On the Line with Terry Moran: The First Trillionaire, Trump / Epstein, 8647 on the Mall?

[00:00:20]Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire and the White House freak out over the Epstein files in the situation room. Those are our stories today on the line.

[00:00:35]>> [music] >> Okay. Well, we'll lead off today with Elon Musk, who has become the world's first trillionaire. It's pretty certain because his company Space X, which started out as a space launching company and has become far more, was put on the market today. The initial public offering, the IPO, and it went much better than everybody thought it was.

[00:01:03]and everybody thought it would go bonkers. It did. It It could hit $2 trillion in valuation.

[00:01:10]The world's most valuable company at this point. And Elon Musk, who was worth about 800 billion yesterday, has almost certainly crossed the trillion dollar mark as an individual. And this is raising questions about power, about wealth. But just before we get to that, to the Elon Musk of all of it, the the Elon Musk whom we know from the Trump White House, the vandalism he did with his Doge stuff, the kind of racist stuff you see on on Twitter from him.

[00:01:42]Credit where credit is due. He is a titan of innovation, right? He built his fortune as being part of PayPal, which revolutionized how he purchased things, payment online. That was basically PayPal's They weren't the only company doing that, and he wasn't the only person there, but that's where he got the money. And then he decided to revolutionize the space business. There was no space business for all practical purposes. Big companies might send up a satellite every once in a while, but having your own rockets, they basically piggyback when NASA sent up something.

[00:02:17]Musk said, "No, we'll do this." And he revolutionized the space business. Then he revolutionized satellite communications. Starlink, I don't know if you've ever used Starlink. Uh that is a network of small satellites that that surround the globe at low low altit low level space like a web thousands and thousands of them. So that the speed you can get communicating with a satellite is better than the than the thing I've got here in this office. It is an extraordinary technical achievement and it has revolutionized uh not just communications but intelligence gathering and all kinds of things especially in conflicts. One of the things that Elon Musk did uh at the beginning of the Ukraine war is he opened Starlink to Ukraine to help Zalinski and that government protect themselves. And as if that enough, now he's onto AI as well, artificial intelligence they call it. Uh his XAI merged with SpaceX earlier this year.

[00:03:19]And so this isn't just a rocket company.

[00:03:21]When you hear about SpaceX, it's rockets, its satellites, uh it's AI, it's social media, of course, because he owns X and it's major defense and intelligence contract. And we have never seen any one individual, not even John D. Rockefeller, have this kind of concentrated economic power. Here is how Elon Musk talked about it to his people today when the stock went up for sale and he remembered back to a a warehouse in California where he began this company. Yeah, it it is certainly uh hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in Elsagundo um is now uh is now is now going public for the with the largest IPO that uh ever u and let me tell you if people had told me this was the going to happen I was like man we must be smoking some really good crack because I think this company's going to fail.

[00:04:31][laughter] I >> mean, it is an amazing moment in American capitalism. Uh and an amazing moment for someone who has the the business smarts and the innovative appetite, you know, of several of the great tycoons and business leaders in the history of our country. He does things. And let's just take a look for a moment. Now we'll get to the power concentrated in this man's hand. Take a look at the Must President Trump SpaceX up thereink stars anyway.

[00:05:09]like the chief of staff said absolutely no way the president would be okay to the right artificial introduction he's owning the data centers and he's integrating it with his space just and satellite business as well that he got X they were victim he took it and he turned it into many of them horrible place on on it just the situation off the left Tesla got all the defense government contracting off to the right [music] you've got neural link which is his dream of interfacing the brain the human brain and technology down at the bottom that's another thing saw the traffic in LA he said people should be driving underground there should be giant tunnels subways and highways underground >> even after that even after California do something like that it will take 25 the release of so many of these files the issue didn't go away and I developed what is a president Tony Freezio >> digging giant tunnels hold up in an earthquakes uh plague we'll find out so then all those things together is voters make Elon Musk head of crime and safety powerful man in the world not just the richest man in the world every country needs to reckon with what he's got and what he can do. The tunnels under LA, everything else together >> makes him an industrial giant, >> a space giant, all these other things, uh, an intelligence giant, and he has the power. And this is a man, and here's where we'll get to the dark side, right?

