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Feb. 12, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:09
Bern Baby Bern, New Hampshire Inferno | Ep. 952
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Time Text
Bernie walks away with a narrow win in New Hampshire.
Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar vie for the most moderate lane.
And Joe Biden finally gives up the ghost.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so last night, New Hampshire primaries, and the big story coming out is Bern, baby, Bern!
Bernie Sanders merges with a very narrow victory.
Now, the question is whether this is a big win for Bernie or whether it's kind of a disappointing showing for Bernie, and all of that depends on whether you think that he should have consolidated that left-leaning lane a little bit better.
Now, here's the reality.
Most of the Democratic Party has basically decided that Bernie can't beat Trump.
The reason I say that is because Bernie Sanders won approximately 26% of the vote last night, which means that 74% of the Democrats who voted in New Hampshire really didn't like Bernie.
Now, does that mean that he lost?
Of course not.
This is sort of like the Republicans in 2016 deciding that most of them thought Trump couldn't win.
Now, that turned out to be wrong, right?
Bernie could very well win, but suffice it to say that Bernie is the candidate in the race with the highest level of name recognition other than Joe Biden.
And Bernie Sanders is the person who has the largest organization.
And Bernie Sanders is the candidate with the most money.
And Bernie Sanders is the person with the heaviest and most loyal base.
And all he could drag out of New Hampshire last night was about 26% of the vote.
Now contrast that to New Hampshire Democratic primary circa 2016, just four years ago.
In that New Hampshire Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders walked away with 60% of the vote.
60 against Hillary Clinton, who walked away with 38% of the vote.
So he skunked her.
He beat her by 22%.
He won an outright majority of the voters in New Hampshire in 2016.
Again, 60% of the vote.
Well, last night, he showed up at 26% of the vote, which means that, presumably, 34% of the people who voted for him, well, 34% of that 60%, went to other candidates.
Which means a lot of people in the Democratic Party are very worried about Bernie Sanders as the actual nominee.
In terms of delegate count, by the way, Pete Buttigieg is still ahead of Bernie Sanders because he came away from Iowa with one more delegate than Bernie.
Both Bernie and Buttigieg end up winning about nine delegates.
Buttigieg shows strong in New Hampshire.
And right now the question is, who is going to fill the moderate lane?
Because the fact is this, if you had to sum up this campaign so far, so to understand how to sum up this campaign, I'm going to have to tell a rather gross story about my three-year-old son.
So the other night, About 2 a.m., my son wakes me up from a deep sleep shouting, Daddy!
Daddy!
I run into his room and he says, Daddy, I need to go to the bathroom.
And I take him to the bathroom where he proceeds to dump half his body weight in the toilet.
And we're sitting there and I keep saying to him, son, Are you done yet?
No, daddy.
Are you done?
No.
Are you done?
No.
And finally, about 20 minutes into this, I finally say to him, you're done, aren't you?
He said, yeah, I just don't want to go back to bed.
OK, the reason I bring this up is because this... Think of the Democratic primaries as a toilet bowl.
I know it's a stretch, but not really.
Think of the Democratic primaries as a toilet bowl.
Joe Biden has been clogging up the moderate lane.
And the floater in this situation would be Bernie Sanders.
And unless Roto-Rooter comes and makes sure that that moderate lane is cleared up, then Bernie will continue to float at the top of this waste pool until he is the nominee.
That is the way that this thing is going to go.
Because the fact is, again, that it turns out that the moderate lane is a lot more crowded Which makes sense, because the moderate lane is usually where the Democratic Party draws its candidate from, right?
Hillary was from the moderate lane, and Barack Obama was kind of from the moderate lane, and John Kerry certainly was from the more moderate lane of the Democratic Party in 2004, and Al Gore was from the moderate lane in 2000.
Obama might be the only outlier here.
And he had obviously very special circumstances that attended to him.
Bottom line is this, there are a bunch of candidates who have decided to be in that moderate lane and there's only one candidate with a significant base inside the progressive lane and that is Bernie Sanders.
So here are the actual results by vote count last night.
Bernie Sanders won about 75,400 votes, which by the way, isn't it amazing that in this country of 330 million people, Effectively speaking, about 100,000 voters, really like 125,000 voters total in Iowa and New Hampshire, basically decide who the nominees of the major parties are going to be.
Because one candidate walks away from Iowa or New Hampshire with both victories, very difficult to stop them.
Even if they walk away with one victory, it's usually somebody who won one of those states who ends up being the nominee.
Okay, Bernie Sanders won about 75,000 votes last night.
Pete Buttigieg won about 72,000 votes last night.
Amy Klobuchar won about 58,000 votes last night.
And Joe Biden, who will not drop out of this race.
I mean, if you really wanted to save the Democratic Party, Joe Biden needs to get out, and he needs to get out right now.
Joe Biden won 8.4% of the vote.
A brutal showing.
Finishing fifth in New Hampshire, a state that he had competed in, right?
Michael Bloomberg didn't compete in this state, so you can't really talk about how Bloomberg did in that state, even though President Trump tried to suggest that That somehow this is a failure last night for Michael Bloomberg, who didn't run in the state.
Bottom line is, it was a failure for Joe Biden, who won 24,000 votes in the state, less than Elizabeth Warren's also dismal showing of 27,000 votes in the state.
Elizabeth Warren, by the way, is somebody who's supposed to be highly competitive in the state.
It borders New Hampshire, just like Vermont borders New Hampshire.
Bernie walks away with it.
Elizabeth Warren completely collapses.
Just an awful showing.
She's not dropping out either.
So you have too many candidates who are sticking around.
And not enough candidates who are dropping out, which is going to lead to the most consolidated candidate, namely Bernie, being the person with the most momentum moving forward.
There also happens to be a real stubborn effect for voters when they look at the quote-unquote establishment Democratic Party.
And it's not quite the same as it was for Republicans in 2016.
Generally, Democrats are happier with their party than Republicans are with their party.
So when Trump ran against the Republican Party in 2016, he had a lot to run on.
Democrats tend to be a little happier internally with their party.
But Sanders does have the ability to run against the media.
And you're seeing that have an impact.
To take, for example, one New Hampshire woman.
She told MSNBC, the reason I'm voting for Bernie is because you guys keep telling me not to vote for Bernie.
I want to say the reason I went for Bernie is because of MSNBC.
Go on.
I think it is completely cynical to say that he's lost 50% of his vote from the last time when there were two candidates.
The stop Bernie cynicism that I heard from a number of people.
