The Megyn Kelly Show - "America First" and Trump's "Don-roe Doctrine," and Tim Walz DROPS OUT Amid Fraud Scandal, with Walter Kirn and Aaron Mate | Ep. 1223

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

Megyn Kelly is joined by Aaron Mate, co-host of the "Useful Idiots" podcast, to discuss Trump’s capture and arrest of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, why Mate is skeptical of the action and believes it amounts to kidnapping, the potentially major consequences and ramifications of the move, Trump’s comments about Cuba falling next while hanging with neocons like Lindsey Graham, what the "Don-roe Doctrine" is really about, and more. Then Walter Kirn, editor-at-large of "County Highway," joins to discuss why Trump’s targeted actions abroad are a display of American might without further intervention, the way Trump is teasing potential further action in Iran and Colombia, Tim Walz dropping out of the Minnesota governor’s race, his excuses like blaming Trump rather than addressing the Somali fraud scandal, the corporate media's attempt to suppress Nick Shirley's viral reporting on the Somali fraud in Minnesota, lowlights from CNN and CBS, why the CBS News rebrand of CBS Evening News will fail, why Tony Dokoupil is not the right messenger for the message, and more. Maté-https://substack.com/@mateKirn- https://countyhighway.com/ Riverbend Ranch: Visit https://riverbendranch.com/ | Use promo code MEGYN for $20 off your first order.Delta Rescue:Delta Rescue needs our help. Visit https://Deltarescue.orgARMRA: go to https://tryarmra.com/MEGYNto get 30% off your first subscription orderDailyLook: https://dailylook.com to take your style quiz and use code MEGYN for 50% off your first order.  Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East. Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly show. We're back. We're so happy to be back with you. We hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and New Year with your family and friends. I was just saying to the team, I love the time off. I love being with my family. I love when my kids are not in school. and I can have so much time with them directly. But by the second week, I was going a little stir crazy. I'm not going to lie. I miss being with you all. I miss doing the show.

It's like my therapy. And without my therapy, I don't know what to do. I was like, weirdly idle. You know, weirdly idle. Like, you think you're going to do all these things. You're going to read every book and you're going to do everything on your to do list and answer every single email. That's not really how it happened.

I don't know about you. I don't know what to do with myself. We did ski some. though the snow wasn't great in Montana. If you haven't checked out my Instagram to see the bear that emerged on the ski trail because it was so warm, you should. In any event, this is a long-winded way of saying, I missed you. I'm thrilled to be back with you.

And boy, oh boy, are we starting the new year with a bang, a new cycle that is breaking on multiple fronts at this hour. Just getting ready for the show this morning, we had Tim Walz announced that he's dropping out of politics in the wake of that Nick Shirley report and other reporting on Minnesota fraud, which has been out of control. We, of course, appear to have launched some sort of military action in Venezuela. We're claiming that it was just in support of a law enforcement effort, but, you know, somewhere between 40 and 80 people in Venezuela are dead. So query just how military and just how legal it was. We're going to get into that in detail. We've got President

Trump saying, Cuba needs to watch out. So does Colombia, Mexico, and Iran. Oh, and possibly Greenland. Okay, all while Venezuela's former leader is in a New York City courtroom today, after having been captured and arrested in this daring mission on Saturday by U.S. Delta Force operators. What else? Oh, just before we came to air, the New York Times dropped an interview with Brian Kohlberger's sister, who for the first time is defending her family, not exactly her brother.

And then we find out that there was a 26-year-old man who took a hammer and yesterday tried to break into Vice President J.D. Vance's Ohio home. And by the way, we have some serious questions about that so-called, quote, man. We'll get into it. There's a lot to get to. But we're going to start with what's happening in Venezuela, obviously. And the newly coined phrase, the Don Row doctrine, that's President Trump's term, to represent his foreign policy maneuverings. Now, in just a bit, we're going to be joined by Walter Kern, who is more supportive of President Trump's actions in Venezuela. And by the way, his publication is one of the ones that first broke the fraudulent activities in Minnesota. So he, too, had a direct hand in Tim Walz's stunning announcement today. The only real question I have about Tim Walz is whether he's going to jail. I mean, truly, that's what I'm wondering. And what about Keith Ellison? His obviously corrupt attorney general who let this shit happen. I mean, he's on tape. We'll play some of it for you, seeming to be just fine with

what the Somalis were doing. So he's the perfect person to get into a lot of this with. But we begin with a friend of the show who's been more critical of Trump's actions. And I, having read everything over the past 48 hours, the supporters, the detractors, the Republicans, the Democrats, I really think this is something we need to consider both sides on. I really do. I don't think, let me just tell you something. When I was at Fox News, which was a long time, 14 years, I would have known exactly what you do in the wake of Trump's attack in Venezuela, his retrieval, shall we say, to put it in mild terms of Nicholas Maduro. I would have known that I was supposed to cheerlead it. And I turned on Fox News yesterday, and I'm sorry, but it was like watching

Russian propaganda. There was nothing skeptical. It was all rah-rah cheerleading. Yes, let's go. And that's fine. I love our military as much as anyone, and I believe in President Trump. But there are serious reasons to just exercise a note of caution before we just get on the rah-rah train. All right, I have done that enough times in my career as a Fox News anchor to have been embarrassed enough to know I'm going to stay on the yellow light for this. I'm not in the green light territory. I'm not in the red light territory either, but I am staying in the yellow light territory for now. I see all of the strategic advantages of what he's done. Trust me, I do. I see that other countries like Russia and China and Cuba were all over Venezuela and its oil posing a potential

threat to the United States. I get that. That's actually the most. persuasive argument and obviously the real one and none of this bullshit about law enforcement. But I have seen what happens when you cheerlead unabashedly U.S. intervention in foreign countries thinking it's for our good and for the national, the international good, only to wind up with what we've called quagmire in places like Iraq, not to mention Libya. We're not great at going into these foreign countries decapitating them at the leadership level and then saying

either we're going to steer the country to a better place or it's going to steer itself. Either one. They just, nine times out of ten, they don't work out well. And what does it mean in terms of boots on the ground? Trump is saying, I'm actually fine with that in Venezuela. Well, whose boots?

Because I have a 16-year-old boy. And I have a 12-year-old boy. And I have a 14-year-old girl. And a lot of my listeners have children, too, who are actually the ones who might have to fill the boots. So I think I speak for a lot of moms and dads for that matter when I say, I'm staying in yellow territory until we know more. And I will not be joining the Fox News cheerleading brigade this time.

I've been burned too many times. So that's why we're beginning the show with Aaron Mate. He's an independent journalist. He's co-host of the Useful Idiots Podcast. and he was one of the journalists who challenged the allegations of collusion by President Trump and the Russian government back in 2016. He knew that was bullshit before most did, even though he wasn't exactly a Trump supporter. He called a spade a spade back at the time. Aaron, again, is not supportive of the Trump administration's actions this weekend. He says

it was nothing short of a kidnapping of Maduro, and he's back to offer that piece of the analysis for us. I've been talking a lot about River Bend Ranch because I love their state. Well, this season express your love with a very special gift of premium steaks from River Bend Ranch. This is the kind of gift you want to give to yourself. They have spectacular beef bundles that are wonderful gifts to friends, family, or you. Their prime rib roast and holiday bundles are only available while supplies last, and they're going fast. For the last 35 years, River Bend Ranch has been creating an elite Angus herd by using ultrasound technology to identify genetically superior cattle with a focus on flavor and tenderness.

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Great to see you. So outline broad brush for us, if you will, why you object to what the United States did in Venezuela on Saturday morning. Megan, thanks for having me. And I appreciate you being open to a dissenting perspective on this. It's important we have debate. And in fairness to Fox News, it wasn't just Fox News that is cheerleading this. You could see so many major news networks cheering this on, CBS News, and NBC. So this truly, which underscores this is a, even though this is Trump's policy, it is bipartisan.

There's been a regime change campaign going on in Venezuela by the U.S. for a very, very long time, which everybody in power has supported. And it's important to raise questions and to, you know, challenge the assumptions that have been made to justify this campaign. The reason why I object to this is, first of all, I don't think we have the right to regime change foreign countries. we don't accept foreign countries interfering in the U.S. If we believe in the rule of law, international law, you know, states being equal, states having rights, we don't have the right to go and overthrow a foreign government just because we don't like them. And in Venezuela, in particular, it's obvious why we've been doing it.

I mean, Trump, to his credit, has been very clear about this. It's for their oil. He said that on Saturday that we're going to take their oil under the so-called Donro doctrine. And I don't grant any state the right to do that. It's also going to have serious human consequences. As you mentioned earlier, people were already killed in this attack, which hasn't gotten very much coverage.