[00:06:55]Who has already demonstrated he will use his power for uh, vicious purposes, right? He's turned X into a home for white supremacists, for open Nazis. He's turned X into a propaganda platform for his preferred causes and candidates and silenced or sicked his dogs uh you know the the the Elon followers on accounts and people and comments and speech that he doesn't like. He says he's for free speech. try to free speech something that the mass of of Elon's followers on X disagree with and if he's if he goes after you you'll feel it. So, and then there's what he did when he did have a little bit of power when Trump installed him in a irregular and probably unlawful way as some kind of White House official, but he didn't actually have to abide by all the civil service requirements of disclosure and other things. Uh, and he went haywire. Took that chainsaw. Haha. like he's a a teenage vandal and he hacked away at all kinds of things doing nothing claiming and lying along with Trump that he was killing waste fraud and abuse and it was going to be 1.44 four billion dollars.

[00:08:08]And when when he first said that or a couple trillion, I can't remember what that giant amount was. I said, you know, it's a big government. Maybe it needs a little cleaning, house cleaning every once in a while. Elon Musk is a smart guy.

[00:08:20]Wait until they see the results. Well, within weeks, within days, we saw what this was really about. Vandalism for things he hated.

[00:08:28]Here's something you may not know. Why did Elon Musk go after the Agency for International Development? Why did he hate it? We know why Trump hates it.

[00:08:35]Trump hates foreign aid. He thinks it's a ripoff. If he's not getting anything, there's no reason. And he doesn't understand the power of the moral position that the agency USAD gave the United States in the world. He doesn't know it's soft power. He doesn't believe in it. It's money and things that blow up. That's it. But why did Elon Musk hate USAD so much? Because of its role in South Africa when he was growing up.

[00:09:04]you know, he they sided with the rising up against the apartheid regime. They uh provided aid to some of the uh some of the township townships, the ghettos essentially where many black people were most black people were consigned and advocated for change, the change that drove his father, his grandfather out of South Africa. Uh and he's never forgiven it. And so the first thing he did was destroy USAD. That's who we're talking about. That's the man with all of this wealth and power now concentrated in his hands. So on the one hand, you want to do hail the you want to hail the entrepreneurial genius that he is. It's hard to argue with it. And on the other hand, in some ways, Trump has to answer to him. Governments have to answer to him.

[00:09:58]You want to use Starlink, you got to dance to his tune. You want to use SpaceX launch capacity, which now exceeds that of any nation in the world, get in line. And you know, he's blown Jeff Bezos who tried to do it out, you know, out of the water. And all of these things combined in a very odd bird.

[00:10:19]Let's just put it that way. He's a strange man. And I, you know, strange people make the world go round. you know, we shouldn't be cookie cutter people, but his stranges has darkness in it. And I want you to listen to to this particular clip in talking about the dangers of AI. Now, he doesn't have quite the frontier model that Claude and Chat GPT do, although he's he's aiming for it. His gro on X is kind of a stupid thing. It's he's tried to unbi what he thinks is unbiased. You know, the world has a liberal bias is is the answer to that. But it's not as good as chat or claude. And yet he does share a concern that many of us have that everyone really should have with of the dangers of AI that it could harm us that it could become the dominant force on the planet and render our future nonhuman.

[00:11:15]And here's what his feeling was about that.

[00:11:18]>> They don't like the idea that a machine could be way smarter than them. I'm really quite close to to the cutting edge in AI. And it scares the hell out of me. The biggest issue I see with so-called AI experts is that they they think they know more than they do and they think they're smarter than they actually are. This is this tends to plague plague smart people. They define themselves by their intelligence and they they don't like the idea that a machine could be way smarter than them.

[00:11:43]So they discount the idea which is fundamentally flawed. That's the wishful thinking situation. I'm really quite close very close to to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me.