I watch MSNBC constantly so I heard that from a number of commentators and so that just it made me angry enough I said okay Bernie's got my vote.
Okay, I'm sure there are some members of the Democratic Party who feel the same way, which is that the Stop Bernie campaign from the establishment Democratic Party actually is leading them to vote, more likely, for Bernie Sanders.
We'll get to more of the election analysis from last night in New Hampshire, because there was some good news for the Democrats, and there's some bad news for the Democrats, and then there's some very bad news for the Democrats.
So we'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so there is some good news for the Democrats, and there is some bad news for Democrats, and then there is some very bad news for Democrats.
The good news for Democrats is that the turnout last night overall for the Democrats was higher than it was in 2008.
Okay, well that is kind of keeping up with the population.
It was higher than it was in 2016.
That is good news for Democrats because one of the narratives coming out of Iowa is that people were not showing up in massive numbers in order to vote in Iowa, which kind of gave the lie to the idea that there was tremendous voter enthusiasm to get rid of President Trump.
So last night, about 288,000 voters on the Democratic side showed up to vote in New Hampshire.
That was compared to about 292,000 expected voters.
About 284,000 showed up in 2008.
In 2016, the number was something like 256,000.
So it was a slight increase, consummate with the population growth in the state of New Hampshire.
So that is good news for the Democrats in New Hampshire, is that people apparently were interested in voting.
Now, there is some very bad news for the Democrats in New Hampshire, and that is the people who showed up to vote, and this was reflected in Bernie's results.
Again, he went from 60% in 2016 all the way down to 26% in 2020.
in 2016, all the way down to 26% in 2020.
This was largely because the increase in voter turnout was among older people.
It was not among younger people.
So Bernie is counting on this vast upsurge in youth voting in order to drive him to victory in a 2020 general election.
We have not seen any evidence of that in Iowa.
We've seen no evidence of that in New Hampshire either.
In fact, according to Steve Kornacki over at MSNBC, early New Hampshire exit polls showed only 11% of New Hampshire voters were 17 to 29, which was down from 19% in 2016.
That is a significant, significant drop in the youth vote in New Hampshire.
I'm down 20% from 2016 and, as usual, people over 65 were turning out the most.
More than that, CNN's David Chalian reported that only 12% of exit voters said they were first-time voters, which was actually lower than 2016.
So everybody who voted in 2016 showed up to vote again, but very few people showed up additionally.
So all the people that Bernie is counting on, namely voters who didn't vote last time and young people, those people didn't actually show up to vote in New Hampshire, which is why Bernie, who's very popular in New Hampshire, as evidenced by, again, the fact he won six out of 10 Democratic voters in 2016, And that is why he squeaks out a very narrow victory.
And there are headlines today that Bernie underperformed, which is true.
Bernie did underperform.
Now, this is alleviated by the fact that the other big frontrunners dramatically underperformed.
But Bernie went out yesterday and he had to fire up the base and he says, this is the beginning of the end for Trump, which is a lot of wishful thinking for Bernie Sanders.
By the way, worth noting, Donald Trump ran unopposed in New Hampshire.
Normally when you are an incumbent, he didn't run unopposed, Bill Weld ran, whatever.
But when you are an incumbent president, typically not that many people show up to vote for you in a primary.
Because why do you bother?
It's like voting for the sky to be blue.
The incumbent president is going to be the person who comes out of the New Hampshire primary no matter what, because there is literally no serious opposition to President Trump inside the Republican Party.
How many people showed up to vote for Trump just because his name was on the ballot last night?
About 118,000 Republicans showed up in New Hampshire and voted Trump.
To put that by way of contrast, when Barack Obama was running for re-election in 2012 in New Hampshire, something like 55,000 Democrats showed up to vote for him.
That means that Donald Trump blew out whatever record New Hampshire had for an incumbent president running in the New Hampshire primaries.
What does that mean?
It means that the enthusiasm for Trump is extraordinarily high.
It also means that Bernie Sanders won 75,463 votes in New Hampshire last night.
75,000 votes, something that 75,463 or something in New Hampshire last night.
Donald Trump won 50,000 more votes than Bernie Sanders did.
Right.
And again, Bernie was running in a crowded field.
But the fact that that many people showed up just to vote for Donald Trump in an uncontested election demonstrates that the enthusiasm is on Trump's side.
Nonetheless, Bernie was out there at his rally talking about how this is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump.
Unbelievable.
Let me say tonight that this victory here is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump.
With victories behind us, popular vote in Iowa and the victory here tonight.
We're going to Nevada.
We're going to South Carolina.
We're going to win those states as well.
Okay, now, there's a good shot that he does win Nevada, and there's a fairly good shot that he wins South Carolina, as we'll get to in a moment.
None of these Democrats are getting out of the race, which means that you've got a 2016 problem for the Democrats.
In 2016, basically, Rubio wouldn't get out, Cruz wouldn't get out, Kasich wouldn't get out.
There was no consolidation of the anti-Trump lane.
And so Trump just kept winning 35% of the vote.
And then it started off at like 25, then 30, then 35 as the time went on.
And by the end, he was winning, you know, 50% of the vote in some of these states.
It could be exactly the same thing for Bernie.
So as I said, there's good news for Democrats.
That is the overall turnout in New Hampshire was slightly up.
There's bad news for Democrats, which is that that turnout was coming from the not Bernie Sanders camp, which is why it was a very narrow victory for Bernie Sanders.
And then there is the very bad news for Bernie Sanders, for the Democratic Party.
And that is that Bernie Sanders is likely to be the nominee.
And as we'll explore momentarily, this is very, very bad for the Democratic Party.
I mean, at least if you have to forecast this stuff, and we do, right?
I mean, that's our job here is to try and think through the ramifications of decisions that are being made today for tomorrow.
Now, we could be wrong.
Listen, the economy could collapse.
Suddenly, you could have a communist president like Bernie Sanders.
Could happen.
Could happen.
But if you're a Democrat, you woke up this morning and you should be disquieted.
Unless you are one of the 25% of voters in the Democratic Party who believe that an open out-and-out socialist Who's calling for nationalization of every major industry in his mid-30s and has never repudiated those views.
That that guy is a 78-year-old and octogenarian communist who has never done a useful thing in his entire life.
That that guy is destined to be president of the United States despite a booming capitalist economy in the United States.
Well, unless you're one of those 25%, you've got to feel a little uncomfortable today.
We'll talk about that in just one second.
First, let's talk about the reality of life.
