First story is about Donald Trump going to China and uh when Trump went there, uh he might have made a secret deal. uh I wanna ask Representative Kana about that in a minute. I think that there might be an exchange between Iran uh and Taiwan in regards to China. We'll come back to that. [00:00:17] And he said that it was okay that China spies in on us. We'll also come back to that. But first, I wanna show you why Trump might have been in such a good mood in China to begin with. Let's watch. uh was a fantastic day. And in particular, I wanna thank President [00:00:34] Xi, my friend, for this magnificent welcome. As allies in World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt's mentions of the brave people of China, that's what they were, drew loud cheers and his speeches in the United States. And everybody loved what he had to say, just as [00:00:54] many Chinese now love basketball and blue jeans, Chinese restaurants. In America today, outnumber the five largest fast food chains in the United States, all combined. That's a pretty big statement. So we're really happy with China now because we eat a lot of Chinese food in America. Okay, [00:01:13] interesting. Well, I'm gonna bring you in right away here. We're gonna talk about the trade deals, potential war in Iran and the future of Taiwan. But uh the Chinese seem to have done something smart here. They buttered them up pretty well. They give them a red carpet treatment and the kids applauding and And so do you think that helped to soften Trump's [00:01:33] attitude towards China? Of course it did. I mean, now people know the playbook. Flattery is the key to almost any politician, but it's certainly the key to Donald Trump. And uh Xi Jinping made a big deal of taking him to the walk in uh one of his private gardens. [00:01:53] And what's ironic is he says, well, the only other person who's been here is Putin. And of course we know Trump's uh obsession, admiration for strong authoritarian leaders. And so they basically got what they wanted, which is Donald Trump uh standing up for our manufacturers, [00:02:12] our workers, our farmers, talking about ending the Chinese dumping and Chinese state subsidies. And not standing up for the Taiwan Relations Act uh and basically saying, okay, I'm willing [00:02:27] to listen to what you want. Yeah, so we're gonna go one by one and I'm really curious what you think about my theory in a minute that they might have done a uh kind of a secret deal. But first, let's talk about what you're mentioning here, all the different things that he seemed to be okay with China doing that I'm not sure we were okay with. So let me show you a bunch [00:02:45] of clips. Let's go to first their cyber attacks against us. They do we do to it's like the [00:03:01] spine they're talking about all the spying I said well this fine we do it infrastructure look no I'm talking about spine The question was asked to me yesterday. I guess what about the fact that China's spying in the United States? Well One of those things because we spy like [00:03:17] hell of them, too oh if you ever decided to come to the Well, you don't know that. mean, I'd like to see it, but it's very possible that they do. And we're doing things to them, I [00:03:33] told them. A lot of stuff to you that you don't know about it. You're things to us that we probably do know about. But we do plenty. It's a double, it's a double exercise. If we do a lot of things to them that they don't know about, our president probably shouldn't tell [00:03:49] them that. Okay, and I've never seen a president defend another country spying this much. Well, asterisks, unless it's Israel. But congratulations, China. Now you're in Israel's category. You're apparently almost allowed to spy in on us, but that wasn't on the spying issue. Here's [00:04:08] more. I was in an interview with a very bad, reporter. She works for CBS. You saw that 60 minutes, person, just an average person. She's talked about China and this and that. uh They steal this and they steal that. I said, yeah, you do it to them too. They spy on us. [00:04:28] I said, we spy on them too, I guess. So some people thought that was cute. Other people said, you don't have to say that. I said, I sort of do. No, we do things and they do things and that's the way it is. Representative Conner, is that normal? Are we supposed to allow one [00:04:47] of our biggest adversaries to spy in on us? think that it's no big deal? Of course it's not. mean, look, uh Trump was known for sort of straight talk and no BS. And he says, here, I'm going to level with you. uh America has these uh spying operations and uh China [00:05:07] does as well. That'd be one thing, but he's