orts. It seems to me they can ride this out pretty well. So they probably played this exactly right by just matching our tariffs which are unsustainable in either direction probably. Whereas we might need the things they have like their various parts that are necessary for our industries and the rare earth minerals etc. We might need them a lot more than they need us. And that surprised me. If you had asked me how much of China's exports go to the United States, if I hadn't looked it up, probably would have guessed north of 30%. And if that were the case, then we would have a pretty good negotiating position because 30% of what they export, they're not going to lose that. But 15% is right at the point where they could say you know what? There are other people who will buy these things. It's not like we're even going to lose any sales. We'll just sell it to Russia instead of you. We'll just sell it to Japan instead of you. So China is in an unusually strong position.

So I don't know where that's going to go, but I hope Trump has some negotiating tricks in his bag.

According to Fox News, the military looks like it might cut 90,000 troops because of budget reasons. Now does 90,000 sound like a lot? It does, but we're also entering the drone age. So if these 90,000 people can't operate drones, I just don't know if we needed them that much. So I guess we're going to have to rejigger our entire military so that we've got the right mix of people. But it's going to be drone operators, drone experts, drone retrievers, drone defenders, drone everything. So probably 90,000 is survivable.

You probably heard that a federal judge ordered that the individual that the Trump administration had shipped off to the El Salvador prison system, and the federal judge said he did not have due process. There's some question whether he was ever in MS-13, but apparently he'll be brought back. I don't have an opinion on this because if you don't know for sure if he was part of MS-13, Pam Bondi seemed to think he was. I don't know if the evidence for that was good or not, but I don't mind that we correct. So it looks like this was just an error.

And he already had a court order prohibiting him from being deported specifically to El Salvador. So I think the administration admitted at least that much was a mistake that they didn't notice that he couldn't be sent to El Salvador because of specific dangers there I guess. So if he's truly innocent and he's never been part of MS-13, this is a pretty bad mistake. But we also live in a world where things don't work perfectly, especially if you're moving fast and you're trying to save your country. So I'm not going to defend it. I'm just going to say unfortunately we live in a world where this can happen and I don't have any further opinion on it.

Trump's tax plan is being hammered out in Congress and the Republicans are going ahead with what they call trillions of dollars in tax cut extensions because we don't want the current tax system to time out. It was scheduled to time out and then taxes would have gone up. And but he wants to increase some border security and some military. It looks like Rand Paul and Susan Collins broke with the party and voted against it. But what they're working on is what they call a fiscal framework.

You know what that sounds like? If you said hey I'd like you guys to come up with a budget. And instead of coming up with a budget, they came up with a fiscal framework. Would you think that they had done a job? If this were corporate America and you knew that all these people were working on a budget but what they returned to you with was a fiscal framework. That's almost like not doing work. I mean it's pathetic honestly. And it just signals a completely broken process. No we don't need any freaking fiscal framework. Just give us a budget or maybe give us a few of them so we can pick one. But no, I don't want a fiscal framework.

You may have seen this clip. There was a guest on CNN named Ashley Ellison and apparently she worked for Joe Biden and she said I worked for Joe Biden. If the people around him knew that he was not capable, it is unacceptable that they allowed him to go on that stage. And her excuse was that she worked for Biden but she didn't spend time around him. So therefore she was surprised to find out he was mentally degraded and the insiders knew it.

To which I say nice try, Ashley Ellison, trying to cover your ass. The rest of us knew it just because we had televisions and eyes. You did not need to spend time around Biden to know that he was mentally degraded. We've been over this. But I think all the Democrats now are trying to find a get-out-of-jail-free card where they can give you some reason why it wasn't really their fault that they were supporting a candidate with no brain. And this was a good try. If you weren't paying attention you might say to yourself oh okay. Well they lied to her. I guess she's mad at those other Democrats and this must be the honest and smart one because it sounds like if she'd been in that situation she would have told people. No she's just another Democrat liar who absolutely knew he was mentally degraded because everybody did. Everybody who had eyes knew it. So don't lie to us a year later and say well I didn't spend any time with him. How could I possibly know?

Now do you think she also doesn't notice that Kamala Harris is often inebriated in public? I guess we'll have to wait for a new book to come out and then people will say well I didn't spend much time around her but you know how could I possibly have known? Just watch the videos. Just look at her. It's kind of obvious. Piers Morgan knew.

So we learned a little more about that mineral deal with Ukraine that kept falling through. Scott Bessent was on talking to Tucker and here's what he says. So he says that apparently Zelensky had guaranteed that the deal was on and then kind of threw the US under the bus by going into the White House and acting like it wasn't on or we were still negotiating and blowing it up. And here's what Scott Bessent thinks is the real reason the deal looked like it was going to be signed but then wasn't. Now this is his own speculation but he's pretty clever so I think I'm going to go with him on this.

He said to Tucker, quote, you know who doesn't sign that deal? Someone with their hand in the till. Because apparently the mineral deal was designed in a way that was hard to skim. So that the Ukrainian people would have gotten a benefit and the American people would have gotten a benefit but it would not have gone through the skimmer in between, third parties who want to take their billion dollars from everything. And so it was the criminals who killed the deal because they weren't getting a cut.

Now he doesn't have proof of that as far as I can tell but it would explain everything we saw. So the fact that it explains everything has some weight but that's his opinion and I won't argue it.

I guess the Supreme Court gave Trump a win on the DEI funding for schools. So now he's going to be allowed to block 65 million that the Department of Education otherwise would have granted to Democrat NGOs to promote DEI in schools. It's amazing to me that DEI is just flat-out illegal and we still have to fight to defund it. How many illegal things that are obviously illegal and the government has declared illegal? How hard should you have to fight to not give money to the illegal thing? It's just incredible.

Speaking of that, James O'Keefe got on hidden video on his OMG company there. He got this NIH official. He said that he was coaching researchers how to work around the DEI ban by using the word ancestry instead of race. Oh my god. And it's just a typical white guy. And it's always a white guy. I feel like the worst offenders are the white guys who just can't let go of their DEI because they have their jobs. So they want to make sure that no white guy coming up can get their job.

Then FBI director Kash Patel says he's going after China's influence on American farmlands. So you know the issue, China has bought a whole bunch of farmland in the US and a lot of it is near our military bases. But to me this seems like as big an issue as it is it seems to me like it's one of a thousand things that China is doing to the US every day. Apparently China's expenses for spy stuff on the United States is just through the roof. That's Fox News was reporting on that.

Then the European Union is still trying to censor Elon Musk on X. So interesting engineering is talking about this. So the European Union, the regulators are trying to levy a billion dollar penalty against X. And it's because they violated their European Digital Services Act according to the New York Times. Now we assume that all this is just a way to get to Musk and defang him and also to destroy free speech in the United States because X is the primary place. And if they can find a way to make it impossible for Musk to stay in business then the last bastion of free speech in the United States will be destroyed by Europe. Probably with the help of Democrats in this country but by Europe.

Now I've got to say this puts the future of NATO very much in question because I'm not willing to defend a country that's destroying free speech in the United States no matter how cleverly they do it. And this is kind of clever. They create a set of laws and then act like it's for everybody but then they really go after X and try to put him out of business. Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable.

Now whatever Trump does, and I assume he'll respond to this, whatever Trump does in response it should be a 10 out of 10. In other words we should never have this co