The Megyn Kelly Show - Trump's Iran Uranium Push, Lindsey Graham at Disney World, and Tiger Woods' Sad DUI, with Professor Pape and Stu Burguiere | Ep. 1284

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

Megyn Kelly is joined by Robert Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, to discuss the reports about "boots on the ground" in Iran, what happens if the Trump administration deploys even more troops to the region, the Iran war "Escalation Trap" theory, the truth about this new mission being discussed of using American troops to extract Iran's uranium, the extreme danger of such a move, Trump's "gambler's curse" Iran policy, why Israel may be in more danger now that the war with Iran has started, whether Israel would consider using a nuke, and more. Then Stu Burguiere, host of "Predictable with Stu," joins to discuss Lindsey Graham spotted at Disney World with a bubble wand as Congress is on vacation, why this looks so terrible while troops are being deployed near Iran, the truth about the latest polls that show red flags for the GOP and the Trump administration, why the issues are bigger than Iran, the absurd “No Kings” protests over the weekend, Jimmy Kimmel and aging Bruce Springsteen in a starring role, the odd leftist freaks who were there, Tiger Woods’ latest DUI arrest, the dangers that can come with an extreme focus on sports at a young age, Woods' inability to deal with challenges after his massive success, and more.   Pape- https://escalationtrap.substack.com/ Burguiere- https://predictable.substack.com/   Birch Gold: Text MK to 989898 and get your free info kit on gold PureTalk: Save on wireless with PureTalk visit https://PureTalk.com/MEGYNKELLY Quo: Make this the season where no opportunity slips away. Try QUO for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to https://www.Quo.com/MK Cozy Earth: Visit https://www.CozyEarth.com/MEGYN & Use code MEGYN for up to 20% off     Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKelly Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShow Instagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShow Facebook: 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 and happy Monday. Yeah, we're there again. We had a ton of news over the weekend related to the war in Iran. President Trump earlier this morning firing off on truth social that, quote, great progress has been made to end military operations in Iran with, quote, a new and more reasonable regime. Sounds pretty optimistic, but the president ended his post by declaring that if a deal is not reached and the Strait of Hormuz is not immediately opened, quote, we will conclude our lovely stay in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plants, oil wells, and Karg Island, and possibly all desalinization plants, which we have purposefully not yet touched. This will be in retribution. He continues for our many soldiers and others that Iran is butchered. and killed over the old regime's 47-year reign of terror, unquote. So it really seems like things could go either way in Iran. The president's optimistic and sunny tone has now become par for the

course right in the mornings before the markets open. So you have to take it with a grain of salt, especially given the way he ended that post. There were two stories over the weekend about what escalation might look like. The Washington Post reporting that the Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations, but the operation, it writes, would fall short of a full-scale invasion. Whatever that means. What is a full-scale invasion versus ground operation involving thousands of our troops? I mean, who gets to decide? Do we need 200,000 for these papers to call it a full-scale invasion? What's a full-scale invasion? I have no idea. Instead, they, right, that it would constitute raids by a mixture of special operations forces and conventional

infantry troops. How many? We got 50,000 troops over there in the Middle East right now, which is 10,000 more than we normally have. Some 5,000 have arrived just in the past few days. So what kind of numbers are we looking at? I'm not sure. Like, if another country sent 5,000 troops to America to come across our borders and start hitting targets, I think we'd consider an invasion, but, you know, I'm not a military expert. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that President Trump is considering an operation to extract the nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium, believed to be in Iran. The journal reports that Trump has not yet made the decision to do that, but if the

president does give the green light, it would be one of the most complex and dangerous missions ever attempted by the U.S. military. Mr. Trump on two social Saturday, encouraging everyone to watch my new best friend, Mark Levin, or micro, as I call him, after 120 tweets calling me a neo-Nazi, I finally punched him back. And here's what he had to say. Troops on the ground. He said, no, troops on the ground. I don't remember that in any campaign speech either. But why would we need troops on the ground? Well, there's a lot of reasons, and we wouldn't need 300,000 of them. It's this uranium, too.

We've got to get the uranium. If it cannot be destroyed, if it cannot be altered, we've got to get it. For the reason I just said, you can make dirty bombs, and over time you can still make sophisticated missiles. So you need to get to the uranium. That's why I'm reading in the paper, we're talking about the 80-second airborne. and we're talking about these very special forces and the various military services and so forth. He's not talking about sending regular army

and infantry in by the hundreds of thousands. Okay. So if it's not hundreds of thousands, then it kind of doesn't count. And now we need to get the uranium. It's a new goal. We're four weeks into this war. Did anybody hear about we're going to go and get vial like containers, scuba-sized containers of uranium?

Was that? Did anyone list that? Okay, like, weren't we told in June that we had destroyed their nuclear capability obliterated? Didn't we, didn't we hear that? Now there's like untold amounts of uranium in the mountains of Iran that we need super specialist engineers to go in, to grab, creating our own airfield with base support. Like, when did that become the goal? Because what we heard from President Trump was make sure you watch micro tonight on Fox News.

And that was his message. We got to get the uranium. That's our new goal. And now the Wall Street Journal, the next day drops a piece saying the uranium. It's going to be a daring, exciting mission. Got to get everybody hyped up for it for the next big show that endangers the lives of our troops. It does sound like Mr. Trump may be leaning toward doing some sort of ground operation. But the president, when asked directly about putting boots on the ground last night on Air Force One,

responded this way. Are you considering still putting boots on the ground? And would you do that without going to Congress? I just have lots of alternatives. We have tremendous numbers of ships over there. We don't need them low because of, you know, the power look. I would say we're just like we're ahead of schedule on the ballroom in a much bigger way. We're ahead of schedule with a red.

We're weeks ahead of schedule. If you would have said that in three days, we were going to knock out 158 ships their entire day, which we did. We knocked out their entire Air Force. We knocked out most of their missiles. That's why you see missile attacks, but they're down to their sputtering. And we have a group. It's really a new regime. It's a group of people, people that we've never dealt with before that are acting very reasonable. It is truly regime change. So we've accomplished regime change, but we have to stay there and possibly hit all the desalination plants and the energy plants, because even though the new group of people, pursuant to the regime

change is very, very reasonable, we might not reach a deal and we might have to bomb them to smithereens. I mean, President Trump there saying, just like the ballroom, we're way ahead of schedule. I mean, like, this is talking about American troops dying, like putting their lives at risk. It's not just like the ballroom. Like this is, and it's not just like a fun little excursion into Iran. We've already lost 13 service men and women. We had another 25 injured over the weekend when Iran hit the Saudis and our base there. So we had another 25 American service personnel injured there, many severely. Severely injured. What does that mean? Lost limbs, severe head wounds. They don't tell us. That information has been largely censored from the

American media. We don't know. We don't believe that we know the full extent of the deaths either. And we don't believe we know the full extent of exactly how all these planes have come down, that we're getting the full story. We're going to unpack the latest with a true expert in the field. Robert Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He studies national and international security affairs with a focus on air power, political violence, and terrorism. He's been warning about the so-called escalation trap that he saw President Trump, possibly walking right into. Think about this.

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There's no obligation, just useful information. With an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau and tens of thousands of happy customers, let Birch Gold help you diversify with gold. Now, that's peace of mind. Again, text MK to 9-8-98-8-8 today. Professor Pape, thank you for joining us. What do you make on the latest? Thank you very much for having me, Megan. You should know I listen to you.

My wife listens to you at least once a week for the last three years, maybe longer than that. Oh, thank you. And nobody covered the Trump trials better. Nobody covers our national issues better. And it's just such an honor to speak to your audience. So just for your audience to know, I've been modeling the bombing of Iran for 20 years. I've taught for the US Air Force. I've studied every air campaign in history.

Big book on the subject, many, many articles. And that's why I laid out before the war started these stages of escalation that we were going to go through, where stage one would be the smart bombs would hit targets, they would kill leaders, but they would not achieve any meaningful strategic outcome. You wouldn't get the enriched uranium. You wouldn't topple the regime. that would then lead to stage two, which is where the opponent lashes back. That's the horizontal escalation campaign.

And that then leads to them getting hor moves. And that happened. And again, I'm laying out these stages before the first bomb fell. Now we're at stage three, which is the ground operations are nearing. This is truly the red line, Megan. This is the point where things will start to become truly irreversive. As much as we've been in a trap now sucking us into this quagmire deeper and deeper. If we cross into stage three, even with limited operations on one of the islands or at the beaches here, this is going to lead to probably months of attrition war, which I'm glad to explain.

Now, the rhetoric from President Trump here, he is showing me that we are moving to stage three. This is what this means. He is promising only one more blow. We're going to knock him out now. We've already got him on the ropes here. And this is the best public relations president in my lifetime. I think better than Ronald Reagan. I think better than Barack Obama.

Nobody understands the media better here, as you've covered so much on your show here. And so when I hear what he's talking about, Seems like both sides was not. No, not really. He's preparing the public in his 36 to 38% of the public who supports this war. Get tired, get ready to double down. Hmm.

You, because that makes sense, because the optimistic part of the message, I think, is speaking to the markets. Trump's been trying to manipulate the market since the beginning of this. And it's no accident. It comes before the market's open. And then you get, you know, it's like, okay, we're almost there. They're very reasonable. We have regime change now. because we're down to our third level after having killed the first two and no specifics about

how they're being more reasonable or how progress is being made. And of course, then you always get the Iranian denial saying we don't know what he's talking about. And then the end of that message was basically threatening World War III against the Iranians. I mean, if we actually did hit all of their energy plants and all of the desalinization plants or desalination, depending on your how old you are, basically is how you refer to that. That's World War III. If, if, if, if Iran then did that throughout the Arab countries in the Gulf. We'd have mass starvation. We'd have mass immigration out of those countries and into Europe.

I mean, it would just be, it would completely change the face of the earth. So like just in a casual, true social, he's gone from new regime. We accomplished it. And we're having great talks to we are officially going to start World War III. So let me try to help here with, because I can certainly understand that keep in mind. I, for 30 years, I've taught the best. pilots in the Air Force. I teach the best students at the University of Chicago. I go and give talks to the public. So I really think I have a sense of where some of the confusion is coming from. If you just listen

to the leaders, our leaders rhetoric, which I know seems to make sense, there's no surprise you will be confused. But there are some very clear indicators, as I've been trying to explain to folks, which is follow the deployments. The deployments are real costs. It costs. It costs. It costs a billion dollars a day this war. Those deployments here are the Marines. They're really moving. The 82nd Airborne is really moving. Pentagon's talking about another 10,000 coming on top of this. This is real cost, real people moving forward. Now, with Venezuela, for example, this real movement of the armada near Venezuela started in the fall. It's not just hitting a few boats, but started to move vast numbers of ships. especially in December and then around Christmas when people weren't paying much attention.

And notice that led to actual action. In February, you saw a similar movement here with the Air Armada essentially coming. And that then led to the Air Campaign, not just simply one day of strikes. So what I believe is follow the deployments. And unless President Trump says, Marines turn around in the water, take your ships go back to Japan, go back to Camp Pendleton in California, we need to understand phase three is coming and nearing day by day by day. What do you, what is phase three? I mean, is it now, because I thought it was going to be,

we're going to take back the Strait of Hormuz. And then maybe it was, maybe we'll take Karg Island and use that as a bargaining chip to make them do what we want in the Strait of Hormuz, which is open it. And now it's, we got to get the URMU's, the URMU's, which is open it. And now it's, we got to get the Uriarch. uranium that's sitting in scuba-like tanks deep in the mountains of Iran, where we have to make this airfield, according to the Wall Street Journal, and send in engineers as well as all these other troops who you just mentioned to protect them in a highly risky mission. So do you know what the next base looks like based on what you heard? I have a pretty good understanding of where we're

heading, getting modeled this for 20 years, taught for the Air Force, as we're going through all this and so forth. So it's important. Let's just stop back one second and see. a month ago, Iran had the enriched uranium, and we were panicking because we didn't know where it was going. And we have satellite photographs of where this is dispersing, or at least probably it's dispersing, and that's civilian satellites. They must have much more. So this is probably, Megan, what's underneath a lot of this, and they're being confusing about it. But something happened in the last month, which is Iran went from controlling 4% of the world's oil to 20% of the world's oil. That means over the course of a year, they will

make somewhere around $50 to $75 billion, money going in Chinese banks, unless we're going to bomb China, not getting that money out, they are becoming the dreaded oil hegemon in the Middle East. They control more oil than America. We're at 16% global production. They're controlling 20%. And this means geopolitical power over time. So you let this ride. Just to be clear, because they control the straight of Homoos down. Yes, it's all about that little artery here. It's like the artery in our throat that controls so much of our lives. That small artery controls 20% of the world's oil, and this is going to change the balance of power in the Middle East.