But dozens of people at least were killed, including civilians inside Venezuela. And if this regime change campaign escalates, many more will be fated to die, including possibly, as you mentioned, U.S. soldiers who will be forced to go in and finish the job. But this has been going on for a very, very long time. a brief history, you know, Venezuela first faced a U.S. back regime change campaign back in the early 2000s when the Bush administration supported the auster of Hugo Chavez, tried to install someone who tried to cancel the constitution. That was reversed by popular uprising and loyalist military members, but the campaign has continued ever since. And it's been pursued in recent years with sanctions that have had devastating consequences to Venezuela, which then is subsequently used as a pretext to justify regime change. So, for example, there have been many migrants coming from Venezuela. And then if you listen to Marco Rubio, he says, this is one of the reasons why we have to intervene because we have to stop this migration crisis. Well, what doesn't

get mentioned by Marco Rubio and most media accounts of this is that the sanctions we imposed on Venezuela knowingly caused migration. Thomas Shannon, who served under Trump in his first term at the State Department, he warned at the time that in his words, the sanctions were going to grind the Venezuelan economy into dust and have huge human consequences, one of which would be out migration. And that's predictable. When you target a country's economy with crippling sanctions, especially Venezuela's oil industry, which accounts for most of its revenue, you're going to cause economic misery. A lot of people fled that as a result. So then we take the migrants and the fact that they're fleeing and we use that as a pretext to go and overthrow the government, when it's

the regime change effort to begin with that has caused this. So look, legally, I don't think we have the right to. And in terms of consequences, I just think this is a disaster for for everybody, because as we've seen, regime change campaigns abroad have spellover effects everywhere, including inside the U.S. You know, the one thing I keep thinking about is before we got Gaddafi in Libya, and that place just turned into a hellhole, we were having sort of proxy fights with Libya. I mean, they weren't really proxy. It was kind of on the nose. But they were conducting certain terrorist operations against us. And then we conducted certain terrorist operations against Libya. And it all culminated in the bombing of Pan Am Flight

103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, by Libya. And that was one of my first introductions to international terrorism as a young woman because I was starting at Syracuse University in 1988. And it happened that there were 35 Syracuse University students on board Pan Am 103. They had been studying abroad in London and were on their way home. And that flight had been targeted by Libya for terrorist activity back at a time when we weren't requiring bags to be identified with their passenger. You could put one on in one city and it would be transferred if the plane had a layover without any question that the person who owned the bag is no longer flying on board the plane.

And that's how they managed to bomb this flight that brought down hundreds of Americans, killed hundreds of Americans, including 35 students at my own university where I just started. And it was something that always, I was remembered. You know, we were there every four years. They would be the memorials that they were certain young people, you know, 18, 19-year-old people with their whole lives in front of them. My point is simply you start these actions and you think, great, okay, like back at the time, they had attacked us. There had been terrorism by Libya. So, of course, we bombed them.

Okay, great. Yes. Go, go America. Again, put on your cheerleader uniform. They deserved it. Good for us. And now, you know, you look at those parents of the 35 Syracuse University students. I'm sure they're not feeling so great about it. So it's just, that's just one example, Aaron, where I, you just don't know what you're starting. And our mutual friend Glenn Greenwald has been pointing out that it's very normal for the cheerleading to happen after an action like this. There's like a froth that builds up amongst the media. We love our military. We're proud of our guys for, you know, superbly executing such a difficult and dangerous mission.

Of course we are. And we're proud of the United States of America for being able to do that in a way that probably no other country can. But that doesn't really answer the bigger question about how is this going to come back to haunt us and not just us, but our kids, our children. Yes, because it's people on the ground who have to pay the price of these decisions made from above. I mean, how many people lost their lives in Vietnam?

and so many other countless wars that were a disaster for everybody involved. And if you look at some of the reasons that we get, so another reason, a major one that the Trump administration claims is Maduro is a narco-trafficker. I mean, Megan, you have a legal background. I'd be curious your thoughts on the indictment and the strength of it. I mean, I noticed that one of the counts that Maduro faces is possession of machine guns, which I don't understand. I mean, first of all, I don't understand why it's a big concern for the U.S.

that Maduro has machine guns. And to me, it speaks to kind of this not being such a robust indictment. But he's accused of being a narco trafficker. And again, I don't think the evidence supports that. And it's also a harder case to make when Trump recently pardoned a convicted narco trafficker in the same court that indicted Maduro. In the New York court, Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, he was found to take a bribe from a cartel, one million dollars he was caught on tape vowing to stuff the drugs up the gringo's noses you know quoting him there was a prison murder tied to his case and trump pardon him so just as he's watching a regime change camp poor just as he's launching a regime change campaign in the name of fighting narco trafficking he goes and convicts and pardons a convicted narco trafficker so this strikes me as just yet as we saw with iraq the pretext there yes the pretext there was a rock bill be and which didn't exist. And I think we're following a very similar playbook here. At least Trump has the honesty. I don't disagree. I totally agree with you that it's protectual, that it is not

about narco-terrorism. I'm sure Trump does object to the amount of drugs coming our way from Venezuela. But of course, if you really want to crack down on countries that are sending drugs in the United States, you'll start with China and Mexico, not necessarily Venezuela. But, and to your point, he just pardoned this other guy who was obviously a party to that, too. I agree that it's protectual. It is about regime change. And I think he was being honest, though, when he said it's the Don Road doctrine. That, I believe.

And if you look at that, you know, it's actually, I haven't spent a lot of time studying the Monroe doctrine. I'm going to be honest from our fifth president. That basically said, not in our hemisphere. Not in our hemisphere. You're not going to, at the time it was Europe. You're not going to come and colonize anything in the Western Hemisphere, period. And we'll fight you if you do.

And we did. We enforced that over years. And I was just kind of researching this morning. what was the constitutional authority for that? You know, like, there wasn't really any. We kind of just made it up and said, we're just not going to allow it. And we've been doing it for 200 years now and getting away with it. And so I kind of understand his decision that, forget the narco-terrorism stuff.

He had to use that as a pretext to get around congressional approval and all the other, you know, legal requirements that would be there if this were actually declared a war or a military. invasion or incursion of some sort. I think it really is Trump saying not in our hemisphere. I've seen that Cuba's basically infiltrated Venezuela entirely. The relationship between those two has been totally interdependent, and they don't like Cuba, especially Marco Rubio. And China was there when we captured Maduro. They were getting closer and closer thanks to China's Belt and Road policy where they're

trying to inculcate themselves into various nations all over the world, including in South America to make them less dependent on the United States and more dependent on China and where that goes, we don't like. We don't know, but we know we don't like. And Russia too with the oil. So I think that was the honest answer. We don't like it. Because one of the reporters said to Trump, Aaron, what about the oil? Like, what do you, why the oil? And he said, why don't you ask Russia that? Why don't you ask China that? They're the ones who are focused on the Venezuela oil. And I do believe that's his actual reason, which I guess I share in that concern of Trump's, that them getting a big foothold in Venezuela, you know, the Chinese, the Russians,

and Cuba, it's not a great thing for the United States of America. Well, listen, I don't share that view, but regardless of what you think about Venezuela's choice of allies, I think the question for the U.S. government is, if you are imposing policies that are designed to destabilize a foreign government, which I would argue has been the focus of U.S. policy in Venezuela for more than two decades, starting with the Kuwait, mentioned earlier, the coup attempt against Hugo Chavez, what do you expect a country to do? If you support the overthrow of a government, they're not going to be too enthusiastic about working with you. And they're going to choose other allies. And that's what I think happened

in Venezuela. I think if the U.S. hadn't been trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government for more than two decades, I don't think they'd be as keen to embrace allies like Russia and China. Maybe they would be. But certainly, if you are, if you were supporting the overthrow of a foreign government, which what the Bush administration did under Hugo Chavez. And that's continued, you know, again, under both parties, under Obama, Obama declared Venezuela to be a national security threat to the U.S., which had the impact of deterring investment in Venezuela. Because that's if the most powerful country in the world says that you're a threat, banks are not going to want to do business with you. And so all these actions have isolated Venezuela. And to the extent that they

would be willing to cooperate with the U.S., they haven't been so keen about. that given the efforts at regime change there. Now, I personally think that states have the right to make the alliances that they want, but whatever, we don't have to agree on that. I think when you have decades of policy aimed at regime change, and, you know, the U.S. has spent a lot of money via agencies that Trump has actually criticized via groups like the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID, supporting the opposition in Venezuela. And so when you have a country doing that, I can understand why in Venezuela's case, they went and sought other friends. Mm-hmm. It does make you wonder, too, like, where was it going in Venezuela? I would really like to see, hear that explained, you know, like, what exactly was the fear that they are going to get control of Venezuela's oil? I mean, Russia already has a lot of oil. It's a big gas company, they say, John McCain famously said, masquerading as a country. Like, so they're worried about what exactly, because Russia's already involved in a very costly taxing war right now. It can't exactly.

hope to open up another front war against the United States from Venezuela. I'm not exactly sure what the thought is there. China, too, is suffering economically. Right now, they really are. So is the thought that they're going to launch a war against us from Venezuela? Cuba? Cuba's not going to launch a war against us from Venezuela. By the way, Cuba already has an outpost off of our border against us if they want. It's called Cuba. Now, Trump is saying on camera, he said this, that is likely to fall because Cuba's been struggling. As Venezuela has been struggling, Cuba's been struggling because Cuba is very dependent on Venezuelan oil. We have that here. Listen to 11. Cuba is ready to fall. Yes. Cuba looks like it's ready to fall. I don't know how

they, if they're going to hold out. But Cuba now has no income. They got all of their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil. They're not getting any of it. And Cuba literally is ready to fold. And you have a lot of great Cuban Americans that are going to be very happy about this. Oh my God. I mean, I'm sorry, Aaron, but the fact that Lindsey Graham is standing next to him going, yes, yes, is enough for me to know. I don't want it. I'm concerned. All of the neocons have been celebrating this whole thing like it's, you know, Christmas in January. And that alone gives me pause. When Lindsay Graham is cheering, I'm not. Yeah. And the fact that Marjorie Taylor Green is now leaving office and she's split with Trump.

