Senator Tom Cotton joins us now.
Offer of 7 Things You Can't Say About China has sailed this week. Senator, welcome back. Hey Brian, sorry about that. It's good to be on with you.
No problem. I know you're a multi-faceted, multi-tasker. Sometimes you're doing other radio shows at the same time you're doing mine, but just keep in mind, mine's the most important, Senator. Always. Alright. So first off, with Doge, where do you stand on it?
How do you... giving me a grade on how it's done so far. I think that it's doing well and identifying a lot of wasteful spending. In some cases, fraud that needs to be explored more carefully. Also inefficiencies in the government.
Look, no one should be surprised this is happening. President Trump campaigned on going in and carefully scrutinizing federal government spending, overreach by the administrative state. And he specifically said that he was going to ask Elon Musk to do this during the campaign. So the president is doing exactly what he campaigned on.
Alright, here's what else he said. Elon Musk found out that when you give an executive order, he said, Mr. President, you got a problem with execution. You give out the executive order, but people aren't doing anything.
Cut seven. What we're doing here is one of the biggest functions of the Doge team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out. And this is, I just want to point out, this is a very important thing because the president is the elected representative of the people. So it's representing the will of the people.
And if the bureaucracy is fighting the will of the people and preventing the president from implementing what the people want, then what we live in is a bureaucracy and not a democracy. So your thoughts about that? I mean, I had no idea the execution of executive order.
I know they're not permanent. That's the problem. But I didn't know the execution was the other problem. Oh, yeah, Brian, that's one of the oldest stories in Washington. You know, Harry Truman famously said that after President Eisenhower, then General Eisenhower was elected to the president, he kind of chuckled and said, you know, poor old Ike, he's going to come and sit in this Oval Office and tell everyone to do this and do that like he did in the military and no one's going to do a damn thing. And I suspect that Elon Musk is astonished at the difference between a business and the government as well.
You know, Elon Musk at Tesla or SpaceX or New Orleans or what have you tells people that they need to do something and they do it. But too often, that's not the case in the federal government. And he's right that that is an affront to democracy. No one elected bureaucrats to make policy. We have civil servants who are supposed to carry out the law that Congress passes and help the president execute it. Now, you're right that executive orders are not permanent and they can't change the law. They can't change the requirements of private conduct of American citizens. Most executive orders, though, don't aim to do that. They're giving guidance and direction to the executive branch, which answers to the president. But as Elon Musk said, too often they don't answer.
And it's very critical that we get the administrative state back under control and impose some Democratic accountability on it. It does not surprise me that you write a book about China and the name of the book is Seven Things You Can't Say About China. Because people might have forgotten, Senator, when this we got hit by covid, the coronavirus, you said this came from a lap. And they said you were some crazy right-winger and you have your being irresponsible and saying that. And it turns out now almost the whole world outside China believes that it came from a lab. I would think I was your first interview after you said it. And did that spur you writing this book to really investigate what kind of country they are and what their with their main objectives are? Right. It was five years ago this month, I think, maybe this week, that I first pointed out that, you know, this coronavirus may not have come from a food market where they didn't even sell bats in a place in China where bats don't natively live.
Why don't we look at the lab down the street, which has notoriously bad safety record, and they research bat based coronaviruses and the director is literally nicknamed the bat lady. Now, it's not surprising that Chinese communist mouthpieces landed on me like a ton of bricks, but I think many Americans were probably surprised that so many American elites man the ramparts on behalf of China as well. The Washington Post, CNN, the New York Times. And that's one of the reasons I called the book Seven Things You Can't Say About China. It's not just the threat that China poses by waging an economic world war or by preparing for or against us. It's that the influence that they have within our society actually tries to muzzle and silence criticism of China. And that's what I wanted to ring the alarm bell on for the American people.
Right. And you did just that, but you got specific. So you brought up the history of China. And remember what happened in World War II. Japan went in and they punished that country.
They did. There was a civil war raging before World War II that Mao had launched after they founded the Communist Party. Now, Mao and his apparatchiks developed this mythology that he was responsible for fighting Japan. In reality, it was Ching Kai-shek and the nationalists that did most of the fighting against Japan while the communists healed and got stronger. And then unfortunately after the war, the communists won in 1949.
And we've been dealing with the consequences ever since. If the Japanese didn't do such damage to Ching Kai-shek, they probably would have just knocked out the communists who were just in the rural section of the country. Instead, they emerge weaker. Mao ends up prevailing. They get pushed to Taiwan.
And what changes? Yeah, you know, and Brian, that's not uncommon in history. The same thing happened in Russia. As Russia was weakened by the end of World War I, you had the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin took over. Once Mao took over mainland China, though, first off, you had horrible atrocities. Mao is the worst mass murder in history, worse even in Stalin and then Hitler.
He's also incredibly, they were also incredibly aggressive. China has invaded or attacked its neighbors more than any other nation in modern times. That's at the heart of Chinese communism. And that's why the first thing that you can't say about China is that it's an evil empire. You have to understand that China is still a communist dictatorship, that Xi Jinping still upholds Marxist, Leninist, Maoist thought and practice to understand how they treat their own people and why they're waging this undeclared war against the United States. And Senator Tom Cotton is as smart as anyone in Congress and you have a real passion for history and you go back in time and you say, remember, the Korean War, we're about to, you know, rid the communists off that island and the Chinese just invade and they kill a lot of our guys. We push them all the way back. They endured heavy casualties.
The peninsula is still divided. And in Vietnam, without China's support, Vietnam doesn't stop, you know, probably does not withstand American pressure. Don't you agree?
