hat looks like a waste of time. I'm not going to go. So good call by Trump.

Rand Paul is warning. He was on at least one of the Sunday shows, I guess, and he said that the Trump coalition, if you will, the Trump supporters could be split under two conditions. There are probably more of them, but here are two of them. He says once there's, this is Rand Paul. He says once there's an invasion of Venezuela or if they decide to re-up the subsidies and the gifts to Ukraine then Rand says I think you'll see a splintering and a fracturing of the movement that has supported the president. What do you think? Do you think that if Trump invades Venezuela or he starts to refund Ukraine that his coalition will split apart? I think so. Yeah, I think that's a reasonable prediction.

But what are the odds he's going to do either one of those things? What are the odds that Trump is going to refund Ukraine when he's pulled off one of the smartest things I've ever seen, which is not only is he now funding Ukraine, but he's getting our allies to pay our military-industrial complex for the weapons that Ukraine is going to use. Don't we sort of win in that situation? I think we do. Do you think Trump's base is going to be mad at him for finding out how to take the free money off the table? Yeah. I mean, he's basically acting like the Chicago Teachers Union. If you were here in the beginning of the podcast, Trump's just acting like the Chicago Teachers Union. Hey, this big pile of money on the table doesn't seem to be labeled. Is anybody claiming this money that's just sitting here? No. No. You? No. No. No. Nobody claims this money. Well, what if I just take it? Any complaints? Still no complaints. All right. Chicago Teachers Union. That's how they do it. Allegedly. Allegedly. I'm just saying allegedly.

All right. Meanwhile, the US White House, you know that White House, not the other White House. The US White House announced it's eliminating the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE. Here's how I would interpret that. You would interpret that negatively, wouldn't you? As in, hey, DOGE was a good idea. If they eliminate it, I will be unhappy because it's something I liked and I think it worked a little bit and maybe they should have just tried harder, but I like the DOGE idea and eliminating it seems like a bad idea.

Well, I'm not sure that's what's happening. I will take a fact check on this later in the day when we learn more. But here's what I think is happening. And this is something I said what, a year ago, two years ago. A year ago at least I pointed out that DOGE was simply becoming how the government operated. So instead of needing a separate DOGE department, what made a lot more sense is what you saw Bill Pulte do in the Fannie Freddie situation. If you're running a big government entity, you know that Trump wants you to cut costs and he wants you to brag about it because he wants to cut the budget and he wants everybody to know it. So if you're running a big entity and you know exactly what the boss wants and unlike prior years, this is the real magic part, unlike prior years, you're not going to get a pat on the back for spending more than your budget. But apparently that used to happen otherwise they wouldn't all be spending more than their budget.

So at this point you saw people almost competing, heads of cabinets, heads of departments, you saw them almost competing to see who could get the most attention for saying I've cut the budget in the smartest best way. So you saw Hegseth talking about budget cuts, you know, Bill Pulte again. And I think you can name half a dozen others where they literally just bragged about cutting budgets. Once you've created that culture, which apparently Trump has done, then DOGE just becomes how you think about everything. It doesn't become the external department that needs to be bothering you all the time. You should be doing those things before they knock on the door. You shouldn't need DOGE to say you need an audit. Nobody needs DOGE to say they should save money. Look where they can cut costs. That should just be part of the operation.

So when I saw that DOGE first was created, I was excited because obviously that was a thing that wasn't in existence that needed to exist. But once it operated for a while and everybody got the idea and it just became part of our conversation, it became a word. I mean, you don't even need to have the department now. If you're running some big department in the government, don't you think that one of the words you would use is DOGE? It would be something like this. All right, everybody. We need to come up with some big cost savings so I can tell the boss that we're on board. So somebody come up with some good DOGE ideas. They would literally use the word to describe what they want to do, which is have a responsible budget that you could audit and keep under control. So I'm happy