And one of those realities is the fact that, you know, there is crime in your neighborhood.
In my neighborhood, there certainly is.
In Los Angeles, we've seen an increase in petty crime.
We've seen breaking and entering happening, in particularly the neighborhood where I live, because the mayor of LA is garbage at his job, and so is the city council.
And so what that means is that crime rates have been going up.
Well, aside from the fact that my family in particular has safety risks because of what I do for a living, also that just basic level of crime that has been increasing in a lot of major cities, those basic levels of crime, the petty crime, the breaking and entering, that means that you really should have some protective devices on your property.
And what I mean by that is you should have a ring, not a spring-loaded shotgun.
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You should be able to know what is happening on your property at all times.
You should know when somebody rings the doorbell to drop off a package because sometimes people who are looking to break and enter, they ring the doorbell specifically So that they can tell that you're not home, and then they will go into your house.
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So, as I say, the good news...
Turned out up slightly in New Hampshire.
Bad news.
It's all coming from old people.
Really bad news.
Bernie Sanders appears to be the person who is cruising toward the nomination.
Democratic Representative Tim Ryan from Ohio, who early on had declared a presidential run, he said yesterday, guys, we're going to lose 48 states.
I mean, if Bernie is the nominee, we're just going to get walloped.
Which, by the way, would be an unbelievable result, right?
President Trump to go from winning a minority of the vote, of the popular vote, to winning 48 states.
I think it's an exaggeration.
Like, Massachusetts and California are never voting Trump.
Massachusetts, California, Vermont.
There are certain states that just are never going to go for Trump.
New York.
These are states that are... The days of 48 states are over.
You could easily see President Trump winning at least 40 states because there are a number of states.
New Hampshire is one of them.
He lost very narrowly to Hillary Clinton.
You could see if Bernie Sanders is the nominee, a bunch of states that were right on the cusp.
Minnesota was another one of them.
You could see those states move into Trump's lane.
Here is Tim Ryan absolutely panicking yesterday over the prospect of Bernie Sanders as the nominee.
I personally am very, very concerned about some of the folks who are running.
I think, you know, if we run under a democratic socialist banner in 50 states, I think we lose the industrial Midwest.
I think we lose 48 states.
I think we lose working class union voters who have negotiated their private health care and want to keep it.
And they don't want to be forced into a public health care system.
You lose those voters.
These worries are not idle.
So there are a bunch of people in the Bernie camp saying, no, no, no, no, this is an exaggeration of the situation.
OK, let's take a look at some of the exit polls last night.
First of all, one of the big raps on Trump is that he's going to do really poorly with women.
With women in particular, that suburban women are going to turn away from Trump.
That's true if he is running against a Democratic moderate who does not alienate women.
Let's take a look at the exit polls in New Hampshire last night.
Okay, the exit polls in New Hampshire, among males, so 57% of the vote in New Hampshire among Democrats, according to the NBC News exit poll, was female.
Okay, according to those polls, Bernie Sanders didn't come in first with women, he didn't come in second with women, he came in third with women.
Amy Klobuchar came in first with 25%, Pete Buttigieg came in second with 23%, and Bernie Sanders came in third with 22%.
Among men, Bernie Sanders came in first by a wide margin with 31%, Pete Buttigieg came in second with 20% and Amy Klobuchar came in third with 16%, which is to say that there is a nine point gap between men and women with regard to Bernie Sanders, mirroring very much the gender gap that exists for President Trump.
So if you are putting women in the position of having to choose, suburban women, in the position of having to choose between their job or their husband's job and their income, And their health plan and Bernie socialism, they're going to hold their nose, many of them, and vote for Trump.
They really are.
And then there's another New Hampshire Democratic primary exit poll analysis that came out from the Washington Post, and it showed who is winning each group.
So let's look at the groups that Bernie Sanders did really well with.
So he did well with people aged 18 to 29.
As we mentioned, those people did not show up to vote.
Their turnout in 2020 was down 20% from 2016, which is pretty unbelievable in a competitive primary.
Also, he won with people who considered themselves very liberal.
The percentage of the American population that considers itself very liberal is low.
It was going to vote Democrat anyway.
He led among people whose top issue was income inequality and among people who never attend a religious service, which is not people in the Midwest.
Generally, religious observance is much higher in the Midwest than it is on the coasts.
He won with men, but that is Trump's stronghold.
He is not going to break through with Trump and men.
He is not.
Trump just has a massive gender gap.
Trump is much more popular with men, generally, than Bernie Sanders.
He did well with union households, but as it comes out that Bernie Sanders wants to get rid of the Cadillac plans negotiated by many unions, as Tim Ryan points out right there, then a lot of unions are going to turn against him.
As we'll see, they're already doing this in Nevada.
And he did well with people whose income was less than $50,000, which sounds great, except for the fact that that also happens to be a voter group that tends to turn out less than its general percentage of the population.
So in other words, Bernie did really well among the groups that are a shrinking share of the American electorate.
Right, he did really well among the groups that don't show up to vote, which is a disaster for Democrats.
Now, you look at Amy Klobuchar, right, who's the person, if Democrats were smart, they would mobilize behind Amy Klobuchar.
I've been saying this for at least a week.
I've actually been saying this for longer than that.
I've been saying for several months that it's bewildering to me why Amy Klobuchar doesn't have a higher level of support.
She did really well last night.
Amy Klobuchar scored about 20% in New Hampshire, blowing out both Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.
Look at her crowd.
Among people who attend religious services weekly, she won by 12.
Those are the people that the Democrats need to win.
They need to not alienate the religious voters who still represent a majority of voters in this country.
Now, the Democrats have a bit of a conflict, which is that the plurality and maybe majority of voters in the Democratic electorate are of no religious affiliation or not religious.
But in the country, the country is still overall a religious country.
Amy Klobuchar won those voters, right?
That's a big share that you need to win.
And she won among voters who are age 65 and older, who are the people who she needs to cut into if she hopes to sink Trump.
Those are the people that Bernie did worst with.
Pete Buttigieg, by the way, won with people whose top issue was climate change, which by a Pew poll yesterday is the second to last issue that Americans care about.
That means that if Democrats were smart, they would mobilize behind Amy Klobuchar.
But the problem is, of course, that the Democratic middle lane has been clogged up by Biden.
And that was the other big story last night.
So there's a question as to whether the big story was Bernie winning, which again was sort of foreseen, or whether it was Bernie underperforming, which I tend to think was a bigger story because it does mean that this is still a competitive primary season.
We've only done two states at this point.