Over a period of several years, Iran will become more powerful than Israel. It doesn't seem that way now, but just play this. out here and Iran will start to then align with Russia even more. Russia has 11% of the world's oil. So imagine if Russia and Iran together decide they're taking 33% of the world's oil off the market for own and they're going to give it to one country, China, and nobody else gets it, think about the power they will wield. This is what's really, again, this was a trap, as I'm saying. We like to believe we have all this choice as America. We can pull ourselves back at any time.

What I have been warning, it's really the bombing of Fordo back in June. This was my foreign affairs. I was warning this would suck us down this road. This is the beginning of a trap. And at each stage, it gets harder to get out of. And once we cross into the next phase of ground operations, oh, my goodness gracious, Megan. And you've seen already how we reacted when we lost 13 dead in the extraction from Afghanistan and all that motion that was brought out.

Imagine you have 100 dead paratroopers coming into car or 100 dead Marines going on the beach. That 36% is going to be extremely committed more than ever. Because that 36% that supports the war, they're going to think in their minds, They're dying for me. I wanted this, and they don't want to abandon them. This is my lane, Megan. I don't just study how to put bomb on target. When I am advising every West Wing of the White House from 2001 to 24,

it's about the mix of how military action affects politics in the target and affects politics at home. And if we cross that red line, even though it'll seem very, very relatively small numbers, will die. Oh, no, no, no, this will create an enormous stickiness. And I don't think we will be able to extract ourselves for many weeks, probably months, once those ground operations start, they will almost surely expand. So you don't believe it would stay limited to the 2,500 to 5,000 troops we've sent over in the past years? Let me just give you an amount. So let's take the 82nd Airborne. And let's say you're going to take the 1,000 troops and they're going to take an

airport. That's what they can take, an airport. And when they land, they're going to run out of water, food, and ammo in less than a week. So they've lost 100 to take the airport. Are we just going to walk and say, well, good luck with this. See what you can do with those 20,000 Iranians on Karg Island. See, the Iranians, they may even decide to wait and let them just land at the airport, surround them, And then they're stuck. What is going to happen? They will, I'm sorry to put so bluntly, Megan, in a week or two, those troops either going to surrender or die. And the problem is we can't just, we're probably already planning.

They're the beachhead. They're the entry point. You're unlikely going to take a beat. The Marines are set up those muse that are moving the 5,000 to take a beach about a mile and a half wide. but not to stay there for weeks and months. Unless they're going to, we're just going to leave them and abandon them to their fate, we will be forced to do what's called mission creep. And this is exactly what happened in Vietnam, Megan.

This is how the incremental escalation happened in Vietnam. At every stage, President Johnson, through his folks, was telling the public, the American public, that this was just be one more step here. We're going to do an air campaign starting in March 65. Then the Marines go in, starting in a little bit later. It's not until July 65 that President Johnson gives the big speech to explain, now he's going to have to put in tens of thousands of ground troops into Vietnam.

So very similar to what's happening with President Trump. He hasn't given the big speech yet. neither did Johnson in Vietnam until we were already deep in the quagmire, irreversibly in the quagmire. I can't help thinking about Trump's bankruptcies in real estate. You know, for example, his casino in New Jersey, in Atlantic City, where this is what real estate owners and brokers, like big dealers, like Trump do. They keep throwing good money after bad to try to see if they can get a turnaround. around. And when it doesn't work, they can declare bankruptcy and get out of the jam. I think it was like Trump had five bankruptcy or something. When I was a young woman and living in New York right

after law school, they had the joking like coffee cans out at the coffee kiosks in New York asking for donations to help Trump. It was a joke because he was a very rich man, but he had had all these bankruptcies. You can't pursue that kind of a strategy when it comes to war games because you're talking about American lives and blood and treasure, you can't just keep throwing good troops after good troops who have fallen because we can't afford that kind of a bank. But there's no question that he's being advised of that, right? There's no question he's being told that. But, Megan, you have very insightfully, I think, more than others, and let me amplify what you've said, given the answer to a question, everybody keeps asking, which is how could President

Trump do this. They're all asking that. He promised he wouldn't do X, Y, or Z. And you've been focusing on this man for so long. I mean, I'm not surprised. You would have some insight and go to the issue. You said bankruptcy. So the way I have been writing about this on the substack is I've been explaining that President Trump seems to have the gamblers curse. And what do I mean by that? If you go to a casino and you win 20 hands in a row, you think you've cracked the code. You think, my goodness gracious, I've got 20 hands in a row that's not supposed to happen. That, however, is the curse because that's when the house wins. Once you think you have beaten the house, then when you lose that first hand, you will double down.

Oh, I'll just get my winnings back. And you keep doubling down. and then what happens is you lose all of the money you just made on the house, and then you lose your house. You lose everything. And I believe this is what I hear from President Trump. I believe when he talks about Soleimani, he talks, I don't agree with him, Maduro's this big success, but nonetheless, he seems to think that he's won all of these hands. And I think this is what has led him to the illusion of control, I call it, and the illusion that if he just does one, more big bet, he's going to get it all back. Well, that is the gambler's curse. And I think that

for people who are, again, CEOs, I think, can understand this proclivity. You've been focusing on President Trump, and I know, because I've listened to you for years, you study him more than anybody else well. I mean, you're giving all sides. And I think this is no surprise. You've come to this as an insight. And I think it's not just, with respect to, by the way, President Trump. It's how Bill Clinton got us into Kosovo. There's a whole story there I could lay out. It's how the Germans before World War I, they had all these string of successes. Why would the Japanese think they could attack us at Pearl Harbor and push us back? All the successes they had in mainland Asia. So again, I bring a lot of history. I bring a lot

of knowledge of what is happening before the wars start. And I think that this helps to explain the gambler's curse is really a it's a mindset. And over and above all of the data, all of the information the president is receiving, I believe that he believes just one more risky bet, and he's going to pull this off. It's, by the way, just for our listening audience, our guest today is Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, political scientist who studies national international security affairs, warfare, and so on. I believe it's almost worse because not only is President Trump at the gambling table thinking that he can't lose, he's next to someone who's even worse along the gambler's row than he is.

And that man is B.B. Netanyahu, who's like dangling like the TikTok pocket watch, his golden pager operation in Lebanon in front of Trump. And then the way he went into Israel for the 12-day war, sorry, into Iran, Israel did, for the 12-day war. and they were doing well, and they were striking their targets and eliminating certain, you know, officials. And Trump was dazzled by that and said, we'll join. Yes, okay, Pete, get the, get the B-12 bombers ready. And we went in. And so he's got somebody egging him along, like, this is going to be easy. Netanyahu tells him the Ayatollah's above ground on this day. We'll wipe him out. It's going to be, it's going to be like Maduro. You're going to be a hero. And now it's just like, just one more thing. Just, like, it won't be 200. They literally, the president's

supporters like Mark Levin are now saying things like, we're not talking 200,000 troops. See how they keep moving the goalposts? Like, oh, but like 100,000 where you're trying to get us used to that or 50,000? So that's a win because it's not 200? So let me, again, I think you're right on this psychologically here. I think you're really capturing this. I would just, let me make two points or a point jumping off of this.

Number one, that echo chamber you're describing here of, I think this fits this gambler's curse immediately. And anybody who's been in the casino knows that's one of the what the house does. They send people over, try to encourage those whales to just keep betting it down. So this is not, this is right out of the, you know, sort of the gamblers, cameras, but then the other point, and you actually made this a little bit earlier, and I just want to amplify it, which is it's, it's worse in another way as well, because it's other people's money, other people's lives. You see, In the case of President Trump, it's not his own financial wherewithal that's actually on the table here. It's the country's financial wherewithal, the world's financial wherewithal, and most importantly, our troops live.

So having taught for the Air Force for years, I still have great relations here all the time. They send me their best and brightest officers to get PhDs. I am really, really, really impressed with how professional they are. If they're given the order, Megan, to go do some of these missions, including we haven't talked about going to get the uranium, the enriched uranium. One of the things your audience just may want to know is, remember, we bombed around there. Those drums, those drums aren't things you put in your pocket. These are big, heavy things, and they could be broken. And this was something that we had to face with, say, sending the 82nd Airboard into, say, North Korea, if we were going to do this there.

If you go into a situation where those drums are broken, that radiation is death. Not death instantly, but ultimately. So what we're talking, we don't know, I'm not telling you, we know for sure what's happening with Esophon and so forth. But this is not just an excavation mission. You're talking about sending people in and the more they dig, they will then on Earth, whether or not it's radioactive. by then it's too late. And you say, well, they'll just have radioactive protective gear. They're being shot at by the bad guys here.

This is not doing this in downtown Chicago. We're talking about doing this in a war zone of the first order with one million Iranians in arms. So we just need to understand. If we give those orders to those troops, I believe they will obey. They will do what the president says. that doesn't mean that this is the wisest move. No, and to me, it's galling because we just had signups reach beyond the bare minimum expectations, thanks to President Trump winning, thanks to Pete Hegseff taking over at the Department of War.

And the message to the troops was, number one, no more woke in the military, they love that. But number two, no more stupid, pointless Middle East wars. We're not going to put your lives on the line for a four. country or to pursue yet another quagmire in the Middle East. And so all these young guys and gals went and signed up, believing that, believing that, these 18-year-olds. And now some of them are being asked to go over there and serve for what? I mean, truly, you tell me what is the United States getting out of this? This is really the back to the Vietnam analogy here, which is so disheartening for me to see, because this is what was so disillusioning for our

troops. Our troops, they come back from this and society is not happy here. And all they can do is take it out on the troops, right? Maybe, because they never see the president. They can't take it out on the political class. They take it out on the troops when this happens. This is, but then the troops themselves, this is what leads to all of those problems we had, the great drug use we had in the, this, the disillusionment, you are described. Megyn, is not because the people, the troops come in as bad apples. We have the finest. I've seen it up close and personal for years.

This is the best of our country. And what's going to happen here is they're going to go through this and the amount of disillusionment. And then also we haven't, you talked about simply the four size. The idea here that you're going to have to take, if you're going to take the straight and four moves back, you're going to have to control, not just a few sandy beaches, you're going to have to control probably over 100 miles stretch by 20 miles deep into Iran. That's probably the footprint that would make any minimum sense, the minimum viable footprint here. Because otherwise, the bad guys have all the missiles, all the drones, and they don't have to fire them all every day. They can just come at it when they want.

So you are going to want to control this space. So this is, unfortunately, we've had war games in this. So again, I've been at this for 20 years. We have war games going back to 2004 and five, and you're talking about six divisions. And so, I mean, oh, my goodness gracious. How many is that? How many troops is that? That would be the 100,000 plus troops just for this footprint.