I mean, it speaks to the direction that he's gone in. He's gone with the Lindsay Graham faction of his party, which amazingly Trump ran against. I mean, part of the appeal of his 2016 campaign was he was running against the neocon legacy of people like Lindsey Graham. But as you can see there, he's fully embraced them. As he's also embraced Israel firsters like Mark Levine, who recently grabbed Trump, like sort of like a puppet, the White House, put his arm around him and so what a great president he's been for Israel. And the point of people like Marjorie Taylor-Ring.

I call it the first Jewish president. The first Jewish president. And the point of people like Marjorie Taylor-Green is that that's not what Trump ran on. And you can see where he's going. Look, I agree with Trump. I'll be shocked if Cuba survives all this. They're already in a terrible state and they rely heavily on Venezuela. And people there are really suffering.

The part that gets omitted from mainstream discussion of it is that our policies have been designed to increase suffering in Venezuela. And this goes back to 1960 after the Cuban Revolution. evolution. The State Department even had a memo saying that our goal should be to decrease wages and bring about hunger so that the government. You're talking about Venezuela or Cuba now? I'm talking about Cuba, and that's been the policy for decades. And that's also now the policy in Venezuela is to impose sanctions that increase desperation. This doesn't mean the government is perfect, can't be criticized. It doesn't have responsibility for its problems. But if we're concerned about the suffering there, our responsibility is to not participate in it. And that has

been exacerbated by these crippling sanctions. And on the issue of oil in Venezuela, I think Venezuela would love to work with the U.S. because the sanctions on its oil sector have crippled it. There's a great Venezuelan economist named Francisco Rodriguez, who's a bitter critic of Maduro, thinks he's a tyrant, thinks he's mismanaged the economy egregiously. But Francisco has the honesty to recognize that U.S. sanctions have destroyed Venezuela's economy. It's a main source of revenue, that when Trump imposed these sanctions in 2017, after that, Venezuela's oil output drastically fell. And that's just a reflection of the power that the U.S. has via its control of the global financial system. So Venezuela needs the U.S. for its oil

industry to work. And I think they'd be open to that. I think even Maduro was open to that. The problem is the U.S. traditionally demands complete submission. And if you have some national pride, is I think Maduro and his allies have, they're not going to offer you complete submission. So if we weren't, I think the problem here is hegemony and the demand for complete control. If we're more open to compromise to working with people, even if we don't like their system of government, we wouldn't have to go to these drastic steps. Right. It's, I mean, it's, you can certainly say it's not isolationist. It's not non-interventionalist, which is what a very large faction of the Republican Party prefers now.

And it's, I think, in large part, the very same faction of the party that had to fight the last two endless wars or cheer led in support of it because they were patriotic and they loved America and they were very upset over 9-11 and they wanted someone to pay. It was all good motivations, not like the Lindsay Grams of the world. He's never seen a conflict he doesn't want to join. But I think it's largely that same group. The first time I really started to think seriously about this was, When I had, you know, every Memorial Day, we do a, like a storied soldier on this program, and we talk about their war experience. We've had Dakota Meyer.

I mean, we've had all of the best ones. And those guys, Aaron, those guys are the ones who really gave me pause. I mean, Sean Ryan came on a couple memorials days ago and asked the question, what if we're not the good guys? What if we're not the good guys? And I was shocked by it. but this isn't Ward Churchill, the crazy-ass professor, you know, saying that stuff, suggesting that we need to be bombed. This is a decorated soldier. This is a Navy SEAL. This is like,

and I've heard it time after time. Like, we have to be honest about asking these questions about whether, not our soldiers, not our men and women in uniform, but those who make decisions about where they go and what they do are making the best decisions, are expending and risking American blood and treasure in the best way. And I just, I just, I mean, you got Trump talking about Cuba's going to fall. Columbia's president better quote, watch his ass. We're ready and loaded to go into Iran. If protesters there get shot because protests are happening in Iran as well. So we're going to be doing a shooting campaign in Iran. We're going into Colombia. We're potentially taking over Cuba. We're, quote, running and quote, in charge of Venezuela now.

And, you know, somebody's making the point on Twitter, how's that going to go, Aaron, as we inch toward the midterms, and people are still worried about the cost of eggs and bread and milk, but Venezuela is going swimmingly. Yes, exactly. If there was a study in Trump's first term, which showed that communities in the U.S. with the highest rate of military sacrifice in the wars in the wars in the wars, disproportionately went for Trump. So people who bore the brunt of wars who suffered the casualty, suffered the injuries, voted for Trump in far higher numbers than for Hillary Clinton because he was speaking to the folly of the conflicts that they had to fight. And Hillary Clinton, his opponent, was seen as the representative of the bipartisan neocon consensus, which Trump was running against. And so, you know, to your point, I think Trump is turning his back on those same communities, on that same base of support that got him into office. And I don't think that will bode very well for him in the midterms. Now, granted, you can never rule out Democrats screwing everything up and handing Trump another victory.

I can never rule that out. But I think, yeah, Trump is not, look, there's two different factions within MAGA. You have people like Lindsey Graham claiming that make America great again. And America First means engaging in all these foreign wars. But you have people like Marjorie Taylor Green and many others who don't agree with that. And Trump has turned his back on them. And I have the same questions about what this means for his electoral chances. And this idea that all this is going to magically help people with the issue of affordability.

I don't see it. First of all, it's going to take a long time. Even if we do manage to steal all then as well as oil, it will take a long time for it to be going again because of the damage that's been done to that industry. And the people who will mainly profit are the people who Trump is surrounded by. It's billionaires, the people who own oil companies, not who. Yeah, Exxon Mobil. Yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But by the way, Chevron's been operating inside Venezuela. And Chevron hasn't had very many complaints, which speaks to the fact that if we wanted to, there could be a nonviolent way to do this to work with Venezuela and for everyone to benefit. The new government of Venezuela, led by Delsi Rodriguez, has issued a statement saying they want to work with Trump. But Trump has been very clear that he wants Venezuela to follow his orders. And if you're a self-respecting state and you care about your

sovereignty, you're just not going to take orders from a foreign government. Yeah, but just Delsey Rodriguez, she apparently, well, she's Maduro's VP. We don't recognize her as the legitimately elected VP. We don't. We didn't recognize Maduro as the legitimately elected president because he lost, but in a landslide in their election back in July of 2024 and refused to leave power. So now suddenly we recognize her, I guess, as legitimate because she seems to be saying to us, she's going to do what we tell her while she's massaging the Venezuelan population, or at least maybe the military, that seems to still back Maduro by saying, screw President Trump, screw America, we're independent. You know, she's not quite that nasty in her messaging.

But her messaging internally in Venezuela has been anti-Trump, anti-U.S. And our government seems to be saying, just rolling its eyes, saying, take that with a grain of salt. She's just doing what she has to do in order to not have them all turn on her. So I don't know what's going to happen with Delce Rodriguez. Meanwhile, the woman who did win the vote, I mean, she didn't win. It was her right-hand man who won that election back in July of 2024, because Maduro made it such that this Maria woman could not run. Anyway, Trump said she can't have it. She can't come back and be the president, even though that's really who the Venezuelans wanted, because he thinks she's too weak. And maybe he's right, because what happened in Libya after we got rid of Gaddafi was

all these internal warring factions. No one was strong enough to keep, you know, their hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel, and it's been chaos over there ever since. But Trump says that's not going to happen here. You can't compare what happens in a Middle Eastern country to what we're about to do in Venezuela. We're not leaving. We're like, we're going to make sure. I'm like, what? What are we going to do over here? And here's just a little bit of that. This isn't the full thing, but here's just a taste of it and sought, I think it's eight. Speaking of those U.S. troops, I mean, one thing that Americans and a lot of people are wondering, you just sounded like you weighed out another strike, another land strike at least

in Venezuela. You sound like you weighed that out. But we didn't need it. We were prepared to do a second strike if we needed. We're totally prepared. But that's off the table. That's off the table now. No, it's not. If they don't behave, we will do a second strike. Dealing with the people, we're dealing with the people that just got sworn in. And don't ask me who's in charge because I'll give you an answer and it'll be very controversial. What does that mean? that means we're in charge what is going to happen to those reserves um we're going to run everything we're going to run it fix it we'll have elections at the right time the main thing you have to fix it's a broken country there's no money there's inflation go ahead Aaron um well on his latter point about

Venezuela being a broken country there's inflation yes but if Trump was concerned about that he wouldn't be imposing sanctions that make life impossible um I went to Venezuela at once in 2019 after Trump and John Bolton had launched their first coup attempt trying to install Wang Guaido. And I saw a very, very divided country. There were big rallies in support of Wang Guaido, Trump were trying to install. There also were big rallies in support of Maduro because people don't like a foreign government coming in and telling them how they should run their country.

