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Nov. 15, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

43:05

The GOP Takes The House | Ep. 1611

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	The GOP loses the Senate but takes the House.
	Arizona's next governor won't be Kerry Lake.
	And Amazon prepares to lay off 10,000 workers despite Joe Biden's supposedly booming economy.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Well, there's good news and there's bad news.
	The good news is that Republicans are pretty much certain at this point to take the House.
	They have fully clinched 217 seats.
	They need 218 seats for the majority.
	It is very likely they'll end up at probably 219, 220 by the time all is said and done.
	That is a very slim majority.
	The reason that this could theoretically make a difference?
	Not being in the majority, but the fact that the majority is slim is the fact that very often you don't have all of the members of Congress actually showing up to vote on things.
	So theoretically, three Congress members are sick that week, and suddenly your majority is sort of gone.
	But that does not mean that they won't control how things move on the floor.
	They won't control the committees.
	All of that, the Republicans will in fact control in the House.
	So worst case scenario was in fact avoided here, which is Republicans lose both the Senate and the House and get two more years of Joe Biden's unchecked, horrible governance.
	In this particular case, Republicans dramatically underperformed.
	I mean, wildly underperformed.
	Because when you look at the popular vote in the House elections, Republicans in sort of the generic ballot, as we would put it, were up by about five points.
	That is a massive sweep.
	The problem is it was all located in heavy red districts.
	Or the upsurge that Republicans saw was actually in heavy blue districts.
	So they did better with black voters, with Hispanic voters.
	And so Democrats in those districts, instead of winning 70% of the vote, won 55% of the vote, still would blow out their Republican opponent.
	But they would lose a lot more of the popular vote.
	What it really meant is that this entire election and the way the seats were allocated, it came down to these purple seats, these very split seats.
	And in those split seats, Republicans have dramatically underperformed.
	There are a bunch of districts Republicans just gave away.
	For example, the Washington 3rd District, Jamie Herrera-Butler, that was the district where the Republican in that district running in a very Trump-y seat.
	I mean, that seat was, I think, R plus 17 in the last election cycle.
	In that particular seat, Jamie Herrera-Butler had voted in favor of the impeachment of Trump.
	And so Trump endorsed Herrera-Butler's opponent, a person named Joe Kent.
	Joe Kent then proceeded to lose by two to the Democrat.
	And this happened all over the place.
	Peter Mayer over in Michigan was a Republican who voted in favor of Trump's impeachment.
	Trump backed his primary challenger.
	His primary challenger then proceeded to lose to the Democrat.
	This happened in a bunch of different places across the House.
	The Republicans underperform in terms of sort of general number of seats they should have won in the House, but they end up taking the House anyway.
	The underperformance is leading people to question exactly whether Kevin McCarthy will be Speaker of the House.
	Now, realistically speaking, does Kevin McCarthy still have the best shot of being Speaker?
	The answer is yes.
	And the reason for that is because Kevin McCarthy has built up a large base of support inside the Republican Party hierarchy.
	With all of the other members of the House.
	And there really is no rival to him in the House of Representatives at this point.
	Some people have mentioned the possibility of Jim Jordan challenging him from the Freedom Caucus.
	The problem for Jim Jordan is he would have to swing over the other Republicans, right?
	When you have this split a majority, when you have a majority that is this slim, and there are significant splits, coming up with a quote-unquote consensus candidate who can win a majority of the Republican Party and then the entirety of the Republican Party, which is what you need.
	Because again, None of the Democrats are going to vote for Kevin McCarthy for Speaker.
	That means pretty much all the Republicans have to.
	All the Democrats have to do is peel off four or five different Republicans to vote against Kevin McCarthy and he's not the Speaker.
	But that's a lot easier if the person up for the Speakership is Jim Jordan, who's opposed by a lot of the moderates in the Republican caucus.
	So just strategically speaking, the likelihood is that McCarthy will in fact be the Speaker despite the underperformance.
	Well, now that he has the power, it is up to him to actually prove that he has deserved the power.
	This is something that McCarthy has been pursuing for nearly all of his career.
	All the way back when he was a so-called young gun with Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan, going all the way back to like 2008.
	This is something that Kevin McCarthy has been pursuing pretty strenuously.
	Well, now he's going to get it.
	And the question is what exactly he's going to do with that leadership power?
	Can he actually present a vision?
	And that vision is going to have to be independent from all of the day-to-day politicking of dealing with Donald Trump.
	So much of McCarthy's sort of image has been tied in with how to navigate the choppy waters of Trump land.
	Because Donald Trump has been such a dominant figure in the Republican party, continues to be a dominant figure in the Republican party. The question is, can he lead the Republican party forward and actually become a leader in his own right, which is what you need from a Speaker of the House. The Speaker of the House is not supposed to be a cat's paw for anybody else.