We haven't hit Super Tuesday yet.
As we'll see, Michael Bloomberg is ramping up the spending.
He continues to spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising in states that have not been polled yet.
We have no idea how that is charting.
But the really big story last night is that Joe Biden continues to just collapse.
I mean, Joe Biden last night did not only leave the state of New Hampshire early for seeing loss there.
He didn't even travel to Nevada.
And I've been saying for a while, if he loses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, he's toast.
Because there's no way to recover from that and win South Carolina and then start sweeping on Super Tuesday.
And you've been seeing his poll numbers in South Carolina collapse.
It's not as though his poll numbers in South Carolina are bulletproof.
They absolutely are not.
The latest polling data From South Carolina is not beneficial to to Joe Biden, particularly the post courier, for example, did a poll at the end of January, and it showed that Biden was only up twenty five twenty over Bernie Sanders with Tom Steyer, who's been spending a fortune in South Carolina, scoring at 18 percent of the vote in South Carolina.
Now, Steyer's going to stay in until South Carolina.
There was some talk maybe he'll drop out.
He's not going to.
He spent all of his money in South Carolina.
Why exactly would he drop out in New Hampshire?
There's one good poll that has come out in the last few days, about a week and a half ago, actually, from East Carolina University.
But that came out again before the Iowa caucuses.
And that showed Biden up 37 to 19 over Steyer with Sanders all the way down at 14.
But it is unlikely that that is going to be the case after Bernie wins a couple of primaries and presumably after he wins Nevada as well.
Okay, in just a second, we're going to get to the epic collapse of Joe Biden, because it is amazing.
So he needs to drop out, because he's just clogging up that middle lane, right?
He's clogging up that pipe.
Roto-Rooter needs to come and blow that thing out.
Because right now, Bernie's just going to float to victory with 25-26% of the vote, as long as Joe Biden is in there, sucking up time, sucking up energy, preventing the consolidation of that middle lane.
We're going to get to more of this in just one second.
First, let's talk about sleep quality.
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Okay, so the big story of the night other than Bernie Sanders continuing to sort of float along at 25, 26% of the vote is the epic collapse of Joe Biden.
There's a third big story too, which is the epic collapse of Elizabeth Warren, but that's more hilarious than anything else.
Watching that pathological liar...
and just fall apart like a mudslide in the Hollywood Hills has been extraordinarily entertaining.
So let me just take a moment and pay tribute to the worst campaign of them all.
So Elizabeth Warren is now in full-on mourning mode, and it is delicious.
So last night, she said she's not gonna drop out, because of course she can't drop out.
If she drops out, then it demonstrates that her campaign has been one of the biggest failures in recent memory, since Kamala Harris.
I mean, this was like a massive failure.
As of October, she was the presumptive nominee.
She was leading in New Hampshire.
She was leading in Iowa.
She was picking up ground in places like South Carolina, and then she presented her Medicare for All plan.
She tried to put flesh on the bones of Bernie Sanders' garbage plan, and she completely fell apart, just imploded.
Okay, so last night, she tweeted out that a, I don't want to say girl, a 19-year-old woman who was going to college, and she came up to Elizabeth Warren complaining that she had a lot of student debt.
She said, I have $6 in my bank account, and I'm giving $3 of it to you.
And Elizabeth Warren tweeted that out as though this was a mark of her vision.
Um, that seems, first of all, pretty regressive, is it not?
I mean, like, the woman has six dollars to her name and you're taking three of them for your garbage campaign that is gonna blow it on ads that have no impact?
This person is just terrible.
She's a terrible person.
So last night, she announced that she was staying in the race for no apparent reason, because she's got no shot at the nomination.
I mean, Bernie is consolidating and she's in Bernie's lane.
He's picked up all his support from her.
Here's Elizabeth Warren being awful at this.
You know me, did the speech and then afterwards did a selfie line and we were there for over an hour.
People are coming through and they're saying thank you and they're giving hugs and talking about what's important to them.
A young woman came up by herself and she said, I'm a broke college student with a lot of student loan debt.
And she said, I checked and I have $6 in the bank.
So I just gave $3 to keep you in this fight.
That's what we gotta do.
We have to take money from people who can't afford it.
That's what we gotta do.
In fact, Elizabeth Warren then smacked her across the face and said, where's your other $3?
Did you bring your other $3, lady?
Don't you want to win?
Don't you want my campaign to be successful?
If you were really willing to fight, you would give me the other $3 in your bank account.
And don't worry, I'll alleviate all student loan debt at the end.
In fact, why don't you just rack up another $20,000 in student loan debt?
You can max yourself out right here on this campaign.
And don't worry, a little bit later, I will relieve all student loan debt.
You know, if you have to falsify the documents a little bit, just give me some money and funnel it to me and take it out of student loan debt, but then just kind of hand it to me.
That's totally fine.
What a terrible human being.
I mean, seriously, if somebody came up to me at an event and they were like, I have $6 to my name and I want you to have five of those dollars, I'd be like, no, here is a 20.
Go get yourself a nice meal.
Like, seriously, who is this person?
Who is this?
That's insane!
But that's Elizabeth Warren's campaign from top to bottom, completely ridiculous, completely insane, completely out of touch with regular Americans, even while pretending to represent regular Americans.
The lady's been teaching at Harvard Law for 20 years.
I mean, she's not been in touch with regular Americans for several decades at this point.
And by regular Americans, I mean people who don't have tons of money in their bank account.
It's just, it's crazy.
Her new pitch, by the way, is that people are being mean to each other and mean to her.
That's her new pitch.
So she got skunked last night.
I mean, just destroyed.
She won 9.6% of the vote in a state neighboring her own.
She won a grand total of 11,000 votes last night.
Just a brutal, brutal showing.
Okay, and Elizabeth Warren then gets up in Manchester, New Hampshire, says, yeah, we were bad, but people keep fragmenting this party, and that's terrible.
No one has fragmented this party more than Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren has been an attack dog against virtually everybody else on that stage.
And she's awful.
And pretty soon those sweaters, the good news is, ladies, if you're looking for Ann Taylor Loft multicolored sweaters, those will be on half price within a matter of about three weeks because Elizabeth Warren's demand for them will have dropped ridiculously, ridiculously dramatically.
So here's Elizabeth Warren saying, everyone is mean and mean to me and everybody's mean and they need to stop being mean.
The fight between factions in our party has taken a sharp turn in recent weeks, with ads mocking other candidates and with supporters of some candidates shouting curses at other Democratic candidates.