saying I'm fine with that. No, the uh job of the American president is to say, we will make sure that they don't penetrate our uh critical security infrastructure and our critical defense infrastructure and our critical financial infrastructure. [00:05:25] I'm not naive, American people aren't naive, they do this and we need to make sure that they stop doing it in ways that compromise our security. But for whatever reason, he has gotten spooked. My theory is he's gotten spooked for two reasons. One, China has a [00:05:40] monopoly on rare earths. He never anticipated when he did his initial tariffs that they would actually go there and- uh they have more leverage because they've threatened to stop that. And he hasn't gotten any deal to extend them beyond a year. And secondly, he spoke because of the war in Iran that's going disastrously, prices are up, the Strait of Hormuz is blockaded, [00:05:59] he needs China's help. And so he's gone in with very little leverage. All right, let's talk about more that he promised them. He talked about allowing the 500,000 students from China to be here. Let's watch that. We requested for a lot. We have Visa which is [00:06:15] not allowed to trade and they were there, it was a big company and other companies are allowed to trade. I said, what about letting Visa, we had a Visa there today by the way, Visa's a big deal. I said, what about using Visa in China? For some reason they were blackballed and maybe [00:06:34] that'll come off. So he brought a lot of business men there and he talked about allowing the 500,000 students to have their visas here. So both the company visa and Chinese uh visas are apparently approved and perfectly fine. Do you know your brain rot index? No, of course [00:06:55] you don't. didn't need it because I didn't know what it was. it turns out you might want to, especially after hearing this. 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Track your own brain rot index and learn how you can save money and spend more time doing things that actually bring you joy instead of doom scrolling on social media. Check it out by heading to tyt.com, switch or by downloading the Noble Mobile app. By the [00:08:02] way, shh, don't tell Andrew, but if you're on Wi-Fi, you also don't use your data, so you're to get money back anyway. UIT.com, uh government officials, he was bringing the people actually [00:08:42] in charge of our government. The head of Nvidia, Elon Musk and other business leaders as if to say like, okay, all the decision makers are here. So how did you feel about that and the student visas? Well, he brought the global elite with him. mean, the very global lady railed [00:08:59] against and look, you have to take some business leaders but not a single medium sized manufacturer, not a single farmer, not a single worker. Like all the people he held campaign rallies with, none of them made the trip. And he basically took the elite who sold out American workers. [00:09:17] I mean, these are the same people who were pushing for China to be part of the uh World Trade Organization with most favored nation status. These are the folks who created the China shock because they wanted cheap labor and they wanted capital to go to China to get high returns. [00:09:32] These are the people who offshore the jobs and now he's going with them to beg China for investment into America with uh jobs that aren't going to have labor unions that are going to abuse workers. A total betrayal of everything he ran for and of American workers. Now on the [00:09:47] Chinese students, I've always felt that we should have Chinese students here. I think it's demagoguery to say we don't want uh Chinese students. 38 % of AI companies uh work forces actually Chinese origin. But that's one area that I think he has in demagogue, but the economics uh is [00:10:06] uh just wrong in betraying American workers. Yeah, and of course these companies don't have America's best interests in mind. It's not to say that they're bad or immoral or evil, they're amoral, they have no morality, they're corporations. And their interest is in trading more with China, and that might be to our benefit and often is. And sometimes it's not [00:10:26] to our benefit, but they're not there for our benefit, they're there for their own benefit. In fact, let me show you the list here real quick. Jensen Wong from Nvidia Corp, Elon Musk from Tesla, Tim Cook from Apple, Larry Fink from BlackRock, Steven Schwartzman from Blackstone, those are two huge finance companies. Kelly Ortberg from Boeing, and the list goes [00:10:45] on. In fact, about Boeing, I have one more for you, Graphic 5. His one detailed announcement during the visit. that