But this is not enough to control all of Iran. To control Iran, we didn't have enough troops, Megan, to control Iraq. We have, that was 25 million Iraqis. We currently have about the same number of troops that we had during the Iraq work. We have a better technology, almost the same number of troops. Iran is 92, 93 million, much bigger in geography. That nuclear material could be anywhere inside of Iran. We don't have the troops to occupy Iran, not really.

That's why they're saying with a straight face, you're not going to get the big Iraq. But that doesn't mean we wouldn't be interested in taking a pretty sizable chunk of Iran's territory. And I've really heard President Trump say this morning he wants the oil. That would be about 100 miles wide, about 10, 20 miles deep. Now you can take the oil fields, not just simply Karg Island. I suspect this is probably the actual plan that's coming. that will take the oil fields, not just car.

Because, like, walk us through it because you know it's so much better than we do. There's the, okay, we're possibly going to go on a search for the uranium at maybe the three plants we bombed, which sounds scary already because who knows what the condition of those sites is and whether it's even safe, whether the uranium has been protected in a way that makes it sound for us to go in there to your point on the exposure to the radiation. Okay, but we could go in and try to get the uranium. we could try to go retake the Strait of Hormuz, which you were just talking about, where you've got to control not just the actual like immediate coastline, but miles to the left and the right so that they can't launch missiles at us, which you said maybe 100,000 troops.

Then we're talking about taking Karg Island, which I understand is where they process a lot of their oil, which my understanding is that move would be leverage. You know, you give us back the Strait of Hormuz or the oil supply gets. sit over here at Karg Island. Correct me if I'm wrong, but are those the three things you're looking at as next escalation? Yeah, that's right. And let me just try to explain here. So as I have no like clearance or something, how can Professor Pape say this with such? Because I'm looking at equilibrium points in the battle. So there will be, as many people have pointed out, taking card, what's the point of taking card? The point of taking card would only make sense as a beach

head to something more. What's the point of taking some of the small islands around Hormuz or the beaches of a mile area? It's to take more. They would be the entry points to expand. What would you expand? Where would be the next equilibrium point? I'm not saying you would even announce this. This would be an equilibrium point you would look to after three four months here. And what would that look like? Probably the size I'm describing. You would have the entry points. You would start to look at what would be realistic that you could both think you could hold and also be of some value, the oil fields. And President Trump has said for years we made a mistake in not taking the oil from Iraq. Of course, he talked about the oil in Venezuela.

We never did get any of the new Venezuelan oil. But this, I wouldn't be at all, because it would also be a military equilibrium point. And that is what I'm explaining is that that's what you look at in war. Where are the equilibrium points in the battles that are coming ahead of us? Not just what are they saying to the public today about what we're doing tomorrow. Well, is there a way that Trump, you know, since the new talking, literally we're four months, four weeks into this war and this is the first we've heard about, we're going to go in and just get the uranium. We haven't, that's, that is new. It changed from, oh, no, it's about the missiles.

We got to get rid of those missiles. Okay, Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. That was stated broadly. We got to do regime change because the a iatoll is bad. It just keeps moving. But now today, thanks to Mark Levin, we're talking about uranium. He magically comes up with this idea the same day the president tells us to watch his show. And then coincidentally, the Wall Street Journal drops a big piece on how that's a new possibility for us. Can we just talk about that one piece, Megan, before we go on to something else, please? Well, that's my question. Can we, is that possible?

We just get in, get the uranium and get out and declare to win? No, it's not possible we do that. But I'd like to just, and I'll explain why not possible, but I also want to just build on something else. I understand that Mark Levin just is now speaking about this. But a month ago, in my first live briefing on the substack, I explained what was the thing sucking us here? It was that enriched uranium.

Whether President Trump was talking about this publicly or not, that doesn't realize, that's, again, not following the actual signal that's occurring here. When we bombed Fordo, we destroyed the industrial part of the enrichment. We did not get the nuclear material, the enriched uranium. In my modeling of the bombing of Fordo for 20 years, that would always be stage one, and that would lead to a bombing campaign a whole year later, a whole year later, for regime change. Why would that happen? Because we would panic what would happen with that enriched uranium. You're right.

Netanyahu's probably whispering in Trump's year or louder than that. They're doing bad things with that enriched uranium. We have some civilian satellite photography of Iranians moving some of what appears to be that enriched uranium in the meantime. This is, so it's not just Mark Levin. I just want to point out. is what I think has really been driving the regime change bombing. And now the regime change bombing hasn't produced any real meaningful results. It's made the matter worse. So now is why you're

getting the ground options. And I believe that this too is going to be, it's going to be like the hunt for WMD in Iraq. It would take years to go through all of Iran, all of the mountains, just take out the maps, you will see this. And this is going to be, that's why just going to Estefan, even for a month and possibly. That's one of the three sites. Yes, one of the three sites. Oh, my goodness gracious. What you're up against because literally even just 20 pounds of that enriched uranium can be put in a radiological bomb, blown up in Tel Aviv.

and suddenly you have a mass exodus from Tel Aviv. That's how dangerous the situation is. So that leads my next question, because you say we may be worse off with the new leadership. And I've heard this, I've read this many places, because the Ayatollah, though he was a terrible man, had a fatwa against developing the nuclear weapon because he knew the position that that would place Iran in. He knew they'd get bombed too. And now they say the fatwa has been lifted. It's his son who's allegedly the new Ayatollah, but no one has seen him.

and he may be dead or just severely incapacitated. And now Trump says we're talking to the third level. We don't know whether those people want the nuclear. They want to finish it up and they want to drop it on Israel or somebody else. But a lot of smart people I've been reading, Professor, have been saying one of the reasons we're in this impossible situation right now is because if we don't get the uranium, let's say Trump just says, you know what, we reopened the straight of Hormuz. We've cut a deal with the third in line and we're out. that the fear is Israel's actually in more danger now because now the fatwa has been lifted. They still have the uranium. Now they're angry. Now their Ayatollah's been killed during Ramadan.

A lot of top officials have been. Their sites have been bombed. Their military has been decimated. Now Israel's going to perceive itself as an even more danger. And Israel may be the first to launch a nuke on Iran. now more reasonably fearing its own nuclear annihilation so that the fear is that the United States cannot leave because Israel would feel more exposed than ever and there may be a reason now we have to stay to prevent that. How do you like that? So let me just talk right about the Israeli-attack nuke thing

because that's coming up quite a bit, Megan, then we can talk about some of the other pieces. So if Israel uses nuclear weapon, my job is not to look at this morally, it's to look at this strategically. If Israel were to use those tactical nuclear weapons in Iran, the radiation

is going to blow back over the GCC. That's going to be over Saudi Arabia. That's going to be over Qatar. That's going to be over the UAE and probably many, probably quite a distance more. This will be Chernobyl times 100.

This will be the actual radiation clouds that really are troublesome and kill And this is why I think that it's highly unlikely that Israel is going to do this. Because if Israel were to do this, and again, my job is to actually think about these difficult scenarios, then Israel now is 7 million Jews surrounded by 500 million Muslims. And I understand Israel thinks that all 500 don't like them and hate them. This is what could turn hundreds of millions into willing to die to get rid of Israel.

Right now, that's not the case. You've got, what, 20,000 Hamas fighters willing to die up against Israel, maybe another 20,000 Hezboa, so this is, as bad as everybody says, no, this can get a lot worse for Israel. And if Israel were to use those nuclear weapons here, just think about the amount of damage that's going to do to Muslims. And Israel say, well, they all hate us anyway, right? No, no, not the way they will. And this is not in Israel's interest to even think about. And they're not going to use nuclear weapons to protect themselves in a ring around Tel Aviv. So this is just not a – I can't tell you what Netanyahu's going to do.

What I can tell you is what the consequences would be. So what if Trump calls you up today and says, my poll numbers are going through the floor? My approval rating is now the lowest it's ever been. I've lost massive support, double-digit support from men, young people, Hispanics, all the people who put me into office and I need to turn this around. I got to get out of Iran. It's going on too long. This other gambler next to me wants to stay at the table all night.

How do I do it? How do I extricate us from this ASAP? I will say three things to President Trump right now. Number one, stop putting sucker deals on the table. You're not going to sucker them again. They've been suckered now for a long period of time. They're not taking the sucker bites. It's not going to happen.

I would say, number two, you have to put something on the table that they would find valuable for their security. They're not going to just give up 20% of the world's oil because you've bluffed them in some way. Number three, what would be meaningful at this point would be an enforceable military containment of Israel. It's not just, you have to remember, it's not just Trump who's attacking Iran. Israel and Israel may be doing the most to push the attacks on Iran. So unless you have a military containment of Israel, we're not nothing to talk about. That's why these talks are going nowhere. What would be an enforceable ban?

This would be, and this will be the big problem politically, is he's probably going to have to cut off aid to Israel, military and economic for, say, a year the rest of his presidency, if Israel breaks the deal. If Israel breaks the deal, President Trump is going to have to enforce that. And Iran, if I were Iran and play in their hand, I would demand that that go through a vote of Congress. I'm not going to just trust anybody here. I mean, just think about it. So this is the horns of the dilemma President Trump is in.

I was giving different advice back on days two, three afterwards. it was a little bit better. That's before Iran grabbed the straight of Hormuz right out from under our nose. Then it was an easier deal. Here, the deal is much harder. And now you can see, Megan, why President Trump is really on the horns of a dilemma. And the political problems here, he is now sitting right at the cusp of where Lyndon Johnson sat exactly at this point, almost April 1, 1968. And his presidency, President Trump's presidency, will be irreversibly impacted by his decisions going forward. I would advise still going with the military containment of Israel option. That way, he would have a chance to recover his presidency. If he goes forward with the ground operation, I believe his presidency will be lost in an unrecoverable way.

Oh, Vietnam War, eight years, sent 543,000 troops. That was the maximum troop level. 58,000 U.S. troops were killed. 153,000 were wounded. That is not what anybody wants. And that's not what we wanted in Vietnam either. We did not think Vietnam. President Johnson did not go into that war in 64, did not start the bombing campaign,

saying he's going to kill 58,000 dead Americans. He did not go into that war thinking he was sinking his presidency and becoming the worst president, even worse than Jimmy Carter, is Lyndon Johnson. And this is the reason. This is what I would say to President Trump. And I really believe the best option here is military containment of Israel in an enforceable way. Great to speak with you, Professor. Thank you so much for your time and expertise today. Thank you.

It's really quite an honor to speak with you. And of course, your important audience. So thank you so much, Megan, for this. And love to your wife, too. I'll tell her. She'll hear it. Wow. That was very sobering, very sobering, guys.

It's, you know, it's funny because some people online who are very, very pro this world will say, oh, you know, you're no longer a Trump supporter because your question, no, and it's exactly the opposite. It's because I do support President Trump and his actual agenda that I want this to stop. I want him to focus on what he ran on. I want him to continue the incredibly important work he's begun, like the deportations. Another young girl was just killed by another illegal in Illinois. After Sheridan Gorman's death last week, I mean, it's like not a day goes by without another American being killed by an illegal that was led in under Joe Biden.

President Trump has yeoman's work to do in getting them out. That should be number one. And frankly, if we're just talking about helping people and electoral prospects, the economy has to be one, two, three, four, and five for President Trump right now. It has to be all the numbers. That's what the people care about. All of the polls. Every poll says that. They don't care about Iran.

The polls have made that really clear. You know, it's interesting. Like, we look, we can see just in terms of the number of downloads on the show. And our audience that we've heard from me, we know you're not interested in the Iran story. No one's is. Our podcast is still at the very, very top of the charts. In fact, it's higher than it often sometimes is. So we're still very at the top. But no one is getting huge numbers on the Iran story, not Fox. The New York Post, which is owned by Rupert, who's one of the biggest pushers of this war, and he owns the journal, he owns Fox. They're all changing their headline, right? Because the people don't want to hear about this.

