Morning Wire - Trump’s UN Showdown & Vance’s Obamacare Crackdown | 9.23.26

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

President Trump takes the stage in front of the United Nations and calls America’s shots, Vice President Vance’s anti-fraud task force removes 760,000 allegedly fraudulent Obamacare enrollments, and more details come to light about the man behind a high-dollar scam that hit NFL star Travis Kelce – and the groups who organized anti-ICE protests in Austin. Reporting from Tim Rice, Mary Margaret Olohan & Jennie Taer. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.- - -Ep. 3105- - -Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3- - -Today's Sponsors:ZipRecruiter - Try ZipRecruiter to post your job FOR FREE at https://ziprecruiter.com/WIRE. 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first dayQuince - Find the fall pieces you’ll reach for most at https://Quince.com/WIRE. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too.ShipStation - ShipStation brings orders into one place and automatically compares carrier rates in real time, helping businesses stay organized and save when volume spikes. Get ahead of it today with ShipStation, and get 60 days free at https://ShipStation.com, with code wire.- - -Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacymorning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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President Trump takes the stage in front of the United Nations and calls America's shot. The entire world is being lifted by the wealth, strength, spirit, and momentum of a newly energized and a very powerful United States of America. I'm Daily Wire, Executive Editor John Bickley, with Georgia Hal. It's Wednesday, September 23rd. This is Morning Wire. The Vice President's Anti-Fraud Task Force removes 760,000 Obamacare enrollments. We're actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them. Amazingly, we weren't doing that before. And more details come to light about the man behind a high dollar scan that hit NFL star Travis Kelsey.

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Of course, thanks for having me. guys. So, you know, as expected, the president had a lot to say about Iran in this speech. So let's start there. What did we hear from him on that front? Yeah, so our listeners, and I think probably most Americans would not be shocked by a lot of what the president had to say, right? It was mostly Iran-driven, and it was really sort of a summary of where we've been so far, right? So updating the other nations of the worlds who perhaps haven't been following this that closely. We heard, again, the president's reasons for why we invaded in the first place, why we struck with bombs. The fact that he believes and has evidence for the Iranians wanting to build a nuclear weapon that they were working on a nuclear weapon.

He repeated the fact that they cannot be allowed to do this. He stressed that Operation Epic Fury has been a success, that we have decimated the Iranian Navy and Air Force, obviously taken out a lot of their leaders, left their regime scrambling. but perhaps the most significant and certainly newsworthy moment of the speech came when, in a very Trumpian way, he sort of started talking and wondering to himself. And he said, you know, I'm about to come to this crossroads. Do I make a deal with Iran that allows them to rebuild as one of the greatest nations in the Middle East? Or do I just wipe them off the face of the earth and annihilate them? So quite a big question for the president there.

Now, do you think Trump's comments on Iran were ultimately effective? Did he, you know, accomplish what he set out to accomplish? Yeah, he absolutely accomplished it in that he set out to defend his choices in the United States actions in the region, whether or not that convinces the other members of the United Nations who's to say. But he probably did as effective as a job as an American president can do selling a war to the United Nations. Now, in addition to Iran, Trump also talked about some of the actions his administration's been taking in South America, Central America. Specifically, he talked about the cartels. he also talked about Cuba. Can you unpack some of what he said?

Yeah, it's a great point, Georgia. It was for a speech that's getting a lot of attention as an Iran speech, it had a really strong South American element to it. And I think we're hearing some rumblings that, of course, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who's been very involved in that region, even as the Iran wars going on, might have had something to do with that.

So to your point, his main criticism was about the cartels. He called them the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere. He said that we are reasserting American power. by fighting them brought up, of course, this seems like ancient history now, but the strikes back at the beginning of the year on the drugboats, he claimed that those strikes reduced the amount of foreign drugs pouring into the country by 97%. And then, and this is where we get a little bit of the Rubio,

he also talked about Cuba, and he chastised the Cuban delegation for providing a hub and a home base for the enemies of America and of the West in the Western Hemisphere. And the Cuban delegation to the UN actually stood up and walked out, of Trump's speech when he said that. So yeah, you know, always something surprising when a president addresses the United Nations. And today it was the detour into the Southern Hemisphere. Indeed, there's always going to be drama in a Trump speech. He also made the comparison between climate change alarmism and AI. I found this particularly interesting myself. What did he have to say?