It's just pretty basic. But I saw just on a very small level how these sanctions work. So the translator I was working with who hated. Maduro and one of the reasons why she hated Maduro is like she's a young person she was about 20 years old and she was just tired of not being able to access apps in the app store that her friends and other countries could access and she was sick of it and uh i wondered though if she had been allowed to download the apps that she wanted if conditions weren't tougher because of these sanctions would she had had the same position now maybe she would but my point is

when you make life difficult for normal people in foreign countries, eventually people are going to be tired. Some people will be resilient, but a lot of people are just going to give up. And I don't think it's our right to do that, to punish ordinary people because we don't want to overthrow their government. Certainly, it's not fair to solely fault their government. I'm not saying you can't have criticisms of Maduro, but to solely fault them for inflation when our policies are designed to increase inflation, to make the economy not able to function. Well, he's terrible. He's terrible on human rights, which is another point that everybody makes, but we can't go around getting rid of leaders of foreign countries who are terrible

on human rights. Well, we'd be policing the entire world. By the way, we should start in China. If we're going to do that, if that's our policy, we just get rid of all the bad people because we believe so much in human rights. Like, we're going to be very, very busy. We don't have enough troops to support that kind of policy. I would start with our ally Israel, which, you know, has killed hundreds of thousands

or tens of thousands of people and what I think is a genocide. But I agree with your point that, yeah, we don't have the right to over the government it's because we don't think they respect human rights, which, again, we do not care about given the allies we have, including Israel, which has killed so many people and destroyed Gaza. And there's just, on the issue of the elections, too, I want to say one thing. You know, I was shocked or I was very surprised when Maduro claimed to have won the last elections, given how just broken the country was and how tough conditions were. But what I do know is this, I think after 20 years of trying to destabilize a government,

which is where I think we've done in Venezuela. We've spent a lot of money propping up the opposition. We've imposed sanctions that have made the country miserable. We haven't respected Venezuela's elections back when there was no question about them. The Carter Center run by former president, Jimmy Carter, certified previous Venezuelan elections, but we didn't respect those results. So given that, I don't think we have the right to go and complain if an election is not on the up and up. I'm not saying that Maduro's claim was valid.

I'd be surprised if there wasn't some corruption going on there. I want to finish by asking you a question. You mentioned Israel. One of my big frustrations in following what's been happening in Gaza is the propaganda that gets put out by Hamas in particular, which is very, very good at propaganda. And this is why I just, I've been so skeptical of all the numbers. So let me ask you as somebody, I realize you're a big Israel critic. Where do you get your information from?

Like, what are you, like, what are the numbers that you're citing and who are you relying on for them? Well, the Israeli military kept its own casualty account. And according to Israeli media, they came to the conclusion that 83% of the casualties were civilians. So that's one source. And yeah, the Gaza Health Ministry, I think, is a credible source. The State Department has long relied on it way before October 7th. And it just makes sense to me that if you have. have a death camp, which is what Gaza is. People are trapped there, two million people,

one of the most densely populated areas of the world. And they're being bombarded every single day with the most powerful weapons in the world at a magnitude far greater than the U.S. unleashed on Japan in the Second World War. It makes sense to me. You're going to have tens of thousands of deaths. And if anything, I think the official toll from the Gaza Health Ministry of tens of thousands is a vast undercount given. I mean, the Israelis have said tens of thousands. Yeah. And I think it's a vast undercount. Given just the scale of weaponry that Israel unleashed on Gaza, people can't go anywhere. They're in a very densely populated area. I think the death toll, the official one from the Hamas run health ministry is a vast undercount. And I don't

think people need to be swayed by propaganda to believe that this was a horrific crime that we supported. Well, okay, we'll save that one for another day because Israel will be with us for a long time in this debate. But let's hope that Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, and Iran will not be with us for the immediate future as areas in which we have massive wars breaking out that potentially involve U.S. interests. Erin, a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. All right. Coming up next, Walter Kern will be here. He's more defensive of the administration, and we look forward to hearing his take on that and Minnesota, among other things. By the way, Tim Wallace is in the middle, I'm told, of a presser. It was supposed to start at noon Eastern.

find out what he's saying. I mean, because now, first he said that the whole thing, the accusations of fraud by the Somali community, he attributed it to white supremacy. Now he says he's no longer going to run for office because it would be a distraction as he deals with his political nightmare and the accusations against him. And he also acknowledges that people are taking advantage of Minnesotans generosity. So which is it? Is this all white supremacy? Or did bad people take advantage of Minnesota's generosity? I think we all know the answer. But let's hear what he's saying. We'll get back to that. in one minute. You know how much my family and I love our dogs. Yes, even sweet Strudwick. I cannot

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today to learn more. That's deltarescue.org. Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show. I want to get through a few of these soundbites before I bring in Walter, just so you can hear Trump himself talking about it. You heard him saying we were prepared to do a second strike in Venezuela, that we are going to run Venezuela. We're going to fix it. We're going to have elections at the right time there. Here is his warning to Colombia's president, Gustavo Petro, in Saudi. 10. This is from yesterday. Columbia is very sick to run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United

States. And he's not going to be doing it very long. Let me tell you. What does that mean? He's not going to be doing it very long. He's not doing it very long. He has cocaine mills and cocaine factories. He's not going to be doing it very long. So there will be an operation by the U.S. and it sounds good to me. It sounds good to me. There will be an operation by the United States. good to me. What? What are we doing in Colombia? What? What are we doing in Colombia? What? Um, here he is about Mexico. Sot 12. And by the way, you have to do something with Mexico. Mexico has to get their act together because they're pouring through Mexico and we're going to have to do something. We'd love Mexico to do it. They're capable of

doing it. But unfortunately, the cartels are very strong in Mexico. I remember one time you actually, speaking of Mexico, I asked you about Claudia Shine, And you told me at one point you had offered to send U.S. troops into Mexico to combat drug trafficking there. Is that something you're going to go about? I think she's a terrific person. I would say every single time I talk to her, I offered to send troops. And she's just not willing? She's concerned.

She's a little afraid. The cartels are running Mexico. Whether you like it or not, it's not nice to say. The cartels are running Mexico. Okay. That one's more ambiguous. You have to do something with Mexico. Mexico has to get their act together. That's less about us doing something in Mexico, though somewhat ambiguous. Here he is on Iran. Sat 13. There's been protesters killed in Iran. You said we were locked and loaded, ready to go. What is the line there for when the U.S. is going to get involved in those protests? We'll take a look. We're watching it very closely. If they start killing people like they have in the past,

I think they're going to get hit very hard by the United States. And I just end something. I played the soundbite of Trump saying about Cuba, that it's ready to fall. Looks like it's ready to fall. I don't know if they're going to hold out. Here's his Secretary of State doubling down on that in an appearance on Meet the Press yesterday, SOT 15. Is the Cuban government, the Trump administration's next target, Mr. Secretary, very quickly? Well, the Cuban government is a huge problem.

Yeah. The human government is a huge problem. So is that a yes? But I don't think people fully appreciate. I think they're in a lot of trouble. Yes, I'm not going to talk to you about what our future steps are going to be and our policies are going to be right now in this regard. But I don't think it's any mystery that we are not big fans of the Cuban regime. It was Cubans that guarded Maduro.

He was not guarded by Venezuelan bodyguards. He had Cuban bodyguards. In terms of their internal intelligence, who spies on who inside to make sure there are no traitors, those are all Cubans. Okay. But saying there, the Cuban government is a huge problem. They're in a lot of trouble. And then there's Greenland. Trump was a little bit reluctant to talk about Greenland.

Greenland, when asked about it on Air Force One yesterday, it was not his idea to raise it. But when it was raised, here's what happened. It's not 14. On Greenland, you know. But Greenland now? Yeah, on Greenland. We come up to Greenland.

So do you expect to take an action against Greenland? Well, I don't want to talk about Greenland. Let's talk about Vineland. Venezuela, Russia, Ukraine, we'll worry about Greenland in about two months. Let's talk about Greenland in 20 days. I will say this about Greenland. We need Greenland from a national security situation. It's so strategic.

Right now Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. And Denmark is not going to be able to do it, I can tell you. You know what Denmark did recently to boost up security on Greenland? They added one more dog sled. It's true. They thought that was a great move. What would the justification be for a claim to Greenland?

Oh, I don't want to talk about Greenland now. I just say this. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. And the European Union needs us to have it. And they know that. Okay, joining me now, Walter Kern. He's editor at large of County Highway and co-host of the America This Week podcast. Welcome back to the show, Walter. So why should I move from yellow into green when it comes to supporting President Trump in all of these initiatives, which, like, I'm feeling overwhelmed with the number of countries that he wants us to get involved in? well he wants hemispheric dominance and so you could just substitute the words western hemisphere for this list of individual countries that's something we had that's something we had once by default

but we have ceded it to some extent to china especially in south america um and uh this grab back of this lost power is, I think, you know, what he's seeking. Okay, I agree. I do think the seizing of Maduro was about that and keeping China and Russia and Iran and Cuba from growing in power in our hemisphere. But this is like, I mean, if we actually go into Colombia, if we actually went into Iran and started, like, actually bombing them because they shot a problem. protester, something we don't support, but my God, you know, I mean, lots of countries shoot protesters.

It's terrible, but we don't normally make it a United States problem. If we actually go into Cuba, if we do something in Mexico, if we invade Greenland, I mean, this is, this is, I'm sorry, but this is not what we voted for. We won't be invading Greenland. I mean, it has a tiny population located on the coast. We've lost more people in Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan than we've lost in Trump's wars, quote-unquote, so far. Agreed. And Trump talks tough, but he delivers so far rather short confrontations, as in Iran and as in Venezuela that lead to rather decisive conclusions. Now, there's always time for a quagmire. There's always time to get bogged down and bite off more than you can chew.