The polls show they don't want this and they don't want to hear about this. By the way, we are interested in what you do want to talk about so you can email us, Megan at Megan Kelly.com. And I feel the same. I feel the same. I don't want to talk about Iran. What I want to spend my day talking and thinking about Iran at all? I want to spend my day thinking about America and our own problems, not the ones that we're

creating, huge ones that we're creating for ourselves by the minute. So I beg the president to get out. Get out. Get out sooner rather than later because it doesn't get easier from here. Talk to Professor Pape. Talk to the experts about the easiest, cleanest exit plan and a way of distancing ourselves from Netanyahu, who to me seems like a bloodthirsty warmonger. He's a Lindsey Graham twin. We have to worry about our own problems here. Number one, the economy. And a close second would be the deep. deportations so that we can live in peace. Up next to discuss it all, Stu Bergier. You've been hearing me talk a lot about Pure Talk lately. Pure Talk is veteran-led,

so helping veterans is their North Star. They have donated over half a million bucks to America's Warrior Partnership, a fantastic organization that's on the front lines of preventing veteran suicide. And Pure Talks creating American jobs with a U.S. only workforce. Yes, it'd be a lot cheaper to send jobs overseas like other companies do, but they're committed to. delivering the best experience possible for their customers. And Pure Talk service, I mean, they give you the same towers, the same network, same 5G coverage as one of the big guys, but for a fraction of the price. Pure Talk supports veterans every single day and creates American jobs. If you want to give it a shot, dial pound 250 and say Megan Kelly to switch to Pure Talk.

That's pound 250, 250, 250, 250, and say, Megan Kelly to switch to Pure Talk, America's wireless company, Pure Talk. Joining me now, Stu Bergier. He's the host of two, count of two new shows launching next month. Predictable with Stu. Find out more at predictable show.com and the relaunched Stu and Dave do America on Blaze TV. Stu, welcome back. Great to see you.

Don't forget about Dave. Don't forget about Dave. He's very, very important. Thanks so much, making it appreciate it. Yeah, it's great to see you. All right. Let's kick it off here. Lindsay Graham is one of the people responsible for getting us into this war, constantly in Trump's ear with, you know, predictions of grandeur and zero downside.

He's frothing at the mouth right now, the thought of thousands of our soldiers going over there. All the reports on X, by the way, are, including citing Israeli sources, are that Israel's not prepared to put one soldier's boots on the grounds. It'll be all America, just American troops going boots on the ground. in Iran. Great. And so what is Lindsay Graham doing to support those troops and the families who are preparing to put their lives on the line? He's at Disney World. A single man with no wife or children or grandchildren has now been spotted at Disney in multiple photos. Here's one where he's pouring, I don't know, coffee, water. And there's another where he is walking around with a bubble wand, Stu, a bubble wand. How old is Lindsay Graham? 70? Look at him. There he is in the middle of Disney

with a bubble wand. I'm sorry, but motherfucker. Look at him. He's pushing to take all of our troops and put them in danger so he can get off because he hasn't been getting off, at least not with a woman that's obvious for his life. And now he goes to fucking Disney world while they deploy to Iran and he's blowing bubbles. Why, I, it's, is this, like this seems like some sort of weird fever dream I'm in. Is this real? Are we? Is there really a Dave?

Am I dreaming this, too? I will say there's no easing into it on a Megan Kelly interview. I'm learning today. It's incredible. I will say, you know, I, I recognize that restaurant. That's the goofy. restaurant. I took my kids there in 2019 when they were like six. That is the, that's the goofy restaurant where you can go get the buffet and have ice cream for breakfast. I'm glad he's having a

good time at Disney. That is an amazing situation, especially concerning where we are in this timeline. You know, I think you would agree with me, Megan, that if I could give President Trump one little tiny piece of advice when it comes to Lindsey Graham is to adopt the stance that I've taken for many, many years, which is ignore everything Lindsay Graham says. If he's saying it, don't listen to it. Because Lindsey Graham sucks for a million different reasons, and he has been doing this for a really long time. I mean, he was essentially a one-issue candidate.

I would remind President Trump running against him for the President of the United States. This is a guy who should not have a high level of influence over anybody. perhaps maybe Pluto or or Daisy Duck. I don't know, one of them, but it's a very bizarre time to go to Disneyland. They're innocent. They're too innocent to spend any time with Lindsey Graham. He gave this statement to TMZ. I was invited to a meeting in South Florida on Friday with Trump official Steve Whitkoff to talk about the possibility of normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

I went to Orlando to meet friends after. I'm already back in South Carolina. Who gives a shit? No one cares. You went to Disney. Our troops are about to deploy and are deploying, are deploying right now because you pushed our president into it. President Trump has agency, not excusing him. But let's be honest, Lindsey Graham pushed this more than anyone. And the nerve to then go blow bubbles at Disney while our troops are endangering themselves because he wanted them to. I just find this so heartless, so fucking tone deaf. Like, look at all the, look at all, look at all like, the shit Ted Cruz got when he, where did he go on vacation? Because they were getting like, they were, yeah, Cancun. They were having, what were they having in Texas? It was like a very bad hurricane or it was a snowstorm.

It was an ice storm. It was a nice storm. It was a nice storm in. Because he was in Cancun vacationing with his family. I actually kind of felt like, eh, they need their vacations. He's not like, I get it. This is beyond. Like this never should have happened.

I'm just angry about his influence over President Trump, and I'm angry that I have to look at pictures of him with his bubble wand. And I'm angry. I have to pretend he's not gay when it's very clear he is. Why doesn't he admitted it by this point in his life, in my humble opinion? He's an insult to the gays. Gays tend to be fabulous. Why is he more fabulous?

I don't understand how he didn't get the memo, and I'm sick and tired of seeing this man's influence over our national politics and our troops. continuing onward. I ended my discussion with Professor Pape by discussing some of the numbers, you know, as we see poll after poll after poll. I'm going to show you one today. But I mean, it goes, Fox News poll, Quinnipiac, Reuters poll, all of them are right in line with this. Okay, so it's not a one-off. This is a trend. Today's is from the National University of Massachusetts Amherst poll, 1,000 U.S. adults. And it gives President Trump the lowest approval rating of his second term, 33% overall, disapproved 62%.

At the RCP, Real Clear Politics list of polls, no poll has had Trump at 33% since one in 2017, Quinnipiac back then. So this says he's at 33% according to this poll. In April of last year, he was at 44% in this poll. Inflation, 24% approved 7%. 71% disapprove. Jobs, 30% approved, 61% disapprove. Immigration, 35% approved, 60% disapprove. Tariffs, 28% approved, 64% disapprove. The Trump handling of Iran, the war with Iran, 29% approve, 63% disapprove. So we've got a 29% approval rating on launching the war and on how he's handling it. And I like, and by the way, they re-asked the Reuters question from a week ago, should we send ground troops in? 8% say yes. 67% say hell no.

8% support ground troops, which reportedly were getting ready to do. Now look, the audience knows I'm not in favor of this war. Fewer and fewer Americans are. The majority's with me. But put that to the side because you don't need to have. have any feelings about the Iran war to answer whether this is working out politically for President Trump and Republicans do? It most certainly is not. And you're 100% right in your analysis on that. It doesn't

matter what you think about the war. If you want to take a step back from it, you might think, and by the way, this does happen. Sometimes presidents look at polls and see 25, 20% approval rating and they feel that the issue is important enough for them to take a stand. We at times, I think look for leaders that do unpopular things at a popular times. So he shouldn't be making his decisions solely based on polls. He should be considering, however, what the ramifications are of this current path if it continues to go this direction, certainly if we go into the area of ground troops. The American people don't want it.

They don't want anything to do with it. They are already frustrated with the state of affairs right now. And history is aligned against President Trump having success in, this midterm. And we've seen this over and over and over again. I think it's 9% of the time. House seats are won with a president in this midterm. Nine percent is what our baseline is making going in. We should expect to lose the House almost every single time unless things are going thrillingly well. And that is not what we're looking at. And when you look at those polls, I'm glad you went through that entire kind of breadth and brought the whole color because it's not

just about Iran. I mean, you saw Iran. Iran's in the category. of many of the other things that Americans care about when it comes to approval rating, that sort of high 20s area, which is catastrophic, honestly. Now, that's the worst poll you probably will find. A lot of them, though, as you point out, are in the general vicinity of those. And the craziest and scariest part of it, Megan, is a lot of the things you highlighted are the legs of the stool that got Donald Trump elected, right? Economy, jobs, the border, immigration.

even immigration, which is, you know, I would look at it as a person who's an immigration hawk when it comes to illegal immigration and say, I think a lot of the things he's done have been good. I think some of the treatment of his policies has been a little unfair. But that doesn't really matter when it comes down to voting time. It matters who's going to actually see this the way that they do. And if we have 28% approval rating of immigration and 30% of jobs and 29% Iran, that is a, when you throw that on top of the history that we're already looking at and a three, receipt majority in the House, I was already expecting bad things in November and you're starting to look at what is a catastrophic possibility becoming, you know, something that's a little bit more

realistic. The folks behind this poll saying exactly what you just said, what's surprising and of likely grave concern to the White House are the dips in support from the very groups that helped Trump take back the presidency in 2024 among men, working class Americans and African Americans, Trump's approval ratings have dropped by close to 20 points since April of last year. Similar drops and support are also seen among moderates, down 18 points in independents, down 13. Another poll shows it far worse with the independence, key constituencies in Trump's victory and in the upcoming midterm election. Now, I want you to know this. We are getting more and more talk about Republicans losing the Senate in November. That was supposed to be out of the

question. And the problem is, even if they take a bath on more seats than expected but don't lose control in the Senate, you know, say they lose a couple, but maintain a slight majority, or at least they keep it tied. Right now they have 53. If it's tied, J.D. Vance cast the deciding vote, so they're still okay. But there's serious talk about whether they're going to lose, whether they're going to lose outright control of the Senate. The map for Republicans in 28 gets far worse. They have to defend more seats then than they have to defend in these midterms. And truly, now you're edging up the Democrats' margin even higher, right, to the point where, God forbid, they get a 60-vote majority, the Democrats in 28. I mean, that'll be a,

it'll be a landslide victory at the White House, the Senate, the House, like, we cannot have that. We cannot have. This is not fun to talk about. But there's time. There's time. I mean, here's the other thing I wanted to point out to you, Sto, that just today, as we talk about the cost of this war, it's about a billion dollars a day. It hits on axios that Republicans are considering reductions in federal health spending to help pay for a budget bill containing as much as $200 billion to fund the war in Iran and immigration enforcement. We are going to take from domestic policies like health care to pay for a war in Iran that is costing us a billion dollars a day at a time when he has record low approval ratings and especially on the economy.

Like, in people's pocketbooks and wallets is where they most need the help, Stu, not to have money being sent over to the Middle East. Yeah. And the optics of this are absolutely horrible, right? I mean, we've seen that happen before previous presidents. You know, President Bush in his second term, as a guy that the Iraq war kind of got on the ugly side of that. You know, you started seeing him, he's leaving office with approval ratings in the high 20s. It was catastrophic for Republicans. It brought in the Obama era, a massive

majorities, a 60-seat majority in the Senate. It can get really ugly, really fast. Americans do not want this. One of the things they like about Donald Trump is, it seems, his approach to foreign conflict has been relatively limited and relatively, particularly limited in school. He's been involved in things. I think he was maybe unfairly seen as an isolationist completely. I don't think that's ever what he was, but usually he tried to hold back and keep these excursions a little bit limited in scope. And that's what, there's still possibility for that here. As we pointed out, Iran has a voice in that, unfortunately, and they might not

want it to be all that limited. They might want to continue down these roads. But one of the shows I do is about prediction markets, predictable. And when we first started putting the project together, one of the things we were looking for, you know, our values on these markets when it comes to elections, it's one of the things I've been doing for years and years. And when the election was happening back in November, you could get the Democrats to win the House at about 56% chance, 56 to 58% chance. That's now up over 85%. The Senate, which was, you know, in the 70s for the Republicans to hold it, is now basically

a 50-50 matter. These are people putting their money where their mouth is. These aren't polls, this isn't even polls where people call you up and you might say, well, I want the Republicans to win, so I'll say that. Now, these are people putting their money where their mouths are. People running their own polls, millions and millions of dollars going back and forth to try to predict what this outcome is. And now, I don't think, I've gone through every seat.

