in Chowchilla,

(20:14):
where a obvious biological man who didn't change his name
has facial hair claim to be transgender, goes to the
women's prison and proceeds to rape some women there with

(20:36):
nothing but a mere verbal claim that he is transgender.
California is housing a monster like that in the women's
prison in Chowchilla. It's like the most clear cut, obvious
instance of this guy's not actually transgender. This guy just
wants to rape women. He's not confused about his sexuality.

(20:59):
He just wants to rape people. He's lying about. But
our insane transgender policies that we have in California under
California state law allow for a monster like that to
be housed in a women's prison. They don't care about
women's prisons. They don't care about women's locker rooms, they

(21:21):
don't care about women's bathrooms, they don't care about Title nine.
On the extreme fringe of the left, they've got this
insane I mean, you saw it at the Oscars, this
insane thing where the woman who one best female actor
goes up and is talking about the dignity of sex work.

(21:44):
A sex work in scare quotes a quote profession where
most of the people who participate in it are being
raped in some form or another, or are many of
whom are being trafficked or raped or or or whatever.
You know, this is the insane liberal thing where you

(22:05):
focus on like the thirty percent, you know, the five
percent of people who are you know, oh, I'm happy, willing, voluntary,
not drug addicted, the sex worker, as opposed to the
ninety five percent of quote sex workers who are being
trafficked or raped or what have you. Democrats don't care
about women in any of those contexts where they're vulnerable.

(22:27):
The only thing actually that these pink dressed women who
are at Trump's address last night, the only thing they like,
actually care about is abortion. That's it. That's the only
real like, that's the only thing where democrats. You know,

(22:48):
I talked about how Trump has all of these issues
where he's got like seventy to thirty favorability. This is
the one Abortion is like the one issue where Democrats
have like sixty six the thirty three favorability something like that.
But even when you drill into the policy specifics of abortion,
I don't even know that it's that strong. That's all
they're they are representing. And it makes you really ask, well,

(23:10):
who really cares about women? Is it Democrats? Because they
support abortion or is it Trump because he actually thinks
that women's sports should be protected from men, that women's
prisons should be protected from men, that women's shelters should
be protected from men. That Title nine, I mean, who's
standing up for Title nine? More Trump or these liberal

(23:32):
female members of Congress. When we return, Gavin Newsom is
desperately trying to make the budget situation in California look
better than it is. Next on the John Geardi Show.
Most of you listening or many of you listening, run
businesses or maybe work within businesses managing budgets. I manage

(23:55):
some budgets in my time. It's a tricky business. It's
a difficult business. And one of the things you have
to do when you are budgeting is you got to
be realistic. And I've been sort of on both sides
of that where I've had some budgets, whether it's that
Right to Life or with my Obria clinic, where I
was being too cautious and to such an extent, like

(24:20):
you know, underestimating revenues and overestimating expenses to such an
extent that the budget sort of fails to be useful.
But the much more dangerous flaw, I'd say is to
be too optimistic overestimate the kinds of revenues you're going
to get and underestimate the expenses you're going to have.

(24:42):
And if you're going to be realistic about doing any
kind of budgeting within a business, you have, you know, honesty,
honesty with yourself, honesty with your board, honesty with your boss.
Honesty has to be the order of the day. Like
there has to be a kind of realism involved. I've

(25:02):
had budgets in different years where I was like, this
is not good. Okay, we're operating at a loss. We
need to find ways to We got to find things
to cut. We've got to find things to you know,
ways that we can increase revenue. And you often you
have to be honest with yourself about well, is this

(25:24):
genuinely a thing we're gonna cut when the rubber meets
the road. Is this genuinely a thing we can realistically cut?
Is this a thing? Conversely on the other side, is
this a thing over here that we can actually bank
on this much revenue coming in? And so honesty with
yourself has to be the order of the day. That's

(25:49):
what you have to do when you're setting a budget
for a year, Well not when you're Gavin Newsom. So
Gavin Newsom is doing a whole bunch of shenanigans to
try to make California's budgetary situation seem not as bad
as it is. Dan Walters from Calmatters dot org has,

(26:10):
as usual. Dan Walters has been doing political commentary in
California for fifty years and is still, I think one
of the best in the business. Has a great piece
talking about some of the little budgetary tricks that Gavin
Newsom is doing to make his proposed state budget for
twenty five twenty six look better than it is. Here's

