Transcript of GOP is now the party of 'yes we can,' journalist argues

Donald Trump's delivering his address to Congress tomorrow night, and he says he's going to be huge, and he's going to tell it how it is. Trump's been in office six weeks, but has a lot to say. Migrant encounters at the Southern border had an all-time low, down 94%, and the cartels are running scared. One cartel leader says he's trying to figure out how to protect his family in case the American military strikes inside Mexico. Another says he's already gone into hiding, rarely leaving his home. Two young men who produce fentanyl for the cartel said they've shut down all their drug labs. The Pentagon's unleashing our warfighters, cutting restrictions and giving them more power to eliminate terrorists. It's working. The US just killed a senior Al Qaeda affiliate leader in Syria. On the home front, the FBI returns the property they seized from Mar-a-Lago. 47 says he's putting it all in his presidential library. The documents that Biden seized because they were so secret that having them at Mar-a-Lago was risking national security, they're giving the documents back to Trump so we can box them up and put them back in the Mar-a-Lago ballroom. What a joke.

And buckle up for another big one. The world's best chip company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, just announced a massive investment in America. Listen.

Taiwan Semiconductor is announcing that they will be investing at least $100 billion in new capital in the United States over the next short period of time to build state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing facilities. Without the chips and semiconductors, nothing runs today. You can't buy a car without them. You can't get a radio, a Television, you can't get anything.

For those of you guys keeping score at home, investments being made in the United States under Trump have topped $1. 7 trillion, and it's only week six. Biden's signature Chips and Inflation Reduction Act investments were 1. 2 trillion, and they had to tax and borrow that money. These Trump investments are private. Remember when Obama said all these jobs were gone for good?

Some of those jobs of the past are just not going to come back. When somebody says, like the person you just mentioned, who I'm not going to advertise for, that he's going to bring all these jobs back, well, how exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do? There's no answer to it. He just says, I'm going to negotiate a better deal. How exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have?

And tonight's the night, tariffs against Mexico, China, and Canada are dropping at midnight.

The most important trading partner to Mexico and Canada is America. They should be more respectful to us. They should be stopping caravans. And that's what the President said these tariffs talks about. He said, Stop the flow of immigration and stop the flow of fentanyl killing our people.

While Trump stops foreigners from ripping off our companies, he's also stopping the government from ripping off taxpayers. Most of what Doge is doing is humming right along. Even anti-Trump judges are ruling, the cuts can stick because the liberal lawyers who are suing can't prove irreparable harm. Doge is now setting its sights on the Pentagon. That's what you call the mother load.

In the interest of transparency, look at some of the initial things that we found in the Air Force. 1. 9 million for holistic DEI transformation and training, $6 million at the University of Montana to strengthen American democracy by bridging divides. At the Defense Human Resources Activity, 3. 5 million for support to DEI groups. How about this one? $1. 6 million to the University of Florida to study social and institutional detriments of vulnerability and resilience to climate hazards in African Sahel.

Secretary Hegset is telling all civilian workers, reply to Elon's email this time.

I am now directing each member of the Department's civilian workforce, just civilian, to provide those five bullets on what they accomplished in their specific jobs last week. It's a simple task, really, as Elon said, as the President recognized in our first cabinet meeting, just to pulse check.

Dose will find the dark underbelly at the Defense Department. Even Democrats can't fight this one.

If there is waste and fraud in the Defense Department, which is the largest single budget item that we fund, which has not been able to fulfill an independent audit in the last seven times, where there's massive waste and fraud, we should go after the waste, fraud, abuse in every agency of government. There's no argument about that.

But Bernie's colleagues aren't going down without a fight. Democrats are inviting laid off bureaucrats to Trump's address to Congress tomorrow. Other Democrats just want Elon deported. My question to Elon Musk and what the hell are you doing here in America? Go back to South Africa. In Tennessee, one guy was arrested for plotting to burn down one of Elon's AI facilities. This weekend, protesters occupied Tesla dealerships across the country. Stop the Doge cuts. Protect federal workers. Stop the Doge cuts. We are in the middle of an administrative pool by Elon Musk and a bunch of high tech hackers. I'm sure Soros wasn't paying those Musk protesters. I am so sure of that. Even Elvira is ditching her Tesla. Here goes my Elon sex mobile. I'm donating it to NPR. Public co founder Michael Alan Berger joins me. What's NPR going to do with all these Teslas?

Well, it's amazing. Hey, great to be with you, Jesse. I mean, it's been incredible several weeks. I think everybody has to acknowledge that it's been a head spinning, the pace of which the administration is just doing things. It's Silicon Valley metabolism. I mean, it's been incredible. As you've been pointed out, these are popular things. These are very moderate mainstream ideas. There's nothing fringe here. And I think the Democrats have got themselves in a really tricky position because they've got a base that's radicalized around things that are deeply unpopular, around trans, DEI, climate apocalypse. Here you've got administration that's doing things that are broadly popular and that we're even being called for by I feel like Bernie Sanders and AOC in terms of making very reasonable audits of government agencies that are obviously overspending and spending on wasteful things.

Do you think Doge is going to be able to take on the Pentagon? No one's ever taken on the Pentagon and won?

I think it's hard. It's going to be hard to get the big cuts. And obviously, there's a lot of things you have to consider there. But I just think the overall intention here, the obvious motivation of it, I don't think that people think that Elon is doing this to make money. He's the richest man in the world. I don't think they think that Trump is trying to hurt government workers. I think they're trying to achieve their agenda, which was a make America great again agenda, an America first agenda. And I I think Elon also, when he got up there in the oval office a couple of weeks ago, he just said, yeah, we'll make some mistakes. We may cut some things that we shouldn't cut. If we do, we'll add them back in. I just think that flexibility, it was something that people said you could never do with the federal government, and they're just proving every day that you can. I was just going to say one more thing, Jesse, which is just remember, Obama ran on, Yes, we can. Now the Democrats are the party of, No, you can't, and the Republicans are the party of, Yes, we can.

That's a good point. Was that the first time you ever heard anybody in the political realm say that they've made some mistakes and they'll probably make another one. I've never heard that before.

I haven't either. I mean, it's been taboo that you're supposed to pretend like you're perfect. Here you have an administration of human beings, and they clearly care about the American people, and you might disagree with some of the things I today pointed out that I don't think they should be cutting Medicaid. I know there's some talk about that in the Congress. We want to see the disclosure. We haven't seen it yet. There's a lot of pent up understandable impatience for things to happen, but clearly, things are happening, and there's still a lot of pressure we should put on the administration.

All right. Absolutely. And we want to reform Medicaid. We want everybody to live a happy, healthy life. And in order to be fully transparent, I'm going to make another mistake tonight on this show, probably in the next segment, just to be perfectly honest. Mike, great to see you.

Great to be with you, Jesse..