[00:11:54]It's capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows and the rate of improvement is exponential. And you can see this in things like Alph Go which went from in the span of maybe 6 to9 months it went from being unable to beat even a reasonably good go player to then beating the European world champion who was ranked 600. then beating Lisa Doll 45 who what been world champion for many years then beating the current world champion then beating everyone while playing simultaneously. Then then there was Alpha Zero uh which crushed Alpha Go 100 to zero and Alpha Zero just learned by playing itself and it it can play basically any game that you put the rules in for if you whatever rules you give it literally read the rules play the game and be superhuman for any game.

[00:12:39]Nobody expected that rate of improvement. If you ask those so those same experts uh who think AI is not progressing at the rate that I'm saying, I think you'll find that their predictions for things like go and and other AI advancements have their batting average is quite weak. It's not good.

[00:12:55]We'll see this also with with self-driving. I think probably by end of next year, self-driving will encompass essentially all modes of driving and be at least 100 to 200% safer than a person by the end of next year. We're talking like maybe 18 months from now. Nitsa did a study on on Tesla's autopilot version one, which is relatively primitive, and found that it was a 45% reduction in highway accidents. And that's despite autopilot one being just version one.

[00:13:25]version two I think will be at least two or three times better. That's the current version that's running right now. So the rate of improvement is really dramatic. We have to figure out some way to ensure that the advent of digital super intelligence is one which is symbiotic with humanity. I think that's the single biggest existential crisis that we face and and the most pressing one.

[00:13:48]>> Okay. So you hear Elon Musk there talking about the Tesla and the self-driving. I actually had clicked the wrong clip. But that gives you a sense that, you know, there needs to it needs to be melded with the interest of humanity. But at another point in that same interview, he did say that he fears he was losing sleep over the the end of humanity problem that this technology poses that it may be that our future is non-human. There's all the people who are developing it, not the not people outside of it who might not understand it freaking out. The people who are developing it are saying there is a nonzero possibility that it will harm us, destroy us or just rule over us because it is now teaching itself, right? It now writes its own code. It now dreams its own dreams of accomplishment, not in any human way.

[00:14:37]And that's that's the point, right?

[00:14:40]Musk is a guy who does not distinguish in some ways between artificial intelligence as it's called and human intelligence.

[00:14:49]And most of the people who are developing this technology which will determine the future of humanity strike me as some of the least humane people on the planet.

[00:15:03]Elon Musk doesn't seem normally, emotionally, or morally cognizant the way I don't know the [clears throat] the woman who puts the flowers in the church on we go to on on on Sundays or my son's baseball coach, they seem to have a better compass how to be in the world. Zuckerberg sort of the same way. we have entrusted this enormous power to people who are, you know, maybe a little dorky, maybe a little evil. And I think that's that's really the question. And obviously now with the super wealth that comes comes the call to try to even that out through the tax code. And Elizabeth Warren had said something if we can kind of throw that up. She posted something. She's been after this for a long time that Congress is anyway. Elon Mus just became the world's first trillionaire. Typical American household would have to work more than 11 million conversation about whether >> and uh it has never really gotten much traction. Right? There's a constitutional problem with it probably and I won't go into the legal details but you probably have to pass a constitutional amendment. That seems daunting. I think it's time that we started amending our constitution again.

[00:16:22]You want a really good democratic project, small D, that could bring people together. Let's I mean, these constitutional amendments have always come in bursts, right? The Bill of Rights right after uh the Constitution was ratified and people said, "I don't feel safe enough with this with this government." So, they passed the Bill of Rights after the Civil War. We got to achieve the real results that all that bloodshed cost us. And then when the tycoons like Musk, but in those days, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, all those guys, they passed an income tax. They passed popular election of senators because it's too easy to buy a senator for those rich guys. And so there is a spirit of necessity around amending the constitution and maybe Elizabeth Warren is right. So I've been hearing from some of you. I think we're going to on this uh on the line putting up some comments here and I want to get to a couple of them if we can. One sentiment stood out and I kind of knew it would because I did say that he is a remarkable figure Elon Musk in the history of of technological development in the world.