(26:32):
what he has to say. One of the many gimmicks
that California's governors and legislators employed to paper over budget
deficits and thus to avoid actual spending cuts, real spending
cuts or increasing taxes is to assume some level of
savings from making state agencies and programs more efficient. They

(26:57):
will plug arbitrary numbers into the budget from such supposed efficiencies, then,
along with other gimmicks, declare that the budget gap has
been closed and pat themselves on the back for the feet.
The twenty twenty four to twenty twenty five budget is
a prime example of such political expedients. So that's last
year's I guess the budget year. I guess we're still

(27:20):
in right now. I think, presumably through June. As enacted
last June. Last year's budget total two hundred ninety seven
point nine billion dollars, of which two hundred eleven point
five billion was general fund spending. But the budget assumed
that the state would receive two hundred and seven point
two billion dollars in general fund revenues, so it had

(27:42):
a gap to bridge. Okay, so two hundred ninety seven billion,
two hundred ninety seven billion dollar budget, two hundred and
seven billion dollar revenues, we have a gap. Gavin Newsom
and legislators turned to a series of gimmicks and indirect

(28:06):
loans to close the gap, including two point nine billion
dollars from assumed efficiency savings in state agencies and state universities.
I'm sure there are some people here listening who maybe
work for a state agency or a state university, and
the idea that there is efficiency in staffing at any
of them probably is making you laugh. However, when Newsom

(28:30):
unveiled a twenty twenty five to twenty twenty six budget,
proposal in January. The plan acknowledged that while the universities
met their relatively tiny savings goal of two hundred million,
other agencies would reduce spending by just eight hundred million,
or less than a third of their two point seven
billion dollar goal, so the actually the universities were the

(28:51):
only ones who met their sort of savings goal that
Knewsom had spent for them. The new budget also revealed
that twenty twenty four to twenty twenty five general fund
spending had ballooned to an estimated two hundred and thirty
two billion, So general fund spending actually went up twenty
billion dollars more than they estimated, twenty one billion dollars

(29:17):
more than the final version they had assumed, and while
projected revenues had also increased to two hundred and seventeen billion,
the twenty twenty four to twenty twenty five deficit would
widen to fifteen billion dollars. Last month, the legislator's budget analyst,
Gabe Petek p TECH reported that his staff was having

(29:39):
difficulty getting accurate information from the administration about the underachieving
efficiency Decree. We have tried to get information from some
of the larger departments to better understand what types of
operational changes are being implemented to achieve the identified savings.
P Tech wrote, as we discussed in greater detail later,
we have received limited information thus far. This venture into

(30:00):
the weeds of state budgeting generates to observations. One that
gimmickry is an integral part of the current process, and
second that the state faces chronic gaps between income and outgo,
a condition dubbed a structural deficit. And I've been talking
about this on the show for a while and I've

(30:20):
related it actually a lot to You might have remembered this.
This was about two years ago there, maybe not quite
two years ago. Jerry Dyer has this grand announcement, Oh,
we're doing all this big, you know, big infrastructure influx
of cash from the state. City of Fresno is going

(30:41):
to get two hundred and fifty million dollars in infrastructure
funding from the state, and this is We're finally going
to revitalize downtown. This is going to provide a lot
of the stuff we need for plumbing and all kinds
of infrastructure stuff that we need for downtown Fresno. A
lot of the boring stuff that you don't think about

(31:02):
like plumbing and parking and crap like that. So we're
gonna get two hundred and fifty million dollars from the state.
We got that first fifty million, We're feeling good. We've
got fifty million one year. Then we're gonna get a
hundred million the next year, one hundred million the next year,
and we're all, Oh, this is great, this is so good.
We're rocking and rolling. State's gonna give us all this money,

(31:22):
and it's gonna allow like ten thousand new residents to
live in downtown Fresno. And this is what we need.
This is what we really need to revitalize. And I
don't This is not a criticism of Jerry Dyer. By
the way, I'm not blaming Jerry Dyer for this. Good
Good for Jerry Dyer. Be a wonderful thing to revitalize downtown.
Be a great thing if ten thousand more people could
move there, like we need infrastructure support. Good for you,