But I guess I'd rather have confrontational rhetoric and fewer casualties than I would a peace talker like Biden who allowed war that, and in some ways, I think, helped trigger a war in Ukraine that has killed hundreds, thousands. I mean, you know, at the same time, I agree with you. that Trump was a kind of non-interventionist, America first, somewhat even isolationist candidate. And this is not consonant with that. I also have to look at the fruits of what's going on. And, you know, so far, these have not been forever wars of the kind that his predecessors started.

True. I hope they don't. People raise these same warnings before we bombed Iran. and they responded with like a symbolic campaign attacking a military base where we had warning. It was like a nothing that they responded with. It did not result in World War III, and Trump's decision to go in Iran, which I supported, was proven to be correct. But I do worry about long-term consequences on these things.

I don't know what's going to happen in Venezuela that we're, quote, running. I don't like that term. But I see his point. If you go in there, you just oppose the leader, and then you leave it. Then you do wind up with another. Libya or Iraq. And while some people are like, well, Iraq kind of is democratic now, it's still a mess. It's still a hot mess over in Iraq.

It's a little better than it was, thanks to us that we left and then we went back. But no one wants to go back. That one wants to turn Venezuela into an Iraq. Well, I mean, this is mob boss behavior on Trump's part. It's big talk. It's intimidation. It's squaring off. it's giving veiled warnings and veiled threats and even ones that are not so veiled anymore.

And he's obviously doing it from what he believes is a position of strength. He believes he holds cards that maybe aren't shown to the world. But from his point of view, what he's trying to do is roll back Chinese influence. He's trying to secure what they believe are critical research. sources from, you know, from certain metals to oil, to other things. He's trying to dominate world markets in oil particularly now. And he's sending out a kind of warning that is almost JFK-like, you know, we will stand strong in the defense of freedom and so on. He doesn't want to be the one to lose these countries in our own hemisphere to,

a global game of risk. And it will all be in the results. It will all have to be judged by how it works out. I have a sense that Trump being Trump, what he does is he overpromises, he overthreatens, he starts the negotiation with his strongest offer or his strongest threat. And then things, then the real world comes into play and things don't quite turn out that way, but he's striving for a 25% better outcome. Here he is talking about how it's going to be different under him. I mean, and he's not the same as Biden. We can all agree on that.

Sot 4. Mr. President, the U.S. has something of a mixed track record of ousting dictators without necessarily a plan for what comes afterwards. Did that weigh on your decision making? Well, that's when we had different presidents, but with me, that's not true. With me, we've had a perfect track record of winning. We win a lot. And we win.

If you look at Soleimani, you look at al-Baghdadi, you look at the Midnight Hammer. We have essentially peace in the Middle East because of that. If we weren't successful with Midnight Hammer, you wouldn't have peace in the Middle East. So with me, you've had a lot of victory. You've had only victories. You've had no losses. It's not wrong there, Walter, but this is the first time we've taken out a country's leader. Oh, well, not the first time we've done that.

We took out the country's leader in Ukraine. back in 2014, which is one of the reasons we have the Ukraine war. Of course I'm talking about under Trump. Under Trump. I mean, the history of the United States in South and Central America is that of taking out leaders constantly. Sometimes it works. Well, that's what we're trying.

I'm sorry. Forgive me, I should have waited to start this until the opposite side of this break, which I will do. We'll be back in just one minute. Don't go away. So I can safely say that at times, sometimes more than not even, we all feel sluggish. bloated, and not quite ourselves. Modern life is hard. Processed foods, too little sleep and endless stress can all disrupt your gut. It can sap energy. It can weaken immune health.

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Megan, so they know we sent you. Hey, everyone. It's me, Megan Kelly. I've got some exciting news. I now have my very own channel on Sirius XM. It's called the Megan Kelly channel, and it is where you will hear the truth, unfiltered, with no agenda, and no apologies. Along with the Megan Kelly, show, you're going to hear from people like Mark Halperin, Link Lauren, Maureen Callahan, Emily Jishinsky, Jesse Kelly, real clear politics, and many more. It's bold, no BS news, only on the Megan Kelly channel, Sirius XM 11, and on the Sirius XM app. Welcome back to the Megan Kelly show. Walter Kern is editor at large of County Highway and co-host

of the America This Week podcast. He's back with me now. We'll get back to Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Iran, and Greenland in just one second. But we had an interesting discussion over the commercial break, Walter, with the team. And it's yet another thing I strongly disagree with Jake Tapper on. We, over the break, watched Nuremberg, starring Russell Crow and Remy Mollick. And Tapper's out there highly recommending it as he loved it. I hated it. I thought it was terrible.

It was so poorly done. I thought the acting was bad. I thought the screenwriting was bad. I thought the directing was bad. You know, usually you're not noticing the acting or the directing. If you're noticing it, something's gone wrong. And Remy Malick, while he did a great Freddie, Mercury, in the movie about Queen, it's, he was, my husband at this point, he was right.

It was almost like taking a play, an actor from the theater and putting him onto a movie screen where all the gestures are too big. The emotions are too big. And the way Claire Daines is now totally carried away with the over-facial expressions and when she cries, Remy Malick with a huge jaw, it just doesn't work. He's calling too much attention to himself in every scene. And even Russell Crow, you couldn't forget that he was Russell Crow. He did not sell me on Herman Gurring. On Nuremberg, Nuremberg did not.

Crow played Gering? Yes. And other than getting enormously fat, it didn't work. Like, he was fat like Guring. Okay, that's great, but did not buy it at all. But secondly, on the bright side, the whole family went physically to the movies. And we actually saw in the theater The House Maid, which is based on the book by Frieda McFadden, who is a very fun author. Like, if you just want to put an audio book on your phone and get some stuff done around the house, I love her books.

You can go through them fast. They require just enough attention that, like, you're interested and you're not thinking about your problems. but not so much that, like, you have to stop what you're doing. And it stars Sidney Sweeney and some very hot guy who plays the male lead who's, I never heard of before, but he's excellent. And I loved it. And the whole family loved it. My daughter had listened to the book as well, but the other three of us had not,

and they all loved it. Very good thriller, twists and turns. It wasn't exactly like the book. I won't give anything away. But the changes they made I approved of and really thoroughly enjoyed the two hours and 11 minutes. and loved my movie popcorn on top of it. So I just wanted to give you my,

as a screenwriter yourself, I wanted to give you my armchair analysis of the latest offerings. Well, I'm a screenwriter who also lives in the middle of Montana where these movies will come somewhere next year, I suppose. I guess Russell Crowe played garing and put on weight because changing your body in extreme ways is how you win Oscars as an actor.

Yes, that's right. That's what they say. The only reason to make a movie about Nuremberg at this point is to control the narrative about Nazis and, you know, the judgment of public officials, which I found immediately suspicious. Are they trying to forestall the moment when America decides to judge its former officials and they're trying to control the sort of context for that? When they pick historical events out of the, you know, out of the hopper, there's always always. a reason. There's always an agenda. Believe me. There are plenty of interesting. Let me tell you something along those lines. Okay. So that I don't think this is a spoiler alert because it's history. You know, everybody knows what happened at the Nuremberg trials. But it's not a spoiler alert. But the

cross-examination of Gering was done by Supreme Court Justice Jackson. And they have him completely fall on his face and do very poorly. And then they have the British prosecutor stand up and saved the day. I did do a quick Google search to see whether that happened because it sounded very much like, oh, Hollywood would just shit on the U.S. Supreme Court Justice. It does sound like he didn't do the greatest cross-examination. Maybe it wasn't as bad as they portrayed in this film, and that the British prosecutor was the one who brought it home at the end. Okay, fine, I'll give you that point. But the movie ends with the character played by Rami Malik as a psychiatrist who they sent in there to go examine Guring and the other Nazis who we were

about to put on trial for crimes against humanity, a new crime. We had just invented. And they asked him to violate his ethical oath by telling the U.S. brass what he'd learned in those examinations. Well, duh. I mean, obviously he was going to have to do that. They weren't like trying to get guring the help he so desperately needed by sending in a psychiatrist. It was an American psychiatrist designed to get information that would help us in the trial. Hello. Everybody knew that. But they play up his ethical conflict. Okay, whatever. But the movie ends with Remy Malick's character, the psychiatrist, going on a radio tour back here at home.

And in the radio tour, he has American radio hosts asking him about the unique evil of these Nazis and it ends with him making the strong case that this could easily happen in the United States of America, that this is what evil is and that men in power can be turned to this. And it was like, okay, except we've gone 250 years

without it happening, But sure, that's the message these filmmakers wanted to leave us with. It could happen just as easily in the United States as it did in Nazi Germany. You know, it reminds me of a Rachel Maddow monologue. There'll be about everything. She'll start about the price of, you know, of food. And it will end with the condemnation of Trump and a warning about the future. You waited two hours for the inevitable comparison.

Yes. You know, when I was at the 2016. Republican convention. I was sitting next to a German film crew watching Donald Trump give his acceptance speech. And the German reporter turned to me and he said, someday we may have to invade you to save you from fascism. And I looked at him and I said, go away. This is how you, this is how you thank us for, you know, first beating and then reconstructing your country. Yeah, I could have seen that softball flying a million miles away. It was ridiculous, honestly.

Like, I watched it. I was excited to watch it, too. The preview, the trailer was excellent. I couldn't wait for it. And what a disappointment. Okay, let me, I want to move on to Minnesota and some other news, but I do want to make this one point first. Anne Colter made some good points online.