These harsh tactics might work if you are willing to burn down the rest of the party in order to be the last man standing.
We're going to need huge turnout within our party.
And to get that turnout, we will need a nominee that the broadest coalition of our party feels like they can get behind.
Yeah, which is not you.
Which is not you.
By the way, her actual final showing, I was reading with like 39% of the vote in, her actual showing was about 27,000 votes last night, she ended up with 9.2% of the vote.
It's just a horrible, horrible showing.
For Elizabeth Warren, I love that she's like, we're splitting the party, we're splitting the party, and that's why I'm staying in, to split the party some more.
Okay, but she wasn't even the biggest collapse last night, obviously.
The biggest collapse last night was Joe Biden, who's the frontrunner in every poll, almost wire to wire, in Iowa.
In New Hampshire, he'd been showing a close second to Bernie Sanders, and then no one showed up to vote for him.
No one.
One CNN correspondent was going around talking to New Hampshire voters and said, I could not find anyone here who supports Biden.
I asked Jill, and Jill was like, maybe I kind of like Bernie.
Here's the CNN correspondent explaining that no single human being could be found in the state of New Hampshire who liked Joe Biden.
Most surprising here is that of all the voters I've talked to, and we're talking probably upwards of a hundred right now, not a single one saying they support Joe Biden.
Ouch.
Ouch.
CNN's John King says the same thing.
He says, the big headline tonight, rotten performance by Biden.
This is two straight states where he has just... So apparently his fourth, fifth, third, first plan is going perfectly.
Remember they had this with Rubio.
Rubio was going to finish third in Iowa.
Then he was gonna finish second in New Hampshire, and then he was gonna finish first in South Carolina and Nevada.
Well, yeah, that didn't materialize.
It turns out that you can not continue losing and then consider that you are a winner.
This is why this quixotic quest by Elizabeth Warren to continue running is bizarre.
By the way, if she got out, a lot of that vote would move over to Bernie Sanders, so that is worth noting at this point.
But Biden is sucking up a lot of time, sucking up a lot of money, and sucking up a lot of votes, right?
I mean, imagine those 8% go to Amy Klobuchar or Pete Buttigieg, or imagine that Klobuchar and Buttigieg and Biden Former Vice President of the United States.
Of course, it's not true.
But if that were the case, that would be well over 50 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, well over 50 percent of the vote in Iowa.
In any case, the CNN's John King was saying, listen, Joe Biden is just a dead man walking at this point, which is obviously true.
Former vice president of the United States, first nowhere.
Second, way up there.
I'll take a look at the size of that in a minute.
But again, this is, I'm almost, I almost don't want to do it because it feels mean to do it.
We're talking about a very tiny place up here.
Four votes, five votes.
Yeah, two to one in the town.
So it feels almost mean to do it.
But that just tells you that again, You're not first, you're not second, you're not third in any place of significance on the map.
That is the definition of a very bad night.
Okay, a horrible night for Joe Biden.
Chris Matthews is like, where's Joe going?
Joe didn't even stick around New Hampshire.
Joe just took off.
He went to China.
Hopefully not with Hunter to pick up money, but he just kind of left.
I roll on in here, come out of the shoe, all rumpled, thinking about the fact that Bernie Sanders is going to be the nominee of our party.
I mean, I'm old enough to remember when socialism was kind of bad.
It is an amazing statement, by the way, about your network when Chris Matthews is the most reasonable person on your network, which is what he is becoming in the face of people like Chris Hayes.
It's wild.
Here's Chris Matthews last night going, where is Joe going?
And maybe he doesn't even know which direction he's up anymore.
What the hell is going on?
Going to China?
Going to Saskatchewan?
Why?
Why is he going there?
I don't know.
It's like Johnny Appleseed just dropping bad campaigns in his wake.
Here we go.
Go!
Biden is now going to basically the island off of China, you know, where he thinks he can hold on against the mainland.
He's like, it's like Taiwan.
That's what he's talking about there.
Taiwan.
He's like, he's like Chiang Kai-shek leaving China, trying to get away from the communists.
And now he can't even find a respite.
He's running away, running away.
I mean, that is accurate.
We'll get to Joe Biden's reaction to all of this last night because Joe Biden is basically in full panic mode.
And honestly, if Joe Biden were as much of a patriot for the Democratic Party as he says he is, he would get out right now because dude, he's done.
He's toast.
Put him in.
Shut the shut the fridge.
This night is over for Joe Biden.
OK, it is.
It is done.
It is done.
We're going to get to more of this in just one second.
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So Joe Biden last night reacting to his devastating destruction in New Hampshire.
I mean, just a decimation of his campaign.
Finishing fifth in New Hampshire.
This is the former vice president of the United States who finished fifth to an octogenarian communist, a mayor of a town of like five people, A senator from Minnesota, who until five minutes ago had no public attention.
And Elizabeth Warren, who has absolutely collapsed.
And he finished fifth.
A devastating showing.
No wonder Joe Biden is walking around getting increasingly angry.
Yesterday, he got angry at a reporter asking him questions.
Here's what that sounded like.
Are you concerned about the message that you're sending to New Hampshire by going to South Carolina?
No, I'm not.
Not at all.
Not at all.
They know we've worked our heart here.
We're continuing.
We're going to go all the way to New Hampshire.
And this is it.
I'm not concerned about it at all.
Does it seem like you're giving up on New Hampshire?
I'm not giving up on New Hampshire.
Don't poke that in my face, okay, buddy?
Don't put that in my face.
I mean, he's getting increasingly, increasingly angry.
And you've seen this in many of his rallies.
Like, he's getting more and more irritated by this whole thing.
And why wouldn't he be?
I mean, he thought that he was gonna cruise to the nomination here, and instead, he is Joe!
In the same way that it was Jeb!
in 2016.
Last night, he sounded like...
Honestly, he sounded like a desperate, desperate man.
He was on stage in South Carolina.
He sort of... He sort of did his rally in New Hampshire from South Carolina because he is desperately attempting to hold what he perceives to be a firewall in South Carolina.
So he did this rally.
And there, he was saying, It ain't over, man.
It ain't over.
You can't shut this bar.
I got one more drink left.
You can't shut this bar.
It's not over, man.
No, no.
I need one more bet.
One more bet on this roulette table.
I know I've maxed out, but I need one more bet, guys.
It's not over.
It's not...
It's over, Joe.
It's over.
Just call it.
This thing's over.
We just heard from the first two of 50 states.
Two of them.
Not all the nation.