China would buy 200 Boeing aircraft, fewer than expected 500, led to the company's stock to fall nearly 4%. So the Chinese are actually not buying as much [00:11:01] from us as we expected. So the stocks dropped, so that was somewhat counterproductive. But now we get to the most important part, Taiwan and Iran. I'm to go to graphic seven here because she said that any mishandling of tensions over the island, a self-governing democracy, Beijing wants to control. could spark a quote, extremely dangerous situation and not to the [00:11:23] potential for a great power war. This got me worried that they are actually thinking of taking Taiwan physically, literally. oh We get to Rose thoughts on that in a second, but first a clip. [00:11:50] President Xi said there was a risk of conflict with the US over Taiwan. doesn't want to see a war. He doesn't want to see a movement. This is, you know. [00:12:25] didn't make a commitment to defend our ally either way. Interesting, there's more on that when he sat down with Fox News. I will say this, I'm not looking to have somebody go independent and we're supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war. I'm not looking for that. I want [00:12:44] them to cool down. I want China to cool down. But you're waiting on approving billions of dollars of weapons for Taiwan. Is that moving forward? Well, I haven't approved it yet. We're going to see what happens. Interesting, so Representative Conazan is a guest host with us today. So Before [00:13:02] I get to my theory on this, which is gonna involve Iran, let's just talk about the facts here. So uh President Trump is saying he didn't make a comment on whether we would defend Taiwan, presumably if they're attacked. He said we don't wanna go 9,500 miles to defend them. [00:13:18] He said he might not sell them weapons anymore. What's your take on that, Ro? Well, this is where knowing some history and foreign policy actually matters. Our policy of strategic ambiguity is uh not that we're uh going to duck making a commitment on providing weapons [00:13:37] or providing sport. It's that we're not going to specify exactly what we would do if China attacked Taiwan. And the policy has served as well and actually led to peace. We have basically said that China and Taiwan can negotiate the future of Taiwan. peacefully and we're [00:13:55] not going to intervene. But if they engage in military coercion as they are currently doing in terms of increasing the patrols around the island, then we have a problem with that. And the Taiwan Relations Act allows us to provide Taiwan with support and weapons. That's not our troops going 9,500 miles, that's us providing them with weapons. Which Reagan in 1982 provided [00:14:17] six assurances to Taiwan about and said, we will never consult Beijing in providing these weapons. Congress passed those weapons uh authorization either unanimously or with one or two dissenting votes. And it would really be reneging on that uh assistance of the Taiwan Relations [00:14:36] Act for the president not to do it. And giving uh Xi Jinping just more of a license to accelerate the military coercion. Yeah, on that one, so I get the strategic ambiguity. We talked a lot about it on the show and every president does it. So don't I would tell caution on [00:14:54] you, don't get too frustrated if Trump isn't telling you exactly what we would do with Taiwan, because that is partly US foreign policy. But when Xi Jinping alludes to, hey, don't mess with us in Taiwan, it feels like it's a little foreboding. uh And then the president [00:15:13] says, basically doesn't say whether he would defend Taiwan. I do get nervous. Is it possible that could get interpreted as a green light, kind of like uh George H.W. Bush's uh ambassador [00:15:29] uh accidentally giving the, we think accidentally giving the green light to Iraq saying that maybe we wouldn't defend Kuwait before the first Persian Gulf War. It's a good point, Cenk, and the president should have said, let me just be clear, uh Mr. Xi Jinping, you will not [00:15:47] take Taiwan militarily. one China policy does not allow you to militarily take Taiwan. And if you do that, the international community led by the United States is going to uh come to Taiwan support. And what we will do, he doesn't have to specify, but he needed to push [00:16:07] back. Instead, he just says, I haven't made a decision or a commitment one way or the other. uh Basically saying, don't really care about uh the future of Taiwan. if Xi Jinping wants to take it, well, uh we'll cross that bridge when it happens. I mean, it was really a uh [00:16:29] very weak statement. there's people who are too hawkish on this, who are really