And she said, it's about time. She's totally in favor of what we've done in Minnesota. She said Maduro's been indicted over and over for drug trafficking, and she says, unlike, for example, off the top of my head, Iran, which poses exactly zero threat to any American, the drug cartel known as the Maduro regime is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young Americans and will continue to kill them unless we crush it. Drop the horse shit, she writes, about making Venezuela great again, other than Uruguay, which is 88% white European, she writes, no Latin American country has ever achieved long-lasting peace. The rest are caldrons of revolution, civil war, coups, coups, coups, military dictatorships, etc. They did this to themselves. It's what they like. How did Venezuela become communist again?

It's not that complicated. She writes, poor people in Venezuela voted for it. Oh, boy, did they vote for it. The ridiculous peasant, Hugo Chavez, promised Venezuela's poor that he would take vengeance on the rich, the squalid ones, and give their stuff to the poor. Millions of poor people responded, yes. the U.S. military can depose. It cannot change the nature of people. Set up a friendly government, get the American oil companies in, and get out before fat female National Guard members start painting George Floyd murals and instructing the local ladies on feminism. She's got away with them word things. Though her final point is send all the Venezuelans who have fled to our country home. Now, there was a troubling soundbite from Christy Nome. on that because you may recall they fought a legal battle the Trump administration did that just resolved in October all the way up at the Supreme Court about whether they could revoke the temporary

protected status that Biden had given some 600,000 Venezuelans here. And Trump revoked it. Well, there was a lawsuit. The U.S. Supreme Court held in October. It was fine to revoke it. They can be shipped back home, those Venezuelans. And Christy Noam was asked by Fox News on Fox News, Monday, whether that's still happening. TPS, temporary protected status. The revocation is still in place and these people are still going home. And here's how that went. Madam Secretary, are you going to force these people to return to Venezuela now, even as their government is in complete flux? Well, Venezuela today is more free than it was yesterday. And it's going to continue to be that way as long as President Trump is in the White House.

is making sure that he's protecting the interests of the American people because that ripple effect will continue to bring that kind of liberty to Venezuela as well. These programs were bringing integrity back to them. The decisions are made in conjunction with the State Department, with the White House, and then we at Homeland Security implement them and make sure that they are followed through. So every individual that was under TPS has the opportunity to apply for refugee status, And that evaluation will go forward, but we need to make sure that our programs actually mean something and that we're following the law. Okay, so it started off well, and then we meandered to every single individual who had the TPS revoked is going to be able to apply now for refugee status, since Venezuela is the way it is.

Now, I will say, DHS clarified on X that that's not what she meant. They said, that's not what she said. Well, it is what she said that they could become refugees. They could apply to become refugees. But then they said that President Trump is bringing stability to Venezuela and bringing to justice an illegitimate narco-terrorist dictator who stole from his own people. Secretary Nome ended TPS for more than 500,000 Venezuela's, and now they can go home to a country that they love. So I'm somewhat heartened by the clarification, but I am a little disturbed by the comment that they can all apply to become refugees here in America. I'm going to go with what they put in writing as opposed to a meandering thought on a cable news hit.

But let's just pick it up where we left off on whether Trump is right that, because he has never deposed a head of state and led that country into chaos, that we can trust him to have deposed this head of state in Venezuela and not anticipate chaos there. Well, listen, all the predictions about Donald Trump turn out to be wrong. And so I greet this prediction with a certain skepticism that he's going to, you know, get us into some morass. Tariffs didn't lead to inflation. Iran, we're not at war with Iran at the moment. All sorts of doomsday predictions have done. as I say, not come true.

I think that Venezuela was the gateway to a lot of things, from migration, you have come up through there, or you leave there, to drugs, to, they were importing oil to Cuba, very low rates, basically propping up the Cuban regime. What Trump's trying to do, I think, is make the minimal intervention for the maximum effect. and he may succeed in gaining some of those virtuous effects. But as yet, he has a pretty good record of scaring everybody into thinking the world's going to end, and then it somehow doesn't. And I guess I will rely on that track record so far as he urges us to rely.

And, you know, if he's in over his head, then we'll soon see. But, you know, saying that we're going to run Venezuela is probably, to me, the most grandiose and inaccurate statement he has made so far. He keeps making it. He said it. And then Rubio came out and said, we didn't mean run. He didn't say that explicitly. He goes, what we mean is we're going to use our oil embargo that we have on the tankers in place right now to try to basically strong arm or threaten or. persuade this vice president,

Maduro's vice president, to do what we want. And then Trump came out last night on Air Force One and said, if I say what I mean, I'm getting it in trouble. And you heard the reporter say, what do you mean? And he said, we're in charge. We're going to run it. So it's like, I think he means what he says. Well, yes, he may.

But there is some element of good cop, bad cop, uh, strategic confusion. And what they call Matt, what Nixon called Matt, Madman theory, meaning you kind of make the ultimate threat and make everybody believe that you are on the verge of actually being unstable, causing them to, you know, start to look at their cards a little differently in case you bring out a gun and it's not a card game anymore. So this is kind of behavior that I would expect from someone who's trying to use the fewest troops to do the most change. Yeah. Okay. Let's keep going, because we're going to have Venezuela to deal with for quite some time now that we're running it. Minnesota, your former state, now you're in Montana, where I was over the holidays. My home state, Minnesota. I grew up there, went to elementary school, high school, and, you know, I consider it my boyhood home, yeah.

Yeah, that's where you're from. I feel like you are from pretty much where you went to high school. So Minnesota is sadly being exposed daily, including by county highway, for massive amounts of fraud within its ranks, all permitted by, that's the best case scenario, Tim Walls, and his attorney general, Keith Ellison. You guys did a huge expose on it, a county highway. Then after you, City Journal came. Then after that, New York Times came. Then after that, Nick Shirley, an independent journalist who's only 23-year-old. Blue the doors off the story, yeah. Yes, and the reason the Nick Shirley piece was so additive is because I had video, right?

Like, I don't know if you remember when my young friend at NYU and her best friend, her best friend got attacked. And the guy, like, wailed on her from behind. He hit her in the behind, and then he yanked her to the ground by her hair. And our friend, Summer, was her best friend and went to the liquor store in front of which it happened and got the video. And we put it on Twitter, and then we put it on this show, and it went viral, and they caught the guy. It turned into a big story because we had the video. And I think Nick Shirley going and getting the video was very powerful addition to the reporting that had been breaking. Not by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, by the way.

didn't see them at all on the list, nor are they even covering these huge news stories like the Nick Shirley stuff. Most of the broadcast networks aren't really covering it. Most of the legacy press, like New York Times, Washington Post, not covering it, just ignoring it. And by the way, then you have CNN, instead of attacking the Minnesota fraud story as like, let's get, let's roll up our sleeves and get it ourselves, attacking Nick Shirley as like he's just some doofist kid who, We couldn't verify his reports because we called the daycare centers and they said that they do have children there. Oh, okay. Well, if they said it, certainly a fraudster when asked directly would definitely tell the truth.

If you could believe what criminals and government officials say, we would have no need for a press. Right. It's ridiculous. The whole reason we have one is that they lie about everything, or at least they have incentives to lie. Yeah. So I'm looking forward to CNN's apology to Nick Shirley because. Tim Walsh just ended his campaign for re-election as Minnesota governor because of this cumulative reporting, including yours, including Nix. And if this is such a made-up scandal that never happened, CNN, why did Tim Wals just announce he's not running for governor again? I'll let you hear him explain it in part right here.

This just happened. I don't want to mince words here. Donald Trump and his allies in Washington and in St. Paul. and online, want to make our state a colder, meaner place. They want to poison our people against each other by attacking our neighbors. And ultimately, they want to take away much of what makes Minnesota the best place in the country to raise a family. They've already begun trying to withhold funds that were meant to help families afford child care. And they have no intention to stopping there.

A single taxpayer dollar wasted on fraud should be intolerable. And while there's a role to play for everyone, from the legislature to prosecutors, to insurance companies, to local and county government, the buck does stop with me. My administration has been taking fast decisive action to solve this crisis. We'll win the fight against the fraudsters. But the political gamesmanship we're seeing from Republicans is only making that fight harder. He says he can't run for office and address the fraud. crisis at the same time. So he's going to just do the latter.

So he's admitting that it's a crisis. He's admitting that there's fraud. He's not specifying at what level, but we already know what level. Record setting historic levels. And yet at the same time, it's all politics. Choose which one is it. Is it Donald Trump lying about Minnesota or is it Minnesota getting together to defraud the federal government?

Because remember, this was federal money flowing through Minnesota, not just state money. It was primarily federal money that was being appropriated and directed into these state overseen programs where it just disappeared. And it disappeared all over the world. And it disappeared into the pockets of politicians. And it disappeared into the pockets of the culprits and bought their cars and their homes and their watches. and it did so at a level that America was stunned by and continues to be stunned by. And it's only a paradigm for other states. Tim Waltz, you were almost the vice president of the United States,

which means you would have been a heartbeat away from being the president of the United States. This story was not covered during that election, yet it existed. All the facts that have come out recently were there for the press to look at when Tim Walts was running for the vice presidency. To me, he's the luckiest man in the world. He might be giving the governorship over to someone who will be in a position to pardon him for various crimes. He might be surviving to fight another day, but I don't think his troubles are over.

And go out blaming somebody when you're also supposedly taking response It's a classic, have your cake and eat it to political move. He's over with. Yeah. It's amazing this guy was like within a breath of the vice presidency. Which means you're a heartbeat away from the presidency. Yeah. And let's not forget.