Not half the nation.
Not a quarter of the nation.
Not 10%.
Two.
Two.
Where I come from, that's the opening bell.
Not the closing bell.
So when you hear all these pundits and experts, cable TV talkers, talk about the race, tell them, it ain't over, man.
We're just getting started.
Game over, man.
Game over.
Nuke it from orbit.
This thing is toast.
Shut it down.
Because...
Again, here's the reality.
If you had said to anybody that Bernie is going to win the first two states, and probably Nevada, that he's going to win the first three, and by the time he gets to South Carolina, Joe Biden will have won zero victories and not finished, presumably, I don't think he's going to finish in the top three in Nevada.
I think he's going to get blown out in Nevada.
I think Bernie Sanders is going to win Nevada.
And I think that Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar will finish second or third in Nevada.
I would not be surprised if Joe Biden finishes fourth or fifth in Nevada.
I mean, that is why he's flying to South Carolina, presumably.
If he thought he was going to win in Nevada or he had a shot at Nevada, why wouldn't he be flying to Nevada?
I mean, that's the next place.
But he's actually backing up all the way until the end of February because the election in South Carolina doesn't happen until I believe February 28th or February 29th or something.
So this is really, really bad showing.
Jimmy Fallon last night calling this thing.
He says, listen, Biden merch, it's about to get a lot cheaper.
So if you've been waiting for that Biden merch, now would be your time to stock up.
The New Hampshire primary was held today.
And good news, if anyone's in the market for some Joe Biden campaign merchandise, I think it's about to get a whole lot cheaper.
Based on a lot of polls, Joe Biden was on track to finish the night in fourth or fifth place.
I'm not saying Biden's in trouble, but the coronavirus is pulling ahead of him.
But this is true.
Today, Biden actually left New Hampshire early to start campaigning in South Carolina.
And since it was Joe Biden, he didn't really leave early as much as wander off.
Joe, where's he going?
He's done.
He's done.
Van Jones, over on CNN, was wildly depressed last night, which is funny because Van Jones is a person who basically was ousted from the Obama administration for being too far left.
So you'd imagine that he's in the Bernie camp.
But here's the thing about Van Jones.
At least dude's honest.
I mean, I know Van Jones a little bit.
I really like Van Jones as a human being.
Van Jones, last night, he was like, I'm depressed.
We're all depressed.
I think we're all gonna hang ourselves.
This is awful.
Correct Van Jones.
Correct.
Here it is.
I think people are depressed.
I think people are sad.
I think people can't figure out which of these people are supposed to vote for, and I think people are waiting to come out to vote against Donald Trump.
I do think that this is an aberration.
We're in this weird thing where, to your point earlier, people were coming out to vote on a Wednesday for an off-election county commission meeting because they felt there was a binary choice.
This is a messy, confusing choice.
People are sad and depressed, and people just want somebody to vote for against Trump.
And by the way, once they get somebody to vote for against Trump, I know that the Democrats are counting on this upsurge of enthusiasm to vote against Trump.
I don't know that that's going to materialize.
Those turnout numbers do not suggest a batch of new voters and young voters who are showing up in massive numbers for somebody like Bernie Sanders.
By the way, the cash race matters here.
Here's one of the problems for the Democrats.
One of the problems for the Democrats is that Trump is blowing them out in fundraising.
Blowing them out.
Here's how much cash on hand.
Donald Trump had as of February 1st, 2020.
Cash on hand, $103 million.
His nearest competitor is Bernie Sanders, who has just over $18 million cash on hand after 2019 Q4, and he blew a lot of that in January.
By the way, the top spenders in the Democratic Party are Tom Steyer, who's now spent something like $200 million, and Michael Bloomberg, who's spent like $280 million.
Bernie Sanders has spent over $100 million.
Trump has spent about $143 million.
I mean, the Democrats are not going to be raising the kind of money I think that they are going to be, that they think they are going to be raising.
And here is the problem.
Right now, as I say, the big issue here is that the moderate lane is clogged, and that became more confusing last night, not less confusing, right?
Buttigieg did not actually consolidate the moderate lane.
Instead, Amy Klobuchar showed very strong Joe Biden was always perceived to be sort of the placeholder, but there's nobody who's rising up to take it.
Pete Buttigieg last night, he keeps campaigning as a small town mayor who's also super savvy.
There's one problem, and Klobuchar is going to nail him on this.
He cannot win a state in the Midwest.
He keeps saying he's going to win states in the Midwest.
He could not even win a statewide race in his home state of Indiana.
The only election he has ever won is to mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
But here's Pete Buttigieg pretending that he's going to revitalize American politics.
Now, listen, he's a very talented guy, Pete Buttigieg.
He's very good at modulating his tone.
He is Obama-esque in his ability to lie through his teeth about his actual positions in a way that sounds moderate.
That is absolutely true.
But there's one thing that Pete Buttigieg does not have going for him that Barack Obama did have going for him, and that is an incredible amount of enthusiasm.
Barack Obama had tons of enthusiasm, bipartisan enthusiasm, really.
I mean, because he had done his whole red state, blue state thing, and because Barack Obama was perceived to be, by many Americans, the end of racial conflict in America.
At least he campaigned that way in the early going.
In any case, here's Pete Buttigieg, who is not Barack Obama.
to win and to govern.
We need to bring new voices to our capital.
We need to get Washington starting to work more like our best-run cities and towns rather than the other way around.
And I know that when you talk this way, you might get dismissed as a naive newcomer.
But A fresh outlook is what makes new beginnings possible.
It is how we build a new majority.
He's just channeling Obama.
The problem is he ain't Obama.
And people are increasingly going to recognize this.
And frankly, I think a lot of people in South Carolina, I think black Americans are insulted by the idea that Pete Buttigieg is somehow a recapitulation of Barack Obama.
I don't think that's going to play.
Meanwhile, Amy Klobuchar gave her triumphalist third place finish speech last night.
She said, we're still here.
You know, they keep saying leave and then we're still here.
I announced my candidacy in the middle of a Minnesota blizzard.
And there were a lot of people that predicted I wouldn't even get through that speech.
But not the people of my state, and not the people of New Hampshire.
Then they predicted that we wouldn't make it through the summer.
We did.
Then they predicted we wouldn't make it to the debates.
And man, were we at the debate in New Hampshire.
What we've done is steady, we've been strong, and we've never quit.
I think that sounds pretty good for a president.
Okay, there's only one problem for her, which is that, again, she needs to consolidate this lane.