Yeah, I mean, you basically nailed it, right? He said that this is this sort of, you know, to use a term popular among the young folks, right? This is a dumer mentality. It's a a lot of overstated fears based on unfounded data. This is very consistent with what we've seen from the president in the past couple of weeks as the CEOs of major AI companies and lawmakers from both parties have come out to say we really need to start pumping the brakes on AI. So the president has been trying to rebrand it on truth social. He keeps hosting these polls.

He wants to call it super intelligence or SI or something like that. But there are there are striking parallels. I would encourage all of our viewers to, our colleague Breka Stahl went to the pro-human conference here in D.C. last week and wrote up a great piece for the site that posted yesterday. And she sort of draws out these parallels too, you know, which is it sort of felt like I was going to a climate change rally. So definitely something there. But again, in a very Trumpian way, that was obviously meant as a criticism. Well, Trump on the global stage, another classic Trump address, I think we'd say. Tim, thanks so much for coming on. Absolutely, guys.

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and get 60 days free at shipstation.com with CodeWire. That's Shipstation.com CodeWire. Taxes and fees apply. The Anti-Fraud Task Force led by Vice President Vance has announced that it's removing some 760,000 Obamacier enrollments that are allegedly fraudulent. Here to discuss that and more is Daily Wire White House correspondent, Mary Margaret O'Lehann. Mary Margaret, thanks for chatting with us in the rain.

Thanks for having me. It's a blestery day here at the White House. So let's start with the Obamacare bombshell. What exactly is the Vice President alleging? Yes, so the Vice President and his fraud task force are alleging that they removed roughly $760,000 Affordable Care Act Obamacare enrollments. And they're saying that these plans involve $0 premium schemes, unauthorized, enrollments that were submitted by fraudulent brokers without consumer consent or individuals who just simply didn't exist. So this is something we've seen over and over. And in this case, the vice president's team is saying it's largely focused on Obamacare. And they're estimating

that canceling these subsidies will actually save taxpayers around $2.2 billion in taxpayer spending. And can you just explain a little bit how this scam worked? So do the brokers get a kickback? for signing these people up, whether they exist or not? That's something the vice president was getting into a little bit during the press conference that he held yesterday, where he said some of these people are potentially still alive and maybe they just did this wrong, but a lot of these people are actually dead.

So administration officials who were talking about it at the press conference yesterday, they said that they barred nearly 600 insurance brokers who were caught submitting these kind of implausible enrollment applications, and they placed a six-month suspension on signing up new brokers to stem all this abuse and kind of just stop the tidal weight of fraud that we're seeing. So they view these kinds of actions as a strong indication that their targeted efforts to kind of end fraud, curtail waste are actually delivering real results.

Now, this, of course, is connected to the broader anti-fraud task force that you've been reporting on for some time now. Does it feel like they're on track to accomplish what they set out to do? Yes, I spoke to administration officials last week, and they told me that their fraud efforts here feel like they're just picking up rock after rock and seeing all of this fraud come scurrying out. I mean, there is example after example all over the country, whether we're talking about Ohio, Minnesota, California, all over the country, we're finding different types of fraud. And actually, during yesterday's press conference, I asked the vice president about fraud that our own Meg Brock is wondering if it exists. We did this report on the Dailywire.com where Meg investigated Planned Parenthood and whether they're committing fraud by the way that they're billing these different gender transition

procedures. So the vice president told me he's going to look into this. Here's a little bit of what he had to say on that front. We do know from other cases, not necessarily Planned Parenthood, but we know from other cases that there was the fraudulent provision of cross-sex hormones, that people were using the wrong medical billing codes in order to give these therapies to children. By the way, highly experimental, in some cases, irreversible, causing damage to kids, getting rich in the process, it's a complete scandal. Now, you recently sat down with our second lady, Usha Vance, and there's a great write-up of it on Daily Wire right now, actually. What were some of the big takeaways for you from that interview? Yes, I really enjoyed this interview with the second lady, because, for one thing, she doesn't do a lot of interviews, and she doesn't do a lot of print interviews.

but I got to sit down with her for a half an hour and talk through their faith, their family, the vice president's job, the 48, 48, 48, 48 chance for him at the Republican midterm convention and just what she sees as the future of their family. So we learned so much about the second family, which has honestly garnered the most attention we've seen a presidential or vice presidential family have since the Kennedys were out here. So it was a very interesting conversation. and I think one of my favorite parts was that she shared that her new baby, Baby Alec, who was on her chest the entire time we spoke, baby Alec has his own security detail.