I don't think it's a 50-50 perspective. I'm a little bit more bullish on Republicans on that. But if what you're talking about comes true and we start adopting policies that have 8% approval ratings, I can assure you that it's probably not even 50% chance for Republicans to hold the Senate. And as you point out, it gets much uglier next time. Republicans had a legitimate chance in 2024 to have a Republican president, a Republican House, and a 60-seat majority. But because of what happened in 2022, and they blew some seats then, they lost that opportunity going into 2024.

They have a smaller majority than they should have in 26, where we are today, and they face a potential loss, and then maybe a 60-seat majority the other way in 2028. So this is vitally important to all of our futures. If President Trump can get out of this war, get out of, I don't care how he has to do it, just get out, get out, safe face however we need to, get out, come back home and spend the next seven months focused like a laser on making people's pocketbook issues better. He actually can turn this around. He's a great messenger. He's charming. When he goes out on the road, he's funny. People like him when they get exposed to him. I mean, not the TDS people, but like normal people can be charmed by Trump. And if they see him working very, very hard to improve. their lives. Yes, health care too. Health care, groceries, gas prices. We have a shot at stemming the losses, at least. Just today, there was a report South Korea's president said the following. I'm quoting, the world is in turmoil over the energy crisis. The situation is so serious that it has even kept me up at night. The immediate problem is grave enough, but the outlook ahead seems even more unstable. the situation is worse than expected.

Many predicting that this energy crisis that's already hitting some people who are directly dependent on their oil from the Strait of Hormuz and more get their oil from the Middle East than people like us are already feeling the pain, but that it's coming our way because the energy market is the energy market. It's all connected. And there's a delay in it hitting the United States. There's some prediction that we'll start feeling the pinch come summer when we already feel the pinch because Americans are driving cross-country and so, like, so all right,

all of this is too depressing to really handle. I can't, like, I'm not even going to, I'm not even going to talk to you about that polymarket prediction that now Gavin Newsom would beat J.D. Vance in a head-to-head because that seems like an op to me. That just doesn't seem like even remotely possible, but I could be wrong. It's just like crazy. But we need to, we need to turn this aircraft carrier around, like yesterday, yesterday. And if anybody can do it, it's President Trump, please do. please do. It may take king-like powers, which brings me to this weekend's protests.

Okay. The no kings people are back at it. Did you know that? I actually didn't even know that until we saw the snippets coming in from their latest No Kings protest, which, by the way, they also held in London,

London, England. You see the problem. Okay. But here in America, we genuinely don't like kings. And it just brings out the truly crazy people. I'm going to start with there's some wheelchair-bound woman who has a fake Trump and J.D. Vance dancing near her. Let's watch this lady. Okay.

So I'm not sure what's going on with this woman in a wheelchair. Is that a shirt? Is that morbid obesity or like a prosthetic? I'm not sure, but there's a fake J.D. Vance and a fake Trump on his knees that she's dragging on a leash. What is she? There's a man with a tuba that I forgot to mention. So you tell me, Stu, where this is taking us, what their point is? I have to give credit to Wheely and artist on Instagram, which is where we got that from.

So thank you, Wheely. Nothing says vote Democrat, like the morbidly obese wheelchair-a-bound person dragging Trump by a train, a chain. Is that Whaley? Is that who we just were looking at? Was that Wheely, the artist? I hope not. I don't know.

No, it's not. No. Okay. Wheely is not this person. I don't know. We will see. It's an interesting nickname for that particular individual. I don't know. We will see. It's an interesting thing here, Megan. And I, we should take this a little bit and drag this away from the despair we've started with so far. Because there are a lot of. Take me. Take me away, Calgon. Yes. Let me do it. Let me give you an opportunity to at least take. a nice little journey. It's not quite Disneyland with a bubble wand, but it's something here, which is there's a couple of things really working in Donald Trump's favor and that, you know, in Republican's

favors and conservatives favor here. Number one, there's still a long time before this election, and we have absolutely no attention spent whatsoever. So if what Donald Trump talked about coming into this effort was a four to six, week situation. If he's able to achieve something like that and prices come back down, there's still plenty of time for us to be focused on something completely different before these elections occur. Another thing that is a, sounds like a negative, but is actually a benefit, is we should be scared. It is good for us to be terrified right now as to what we're going to

see in November, because then we can prepare for it. It's not a last minute October surprise where we think we're going to win and all the stuff we're going to lose. We should be, every single effort that we have, every giant billionaire donor on the conservative side should be thinking about how to place their money and efforts right now, including our own efforts, to get out there and change this because if we don't, if we take it easy this time, if we all kind of sit around and think about, oh, well, everything's going to be fine. Donald Trump pulls these things out in the end or whatever. We're in real trouble.

So the fact that we're getting an alert this far out in advance, before we're even picking candidates in some of these races is a really good thing and we can look at that as a positive. And finally, the biggest thing that Donald Trump has going for him is he has the most pathetic enemies politically that is possible. These people. The people you just showed is who we're going against. And the American people can't stand those people. Every time they're faced with the opportunity between going their way or any other way, they choose the other direction. So if they keep having these no kings, we are. We are.

He is blessed with the just the most ridiculous enemies possible. And if we can just see them continue to go down this road, the more no kings rallies, the better. Because if that is the face of what the opposition is, we've got a shot here, a real possibility of a holding on. We're still in it. We're still in this thing. I want to say this. Joe Kent tweeted this out, and I totally agree with him, saying tell President Trump, tell your congressional representative and your senators that you don't support American boots on the ground in Iran.

Stop him from making that catastrophic mistake. He tweeted out the White House comment line, which is 202-456-1111-11-1. 202-156-11-1. The congressional switchboard, 202-224-3121. 2-2-2-3-1-2. Just tell them. We don't support boots on the ground. Please stand up. Use your voice against it and stop that piece of this at least so that we are not going to, to be governed by the morbidly obese wheelchair-bound person dragging Trump along by a chain. It's a no. Or, God forbid, this person here, get ready. It's not 32. And I will add a special, a special thank you and a special acknowledgement that we will never leave the side of our Somali Minnesotans. Here's our pledge to you. Our Somali Minnesotans, your great-grandchildren will still be here when that orange clown is in the dustbin of history.

You will be here. Awesome. Awesome. Don't worry. The Somalis are doing great in Minnesota. So Tim Walts is feeling really good. And by the way, Tim Walts could throw his hat in the ring and be one of the ones vying for that 28 nomination on Team Blue, if we're lucky. Yes.

If we're blessed, he will run. I will say I would vote fat person in wheelchair a thousand times in a row before I went with Tim Walls. Did you see his shirt? He's back to his like, plan all. I'm just one of you, you know, normal midwesterner type routine. By the way, one other thing. He was at the no king's rally. The GOP official account tweeted out a picture of him with the caption, No Queens.

Oh, no. Sorry, sorry. Actual gays and lesbians don't mind these jokes. They know they come from a good place, at least from us. No, it's true. And Tim, look, Tim doesn't help himself the way he acts. You know, it's so funny that he was brought into our lives as the focus of, he was redefining a manliness, which was, you know, that was what they told us. You know, you have an idea what a man is, and then this guy's redefining it, which isn't the compliment you think it is.

frankly. I think that's actually a criticism. I could be wrong on that. But yeah, he is brought into our lives to redefine manhood. Nobody bought it. Nobody believes this guy. And that was, honestly, he was so bad on the surface. We didn't spend any of the time in the campaign focusing on what a terrible job he was doing as governor of the state. I know, I think it was Jim Garrity wrote about this a decent amount at the time. And I remember like, wait a minute, this guy's really corrupt. He's let a lot of terrible things happen inside the state. And no one paid attention to it because it was just so easy. It was like, well, it doesn't matter if he's a good governor or not. Look at him. But now that he's no longer running for a national office, it's a little bit easier to focus

on what he's doing and what he's saying. And the fact that we are still hearing from this guy. I mean, thank God he's dropped out of the reelection push in Minnesota. Thank God for the people in Minnesota. But I can't get rid of this guy fast enough. Please get him out of our political lives. I want him out off of TV, off of, out of my face as soon as possible. Yeah, I know. Another person you could put on that list is Jimmy Kimmel. He showed up at a No Kings rally out in California where he ran into my adopted home states, one of the U.S. Senators, Chris Murphy. What is Chris Murphy doing at a No King's protest in California? Get back to Connecticut and do your job. We have our own problems.

You shouldn't be out in California marching with the losers out there. We got plenty of losers of our own right here who need your help. All right? But there they are together. Jimmy Kimmel went. He brought his whole family, his dad to. They were holding signs. I mean, it's just like, okay.

So he's got his kids at an anti-ice and no-kings protest. Great. Then, speaking of the rich and famous who want to pretend they're not, But here's Bruce Springsteen from Minneapolis on Saturday in South 34. Well, this past winter, federal troops brought death and terror to the streets of Minneapolis. Well, they picked the wrong city. The power and the solidarity of the people of Minneapolis and of Minnesota was an inspiration to the entire country.

Your strength and your commitment told us that this. This is still America. And for those who gave their lives, Renee Good, mother of three, brutally murdered, Alex Preti, VA nurse, executed by ICE, shot in the back and left to die in the street without even the decency of our lawless government investigating their deaths. Their bravery, their sacrifice, and their names will not be forgotten. I love how he even puts on the fake Midwestern accent. Minnesota. He's from New Jersey.

Okay. That's not how New Jerseyans sound or talk. Kamala Harris. Why all these Dems use their fake fucking accents when they go out to various neighborhoods to try to sound like they're from the hood? You're not. You're not from Minnesota. So stop with the long ooze because you're from New Jersey.

Okay. It's very annoying. and why is Bruce Springsteen the same person as Megan Rapino and Tilda Swanson? Explain that to me. How did that happen? I don't know. That's a great point. I have no idea how that occurred.

Some scientists needs to look into that. I need a full study. I think I don't, I'm not a Bruce Springsteen fan, I will say. I didn't. I never got into him, never liked his music. All I hear when he's speaking right there is that just abortion of a version of Santa Claus is going to town that I have to, coming to town that I have to hear 500 times every Christmas. mess. So I, you know, he is, he's just awful in every way. And he does this every single time an

issue comes out. Like, as if he would have cared for a second about Minnesota. This is just, you know, him, you know, he's like worrying about an investigation. But we all saw it on video. It's the only reason he even know it occurred. Where is his song for Sheridan Gorman? Where is that song? Nope. Who, by the way, is from a lot closer to home, his real home, than anybody in Minneapolis. He has time to go out there and pay homage to Alex Pretti and Renee Good to agitators who inserted themselves willingly into a dangerous situation they never should have been involved in to begin with. No fucking words for Sheridan Gorman, an 18-year-old innocent murdered by ICE last Thursday. The insensitivity of it, like the elite snobbery of it. How dare he, how dare he forget her in the. the name of two agitators as he condemns the very men and women who are trying to keep the next

Sheridan Gorman safe from illegals. Yeah, murdered by illegal immigrants. I mean, it is a, there's no, there's no, there's no barely any coverage of it, frankly, let alone songs. You know, he did it in a whole original song, which thank, by the way, thank you, Megan, for not playing his actual horrible song that he was about to launch into there about Minneapolis. I am, I can't, I can't thank you enough. I've done everything I could to not hear anything from that stupid song. I think it was, he did a streets of Philadelphia thing back in the day. It was like a parody of his own song. I mean, that's what you're really desperate as an artist when you get to that point. But he is the way I won't watch a minute of the, uh, Willie Wonka and the chocolate

chocolate factory revamp with Johnny Depp. Not one minute. I do everything my power to avoid it. Keep going. Yes. No, no. I will say, I do have a bone to pick with you though. And I, and I, you know, I typically agree with the things that you're saying. And I, you know, occasionally people, I don't know if you've noticed this online, Megan, occasionally people push back against you. And I hate to be, I hate to grow to join that chorus. Everyone agree. Not everyone. Not everyone.