belligerent in trying to create a Cold War. I don't believe that, but I do believe you have to stand up for territorial integrity not being violated by a military invasion. Yeah, I don't think [00:16:46] we need to do anything provocative like Nancy Pelosi did in my opinion by going to Taiwan out of nowhere and then that led to more sales and more antagonizing of China. On the other hand, um we are supposed to defend them. And so if we say we don't promise to defend them [00:17:02] militarily, yeah, I'm worried that that could be misinterpreted. But maybe it's not a matter of misinterpreting, maybe there's a grand bargain here. before we get to that discussion, last video is about Iran and that'll be part of that. grand bargain discussion was what On Iran it's very interesting, you feel strongly they can't have a nuclear weapon. He said that [00:17:22] very strongly. They cannot have a nuclear weapon and he wants them to open up the strait. But as he said, they closed it and then you close them with a smile. That's true. We control the strait. And they've no business, literally they've done no business in the last [00:17:39] two and a half weeks, which is approximately $500 million. oh So look, this trade is not open and we can't transit through it. It could wreck the entire [00:17:57] world economy, especially if we go back in. uh But what that made me think is, look, when you read the stories in all the mainstream press and you hear the details, it looks like this was a giant nothing burger. They get together, there's barely any trade done, a lot of CEOs [00:18:15] go but- We get actually a smaller deal than we expected on the one tangible Boeing deal. It doesn't seem like we have reached any kind of agreement on Taiwan or Iran or really anything else. But I wonder if there was a grand bargain struck and along the, that we don't know about, [00:18:34] along the lines of Iran and Taiwan. And so I want to run this by you, So as I looked at all of those context clues, I thought basically Xi Jinping is saying, Well, if you're in the middle of a hot war, we won't uh give weapons to Iran, right? But we don't say much about [00:18:56] Iran otherwise. uh And remember though, if we go into Taiwan, you're not to come to Taiwan. And Trump says, no, okay, I'm publicly like maybe. So did they strike a deal that, hey, [00:19:11] Trump tells them we're going back into Iran basically? and don't do anything about it. And China says, all right, then we'll take Taiwan and you don't do anything about it. That's what I'm concerned about. Well, I'm concerned certainly that Trump wasn't clear enough and it's because of the lost leverage with this dumb, immoral war in Iran. I mean, we now [00:19:32] need China not to come to the Iranian regime's defense. We need China ultimately to be pressuring Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. And uh whether Trump gave the green light, I may not go [00:19:48] that far, but he certainly is uh hesitating to provide Taiwan with the arms that Congress has provided that the Taiwan Relations Act requires. And if he renegotiates that, that is not just a Trump thing, that binds potentially future presidents. uh He's overturning a Reagan uh [00:20:07] assurance to Taiwan saying that we aren't going to consult Beijing and we're going to provide you arms under the. Taiwan Relations Act. And now if Trump is saying, well, you know what, I'm uh not going to do it because China is upset. Well, next president coming in is going to [00:20:23] have to negotiate once we've given up this leverage to China and undermine policy for decades. So it's weakening the US posture and slowly eroding the possibility of Taiwan uh not being uh coerced into being part of China. Look, you put my theory aside, back to the [00:20:46] facts that you're stating here. uh Even if there is no secret agreement, if we go back into Iran, how in the hell are we going to make sure the Venezuela stays in line and hence we have ships off their coast? We're in the middle of the most disastrous war in a long time in Iran, [00:21:05] and then we're going to go defend Taiwan. Is there any realistic chance that we could actually go 9,500 miles across the- the seas and whatever is left of our Navy, show up there and fight and win a war against China. So is Taiwan in de facto in reality, pretty much defenseless [00:21:28] now? Well, we've certainly compromised a lot of our munitions in uh Iran that uh would be needed uh in a battle in the South Pacific. We have stretched already in two war theaters [00:21:44] in Venezuela and in the Middle East. So I would argue that while we still have a significant enable presence in the South China Sea, we've weakened our