So that's just one of the many things I learned about their family in this interview, and you can find it at Dailywire.com. And the vice president himself told me that he enjoyed reading it and said that their family found three eggs in their chicken coop the day we published the story. So he asked me to add a correction there. All right. Mary Margaret, thank you for chatting with us, especially in the rain, our intrepid White House correspondent. Thanks so much. Absolutely. New details have emerged about the fraudster who victimized Kansas City Chief's tight end Travis Kelsey in a Ponzi scheme. Meanwhile, the groups behind the anti-ice protest in Austin have also been exposed.

Daily Wire Immigration reporter Jenny Tair joins us now to discuss the latest developments on these two stories. Jenny, great to have you on. Thanks for having me. So you received some new information about this fraudster's background in the U.S. This whole case is pretty amazing, actually. What can you tell us about that? Department of Homeland Security tells us that Indian National Sidharth Jawahar. He was convicted of carrying out a $35 million Ponzi scheme that he overstayed his visa and was earlier convicted of a DWI in Texas.

Now, this also comes after NBC reported that Joahar tried to marry Caroline Trayette. Treadway, an American citizen to avoid deportation. His lawyer, however, denies that the relationship between Jahuahar and Treadway was fraudulent. So a $35 million Ponzi scheme, and yet this guy was here illegally and also convicted of a DWI. That's right. It's amazing. Let's pivot to this ice involved shooting in Austin. You know, the Sunday shooting has sparked a lot of demonstrations against ice. What's going on there? We've learned more about what's driving those demonstrations. is correct? Yeah, here's what happened. An ICE officer shot a Venezuelan migrant with a deportation order on Sunday during a traffic stop, and almost immediately you saw protesters out in the streets.

Now, if you read local media reports, you would think people just got up and randomly found each other and started demonstrating at the shooting scene. But in reality, according to a Fox News investigation, there was nothing, quote unquote, spontaneous about these protests. Well-funded groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, the Marxist-Leninist Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation advertised demonstrations almost immediately on social media. And from there, you saw their followers heed the call. So it sounds pretty organized. Are there any updates on the investigation into the shooting? What we know right now is that Wilbur Raphael Garcese Perez, who is 28, was shot during the incident. He was taken in the hospital initially and then

placed into ICE custody while he still had a bullet in his back. Doctor said they couldn't remove it because it was too close to his spine. Now, this is all according to his lawyer. We should note that local police did say there was a, quote, small foot pursuit during the incident. On Monday, he was taken back to the hospital after saying he was still in a lot of pain and in need of care. Now, a critical and highly anticipated element to all of this is where is the body camera

footage. It actually appears to be non-existent, as reports suggest the accused officer was not actually wearing a body camera during the shooting. Now, to give you some context, the Trump administration promised that all ICE officers would have these body cameras by the end of August. And if this guy wasn't equipped with a body camera, he would have been one of the very few officers who don't have them right now. Now, I called some of my sources within ICE today, and they all said everyone has body cameras, and if they don't, in one of their words, you can get in big trouble. The officer is also reportedly a new hire, and that could also be a cause for some concern since the Trump administration has faced a lot of criticism for rushing their training

and also putting some officers onto the streets without having their background checks completed. Well, clearly a lot of questions still to be answered with this case. Ginny, thank you so much for reporting. Thanks for having me. Thanks for waking up with us. The reporting that fuels this show is only possible because you tune in every day and because of our DailyWire subscribers. To enjoy the show, add free and join our mission, become a member at DailyWire.com. We'll be back this evening.

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