I hate to join the chorus here. But I grew up in Connecticut. I was born in New York, but I grew up in Connecticut spent my whole life there. I have tons of relatives that are still there. How dare you try to bring Chris Murphy back to that state one day earlier than he, please. Stay in California forever, Chris. You're doing a great job out there. Don't come back.

Don't, please don't solve any problems for my family members that are living in the state. Don't try to solve any of their problems. You will only make it worse. Stay in California. Join Lindsay Graham at Disneyland. I'm fine with it. Stay there forever. It'll be great.

When you're right, you're right, Stu, and you are right, I see the argument. I am less wrong now than I was 10 minutes ago. Thank you. Thank you for that. You're right. Yeah, Bruce Springsteen is insufferable. And Jimmy Kimmel, and I'm sorry to do this one to you, too. but here's Robert De Niro.

Trump has to be stopped. And that's what No Kings is all about. Because he can't do all the fucked up things that he's been doing without the collusion of Congress and the goons in his administration. They're bound to him by fear of losing their own jobs, their own power. It's diabolical. How can this be happening?

Look at the power of the No King's National Law. Uprising of... Look at the power of the no king's national uprising. Afraid of Trump? Please. No, they should be more afraid of us. Yeah, right. Because we still believe in the core American values of justice,

equality, decency, and kindness. Because we're going from the streets to the ballot box, and because we all deserve a country with no kings, no Trump. Okay, Carine Jean-Pierre. He had to read every word of that and still couldn't spit it out. Isn't he like one of our most storied actors? He's able to memorize a few lines, or at least used to be able to.

You can't even spit it out. And Stu, Robert De Niro would like to lecture us on kindness. After all the interviews, videos, he's put out, I like to punch him in the fucking face. I like a fucking blah blah blah blah. He has become so angry and so nasty because of his TDS and thinks he can get away with this by reading. I mean, truly, just by reading, which he couldn't even spit out. It's kind of sad, really. It's really, really sad.

And he's been sad for a long time. Remember, he did almost the same type of thing right before the election? He came out and did this big press conference. And he was around, you know, a bunch of them. Yeah, yeah. 16, 20, 24. Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

He's been in every single one of them. He's dedicated, I suppose. He could say that for him. Yeah, he's just absolutely terrible. And, you know, he threw in that line, too, about, well, they should be afraid of us. I mean, there's some reason to believe that. The donors to these organizations keep trying to assassinate the president. So at some level, I can understand his threat of being afraid.

I get why they might be. But I don't see how this, again, helps the left. They've tried this in 16, in 20, 24. Go back to every election that I can remember, Megan. There's always some left-wing celebrity of the day that's going to be the difference between what happens the election and what the American people actually want. There's, you know, Taylor Swift's going to come out and endorse someone we're told. And all these things are always preached to us.

At least there might be some influence from someone like Taylor Swift. For someone like Robert De Niro, there's absolutely none. He's pathetic. He comes out every single time and does the same thing. And it never moves the needle. Okay, boomer. I miss the Michael Corleone version of him and from Godfather, too. The rent stays like before. He had some benevolence in that role. He had controlled anger when it was proper. You know, he was a killer in the making, but he did it, you know, quietly and only when, like, there was some sort of ethical, like, justification for it in mob world. Here, he's just unspooled. He's out of control. It's like, all you can think is, like, he's, like, he's, going to need the adult diaper change ASAP because you can see he's like crapping his pants. He's so angry with his TDS. He can't see straight with it. And now it's, you know, come to like,

he's got to read, insert anger. Ah! You know, like it's, I don't like to see it. You hate to see it, as the kids say. All right. Wait, I want to play this quickly. This is back to Bruce Springsteen. Wait, let me just show you, Bruce Springsteen, Tilda and Rapino together. Oh, my God. I feel like you might have to censor one of those images, actually. It feels like his womanly nature is coming out a little bit bursting from the seams there. Do we need to play the Mary F. Kill game here, Stu? Okay, I'm going to make you do it.

Absolutely not. Are you kidding me? Yes, I'm making you. I can do the first one, which is Kill, and that's myself. That's how that game ends. Oh, God. All right, wait, let's play SOT 35, Bruce Springsteen and Jane Fonda. Guess where we are?

Guess who's here? No kings. Do it. Do what? Do it. Well, we stop the king that we don't have. It's important to make sure we don't have the king that we don't currently have. Oh, it's just delightful.

They make it easy. This is exactly, you know, Megan, what we're talking about when it comes to this election. All we can do is screw it up. They hand these elections to us every single time by associating with the most annoying people in our society. All we have to do is avoid being completely terrible and we should win every time,

yet we somehow figure out a way to screw that up quite often. Okay, so that's do it. Do it. That's what Jane Fonda gave us her call to arms. And look who responded. Take a look at these clowns. We believe that we are participating in an active political theater, not direct action or change. Active clowns. There isn't really anything that's done by this.

We are clowns at the circus, led by police, people to lead you and guide you like cows. What are we protesting? What are we rioting? We're not. Nothing is getting done. Yeah. I agree. I was going to say, I think we might agree with him.

Yeah. Is he on our side? He might be. I mean, he might not be, but he might actually, in reality, be on our side and have no awareness of that particular fact. Like inadvertently. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll keep an eye out for him at the next one because he's the closest thing we got to truth.

Quick break. Back on the other side. Among other things, we got to talk about Tiger. When you are in a business growth mindset, you know how much the basic stuff matters, like how you talk to customers or clients and keep your team aligned. A more modern setup makes everything run smoother. So I want to tell you about one of our sponsors. Quo, spelled QUO, the modern alternative to running your business communications. Quo works right from an app on your phone or computer unless you keep your existing number,

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Du Brighier is back with me now. Stu, we've got to talk about Tiger Woods. What a travesty. What's going on with him? It's a pattern as far as I'm concerned. Like, if you, you're a dad, if you wanted to ensure that your kids had problems later, you would abuse them. I mean, that would be the number one way. Abuse your wife.

That would be a great way, too, in front of them, or not, just period. Sign them up for modeling or acting and pray they may be. make it big. That would be another great way. Or push them to beyond the bounds of reason in some sort of early profession, including sports. And I'm sorry, like, I think it's great to, like, ride your kids a bit, push them to, you know, meet what potential they can, you know, at that age, at these tender ages, though I also think, like, just letting them have fun and be kids is great and really the way. And I think we've celebrated him and how. hard his dad pushed him for many years now, Tiger's 50, and his accomplishments on the golf course

are literally like unmatched by, I think anyone. I don't know golf that well, but if not anyone, then by virtually no one. And I think what's happening with Tiger right now as a result of all that. Yes, I think it's drugs as a result of multiple injuries from car crashes, many of which have been impaired, right? So it's like what came first? the injuries or the drugs, I don't know. But I think childhood was not an option for Tiger Woods. He didn't really have one. He spent every waking minute on the golf course being pushed by his dad. Then he made it huge at a young age, had that thing of early, overwhelming fame, and then had physical ailments, which will come if you are that big an athlete, usually. It's rare that they don't.

and turned to narcotics quite clearly. And now, not only is he endangering himself, I mean, he almost had to have his leg amputated in 2021 after a car crash then, almost amputated. He said it was 50-50. Could have gone either way at the time. But it is endangering others repeatedly. He's endangering all the children in the neighborhood,

which is his neighborhood repeatedly, driving these cars impaired. It's been, what, two or three incidents now? and doesn't seem to get it, no matter how many stints in rehab, brushes with death, possible ends to his career come flashing before his very eyes. So it's not to say, never put your kids in sports, never drive them to be great athletes. But I just think any parent who's really hoping for their kid to make it big as a star, as a star at a young age is asking for this, what you see on your screen, right here, a total car crash, actually and metaphorically, in the not too distant future,

as soon as they come of age, basically. And in his case, ever since, your thoughts? Well, this is how you build the best driver and the worst driver simultaneously in America. This is Tiger Woods, and it's a, you're right in that, driving your kids that way to try to be, you sort of, you know, you sort of put all their life's value, into a sport. And like, it's easy to see with Tiger Woods how that's gone wrong because you layered on a bunch of mistakes he made on his own, obviously substances and injuries and all of those things. But for every Tiger Woods, I mean, Tiger Woods at least had immeasurable success, right, when it comes to this goal. You know, I live in Texas, Megan. I mean, my,

both of my kids are active in sports. They're both very talented. You know, I see a lot of the parents, though, that are constantly focused basically on sports only as their future and are making all sorts of decisions, you know, on their education and where they live and, you know, how they're spending all their time based on this idea that maybe they've got the next Tiger Woods on their hands. And look, maybe they do. It's possible, you know, really successful athletes, you know, can be created at some level. I mean, obviously natural talent has to be part of it. But working hard is a great thing. And I think there's a ton of. great lessons that come out of sports right working hard understanding your your role in a in a in a

team framework is really really important understanding failure is a massive part of that and being able to deal with it i think sports teaches that to a kid maybe better than anything else can but you can go overboard and you have to realize that not only uh especially now there are tons and tons and tons of people trying to do the same thing you're doing. You know, I remember when I grew up with a friend of mine in high school who wound up playing in the major leagues, my friend Jason, great dude. And he wound up getting into the majors and he played for, you know, five or six years in the majors.

He, though, was also over my house playing wiffle ball a lot. And we were hanging out and playing basketball at the local gym and pickup games. He wasn't even specialized really in one sport. He was playing all sorts of sports, and he had a good normal life with great parents and a great family around him. And, you know, I'm sure he was doing some private lessons and stuff. He was a great athlete. But, like, it wasn't all of his worth, right? Like, he was, that's not how it was.

Now, I, you know, I'm in this world at some level. Like, my kids are, you know, a very good baseball player. I have a daughter who's very good gymnast. Like, but they, you know, they do private lessons. that I don't push them like that. I do see tons of other parents, though, that are much more intense than I am. Sometimes with kids that are far behind

where my kids are when it comes to ability, some are even ahead. But it's like if you have that... Sometimes with really young ones too. Really young. I mean, the private lesson starts super duper young now where I don't remember that at all when I was a kid. So, I mean, look, there's a lot of good things

that can come out of sports. Frankly, with a lot of the other things that kids could be doing as far as being in front of screens, I don't think it's the biggest worry in our world, but it is a concern. And you can put yourself in that mindset. They need to have a childhood. Yeah. You have to have a childhood, and you have to teach them that their life's worth is not tied

directly to the outcomes of where they go in their sport. When you're totally focused on that. And their value as a human. And value as a human, right? Like their whole, they look at their lives and it's like, well, if I fail at this, where do I go? You know, when you leave sports professionally, it's a difficult transition for a lot of people because they've spent their entire lives up to 30, 35 years old with one goal in mind.

And then all of a sudden they can't do those things anymore. And they have to figure out how to make it in real life. And that is really difficult for people to transition to. So, you know, there's the balance here. There are a lot of great things that come out of sports. I'm not going to deny that. I love sports. But, wow, you can go the wrong direction.