(31:45):
Jerry Dyer. Well, those promises were made in the fat times,
and now we're coming up on the lean times. Those
promises were made when the state was flush with federal
COVID cash, and that well is now dry. So that

(32:10):
next installment of one hundred million dollars, Oh it got
de layed a year, and then oh it got delayed
two years. Why because California faces I think, as Walters
is talking about here, there's a fundamental structural problem. Income

(32:35):
into the state from taxes from the most heavily taxed
state in the Union is not enough to cover our
sort of baseline set year over year expenses, even just

(32:56):
talking about general fund expenditures. Our general fund revenues are
not enough to match our general fund expenditures. Even in
a year last year where we had ten billion dollars
more in general fund revenue than we anticipated, we had
twenty billion dollars more in spending. So how do you

(33:19):
solve that problem? I don't know if or that you can.
It's a fundamental problem. A lot of people left the
state and took their capital gains tax revenue with them.
A lot of higher income or you know, higher total

(33:40):
wealth people took their tax revenue with them to move
to Nevada or Arizona, or Florida or Texas or Idaho,
and they ain't coming back. So we got used to
a certain level of spending, We got used to certain

(34:00):
habits and we're having to have this painful realization that
this is not the kind of you know, we're not
a filet mignon and you know, lobster mac and cheese
state anymore. We're a hamburger and French fries state. And
we're just not adjusting accordingly. And by the way, oh,

(34:28):
you know, we had a massive wildfire destroy huge swaths
of Los Angeles, So you know where we're having to
where Gavin Newsom is going to have to go with
his beggar bowl to Donald Trump to find some way,
you know, Donald Trump, who is clearly leveraging all of

(34:49):
his power and the power of the federal purse to
enact the policy changes he wants. Donald Trump's making threats
about not wanting to pay money to not wanting to
give federal money to jurisdictions that do all the kinds
of things that California loves to do dei sanctuary jurisdictions.

(35:15):
He's not wanting to give fire releaf to California unless
it fixes some of its stupid fire policies or gets
you know, stops listening to the Sierra Club. So Gavin Newsom,
basically there's this lack that this unreality in which Gavin

(35:38):
Newsom lives. But that's okay for Gavin Newsom to a
certain extent, because he's not really thinking about anything other
than twenty twenty eight when we return, How many podcasts
is Gavin Newsom gonna do next? On the John Girardi Show.
Gavin Newsom is so board with being the governor of California.

(36:03):
He's got he already had a podcast set up where
he was doing a podcast with it was him some
guy to actually kind of play as like the host
of it. And Marshawn Lynch, the former longtime running back
for the Seattle Seahawks, who one you know, he got

(36:24):
to the two won a Super Bowl with them, got
to a second Super Bowl, Which makes me wonder, like,
what on earth is Gavin Newsom doing with a podcast
with Marshawn Lynch. I don't know. It seems like Marshawn
Lynch is just like, yeah, I'll talk with Gavin Newsom, Okay,
but where's my check? Sure sounds great. Newsom's launched another podcast,

(36:45):
just The Gavin Newsom Show, and it's just it's so
obvious how bored he is with being governed. He is
so tired of being governor. I think he is tired
of state emergencies, He's tired of actually governing. He doesn't
want to talk with Donald Trump or hang out with
Donald Trump. He is so bored and he's just all

(37:11):
he's trying to do is position himself for twenty twenty
eight to be the front runner. And he thinks he's
the man. He thinks he's going to be the guy
to get the Democratic nomination win the presidency in twenty
twenty eight, and that's what everything he's done has been
focused around that. Now here's the problem. I think everything

(37:33):
he's done has been focused around getting the Democrat nomination
and maybe more specifically, getting the Democrat big time donors
behind him. I think once he's on a debate stage
in Iowa somewhere, he's not gonna look so good because

(37:56):
it's not like California is doing great, and under his watch,
it's not looking good. And he's another guy with some
of these sort of seventy to thirty negatives, like high
speed rail is going to make him look like an idiot.
Our economy is going to make him look like an
Idiot's handling wildfire is going to make him look like
an idiot he's but he just keeps dancing for these

(38:16):
donors who he wants to fund him. And maybe it'll work,
work to get Kamala Harris near the throne. That'll do it,
John Giardi Show, See you next time on Power Talk