position. But I don't believe that this means okay, Xi Jinping is going to go into Taiwan partly because they uh have [00:22:04] a strategy. They just met the KMT leader as you know, the KMT leader who's coming to America actually is the opposition leader wants to integrate with China peacefully. And my guess is that China is a more, it's a patient civilization and they're going to try over the next decade, [00:22:24] a more peaceful integration rather than going conquering Taiwan, uh antagonizing the international community, uh risking sanctions, uh having antagonism even within Taiwan. I just don't see that being their course of action, but I I believe that Trump has weakened our leverage. [00:22:43] Yeah, I'm going to say on that one more minute because I hear what you're saying and before I never heard China talking about the military option in regards to Taiwan. And generally you're right, they disfavor the military option. Their strategy is why don't we go into these [00:22:58] countries and instead of threatening them, bullying them, uh killing them, imposing a puppet leader, etc. We actually help build bridges and schools and they want to work with us. So going in a military direction would be surprising. And I think that they have the better strategy. [00:23:14] And they just saw our military get depleted in Iran and Russia's military get depleted in Ukraine. On the other hand, I have never seen them talk about the military option this significantly and clearly and wrote, wouldn't this be the one time? Let's say that a reasonable, [00:23:30] sensible, sane Democratic president or even a sane Republican president gets back in office, the military option would probably be lifted. in terms of what China has. At that point, America would almost certainly defend Taiwan. But if we re-engage in Iran and we're totally [00:23:49] bogged down there, and you've got this madman Trump in charge, and he's already said to China, basically, I don't really care about anything that isn't Israel's neighbor. ah So if ever there was an opportunity to take Taiwan, and look, I got family in Taiwan, I'm pretty [00:24:07] worried about it. But I'm not being hyperbolic. And before this trip, I would have said and I did say, well, there's no way China's going in militarily. But after three different times, he says, now remember, if we go in militarily, you don't do anything. In fact, last thing [00:24:23] I was mentioning is I forget the Greek philosopher that he mentioned, it sounds a little bit like Tostitos. But anyway, the Tostitos tragedy that Xi Jinping referred to was, hey, when there's a rising power and a- power that's losing its power. uh Usually there's a military [00:24:41] clash and he said, we could avoid that, we don't need to have a military clash. I thought, well, that's true. And I really like that. On the other hand, wait, wait, don't tell me we're the declining power and that you're going to pass us. And then don't tell me for the third time, hey, don't interfere if I use our military. That's what's got me concerned. Well, you're [00:25:02] right to be concerned. And short of a- direct invasion, they can keep tightening the noose, right? They can have more patrols around Taiwan, they can uh fly over Taiwan's airspace. They can have uh the conditions where Taiwan knows they're going to have an embargo. And what [00:25:20] are they doing? They're showing their military strength. They are trying to get a commitment from America to change the six assurances to Taiwan. Once it's broken, Taiwan can't trust the uh American president, American commitment. And then you have a domestic opposition leader [00:25:39] like KMT saying, well, we want to integrate with China anyway. And my sense is that they're trying to pursue that kind of coercive strategy on integration to have the KMT come to power. Now, could you be right that they see that there's this two year window and they go and they [00:25:57] attack Taiwan? I mean, I don't rule it out and of course, uh That's why we need in Congress and the Senate and others to have a clear voice that America will actually provide uh defensive support to Taiwan. uh if I had to bet and guess, I would still uh err on the side that they're [00:26:17] going to use coercive technology, and that Trump has uh weakened our hand. Yeah, uh there's no question we have less leverage. So whether there is a deal or not a deal, God help Taiwan if China decides to take military action, because it looks like we're going to be really hard [00:26:37] stretched to help them. And so by the way, we'll just say it is not the Tostitos tragedy. It is the Thucydius Trap, and I'm sure I said that wrong Thucydius Trap, Allison Graham.