d really except the most partisan. So be aware of that. Don't let them make you think past the sale.

Trump humorously announced the appointment of Morgan Ortagus as a deputy special presidential envoy. And in his announcement he made it clear that, quote, early on Morgan fought me for three years but hopefully has learned her lesson. So I wasn't aware of this but I guess Morgan Ortagus at one point was an anti-Trumper. But because other people told Trump that she was the right one for this job and she has since of course become pro-Trump, the other people said she should be in the job. Trump says directly basically it's not his choice but he's going to let other people's opinion on this rule. And so he's going to go ahead and do it.

Now the fact that he said completely honestly — it looks to me at least transparently — he said that he's just not crazy about her but he thinks under the circumstances it's worth a try. I love that. I love that. And it is so sticky and persuasive because if you hear him talk like that and you know he didn't care what anybody thought about it, he just said well this is what I think, this is what I thought of her before, this is what I think of her now, and here's why I'm going to do something that doesn't make sense to you because other people have a different opinion. I'm going to let them play that out. Everything about that I love.

Now it must have been a bad day for Morgan Ortagus because unlike other people who have been nominated she did not repost the Truth Social endorsement from Trump. She just wrote her own. So that's got to be kind of embarrassing and humiliating. But Trump as always does this persuasion play where he makes sure that if you're against him you pay a price and he makes sure that if you're with him you get more benefits than you were expecting. So I've often told you that's the pinnacle of good persuasion is that everybody knows there's a really big difference between making you happy and making you not happy. If you make me not happy I'm going to make you twice as unhappy. If you make me happy you might get a great job, I might sing your praise, I might retweet you, something like that. So he's really good at that, making sure there's a giant difference. And this was more of that.

Well, you may have been following the drama that I stirred up yesterday on social media on X because I noticed that Amazon had many of my calendars for 2025 listed except that I'm not selling a calendar on Amazon. They were all counterfeits, all of them, and there were several. Now if you look you'll see that they've been removed because I made a very big deal about it yesterday and it got a lot of attention. And I was talking to their support trying to get me to their legal team so I could talk about it as a legal problem. But the more I thought about it I was like well yeah at first I thought well this is just sort of an ordinary business problem. Just have to be faster in reporting things. But their system is such that you could report all day long but the time it takes for them to react — and sometimes they'll even require you to buy the product. Like if it's a book, if it's a book you have to buy the product and then prove that the insides of the book match the insides of your book. That's their system.

And there are new ones coming on faster than you can do that because it might take two weeks to get that done. So there are some people who think that process works. I think 100% of the people who wrote to me and said they tried it confirmed it doesn't work. And apparently if you try to fix this no matter what kind of a seller you are, whether you're selling goods or books, well anything that's not a book, apparently you hit glitches and problems and pushback and eventually you get put out of business.

So the real model of Amazon for practical purposes is that it's a way to steal the good work of American businesses, small businesses, and hand it off to China. So Amazon has become a weapon of mass destruction that China can use to suck all the vitality and innovation out of our economy at the small business level, which would be enough to destroy it. Now if they're doing that that's not just a legal IP question. If it's massive it's a homeland security problem. Would we ever agree to a situation in which the entire business model of Amazon is to effectively hand over the IP to a Chinese company that will make your product and while you watch it and there's nothing you can do about it?

So a number of people wrote to me and said you know we tried making a business online. China stole all of our property, knocked it off immediately. We couldn't get Amazon to take them down even though we tried. Sure there's a system, it just doesn't work. So then I thought to myself I wonder if I'm sort of imagining that Amazon could do more but they're intentionally not. And I heard from an insider. So this is Mark Atwood on X. This is public. So he said this on X. He said here's some insight from a former Amazonian. Roughly every three years this gets into the press and then retail — I guess the part of Amazon that does the retail stuff — put together a program and a team to fix it and they start fixing it right up until it starts reducing revenue and diversity of suppliers and then it's yanked up short and then the program is starved until it rots away because it doesn't actually generate revenue. And there it sits until it shows up in the news again. I watched it happen twice and found the remains of at least two previous cycles.

Does that sound like it's accidental? No. So there's an insider telling you that they intentionally starve the process because they make more money if they let it go and it's really that simple. So they're allowing the complete rape of American businesses, just wildly inappropriate theft. And they, the primary movers of it. Let me ask you this question. We've all heard that China massively steals the intellectual property of companies that operate in China. We're all aware of that, right? It's a well-known phenomenon. Who do you think has stolen more intellectual property, Amazon or China? Because Amazon probably has essentially given China more opportunity to steal things than all of the companies that are just doing business in China itself.

So I did send a DM to Senator Hawley to ask if he can bring Bezos in and ask him what he's going to do about the fact that he's the primary agent for the destruction of the American economy because he is. And I don't think that Bezos is a bad guy. I think he wants what's best for America. He might not be completely filled in on how bad it is. He might have been told that they have a process so it's fine. Oh don't worry Jeff, we have a process. They can just report it and then we take it down. But do they tell him that that process doesn't work for anybody? Do you think he knows that? Well he probably knows it now because I made such a big stink about it. Millions of people viewed it. I think I got three million views on one of them.

One of the views came from Thomas Massie who weighed in on this and said, quote, us inventors get ripped off on Amazon too. Oh it's worse than I thought. Amazon makes money on the fakes and knockoffs so they have no incentive to fix it. Yeah that tracks. That tracks. It's clear to me they should be legally liable for the fraud they help perpetuate on the public, the authors and the inventors, right? However, Thomas Massie, this is not just a fraud case. This is a homeland security issue. We're literally we've created a pipeline to export our entire small business economy that sells things through the mail to China. So yes I'm very happy that you weighed in and he's right on top of it. But I'd love to get it out of the frame that it's a fraud problem. It is a fraud problem. It is a fraud problem. But that's not the thing I need fixed. What I need fixed is stop throwing away the country. Stop transferring the intellectual wealth of America to China. That's what I need to stop.

Anyway, Mark Cuban weighed in productively and he had a fairly long list of suggested fixes. I won't go into those because I don't know enough to know if they're exactly on point but they look good. So here's one of those cases where I always talk about the internet dads. When the election was on of course people took sides and Mark Cuban was on a side that many of you were not on. So we didn't like that part but we also understand politics is politics. That's not the real world. When it comes to the real world, yes you want Mark Cuban to say how do you fix this thing and to also observe that it needs fixing and to get the conversation going at a higher level. So thank you Mark Cuban for a very productive contribution to the conversation.

Now one of the things I wondered about is why can't they fix it by just making the legitimate seller have the authority to take down the fakes? And if I take down a real one and the real one complain