[00:17:23]Uh uh but MH says Elon Musk is no different than all the grifters and liars in the people's house. He takes advantage of women and per his children's mother, he's not a good father. He has no morals or integrity.

[00:17:33]Excellent point. Excellent point.

[00:17:38]from a distance, and I don't want to be too judgmental, he seems like a bad man, like Trump, a bad man.

[00:17:51]Now, the normal twinges of conscience that we get when we harm others seems to it in some ways and certainly, as you say, in his private life and, you know, he has a he has at the very least and [clears throat] an unconventional private life. But you're pointing out something. He doesn't take a responsibility. It's money. But money is not responsibility.

[00:18:14]You don't you don't have 14 children and say, "Oh, if I write a check every month, I'm taking care of them." That's not normal. And that's what I mean. I think you put some your hand on some your your finger on some image, which is these people who have this enormous power spend all time, you know, in front of a computer their whole lives. How humane are they at a time when humanity is in need of the best moral qualities?

[00:18:39]And I don't want to I'm not a saint by any means, but I think at least most of us are trying. Sometimes it seems like guys that get that rich, Bezos and Zuckerberg and Musk, they aren't really trying. And then um that is what happened today on Wall Street.

[00:18:59]the White House for a second couple minutes. You may not have seen it, you may not uh read the New York Times, but there was a remarkable ser report in the New York Times over the past couple of days uh by Maggie Habman, Habberman um and Jonathan Swan who have done this before. They have really good sources in Trump world and they take you inside the rooms. They always make a point of identifying who sitting where around the table to give you that granular sense that they they were talking to people who were in the room.

[00:19:33]Well, the room in this case is the situation room, right? Are you thinking, okay, well, there's a story about Iran or or Venezuela or maybe some terrible natural disaster or a secret threat that we don't know about. No, it's about the Epstein files. The White House was freaking out last year. This is the report that Maggie and Jonathan put out.

[00:19:55]It's from their book. So, first this raises a question. Well, why didn't they put it out when they got it? Anyway, it it'll help the sales of the book. They got uh people to describe two meetings in the situation row presided over by Vice President J. D. advance and there were the chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, Carolyn Levit, the press secretary, Todd Blanch, the acting attorney general, the assistant attorney general at the time, now the acting attorney general, and others in that room to talk about what are we going to do about the Epstein files. It was a full-on freakout. And this, of course, is they didn't expect this because Trump had campaigned uh on releasing the files. I'll release the files when he became president. remember the tweets.

[00:20:42]This is all BS. This is a democratic uh invention. This is this is a lie about everything. There is no there are no Epstein files. Let's move on. We got more important things to do. I mean, he was just telling on himself every single day on social media. And so Jonathan Swan and Maggie Herman, they got inside, not inside, they talked to people were inside the situation room about what went on in there, what the discussion was. And here's one part of what they learned about how they were going to solve this problem of their own base demanding a fulfillment of the promise that the files be released and a president who didn't want them released at all.

[00:21:24]>> What they didn't talk about was prosecuting additional men or [music] any kind of widespread justice for the victims. We're talking about a number of women who say that they were victimized and abused by Jeffrey Epstein. Many of them were minors. The discussion in the situation room was not about how to give these women a hearing or a chance to tell their stories. These [music] meetings were about how to handle the political fallout around the White House. What ended up happening is their hand was forced [music] by Congress.

[00:21:54]They ultimately passed nearly unanimously the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

[00:21:59]>> [music] >> Trump was forced to sign it. And what was clear from our reporting is even after that, even after the passage [music] of this bill and the release of so many of these files, the issue didn't go away at all. Maggie and I obtained a document written by President Trump's top pollster, Tony Frizzio, which described focus [music] groups that were conducted in March of this year.

[00:22:25]>> It was the sixth most important issue raised by voters in this focus group.

[00:22:29]head of crime and safety, the military, um, data centers. I mean, these are really potent political issues that ranked below the Epstein files.

[00:22:46]>> No.