The Democrats are not going to consolidate.
This is their biggest, biggest problem.
Which is why there are a lot of people who are waiting for the deus ex machina of Michael Bloomberg.
They're hoping that Michael Bloomberg spending in the Super Tuesday states is actually going to turn out with Michael Bloomberg winning some sweeping victories across the country.
And that, by the way, includes a lot of people who are widely perceived to be not in Michael Bloomberg's crowd.
By which I mean, the pundidocracy suggests that because Michael Bloomberg was tough on crime in New York City, that he is widely perceived as racist by the black community in the United States.
There's not a lot of evidence to support that.
Again, the national polling shows that Bloomberg is actually polling ahead of Bernie among black voters, at least with Quinnipiac poll that came out a couple of days ago.
Joy Reid.
Yesterday actually made a case for Michael Bloomberg.
She said the Democrats need a nominee who can beat Trump and Michael Bloomberg might be the only guy who can beat Trump because here's the dirty little secret.
Pete Buttigieg is not going to beat Trump.
Pete Buttigieg is not going to win those Midwestern states.
He is not.
Bernie Sanders has a real problem against Donald Trump and all the talk about how he's going to reshift coalitions.
Maybe it'll happen.
Maybe it will.
But that is not what the poll says right now.
Not in these Midwestern states.
And if you think that Amy Klobuchar is going to be the nominee, like again, I think that that would be the smart move by the Democrats, but if you think Amy Klobuchar is going to be the nominee, That is highly unlikely.
And the reason I say it's highly unlikely is because she ain't raising money.
Her total raised in 2019 Q4 was $11 million.
$11 million.
Compare that to Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders in Q4 raised $35 million.
He's blowing her out in the fundraising.
And that does make a difference when it comes time to advertise for Super Tuesday.
But here was Joy Reid making the case for Michael Bloomberg, who has lots of cash and who does have a fairly good record, particularly on crime in New York City.
Here's Joy Reid.
There is a sense with Bloomberg, not that he'll break any rules, but that he'll go high and he'll go low.
He talked about, you know, porn and a cheeseburger and a putter being in his brain.
That was our friend Tam O'Brien, too.
And you cannot beat Trump unless you hit him where it hurts.
And the bottom line is, number one, you can't beat showbiz without showbiz.
And Democrats don't understand showbiz, even though all of showbiz is on their side in Hollywood.
But they don't understand showbiz.
And the other reality is, if you want a Democrat to win, they have to know how to fight like a Republican.
He's a Republican.
Also, worth noting that if anybody is going to stop Bernie Sanders at this point, it's going to have to be somebody who has some pretty heavy union support.
The reason I say that is because you could see theoretically... I think Bloomberg made a mistake by waiting too long to get in the race.
I think that Bloomberg should have put a bunch of money into Nevada, right?
It's a small state.
A lot of money in a small state can make a big difference.
And in Nevada, there is a kickback against Bernie Sanders that is happening right now.
According to the Nevada Independent yesterday, the culinary union warned its members that Sanders would end their health care if elected president.
That is the biggest union in Nevada.
A lot of the unions in Nevada are not happy with Bernie Sanders because his Medicare for All plan basically requires the death of all of the special union contracts that have been negotiated in order to achieve Cadillac health care for their members.
The Culinary Union, which provides health insurance to 130,000 workers and their families through a special trust fund, strongly opposes Medicare for All.
They've not endorsed anybody, but they are basically unendorsing Bernie Sanders, which means that you could see somebody like Amy Klobuchar show strong.
This is why it's so bewildering that Joe Biden just abandons Nevada.
It shows that he thinks that his campaign is dead.
So as I've been saying all show long, bottom line here, Democrats have a consolidation problem.
They have a collective action problem.
Everybody wants to be the last person standing versus Bernie, so no one's gonna get out, and that means that Bernie is likely to be the nominee.
Klobuchar, by the way, is dropping heavy money in Nevada.
Klobuchar understands this.
She's dropping heavy money in Nevada, hoping to draw maybe a surprise victory or a surprise second-place finish surpassing Pete Buttigieg in Nevada.
Okay, let's get to some things that I like and then some things that I hate.
Things that I like today.
So I went out with my wife last night.
My father was babysitting for my kids.
I came home and he said, I want to play you this two minute clip of Art Tatum.
So for folks who don't know jazz piano, my father was a professional jazz pianist.
He's a terrific, terrific pianist.
And Art Tatum was one of his idols growing up, Oscar Peterson being the other.
Art Tatum was such a great pianist that when Oscar Peterson heard him as a teenager, Oscar Peterson said, I might have to quit piano because nobody can ever play like Art Tatum.
Tatum was nearly blind and one of the great jazz pianists of the 20th century.
So, here is a clip of Art Tatum playing something called Tiger Rag.
Listen to the cleanliness of his keystrokes.
I mean, listen to how clean he is on the piano.
It really is unbelievable stuff.
piano plays softly
piano plays softly I mean, a lot of the harmonic sophistication that he's using here is pretty incredible, and obviously his style of playing is unbelievable.
I wish I were a pianist so I could better understand and explain to you what exactly he's doing.
Listen to how fast he's with the left hand there.
That's what you're hearing in the bass part there.
It's unbelievable stuff.
Check it out.
It's Tiger Rag by Art Tatum.
You can find it on YouTube.
It's pretty spectacular stuff.
This is why it's always weird to me when people say the great American art form In terms of, like, the black art form in America is rap?
No.
The great American art form, truly, is jazz.
It really is the great American musical art form.
And it was largely black.
It was created by black Americans, and it is unbelievable.
I mean, Art Tatum is just spectacular.
So is Oscar Peterson.
I played some Oscar Peterson on the show, so if you're looking for some jazz, go check out Art Tatum or Oscar Peterson.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
All righty, so President Trump needs to stop.
And what I mean by this is stop.
The reason I say stop, President Trump, is because the Gallup polls right now are showing Americans pretty happy with everything that is going on in the country.
And according to the Gallup polls, Trump is now approaching 50% in terms of public approval rating.
He apparently is about to run against an octogenarian communist.
So everything is going pretty well for Trump.
You know what that would necessitate?
He needs to stop being thin-skinned and vindictive and reacting in vindictive ways that make him look petty and silly.
Really, he needs to stop this.
I'm not talking about him firing Vindman.
So he fired Lieutenant Colonel Vindman the other day.
Alexander Vindman.
Vindman was the person who I think was wrongly maligned by some people on the right as somehow unpatriotic for whistleblowing about Trump's behavior on Ukraine and then testifying about Trump's behavior on Ukraine.