This was the one decision Kamala Harris made on her gut, on gut instinct. That's what she said. She interviewed him and she just knew, Tim, Walls was right for the job. Oh, my God. So here, here's the deal. Let me play a little bit more of him explaining why he can't both be governor and run for re-election given the amount of this fraud now. Here's, this is him just within the last hour. But as I reflect on this moment with my family and my team over the holidays, I came to the conclusion that I can't give a political campaign my all. Every minute that I spend defending my own political interest,

would be a minute I can't spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who pray on our generosity and the cynics who want to prey on our differences. So I've decided to step out of this race and I'll let others worry about the election while I focus on the work that's in front of me for the next year. Okay, so criminals. Is he going to turn into Batman now?

He's going to be a private citizen seeking out fraud and avenging wrongs? What's he even talking about? So he says, I, I can't devote any time away from focusing on the criminals who pray on our generosity. Now, literally, he was just calling those of us who are pointing at the Somali community within Minnesota saying, it's them. Hello. We saw them. We see them copping pleas, getting found guilty for earlier frauds by the day. And now we see the Nick Shirley report about what's happening with the children's care in this explosive report.

that hit over the holidays. And you call us all white supremacists. You literally said that you're a white supremacist if that's what you want to focus on. Okay. Or you just want to go where the facts lead, which happens to be here, the Somali community. Here's one of the reasons why he's doing that, in my view. Keith Ellison is his attorney general. Keith Ellison was caught on tape. And this group, the American experiment, had an exclusive with Air, this. I'm just going to play you a little bit of Keith Ellison in the problematic soundbites, and then I'm going to play you the one where he says Tim Wals is right there with him, like, you know, two peas in a pod on his attitude about Somali fraud. Here he is on tape

to some of the feeding our future scandal individuals, people involved in it. And he's all about how he's going to help them, not how he's going to crack down on them, but how he's going to help them because Keith Ellison, of course, himself is a radical and he's been running cover for groups like this for a long time. Here he is in SOT 30. Of course, I'm here to help. I mean, but let me be clear, I'm not here because I think it's going to help my re-election. I don't give a, I don't care about no re-election. I voluntarily through my congressional career away. I'm like, I don't want to do it anymore. It's boring to me. So to do this, to do what I'm doing now. So, of course, I didn't leave

that job to do nothing in this job. I mean, is this, am I going to get more hits than I got by prosecuting a police officer and giving them life in prison? Right? So we're going to, yeah, so let's just go just go fight these people. So the question

is figuring out exactly how to put a stop to it, right? So what happened? The how is the real question for me. Here, the how. How? How. do we do it? Okay. So this group would be charged a month later by the feds accused of fraud. But here he is on tape like, how can I help you? I'm here to help. And then here's more where he

asks some of the feeding our future scandal individuals, the names of the government officials denying them money. He's pissed off that the government is pumping the brakes on giving this group that would be charged within a month of fraud by the feds, that they're pumping the brakes and giving them money. Take a listen to here. Next SOT is SOT 31. And just send me the names of all these folks who are just hung up and like hanging on by a thread and barely going to and probably ain't going to survive unless they get their money soon. That I can take that list and start saying and I can call Joey Hartstead, the person over at education and say what is going on? Why I'm not getting these complaints and start them. And I'll call them in my office.

and demand some explanations. Maybe it's because they are accused of committing fraud. Maybe there were some sniffs, some aromas of the fraud, Keith, which you should have looked into as Attorney General, rather than running cover for this group, which is a very large constituency. I don't have to tell you that, Walter, in Minnesota, that he knew he needed to win re-election.

Here's the third one. So at 32, he talks about Governor Wals and his attitude on this whole nasty business. Listen. Here's the thing. As big as you are collectively, most are pretty small. And you're running small,

tiny businesses out of business over nothing. And a lot of times, if you think there's a problem, I mean, look, everybody has to comply with what the rules are. But if somebody submits something that's not in the right format,

then you call them and say, this is not in the right format, not you're out. you're done. Your contracts are over. And so this has my attention. I'm extremely frustrated by it, but we are in the middle of the battle with the agencies now. And I can tell you this. Walls agrees with me that this piddly stupid stuff running small people out of business is terrible. Piddley stupid stuff. According to my team, that was Salim Saeed on this tape

in the meeting with Keith Ellison. Said was convicted of 20 counts after this. One count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, four counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit federal programs, bribery, eight counts of bribery, one count conspiracy to commit money laundering, five counts of money laundering.

Brought by the feds, obviously, not Keith Ellison. He and his colleague Amy Bach took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the feds, to carry out a massive fraud scheme that stole money meant to feed children. The defendants falsely claimed to have served 91 million meals for which they fraudulent they received nearly $250 million in federal funds, not piddly stupid stuff, running small people out of business, like Keith Ellison said, and like he said Governor Walls agreed with him on.

Instead, said the feds, it was used to fund their lavish lifestyles. Today's verdict, after they got the conviction, sends a message, said the feds, to the community that fraud against the government will not be tolerated. This is uncovered by the Minnesota Think Tank American Experiment obtained December 2021 audio. And that's, I believe, Walter, why Tim Walsh, will not be running for re-election, and it's not because defending the people of Minnesota

is going to be a big distraction for him. Well, he's got his own defense to pay attention to, and I'm sure he's got teams of lawyers on speed dial ready to prepare it, and it's going to be a full-time job. Remember the movie The Godfather? They go up to, the gangsters go up to testify before Congress. And all of them are all of oil importers and just small businessmen. And, you know, that's the same defense you're seeing here.

When your business is fraud, we want you out of business. But Ellison sees his job as keeping the money flowing. It's clear from that whole tape that what he's guaranteeing is we're going to keep the money flowing. If you have a problem, call me and we'll help, you get it. And everybody's going to be happy. And treating that as a business is, maybe he believes that that's a legitimate business. But then that's even scarier, that running daycares without children, school lunch programs without food, transportation programs for health care without passengers is business, only to him.

Mm-hmm. The attempts to take down the Nick Shirley reporting are stunning even to me. Like the absence of interest in the allegations as opposed to the supreme interest in exposing Nick Shirley because he used to post what they said were hoax videos as a high schooler. How about actually kicking the doors? Because this didn't come out of nowhere, as I pointed out. You guys broke a massive fraud story about Minnesota. months ago. And then City Journal did. And then New York Times did. So Nick Shirley didn't pop out of the blue, right? So like, where was the interest? Why didn't the Minneapolis Star Tribune blow the lid off of this, Walter? Why did you break it

in Montana? And why now do we have CNN and CBS as well, appearing to try to run cover for the fraudsters as opposed to blow more of the lids off of the fraud examples? Well, first, if they admit that it's

a major story, then they also have to explain why they never covered it. And they can't. Secondly, one of the reasons this story didn't get the national attention it should have is that anyone who went in to report it, and I can tell you this for a fact, felt very apprehensive about their future. They knew that not only the criminals would be coming after them, but so would this curiously silent press, which had basically, I wouldn't say collaborated, but had, if silence consent, they were consenting. If silence is consent, the Minneapolis Star Tribune was allowing us to go on. So everybody's implicated. Nick Shirley, Huckleberry Finn, all-American boy, Lois Lane, comes along, you know, does his shoe leather and shows us in five seconds that what looks

like a daycare actually looks like a bombed out strip mall adult store with blacked out windows and kids, if they even did attend, shouldn't be allowed to. That point was made visually in such a, I think, decimating way, especially to Americans at Christmas who are feeling a little stressed about their credit card bills buying presents for their families while these people rode around in their sports cars having used our good nature. And listen, Minnesota is so good-natured that it may, you know, not survive. Everybody wants to believe themselves to be a great person. And it's like a Monty Python sketch.

They will still, when they have nothing and their cities are burning on horizon, say, at least I was a nice person. And so that now you have the feds saying we have shut down the funding to these alleged child care institutions because of these reports. And then Tim Walz's response is they're mean. The feds are mean. Donald Trump wants more meanness here in Minnesota. He wants the money to go to actual children, not too obvious Somali frauds. Exactly, Megan. The people who should be most outraged by this are the people who want children to be fed. The people who want there to be decent daycare. The people who want there to be transportation systems that get people to their medical appointments and so on. The people who want artistic children to be cared for. All of this money basically came out of the mouths and minds and bodies of the people who should have been getting it. And because it was diverted from them, the charity toward them and the good feeling toward them has been vastly reduced. They're making everything seem like a scam because everything that they've done looks like one.

Meanwhile, the problems go untreated. And shouldn't it be the liberal, good-hearted, kind-hearted people who want to see these real problems addressed who are the most outraged? Instead, they're the most angry about this, I mean, a truck pulled up before the money got to the kids, before the money got to the autistic, you know, children, before the school lunches got to the Hungary, and took it all away. Yeah, they're like, Nick Shirley, he may have gone there in hours that it wasn't open, the daycares, every single one, because he went on a Tuesday in the middle of broad daylight and the centers for alleged daycare services, claim they're open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. So what was it like Northern Lights in

Minnesota when he got there? Because he says he was there in the middle of the day, and there were no children in center after center after center. And instead of seeing Somali workers saying, yes, I'm not going to let you put them on camera, but you can come in and you can see if you want that there are 20 children sitting here. You know, you can verify it with your eyes. No, they all, here's what happened instead. I'll just give an example. We could be here all day showing his 45-minute report, which is well worth your time on YouTube. It's been seen by almost 150 million people now. Here's SOT 26.