[00:22:48]>> Well, that gives you a feel that's they're great reporters. Uh, the Trump world both hates them and needs them, right? Because any administration, even Trump's administration, part of the game, having covered the White House, I can tell you this, part of the game is that you're going to see uh a lot of people inside the administration jockeying for position, for their own power, for their their pet projects, what they want to do, people that they want to help. And that always leads to leaks. It's one of the it's one of the nice things about covering the White House is that they're always at each other's throats. I mean, you know, except here here's the thing about covering the White House and this one in particular, but everyone every White House, like every organization, whether it's a school or a company or whatever, takes the tenor of its relations, internal relations and its external speaking from the person at the top, right? So when I covered uh Bill Clinton for a year or so at the end of his uh administration, he was never on time, like hours late sometimes. Uh he was but and everybody else kind of matched him.

[00:23:58]And yet they talked they talked substantively because they were all policy geeks just like Clinton. George W. Bush ran the place like a a small business like the one he he took into bankruptcy. the only actual business experience he had. But everybody was on time all the time. They were all in early and did not want to talk very much. But they did eventually because of the clashes inside the administration started pointing fingers at each other.

[00:24:23]Obama's people were in in unfailingly polite. They took your call. They talked to you. At the end of the day, you don't really they told you, but they they do when when things got a little sticky. Uh the knives were out there. So, you know, we ended up at the end of the day with Trump with, as you can just see, they were on with people who were in that room. Was it the deputy chief of staff?

[00:24:49]Was it Carolyn Levit? It's people kind of jockeying against each other. And the person who comes out the worst out of this is JD Vance. Now, that may be just because JD Vance is going to come out the worst in in a lot of ways, I don't think he's meant for high office. He did win the Senate seat with the money of Peter Teal and and the fame that he had uh from what was a pretty well-ritten book. He's a good writer, but he doesn't seem to me like a great politician, although Trump says he may be his successor or Marco Rubio may be his successor. Uh, you know, Rubio has sold his soul into Trumpism. He'll probably try and buy it back from the devil when he runs himself. But that gives you a sense of what is still the shadow of the Epstein files hanging over this administration because they haven't released them all. And there there is uh in in Swan and Haberman's reporting there is u discussion of the one uh witness who told the FBI that Trump um and Epstein both had sex with her when she was a minor when she was under the age of 18. Trump has always denied that.

[00:26:00]Uh she has had other things that she's retracted. So, you know, you'd have to take a look at the credibility issue there. But they haven't given us all the Epstein files. They haven't given their own people all the Epstein files and at some point that's going to count uh at the ballot box. I think it's not the biggest issue. The biggest issue is probably going to be inflation and the cost of living and all kinds of other things, but it will be there. In fact, one of the things they report is that in private focus groups that the White House had with Trump supporters, it's still one of the top 10 issues. the sixth uh biggest issue, you know, more than other things uh like the military u and gun control and gun safety, gun freedom, gun gun rights, I guess they would say. So big issues and it remains on the agenda. All right, so let's let's finish on a bit of goofiness, right? You know, so this happened. Somebody vandalized them all. Now, I'm I'm not I don't much like graffiti. I mean, I know it's an ancient tradition dates back to Rome, but and probably before, but I don't much like it. I don't I don't think it's I think it makes a place look drafty. Anyway, so somebody graffitied the actual mall. Now, how did they do this? When did they do this? They seem to have uh singed or charred a little bit. Uh that very big picture of the night. Look at that. You can see faintly there on the left. Eight and then a seven. And down below, it's hard to see in the sunlight there. 4 and 7.

[00:27:32]87. Sorry.

[00:27:34]Yeah. 86. No, it's 86. 447, which means 86. Sorry, I can't even read it because it's so You can see it though. 8647. So 86. This is what got Jim Comey indicted.

[00:27:47]Remember that was the design of the shells on the beach for which he has now been indicted for threatening the president the life of the president of the United States because the claim is to 86 somebody is to deepick somebody. I think they're getting it confused with that a little bit. Uh and it means to kill them and you can't threaten to kill the president and the White House is now in high dungeon and the justice department is going to investigate.

