f the U.S. citizens. President Trump's ability to negotiate effectively with China depends on China understanding the mood of the U.S. I would say the mood of the U.S. is that China is sort of a frenemy, meaning that they're mostly friends and in most ways that countries interact it's mostly good. You know, we're not at war with them. We trade with them. We both make money off each other. We coordinate on North Korea. So we're more friends than not.

But then there's all these areas of like intellectual property, South China Sea, you know, some interference with maybe some stuff we want to do. Maybe they were a little bit lax with what they're doing with North Korea, playing both sides. We don't know exactly the details of that story. So China is sort of balancing between being our enemy and being our friend. If China can keep their brand as clean as they can get, if they can keep their brand clean in terms of how the United States population thinks about them, then the president is handicapped.

So President Trump would have far less negotiating power if the United States citizenry thought, you know, we like China, why are we messing with them? You know, why should we push so hard on our friends? You saw what happened when he was negotiating with Canada and with Mexico, right? When we negotiated with Canada, what was your feeling? Because he was going hard at probably our best international friend. I don't know if that's true, but Canada is the United States' closest best ally friend. Personal good feeling just completely positive from top to bottom. I mean, you know, we joke about Canada, but the fact is the Canadian-U.S. feeling about each other is just very positive. So it was harder for him to push on them because the population was like, do we really need to? We don't really need to do that. How much pain do we want to take in this country? You know, because of course they would retaliate with their own tariffs to push a friend. Yeah, now, but China is not quite Canada, are they?

China, you could easily imagine the U.S. opinion of China flipping one way or the other. If it flips negative and people started thinking of fentanyl China, which they should, it's our top priority is the fentanyl because of the number of people it kills. Everything else is just money, but the fentanyl is just frickin' killing people by the droves. I talked to somebody at my son's funeral, a 25-year-old who has lost eight friends to overdose, opioid overdose, mostly fentanyl I believe. Eight. He's 25 years old, you know, normal guy living in a normal suburb. He's lost eight friends to overdose and most of it probably came from China. We don't know for sure but probably. And then, you know, I lost my stepson this week, 18 years old, and there was another friend his age who died the next day from who knows, same batch maybe.

So this is why you open up the question of increasing the postage on China to pay for fentanyl sniffers or even to pay for drug rehab. I mean it doesn't have to be just for the fentanyl detectors at the port of entry from the mail. It could be for drug rehab. But branding China as the source of this problem and just making it their brand either forces them to negotiate better for the rest of our deals because they know that the U.S. is solidly behind their president because, you know, he's hard on China and wants to be friends and be professional with leadership but he's very hard on them for negotiating. And he needs the spine of the citizenry to say push as hard as you need to. You know, we'll wait. We'll take the pain. We'll take the risk. Push as hard as you need to. And this would be just a perfect branding for that.

All right, so let's get off of that. Here's what else is going on. China would just transship it. So somebody said that China would just ship it through other countries and that it would come here, and that's even more reason to increase their postage because we have to check the port of entry from every country. Because you're right, China would, if the only things we're checking is mail from China, you're right, we wouldn't get it all because they would just ship it somewhere else to ship here from after that. So we're gonna have to charge China a lot for extra postage because because of them we're gonna have to check all the other ports of entry as well. Although we might have done that anyway.

I know, build the wall. Yeah, I don't know how much difference the wall makes for fentanyl because the problem with fentanyl is, you know, you could hold a bottle in your hand that would have enough fentanyl that would wipe out a city or a lot of people. I don't know the exact math of it, but it's such a small thing that Mexico doesn't even really need to — I mean they could literally walk up to the wall and say, hey you over on the other side, here you go, catch that. So I don't know how a wall would necessarily stop that.

However, I did hear that there was recently a fentanyl dealer who was not ISIS, and I believe he was probably either Mexican or Central American citizenship, who because they could not get him because of the sanctuary city. So the sanctuary city stuff is apparently protecting fentanyl dealers from below the border. And I have to admit I wasn't a maniac about the issue in general because I could see it both ways. I'm emotionally, so emotionally, socially, personally, I'm very bonded to the immigrants who have come from below the border, both legal and illegal. If