We're just wondering where the children are. Where are the children? Yeah, where are the children? It says you have 102 children here, and you got $2.66 million this year in funding. And 2.5 million last year. We're just wondering where the kids are. And who are you? My name's Nick Shirley.

Nick Shirley. Oh, we are from ourselves. Hello, we'd like to ask where the money's going. Look at that, shut us down. No children inside of this daycare center. And look, this daycare center right here, no children inside of this daycare center. But between those buildings, over $2.6 million. We were just curious, where are the children at?

Do you know where the children are at? Where are the children at in these daycare centers? I don't say. Where are the children? I will sue you. You don't have any permission. We have nothing to do with this. Okay.

Then are there children? Please leave. Are there children here? Please leave. In center after center. Where are the children? They don't say they're inside. They don't say they're.

David, the guy who is with him, said he goes by there every day. There's never a child. They had witnesses that they interviewed. He said, I've never seen a child at any of these places. And then, then you've given. you get CNN like, we called and they said they had children there. Or CBS is like, we went by and we saw four children. Oh, you mean after Nick Shirley's report, you found a couple of children that obviously these fraudsters brought from their own home because they knew this is a national

story. The vice president of the United States was tweeting about it. And you rolled up your carpet and said, this story's done? Let me give you a sample. Here's just sample, Walter, and then I'll give it to you. CNN correspondent Whitney Wilde, who I've never heard about, about and is not going to make it at CNN with her report on her investigation. It's out 35. We're from CNN. Can we talk to you? This is mega-yutuber Nick Shirley. Back at a daycare in Minnesota, he alleged was a fraudulent facility in a now viral videos.

But surely, you don't think a daycare should just be unlocked. You shouldn't be able to just walk into a daycare. It shouldn't be a reception. No. Every daycare is locked. You bring you a fair point. then why can't they actually give me information how to enroll a child? How do you know that all the allegations that you're making are true?

How do I know that they're true? Well, we showed you guys the, we showed you guys what was happening, and then you guys can go ahead and make your own analysis. We're coming, so we can make our own analysis. Are you 100% sure you're true? Yeah, I am 100% sure I'm true. We reached out to several of the daycares featured in the now viral video. Only one daycare facility answered and said they are a legitimate business.

Have you seen that the videos, you know, purporting that some of these daycares don't have kids inside at the daycare where Shirley showed back up a stream of children walk inside you're saying that this is a fraudulent daycare there's kids being dropped off right now yes the commissioner of children literally said a week ago this place was closed did you know they're showing face right now yeah but are you true that with the with the meaningful cross-examination by cnn walter are you true yes i'm true you weird lady from cnn nitch surely could probably buy cnn at this point with its low ratings and his high ratings and YouTube income. And I hope he does.

It kills 150 million views. I hope he does. You know, American was always supposed to be a sort of a show me common sense country. And he did show me common sense reporting. And he struck a nerve. CNN has, you know, tried for years to make itself relevant. And I remember back when Al Gore was going to start, I think a network that used citizen reporting.

It was a very high-minded approach, citizen journalist, until somebody actually succeeded at it. And that's his sin, success. He didn't claim to be the kind of person who goes and, you know, first of all, he's only one person, stakes places out around the clock and so on. But he did at least 10,000 times what CNN did and has done since. And there are no one's stopping anyone from checking his work. But that was not checking his work, putting a camera on you while you made a speaker phone call and took as gospel the statement of someone who is at least an alleged fraudster.

Here's a little sampling of how CBS handled it with their reporter Jonah Kaplan. Stop 36. We visited those sites, too, as did state inspectors many times over the last six months. And we found the facts on the ground tell a different story. Those daycares, many of them were written up for safety violations, things like maybe busted equipment or staff training issues. But that's not the same as being fraudulent. So it's important to put all of this into context. yes sure that's apples and oranges that these places that apparently don't have kids in them also have busted equipment isn't i like how you use the word busted trying to minimize it using the high school term oh it's just busted uh you know uh why they are running clean up for this operation is the biggest mystery of all and i would uh challenge the young crusading reporters of america to try to figure out why they're doing it

Mm-hmm. Yeah, figure it out. And by the way, if you want to show me that there are kids there, then maybe show me the kids. You don't have to show their faces. You could blur their faces. Don't show me yourself, Jonah. That's really not that persuasive. Just you asking me to believe that everything Nick Shirley showed me on camera with people running and slamming doors in his face was a lie. You did not persuade me. You persuaded nobody. And this is one of the many reasons why, Walter, the new experiment over at CBS Evening News is going to fail. We did this out when Tony Docapul, the new CBS Evening News anchor, who no one's ever heard of, tweeted out like, we're on a new mission and we are going to not, you know, we're going to listen to you. Here's a little sample of what he said in SOAP 42. People do not trust us like they used to. On too many stories, the press has missed the story because we've taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites and not enough on you. I have felt this way too.

I felt like what I was seeing and hearing on the news didn't reflect what I was seeing and hearing in my own life and that the most urgent questions simply weren't being asked. Okay. Nice. Good try. It's going to fail. CBS evening news will fail. CBS will not be turned around by Barry Weiss or anybody else. I'm sorry, but its days have passed. CBS was never, for the past two decades, seriously in the running, for dominance in the morning or the evening or any place else in the lineup.

It was living off of its legacy from the Walter Cronkite years, which Dan rather maintained for some semblance of time, and then he imploded over fake documents during the Bush administration. when he was running for office, when George W. Bush was running for re-election that had been misrepresented on 60 minutes. In any event, CBS News has not been relevant in forever, and it doesn't matter who they put in the evening news chair or how late in the game they've realized that none of us trusts or, more importantly, needs them anymore. So you can take your suit code off, You can act like Joe Friday, my buddy, who's just going to be there trusting me, the consumer, and what matters to me.

It's too late. You should have talked to Jonah Kaplan and others like him about how to report on real stories before you try to sell us this line of bullshit and clasp to some last gasp of relevance at a time in which the world has moved past the dinosaur that is evening news. Well, Megan, how can I add to that? That was the Gettysburg Address of Condemnations. The fact is that when he says that he's felt sometimes that he can't trust the news, it so vastly understates the problem that it feels like a fraud in itself. These are people who went every day to the White House to press conferences, to other events who are stationed there and couldn't tell us that our president had dementia. These are people who claimed that Donald Trump was a Russian agent, despite no proof

and still no proof. These are the people who claimed that, you know, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was somehow not the absolute deadly debacle that it was. It's not that they sometimes gotten things wrong. It's that they always get things wrong and they get things wrong in a big way. And they did it through COVID. And they did it through the first Trump presidency. And they have done it right up until this very moment with this new big story, which is the defrauding of the United States taxpayer by a vast array of social welfare schemes that aren't helping anyone except politicians, gangsters, and even foreign recipients and, you know, gang. Al-Shabaab overseas. So this guy has been at CBS for nine years. He was at NBC prior to

that, what did you do, Tony, to show that you had a loathing and objection to the way CBS news was covering everything? Because all I remember of Tony Docapul was he stood up to Ibra Mexico, no, it was to Tanahesi Coates, who spent 10 days in Israel and then declared himself an expert on the oppression happening over there. And he did a good job of cross-examining him on his empty, meaningless, stupid-ass book when he went on one of the show. that they have on CBS that Tony was a part of, CBS mornings. So he did a good job there. And then he got the evening news rule because he stood up for Israel. And Barry Weiss is now running CBS. And so she gave him the top job. Great. Okay. So I think we can expect him to stand up for Israel. And there is

a lot of left-wing bias against Israel. So we'll look forward to seeing that. What else has done? Seriously, what is a single instance in which he has stood up for the regular Joe on on corporate media bias. None. Bullshit. This is fucking revisionist history meant to set him as the new truth teller. Where was he in the independent lane? Where was he standing up for people who were in the independent lane trying to tell the truth about media, about government, about the Biden administration? I don't remember you, Tony. So I find this utter bullshit condescension, Walter, and I do believe it will fucking fail, as all these networks are failing, because the audience has caught on to their bullshit.

Well, if they wanted to take a big swing, they would have hired Walter Kern Kite. He's sitting right here in front of you. And he has paid a very dear price for his dissent on these stories, frankly. I've lost jobs. I've lost friends. I've lost social standing among the people

that used to bug me when I had to go to their party. So that's no loss. But there are, are a lot of people who've lost a lot in this fight for the truth. And he's not really one of them, frankly. Yeah, Walter Kernkite, they would do a lot better. Now, speaking of people we love, you are definitely at the top of the list. I do want to give an update on our pal, Victor Davis Hanson, who underwent a radical surgery on Tuesday that was dangerous. And he has come out, issued a statement through his boss at the Hoover Institution, Condoleezza Rice, that reads,

share a brief health update. I recently underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor and am now recovering. I'm doing well and hopeful as I move forward. Thank you for the many messages of support and prayers. They truly mean more than I can say. As I focus on recovery, I may not be able to respond to everyone, but please know how grateful I am from VDH. And I've been in touch with his wife, too, and I know that he's doing a lot better. And he did come through the surgery with a complication or two, but he's doing very well now. So God bless him. He needs your prayers. Walter, God bless you too, my friend. Great to have you. Thank you. See again soon. And we are back tomorrow. See you then. Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.