[00:28:09]There's all kinds of cameras out there.

[00:28:10]It's hard to do something that big secretly on the mall. they probably will catch the person and probably charge them like they did with Comey of threatening uh to assassinate the president of the United States by 8647.

[00:28:26]And so they the original term 86 apparently comes to the restaurant business back in the 1920s and 30s. It it I'm not quite sure why, but it meant kill that dish that the customer doesn't want it or we aren't going to serve that dish. 86 it do away with it. And there may have been old gangster movies. I it feels like there are in which that phrase was used as you know get rid of that guy. In this case you have the the White House very angry the justice department investigating uh and yet you may or may not remember that in the Biden administration there was cottage industry of t-shirts of mugs of bumper stickers that said 8646 Joe Biden. There's one of them. Was that a threat on the life of the president?

[00:29:14]There's another one. 8646 USA. People made a lot of money out of these and you see them every once in a while. There's the 8646 for your car decal if you want to if you want to do that. Are those threats to the lives of the president of the United States? Well, clearly with this administration, there's one president who counts. There's an everybody else doesn't. So, no. They I I don't know what their answer would be, but it's pretty clear that it's not. And it's for this reason.

[00:29:43]There is a Supreme Court case from 1970ish, um, and his name escapes me now, but a a man, a young man, I believe he was 20 years old, stood up at a antivietnam war protest, and he didn't want to be drafted. I think he might have tore up his draft card there. And he said, "If they if they come at come for me and they put a rifle in my hands, first guy I want in my sights is Lynden Johnson."

[00:30:13]Now that's a death threat. Or or is it?

[00:30:16]That case went all the way to Supreme Court. He was convicted by a jury of threatening to assassinate the president. And the Supreme Court of the United States in a 5 to4 decision was pretty close decision said no. That was clearly political speech. And for it to rise to the level of threat, you have to have evidence that it is an actual threat that there was uh preparation or an in or evidence of an intent in writings or or planning or other things that would indicate this person actually intended or or was threatening to kill the president. That a threat has to be what they call quote a true threat. A true threat. And they decided that uh that young man's threat was political speech. And this is just the speech of our time, right? This terrible division we have in our country where uh you know, one side makes t-shirts uh 8646 wink wink and then as soon as the the other side does something similar, they're calling for, you know, prison time for whomever did that. At any rate, keep an eye on the mall. Apparently, it's it's fading fast. It's spring.

[00:31:23]Things grow very quickly here. The green comes back in the first rain. So, it whatever they did is not going to last very long.

[00:31:30]But it's it's a it it's a sign of our times for sure. So, as you hear, we're going to close up with a comment or two.

[00:31:36]Uh um which I love. Right. This is on the line. This is what it's for. Once again, we're we're on our way to getting um to getting phone calls going. So, it'll be that kind of So, what do we have here? We have uh There we go.

[00:31:55]So, that's Vicki. Is that who that is?

[00:31:57]Terry, are you only on YouTube now?

[00:31:59]Okay. Well, I I not on Substack. Okay. I appreciate this. I can't tell you how much I appreciate this this comment. I love Substack. Okay. Substack came to me like two days after I was fired and I I hadn't hit ground, right? I was still falling. And they said, "Here's what you're going to do. You're going to open a Substack." I actually had one. I was kind of a lurker. I would read Supreme Court stuff. Actually, some some religious stuff. There's great stuff.

[00:32:26]There's a fashion substack that which I don't read, but there's all kinds of other things as well. And they said, "You're going to now start, you know, here's how you do it. You do a newsletter. People subscribe. You know, if you if you're adding value to their lives, they want to support you, they'll pitch in a few bucks a month." And um it changed my life. It as soon as I heard the description of what it was, I said, "Yes, that's what actually I was kind of looking for at ABC." not kind of somebody hands you the story and gives you a minute 20 but I was looking around seeing all these creators doing amazing work all these some journalists but a lot of people in all different kinds of fields and I thought that's for me and then they said it and I said and sure enough my first year that's what I was doing writing mostly not doing much else all right so I'll just be frank so this is a business is going to keep a roof over my head substack does take like 10% % um you know of every of every dollar that you make and also is kind of a closed community. It's a wonderful community. I that's why I'm still on there.