And you hate to see it with Tiger Woods. I mean, he seemed to be a guy who really had it going the right way, who's handling it really well early. on was able to kind of keep a normal head on the shoulders. I have seen this. Like, I am not an athlete, but I have known many athletes over my time. And this is not unusual, this pattern, where you hold it together, you achieve all these accolades, you know, you're a star.

And then something happens. Like it does to all of us, all of us is called life, you know, where something bad happens to you or in your family or to your career or, you know, in sports, it can be up and down on the golf course or the basketball court, whatever, or an injury, and you don't have the foundation to handle it. You haven't, you don't have the ego. You know, you don't have the id that's been developed for you, apart from this sport or this thing, this one thing you do, to be able to handle a massive setback, either in that lane or in a related lane. You just don't, you didn't build up the resilience. And the.

muscles over the years and you didn't have a family that insisted on throwing you in the deep end so that you would learn how to handle this stuff. And I, so to me, it's no surprise at all that Tiger, as he got, all right, so we have a minute left on Syria. Can you hold over for just a little stew? Because I do want to continue this discussion. Yeah, sure. Okay, good. We'll keep it going on, just for a little bit on the, on the back end. Because I think what's happening with Tiger is happening like more and more. We just covered Britney Spears's DUI the other day, right? When Justin

Timberlake, we just saw the video of him completely fall down drunk doing his sobriety test from the Hamptons two summers ago. It was it two summers ago or last summer? These people have it all. What they didn't have was a stable childhood where they were allowed to be kids

and not focus on their singing, their dancing or they're swinging of the golf club. And now it's coming back to haunt them all. And this piece of the story is too rarely examined for its links to the first piece. I'm going to play a Tiger Woods soundbite from when he was younger when we come back. A quick break, and then we're back with Stu Buregear. Don't go away. Let me tell you about cozy earth, which makes relaxing at home so much more enjoyable. If you have not tried their robes or slippers yet, you are seriously missing out, my friends.

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promo code M-EGYN for 20% off. And if you see the post-purch survey, mention you heard about Cozy Earth from this show. Hey, everyone. It's me, Megan Kelly. I've got some exciting news. I now have my very own channel on Sirius X-M. 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, Lake Lauren, Morin Callahan, Emily Jashinsky, 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.

Stu Bergier is back with me now. His new show, Predictable with Stu launches next month. Go to Predictable Show.com to get more info now. For the listening audience, just joining us, we are discussing the latest Tiger Woods tragedy. That's what it is. It's a tragedy. He was said to have been frustrated and depressed, according to the New York Post, about his state of health when late last week he got involved in an accident in which his car rolled over as he almost collided with another car on the road down near his home in Jupiter, Florida. He had lumbar disc replacement surgery in October. By the way, miraculously, neither Tiger nor the driver of the other car nor anyone else was hurt in this latest incident.

But in October, he had lumbar disc replacement surgery. He also had a surgery for a ruptured left Achilles last March. He has had multiple car accidents now. The one that we all sort of heard about originally was, May of 2017, he was arrested in Jupiter, Florida. Cops found him asleep at the wheel of a running car, which had two flat tires and damage to its rear and front bumper. He said at the time that he had a bad mixture of painkillers in him and pleaded guilty to reckless driving. He was convicted of DUI. He tested positive for five drugs, five in his system. Then in 2021, four years later,

He was in a one car crash outside of Los Angeles. His SUV rolled several times. He was trapped inside. He had several open fractures to his lower leg. He was driving between 84 and 87 miles per hour. There was a real question about whether he was going to survive. His injuries were so bad and the car crash was so catastrophic. And that was the reason, reportedly, they said no blood alcohol content test.

was administered to him at that time, Stu, that it felt indecent to push in the very good article that's on Yahoo News right now about Tiger Woods called Tiger Woods is Not Okay by Joel Beal. And he said Woods had nearly died and it felt indecent to push. But the absence of a test is not the same as a clean result. It is the absence of a test. What we were left with in place of information was a story about survival and the road back. That was covered extensively, and which made it functionally impossible to also say, we don't know what was in his system that morning. That matters. It still matters. The golf world, this publication included, he writes, has organized its tiger coverage around one persistent question for years. Can he play?

It's a reasonable question if you're covering sports. It becomes an incomplete one when the honest answer to a prior question, is this man okay, is visibly and has for some time been no. And he goes on to say this, we hope we're wrong. Maybe there's an explanation for the refused urine test because he refused in this latest incident to have the urine tested. So he's been cited for failure to submit to a urine test. But we all know why he refused to give the urine test. When he came out of that car after the rollover, the police said he seemed dazed and impaired. He had no alcohol in his system. They did a blood alcohol like a breathalizer on him at the station, but he refused the urine test, and it's very clear why. But they write, maybe there's an explanation

for the refused urine test that has nothing to do with what it appears to suggest. Everyone's entitled to their privacy, and no one should be mocked for their trials. But privacy is a harder argument to make when the struggle keeps arriving in public, on roadsides, in mugshots, in sheriff's press conferences, at some point looking away as not discretion. It's something closer to abandonment. Stu Tiger Woods is reportedly worth over a billion dollars. His homes are absolutely magnificent. He has a huge mega yacht. And do you know what he named it? Privacy. He named his yacht privacy. He's desperate for it. And because he's so beloved as a public figure and a sports hero, the media tries to cooperate in the way this Joel Beale of Yahoo accurately writes about.

But he's right. Protecting Tiger Woods by not giving him that blood alcohol test and urine test in the 2021 crash that almost killed him. And anybody who's running cover for him on what's obvious in this crash that could have killed him and others is not doing Tiger Woods any favors. This guy needs help. He's obviously not well. He's not well mentally. He's not holding it together. And let me give you one more. Here's how the article continues. There is a 50-year-old man who has been in form of pain, physical, or otherwise, for longer than most of his fans have been watching him, who has been trying, by every public account, to hold together a competitive life and an institutional role and a comeback narrative and a body that has been asked to do more than bodies

are meant to do. The golf can wait. It is waited before. The difference now is what's at stake isn't a green jacket or a record or a comeback story. It's him. And so we are hashtag part of the problem, Stu. Everyone who makes the focus on what's the next tournament he'll be back at. Can he win the Masters again or the U.S. Open? We are hashtag part of the problem. The focus now really must be on Tiger Woods the man. Yeah, I think part of it is somewhat natural, right?

Like, we just, he's really beloved. Like, we really want the best, I think, for Tiger Woods. You know, some public figures go down roads like this, and we are, you know, Alec Baldwin. We're like, you know, he's had his problems and we're just all like, you know, no one wants to embrace Alec Baldwin. There's a bunch of people who go down these roads and we're like, oh, gosh, what a pathetic waste. You know, the society sort of decides at some point how they want to treat these people on sort of, we don't know exactly why these decisions get made. But I do feel like with Tiger as a society, we're really rooting for the guy. Like we really want him to succeed.

You know, we love him. He's not a villain in our society. He's not one of these people where we're like, oh, gosh, you know, he is a bad guy. And we're sort of kind of rooting on his failure, which is a dark part of especially celebrity culture. That's not really what happens with Tiger. We want him to succeed. And he just keeps falling down over and over and over again. And these are just completely nonsensical, type.

of things, right? Like, as you mentioned, he's got a billion dollars here. There's no reason for him to ever be driving a car. The capitalist in me did think immediately Elon needs to get him on the phone for a commercial for Tesla's auto drive feature because he would be the ultimate spokesperson for that particular item. Waymo, get on the line with Tiger Woods immediately. But it does feel like there is a situation where with Tiger, because he's so good at what he does that we kind of assign that ability to the rest of his life. We think he's going to be able to pull these things out. You know, he had a back injury. He was able to push through it and win a major. Like he's able to do these incredible things, and we think he's going to be able to do that in his own life.

But he's obviously shown he's incapable of it. The fact that he's making this, it's not even a mistake, it's this type of mistake. How can that possibly be happening? after everything he's been through, after what we've seen with other people who have been, you know, died in tragic accidents throughout the years. There's, his life could be over at any moment. And he has all these people around him who you'd think have nothing but the best, you know, want the best for him to be able to succeed at least financially in his life. And he still keeps going down these roads. That's a sign of a much deeper problem.

And certainly one that the celebrity press is not going to be able to solve, but you just hope there's still. somebody in his life who actually cares, who can get in his head and say, please solve this. The Post has, there's a quote from an insider today that reads, he is enabled by people making money off of his talent and reputation. Of course, we see that in almost every case of these megastars. It's very hard to get exactly the right team around you. And even then to know that they care about you, you the person, as opposed to you, the star. You know, I mean, he's got he's got really FU money. And of course there will be a team there that wants to keep the machine going forward, you know, the moneymaker making money as opposed to thinking about the man.

Look what happened with Elvis. Elvis Presley is the greatest example ever of that, right? How exploited he was and how much advantage they took of him and how they pumped him through full of drugs just like he was some sort of a racehorse, which is a terrible analogy, because we shouldn't be doing that to race horses either. And he died. You know, he died. He died. what, at 47 of a massive heart attack because they couldn't keep that horse running for too much longer. You can't do this. You can't torture a human this way. And with Tiger, the torture seems self-imposed. We pulled this soundbite. His relationship with his dad is storied. His dad died in 2006. Some reports are that Tiger never got past it because they were so close.

And then it was 2009 that he had his big implosion with his now ex-wife. Her name is Eelon, right? Not to be confused with Elon who should get him in the ads for the Tesla self-driving car. But he had that huge meltdown with his wife. And then it came out that he had been having all these multiple affairs with all these questionable women. And that was the first we sort of realized, whoa, whoa, whoa, there's something going on with Tiger that we didn't know about. That was 2009. And then it was sort of, will he come back? And he did come back. And then the 2017 thing with the DUI and then 2021 where he nearly died. By the way, in that 21 accident, multiple surgery. three weeks in the hospital. And as I said, he nearly lost his right leg. And now here we are in 26 with yet another accident caused by Tiger and more obvious impairment, according to the police. But look at this. Okay, look at this clip. Tiger here, I don't know, he looks like maybe he's,

I'm bad at estimating, but maybe 20. I don't know. He looks young, but he's not like the little kid. We've got video of that too. But here he is with his dad. His dad is mostly the star in this clip, talking about how the dad trained him. Just as he's beginning to swing, I dropped my whole bag of club, and he would stop and look at me, those teeth gritting. And start again, I'd throw a dozen golf balls in front of his ball. But he'd never push me over the edge. He would take me right up to the breaking point, and he'd back off.

He'd stop again, and I'd say, hey, look, are you through shoveling? the marshal says we have to complete this round in four hours and you're taking up more than your share at a time so either hit or get off the course and then he would stripe it just hit it perfect and turn around and look at me and never say word but that look said not take that and go walking down the fairway

eventually we'd take more and then more and then more and then more and then more Finally to the point where it didn't bother me anymore. It's a tiger, the training is over. I said, you've got it. And I promise you that you'll never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life. I mean, that's like, to me, that's sad. Yeah.

Because you can hear him saying like he pushed him, pushed him, pushed him, pushed him. Tiger says never over the edge, close, but then he'd back off. and the stamp of approval at the end. You'll never meet anybody mentally tougher than you. Well, it turns out, Tiger Woods is not, he's not all superhero. He's part man, too, human, who isn't mentally impermeable, who actually does have weaknesses and doubts and insecurities and is subjected to physical pain, just the same as any mere mortal. But unfortunately, he doesn't seem to have the skills to deal with that. He knows how to be resilient on the golf course, but in life as you age, as your body starts to fail you, as it does most professional athletes,

get just given the number of hours of abuse they've put it through. He is dating now. We understand him to be in a relatively happy relationship with Vanessa Trump, but that can't solve everything. And by the way, the Post also reported that the Secret Service knew not to let him. let Vanessa and Don Jr.'s children ride in any car being driven by Tiger. So that's good. They took that precaution. But clearly, you know, those around him have seen issues and known of earlier issues. And I just, to me, I feel sad. I'm sad. I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but I feel sorry for him. I wish he had grown up knowing it's, I'm just loved, just me, this little boy, no matter how I swing this club, my dad is going to appreciate me and value me

no matter whether I win that green jacket eventually or not. And I think that's what we're seeing him struggle with. I mean, I'm armchair, psychologizing him. But to me, it seems pretty clear. That's what he's struggling with. That and the physical pain from earlier bad decisions. And I don't know, Stu, I think it's a good, I wish Tiger would talk about it.