Now, I thought that Vindman's Vindman's testimony was surprisingly political.
I thought that it was much more about his disagreement with Trump on Ukraine policy, which is a policy, by the way, I disagreed with Trump on, but I thought that Vindman's testimony was less about what Trump had actually done in terms of pushing for corruption in the 2020 election than it supposedly, than it was about Vindman's particular view of Ukraine policy.
With that said, Trump fired Vindman, and he fired his twin brother also.
I don't know why.
I guess there's like, maybe he was afraid that the twin brother would switch places with Vindman.
It would be like the parent trap or something.
I don't know what happened.
Those guys were fired from the White House.
Now, it is true they were not actually fired from their jobs, right?
They were just transferred from White House duty.
And that is Trump's prerogative.
Like, if I had somebody at this company who I thought was reporting out on stuff that was happening at the company to somebody else, and it wasn't criminal activity, it was just them reporting stuff that they don't like at the company, That seems like a fairly good case that they probably should not be working at headquarters, which is what Trump did here.
People are going nuts over that.
So I'm not talking about the Vindman thing.
People on the left are saying, well, how could he get rid of Vindman?
That's retaliation against a whistleblower.
Well, technically, if there's no crime, he's not a whistleblower.
He's just somebody who disagrees with the policy.
And the president does have a right to run his executive branch with people who agree with him on policy or who at least are not going to actively undermine policy by going and leaking it to Adam Schiff.
I don't have a problem, really, with what he did with Vindman.
I do have a problem with his intervention with regard to Roger Stone.
Now, in order to discuss what happened with Roger Stone, you need to understand that when there are big cases in the DOJ, and the Roger Stone was a big case in the DOJ, obviously, because it had significant ramifications for the Trump campaign.
Roger Stone had been charged with lying to Congress and also lying to investigators and trying to bully witnesses not to testify in front of the FBI and obstruction and all this kind of stuff.
So he was sentenced the other day to seven to nine years in prison.
And a lot of people, I think reasonably, said seven to nine years for what Roger Stone did is a very long sentence.
He's going to get more jail time by orders of magnitude, more jail time than Rick Gates, who had admitted to stealing money from Paul Manafort.
He's going to get orders of magnitude more jail time than Certainly, like Andrew McCabe, who will probably get no jail time, who also apparently lied to investigators.
So, I understand the case that there was injustice in the Roger Stone case.
Here is what I don't get.
So, if you have a major DOJ case, it is very rare to have a major DOJ case where the DOJ lower downs, the ADAs, the Associate District Attorneys, are not actively talking with the higher ups in the DOJ.
So, when they went for their sentencing recommendation, unless all the prosecutors in that case decided to just ignore William Barr, the Attorney General, Then they probably went to the higher ups in the DOJ and recommended this seven to nine year sentence and Barr probably signed off on it or at the very least didn't sound an objection to it.
Then Trump publicly, Trump publicly says the sentence is too much.
And now Trump is publicly declaring that he had William Barr basically downgrade the sentence recommendation from the prosecutors and all four prosecutors on the Roger Stone case quit.
Hey, that is a bad look.
It is a bad look.
It looks as though the president is person.
Look, if the president wants to pardon Roger Stone, I think that's a bad look, too.
But he does have the pardon power.
And sure, he has the power, I suppose, to order his attorney general to do this sort of stuff.
But it is a it does not look good.
It looks corrupt.
It looks bad.
And mostly, it looks like William Barr was twisting in the wind.
I mean, William Barr is the guy who's left out there, out front, twisting in the wind.
And the widespread media-driven perception of Barr is that he's a political actor anyway.
So unless Barr comes out and he says, listen, these DOJ lawyers, they went rogue, they recommended a harsh sentence because they don't like Trump, and then I had to come in and fix that thing.
Then it's hard to imagine a situation in which lower-down ADAs simply decided on a high-profile sentencing recommendation without even running that up the flagpole, which is why it is a bad look when four prosecutors abruptly withdrew on Tuesday from the case of President Trump's longtime friend Roger Stone after senior DOJ officials intervened to recommend a more lenient sentence for crimes he committed in a bid to protect the president.
This is according to The New York Times.
In an extraordinary decision over ruling career lawyers, the Justice Department recommended an unspecified term of incarceration for Stone instead of the prosecutor's request of a punishment of 79 years.
The move coincided with Trump's declaration on Twitter early Tuesday that the government was treating Stone too harshly.
Now, it wouldn't have been a surprise and would have been fully precedented for Trump to, for example, commute Roger Stone's sentence.
This actually happened with with Scooter, Scooter Libby under the under the Bush administration, It was, it was felt that he was unfairly targeted by the Department of Justice because he was not the source of the leaks about Joe Wilson, you remember the CIA officer, and his wife, Valerie Plame, and then it turned out that it was, it was Richard Armitage who leaked their identity, and then apparently in the course of the investigation, Scooter Libby said something that was not true, and then he ended up being sentenced, and all that.
Okay, bottom line is, That it would have not have been a shock.
The president could take the direct power and the direct blame for commuting the sentence or pardoning Roger Stone if he saw fit to, but directing William Barr to change the sentence, which it appears is what happened here.
And then William Barr going back on presumably negotiations that took place between the DOJ and the ADAs as to which sentence to be recommended.
That looks really, really bad.
Right?
The development immediately prompted questions about whether the Justice Department was bending to White House pressure.
The gulf between the prosecutors and the DOJ superiors burst into public view the week before Stone was to be sentenced for trying to sabotage a congressional investigation that had posed a threat to the president.
The prosecutors were said to be furious over the reversal of their sentencing request.
The Stone case was one of the most high-profile criminal prosecutions arising from the nearly two-year investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election by Robert Mueller.
So again, this is Trump running for re-election.
Maybe he feels what's happening to Roger Stone is a bad thing.
Okay, well, that's his prerogative.
But you know what looks even worse?
You manipulating the Justice Department top-down in order to help your friends, right?
That looks even worse.
And Trump should keep that in mind because if the man wishes to win re-election, then his vindictive sense of what ought to happen and what ought not to happen is not going to serve him well.
It didn't serve him well in this whole Ukraine debacle, by the way.
I know people are seeing this as like a big victory for Trump.
Now, the big victory is that Democrats overreached.
If they had not overreached and gone for censure, Trump would have had a bigger problem on his hands.
Okay, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more.
We'll see you here either later today or tomorrow.
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