[00:33:32]Substack community. I am now moved my the newsletter part of it to my own place what I'm thinking of as a civic newsroom uh a two-way newsroom. This is part of it. I want it's called realatriotism.com.

[00:33:46]You can find it. It's a a work under construction. But I want that to to be a place where we together report these stories. I'm gonna have a feature called reporter's notebook and I'll be on the road covering the midterms and in that way I feedback perspectives all kinds of things on my work and eventually hopefully bring other people along. It is like this news-based and yet yet not values uh negative. In other words, the news is a kind of witness. If you're a journalist, you're a witness. And so, you have to bring some kind of your your truth to that. And that's what that will be. That's at realism.com. That's now where if you but if you subscribed, you should be there. In fact, get a hold of me if you have a problem. This transition has been a little rocky. My fault, I'm sure. It's a, you know, old dog, new tricks, figuring out how to run this thing. But if you've been a subscriber, it's been my life and I thank you for that. And um, and I'm going to get this straightened out. It's a couple of buttons here, couple buttons there, but that's the goal. At the end of the day, the newsletter lives there. I can publish it also on Substack, and I will do so and participate in that marvelous community. But this is my home now. uh real patatriotism.com and here on YouTube and elsewhere. And I hope you take a look. Thank you for that question. I really appreciate that. Uh last night, by the way, somebody who had a similar question and an issue texted me. She got my phone number and I called her back and I was like, "Okay, I guess I'm customer service now, too, which I'm happy to be." Okay, here we go. Here's Cal. I don't like any defacing, but their outrage is a farce. Look at what they did to the White House. Well, that's Yeah, look, it's a trivial matter of taste that I'm old and in some ways conservative and I don't like graffiti.

[00:35:43]Whatever. What they've done at the White House now, that's that's a crime. I mean, it was lawless. It was completely lawless.

[00:35:52]Major renovations in historic buildings like that have to follow legal procedures laid out by Congress in statute. Okay? And Trump just ignored that and tore it to pieces. Um, and the UFC thing in the back, he wants to keep that there. The arena that he's building. So, yes. Yes, that's a that's a defacing of the White House. That's a a kind of sacrilege against the people's house. It's not his house. Now, other presidents have beautified it, right?

[00:36:22]Harry Truman had to tear the tear the thing apart and live in Blair House for two or three years because it was falling apart. Uh, apparently William Howard Taft in the bathtub was a little bit too much for the uh for the beams in the White House and they would never properly repair it. So all of that, yes.

[00:36:38]And really, but I I don't care about 8647. I'm just saying in general, it's not my favorite way of political expression, but it's a free country, although it's private property sometimes. Um, but thank you for that.

[00:36:51]That's a matter of taste. The White House is a matter of of our government and its procedures and laws that are meant to guard interests even interests like aesthetic interests of a treasured building and um I've always been proud go around the world went to 80ome countries uh as a White House correspondent mostly so you're going for a day or two everywhere and you always see the presidential palace and that's what they are they're always palaces they're all these enormous now kind of like what Trump is doing to the Oval Office. And I was always quite proud to come back and work in the White House, which is large, but a house, a house, an an identifiably American house, and Trump is trying to turn it into something grotesque and deform. Um, and that is far more important than anything anybody's doing on the lawn of the mall. But thank you for that. And I think that'll do us. So, I thank you uh for watching, hanging in there with us. Um, seriously, get in touch with me uh you know, at the email response line if you've got trouble with this transition to realatriotism.com. And if you haven't been there, check it out. And on this, if you like what we're doing here on the line and when we bring in calls, I hope you'll like it even more. Like and subscribe. There's a little button right below us here and that'll help us a lot.

[00:38:14]Thanks very much. Have a great weekend.

[00:38:17]See you next time on the line.