You know, I wish he would get the helping needs, seriously get rehabbed, get therapy, like real therapy, and maybe come to the point where he can talk about what was missing. We know it wasn't the golf swing, but it was something else. Well, first of all, hashtag let Vanessa drive. I think would be something maybe we should start spreading around. But I agree. Or the Secret Service. Yes, Secret Service would be great. Yeah, that's a great outcome. You know, it's tough. It's a, you know, we have this idea. There's a great book, How Innovation Works. It's by Matt Ridley.

and he goes through kind of how all these incredible inventions came around. How did we get here to this, you know, the civilization that we have with all these amazing things? And we all know these stories, right? The story of, you know, some incredible person, you know, Einstein or, you know, these big names. And the book basically talks about how in almost all of these circumstances, there were five, six, ten, twelve people around the world who were coming to a very similar conclusion, right around the same time, right? Like, they all kind of were taking all this knowledge the world had built up and kind of building it into the new thing, whether it's, you know, like the light bulb,

you know, was it Edison, there's a Tesla, all those things back and forth. But there was a bunch of other people had other parts of that at the same time. And we love that sort of like storybook of the one guy who had this amazing light bulb moment where they were like, oh my gosh, now I know how to do it. And we build this hero out of them. a lot of times when it comes to sports, it's this story, right? Where the dad or a coach is super tough on them and just beating them up. And they were able to rise above that.

But are taught those lessons. And they become this incredible success. And now we look up to them. They're in monuments and they're in museums and Hall of Fame. And like that can happen. And sometimes it does work out better than Tiger Woods and sometimes a lot worse. We lose track of the thousands and thousands and thousands of people who have childhoods like that, who wind up hating their parents because of the way they were treated and who never rise even close to what Tiger Woods achieved.

It's really, really difficult to do that, obviously. I had a guy I knew a few years ago who was in his, he was like his late 20s, and he had worked his way through, you know, the tennis circuit, right? He had played in all the great camps and gone down to Florida and played there. I think he was from Sweden. He'd come over. He had been trained as a. a high school student and on, was pulled out of school, was playing tennis constantly, and became good enough to be like the thousandth best tennis player in the world.

What an incredible achievement. And I was asking about his life. And he was saying, you know what my life is like? He's like, I don't make, even when I win a couple of matches, I go to these tournaments and I don't make enough to pay for the trip. That's my life. He's like, I love tennis at one point. I don't love it anymore.

He was like giving lessons. He was converting into regular life because it had beaten the love of the game out of him. And there's thousands and thousands and thousands of those stories for every one Tiger Woods. So encourage your kid to play sports. It's great. But make sure that balance is there. It's more important than trying to make them this massive success. Because honestly, they'll probably get there on their own if they had that type of talent,

if you could nurture it at some level. But really your relationship with them and the man or woman they become later on in life, is far more important. Yeah, amen to that. Stubergear, love talking to you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Megan. This is so much fun.

I know, as always. I love having you on. I just want to tell the audience a couple more things. I didn't read to you exactly what happened during this crash. I didn't have it in front of me, but here's how the post describes it. Happened Friday, allegedly under the influence of some type of medication or drug

when he rolled his land rover, just minutes from his home around 2 p.m. in a two-car crash on South Beach Road, again, on Jupiter Island, just like the one in 2017. According to the Martin County Sheriff, that's the one saying he appeared under the influence of some type of medication or drug, and that's how it happened. He looked dazed and glassy-eyed in the mugshot after being busted on DUI charges for flipping his luxury SUV while allegedly trying to zip around a truck on a narrow Florida roadway, Friday. He wasn't injured. He allegedly tried to blow past a flat bed truck at high speed, but clipped it, causing his SUV to roll onto its side in the accident. Police say he appeared lethargic following the crash and showed signs of impairment, but a breath test showed no signs of alcohol. Authorities also found no drugs or medications in the car. He was arrested and charged with driving under the influence, property damage, and refusal to submit to a lawful test. That's what he's dealing with here. I think that, you know, Tiger, he's probably now going to get some help. I mean, I certainly hope now he's going to get some help. And I think probably the narrative will quickly switch back once again to golf. I mean, he won the Masters, I think, in 2019, it wasn't that long ago. Like, he's, he's totally been back at it, even though he is aging. He's getting older. And I don't know. I,

his life is so big and so grand, it's hard for people not to admire him. He has so many athletic accomplishments. Let me show you pictures of his home, which we pulled. They're incredible. The way he lives is, I mean, most normal Americans could only dream of living in the homes that he lives in. And like I mentioned, the, I mean, his yacht must have cost him, I don't, 150 million dollars. It's so huge and so gorgeous. He's got tons of great, like, investment properties and resorts. He's got tons of great, like, investment properties and resorts and, you know, he can have basically any woman in the world he wants. He's, you know, dating Vanessa Trump, who is stunning and smart and cool and has the Trump name and, you know, some pretty interesting connections of her own, of course. But here's the thing. It doesn't make

you happy. I think you know that. I think, you know, you guys watching this program, we all, we both know that because we talk about it a lot. You can achieve all those mansions and a billion dollar net worth and all the fancy cars and a yacht and all of it and it doesn't make you happy. That has to come from you. And by the way, and by the way, it takes parents who aren't just focused on making you into a golf star. It takes parents who are building up that sense of resilience inside of you no matter what disappointment comes your way and no matter in what form. And the ability to understand right from wrong, like not serial cheating on your spouse. and not getting behind the wheel of a car impaired over and over and over again.

Because now you're endangering not just yourself, but other people's children. That's just, that's a moral sin. And he's not able to control it. That's very clear. And now they say that the penalty for that not submitting to a test could be suspension of your license for a year. It better be longer than that. I mean, please, this guy, Tiger should not have a license. He doesn't need one.

He can hire a chauffeur. It won't even notice the deductions in his checking account. Not to mention Uber or the self-driving car, but it doesn't make you happy. And here's one other thing I wanted to say. I went through high school and I was not a serious student. I was never a serious student. I was smart enough that grades came relatively easily to me. I didn't have to work that hard.

They weren't great. They were fine. I got A's and Bs for the most part. There were a couple of Cs. But I did fine. And I just didn't care. I was much more focused on my friends. My dad died at the beginning of my sophomore year of high school.

So that definitely had its effects on me. And I was focused more on just like being with friends and feeling supported and loved. And, you know, the feeling you have is a teenager with your pals. That's what I was after. Well, I got into Syracuse University and I did pretty well there. And I started to care more about grades. My mom told me I had to get a 3.0 or she wasn't going to pay. She was using my dad's insurance money to get me through.

So I knew I better honor that. And I did fine. Then I decided I wanted to go to law school. I didn't get into any fancy law schools. I did get into Albany, which is where I'm from, first 10 years in Syracuse, rest in Albany. So they're both kind of my hometown. And I went, went to Albany Law School. When I was at Albany, I started to take myself seriously. I finally started to take my academics, like, truly seriously and really to study and to now I'm paying for it myself, right? And I did well at Albany. and I graduated toward the top of my class, and I made the law review that was important in law school. But none of that was getting me like the job offers from the top, top tier law firms that you get. You know, if you're in the top, I think I was top 12% when I graduated or no, I was top 10% when I graduated, but top 12% at the end of the first year. In any event, the point is simply I was at the top. But you have to be like top 3% if you're in Albany to get the best offers. and I wasn't. But I managed to like work it and get one anyway. Long story short, what I'm

trying to say is got a great job with Bickland Brewer and then two years into that, I managed to upgrade to this firm, no offense to Bickland Brewer, but this very large white shoe law firm called Jones Day. Now, how did I get that? Well, yes, by this point I had experience at a great firm, but I knew a professor from Albany Law School who had a connection at Jones Day. And that professor just picked up the phone and said to this partner, you should meet her. Like, it didn't, no one looked at a resume. No one looked at what I'd done in moot court, you know, what I'd done during my first two years when I was at that other smaller firm. It was somebody at my small pedestrian, you know, third tier law school who knew a guy who said, this is a great gal. She's

really smart and you're going to like her. He was being kind. And I went in an interview with that guy and we hit it off. And next thing I know, he brought me back for the full range of interviews that you have to go through. And I got the job. And my life changed. This small town girl from Albany and Syracuse who totally saw herself growing up, getting married, probably in living my life in Syracuse, which I really loved. You know, it's like, I didn't know what I would do. I really, I don't know. Maybe practice law, maybe hang out my own shingle, maybe be a criminal prosecutor. But I thought I would have a suburban life in Syracuse, New York doing that. But my life changed. It changed dramatically because of that one phone call that led to one thing and then another. And this is a long way of telling you, you don't have to ruin your child's life in hopes of him or her achieving something great when they're in adulthood, having money, having accomplishments, having love. I could have easily been very happy in Syracuse, New York, doing exactly the plan I originally thought of. my life got much bigger for the reasons you know. I mean, you sort of, those of you watch the show, no, it took a different direction and that's fine too. I will confess that comes with a different set of headaches. Definitely comes with a different set of headaches, but also blessings. And I didn't, I didn't lose my childhood. I had great times with friends and boyfriends and the prom and frivolity and going to concerts, going to parties.

I loved it. And part of all of it did go into making me who I am today. I do think joy is important. Schedule the joy. Like I'm going over my kids' schedules with them for next year. They have to make some course selections in high school. And it's like, of course, they're in a competitive school. And there's pressure to like take all the hardest classes.

and get the toughest resume with the best grades. And I keep saying, like, don't do that. Like, challenge yourself. Keep yourself busy for sure and challenge your beautiful minds. But do some frivolous things. Like, choose some of the fun electives that no one is going to be impressed by. Like, make some deposits into the U fund. Or everything else gets depleted really fast.

You know, it's like you, and all those apps on your phone when they're open, there should be some that are like books and Sirius XM and the crossword or whatever, something, and games, those are fine. Like, it can't all be about the sports, the golf, the academics, the discipline, the ballet, the what, you know, like, you're building a person. You're not building a tea time. you know, or a golf handicap. And I just think too often we forget that. We think we're doing it for their own good.

They'll get into the best college. I didn't get in the best college. No offense, again, to Syracuse. It's actually more respected right now academically than it was when I went there. But things can work out. Sometimes it's based on a phone call, like one phone call. That, you know, you just happen to know a guy who knew a guy. and your willingness to speak to that guy and ask for the favor,

maybe that comes from all the socialization you did that made you unafraid to ask somebody for a favor, even though you didn't know him that well. Whatever. I just think trust in the process, and the process doesn't always have to be near-abusive commitment to the thing that we've now been told under modern-day standards is going to make your kids life better.

Okay, sorry, I'm done with my rant. That's my two minutes or 20 on the Tiger Woods saga. and I'd love to know your thoughts on it. Email me, Megan at Megan Kelly.com and also go to Megan Kelly.com. Go there. Sign up for my one email a week. Comes on Fridays. It's called the American News Minute.

And truly, like, when you, I took video, I caught Stredwick in the act of the most epically bad thing he's done in years, in years. You will see it. You will see the eyewitness and co-conspirator to it. And you will feel very sorry for me, I think. You will be very sorry for me, given the naughty, naughty dog I continue to have this late in his life. In any event, lots of love to all of you. Thank you for listening.

We will be back to see you all tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.