Oh, no question. Without China's support for Kim in North Korea and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, we probably would have decisively won both wars and we certainly wouldn't have lost nearly as many soldiers as we did. You know, so it's also very fair to say that communist China has the blood and lives of tens of thousands of Americans on its hands. I'm Dana Perino. This week on Perino on Politics, I'm joined by former GOP strategist and host of the Rich Zioli show, Rich Zioli, available now on Fox News podcast dot com or wherever you get your favorite podcast.
Must listen to podcasts from Fox News audio. So they end up getting the bomb in the 1960s and then they get welcomed to the nuclear age. But we always looked at that as divide China from Russia and the Soviet Union and we'll be OK. But China has an objective to pay back the West for poisoning them during the opium wars, and they're doing it with fentanyl right now. And they do want to supplant America with the dominant currency as the dominant power. And they have a plan.
How's that plan going? Unfortunately, the plan has been going pretty well for China. If you take the long view, going back 30 or 40 years, there was a bipartisan delusion in Washington that if we would simply open up with China, trade with them, invest in China, outsource our jobs, our factories, even whole companies and industries, then China would get wealthy and therefore China would moderate its behavior. It would become more like the West. It would stop oppressing and murdering its own people. It would no longer threaten the United States and our allies. The exact opposite has happened in one of the worst strategic blunders in American history. We have underwritten the rise of probably our most dangerous adversary. I think more dangerous than communist Russia was during the Cold War because Russia was never integrated with our economy the way China is today. We were not dependent on Russia the way we are dependent on China for so many goods or products.
And obviously, China is eight times bigger, ten times bigger than Russia ever was during the Cold War. So I think this may be the single biggest challenge America ever faces from a rival nation. And we finance it by letting them make our stuff. So we finance and give them money. So our middle class gets hollowed out.
They make our products and they make a ton of profit, but they do it with a command economy so they're able to keep prices low. And if we were to fight China right now, General Jack Keane, I asked him about that. Here's what he said would happen.
Cut 39. We don't fit right in terms of the kind of war that we're going to experience there. A high-tech war, our surface fleet is very vulnerable. If it moves in where it can be effective, where its missiles and airplanes can range China's capability, those surface ships are going to be destroyed. As high capital assets on a scale we have never even seen or experienced during World War II, the Chinese will swarm anti-ship missiles and hypersonic missiles at those ships. If we stand them off where they're out of range, then our fighters cannot reach the coast and our missiles cannot range China either. So they're not making any contribution. The tabletop fights don't work out well for us. Yeah, I've seen a lot of war games over the years, Brian, both conducted by the government and conducted by private academic or research institutions.
None of them have a happy ending. Even if China fails in its objective to blockade, invade, and annex Taiwan to the mainland, even if their beat back, they don't get a foothold, it's kind of fought to a stalemate, we would still see probably an instant global depression because of the damage to the semiconductor industry on Taiwan, which is a global bottleneck for one of the most important products in the modern economy. The severing of tie, the total severing of economic ties between our two nations. So you'd see a stock market crash, you'd see job losses, shelves going empty in American stores. And we'd probably lose thousands, if not tens of thousands of our troops and hundreds of aircraft and ships.
General Keen is right. No one living today has seen any kind of war like that. And that's why the only way to win in a fight over Taiwan is to be strong enough to prevent it from happening in the first place. Because as Churchill said about warfare in the early 20th century, we could say it today about a battle over Taiwan, the victors will be nearly as destroyed as the vanquished.
Absolutely. So the actual war, but part of the war is TikTok and they want to be able to manipulate America's thoughts, especially next generation by manipulating the feed in which they're there with algorithms. So they're only going to see pro-China, subtle pro-China information. We have a trade war with China. Don't expect to see anything pro-American. Also, don't expect to see anything pro-Taiwan. So for people at home, and I brought this up on TV, for people at home who say Taiwan, who cares? Not our problem. Simply put, why do we care about Taiwan?
Yeah. And I get that question, too, in Arkansas, Brian. I mean, well, it's a small island.
It's so far away. There's some kind of vague, disputed historical ties. Plus, when communist China took over Tibet and took over Hong Kong, there was not a global depression or major war. The reason is that Taiwan is simply different. It's different from an economic standpoint, from a geographic standpoint. Douglas MacArthur said at the outset of the Korean War that Taiwan is the unsinkable aircraft carrier and battleship off the coast, or I'm sorry, submarine tender off the coast of mainland China.
He said it would be a disaster of utmost importance to the United States if it ever fell into hostile hands. Today, that's even more so, again, because of the semiconductor manufacturing there. Sixty percent of all the world's semiconductors, more than 90 percent of all the advanced semiconductors. Without those semiconductors, modern life basically grinds to a halt.
Automobiles, smartphones, computers, appliances, tractors, industrial equipment, everything. So if you had a conflict over Taiwan, the most likely outcome, and you had the destruction of that manufacturing capacity, no matter who won or lost, maybe as bad if China was just allowed to take Taiwan, they would then control all that manufacturing and they would be able to leverage it against the United States. And if China did succeed in taking Taiwan, you'd also see the fraying of American alliances. This country looks like Japan and South Korea and Australia start to cut their own side deals with China. China demands that they start cutting off the United States as a trading partner. And ultimately what China wants to do is kind of isolate America over here in the New World, make us, as Kissinger said, an island on the edge of the world, and basically turn us into a small colony that produces oil and gas and farm products for them. Senator Tom Cotton, his book is now out, Seven Things You Can't Say About China is a must-read, and we all need to get a competency on this. Senator, congratulations. I'll talk to you on Sunday on One Nation. Thank you, Brian.