	The Speaker is supposed to have an independent agenda and he's supposed to be capable of bringing his majority to bear when need be.
	So we'll see if Kevin McCarthy has the ability to do that.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, House Republicans will choose their leaders for the new Congress on Tuesday.
	In a vote that could reveal how much resistance McCarthy faces within his own conference.
	McCarthy is running to lead his party again in what analysts believe will be the narrowest GOP majority in recent history, much slimmer than Republican leaders had initially hoped for.
	The election results have complicated the path for the California Republican.
	He needs to win the backing of his conference on Tuesday in a closed-door meeting, and then 218 votes on the House floor if all members are present and roll call vote in January.
	No Democrats will back McCarthy, so he will need to keep most Republicans united for a floor vote, giving each individual lawmaker significant leverage.
	McCarthy said, ask Paul Ryan, ask everybody who ran for Speaker before.
	Nobody has had it.
	When asked what it meant, he was unable to get 218 votes from his conference in the initial vote.
	In a closed door meeting, McCarthy emphasized Republicans would have the majority and would hold the committee gavels no matter the size of the conference.
	According to a couple of people in the meeting, McCarthy received a standing ovation, according to two people.
	So again, he's very likely to end up as Speaker of the House.
	The question then is going to be what he does with it.
	Because the reality is that McCarthy leading the House minority, he's done a good job of keeping them united against Joe Biden's agenda.
	Being in the majority is a bit of a more difficult proposition.
	Also, the question for Kevin McCarthy is how do you expand that majority?
	And that's going to mean, again, now that he has the speakership, actually carving out a position for himself as a Republican leader with an independent vision of his own, not merely parroting what any of the other so-called leaders of the Republican Party say.
	According to the New York Times, McCarthy scrounged on Monday for the support he would need to become Speaker if Republicans gained control of the House, facing resistance from a newly emboldened right flank as his party grapples with its historically weak performance in the midterm elections.
	Republicans began the week limping toward the finish of an election cycle McCarthy had confidently predicted would be a GOP bonanza they were bitterly divided over who should lead while he was shaping up to be a tiny and unruly majority.
	Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, member of the Freedom Caucus, said no one in this town has 218 votes for Speaker of the House.
	We're going to have a debate and make sure we set up the structure properly to then figure out how someone will get to 218 votes.
	What this is going to look like is a lot of Freedom Caucus members basically lobbying for leadership positions on important House committees in order so that McCarthy is able to lock down this level of support.
	Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, who was a former Freedom Caucus chairman, he is going to try to challenge McCarthy.
	He doesn't have the support to defeat McCarthy.
	Again, there have been some talks about Jim Jordan.
	Steve Scalise says that he doesn't want to run for it.
	So there are not a lot of rivals for McCarthy who have a legitimate amount of support inside the Republican caucus.
	A lot of this is going to be sort of negotiating for better position for some of the fringier players in the Republican Party, which in fact could hamper McCarthy going forward as Speaker.
	Because the fact is that if you are Kevin McCarthy and you take one lesson away from this election, it is run back to sanity.
	Do not put the people who are the most controversial in the most important committee slot.
	Because if you do, they will absolutely crush your chances of expanding your majority in 2024 and increase your chances actually of losing a majority in 2024.
	So I don't envy McCarthy his sort of political position, but now is the time for him to actually demonstrate a spine.
	Because when you're in the minority and you're negotiating against Joe Biden, it's a lot easier.
	Once you actually have to lead, it's a different thing.
	Meanwhile.
	A lot of talk about who's going to lead the RNC.
	So apparently, Ronna McDaniel wants to continue to lead the RNC in the aftermath of what was a tremendously underwhelming performance by the Republican Party in the last midterm elections.
	That is a mistake.
	Ronna McDaniel has not done, I think, a good job as the Republican National Committee Chairwoman.
	The Republicans did well in 2016.
	They've done poorly in every election since then.
	There's no reason to renew her contract.
	One of the people who's up for it is Representative Lee Zeldin.
	He's reportedly considering a bid for chair of the RNC following his candidacy in New York's gubernatorial race.
	That would be good because Zeldin actually has been able to negotiate, again, those choppy waters of the Trump era.
	And it was Zeldin, wildly over-performing in New York, that won Republicans the House majority.
	If Zeldin had not run in New York, I think that Republicans are probably in the minority right now.
	and the House of Representatives.
	Remember, the Republicans picked up three to four seats in New York, specifically because there were moderate Republicans running in New York who ran directly away from Trumpism, and Zeldin gave them the cover to do that.
	Zeldin, running strong at the top of the ticket, dragged a lot of those Republicans to victory.
	It remains unclear if Rhonda McDaniel or Tommy Hicks is going to run for re-election, but Zeldin's consideration follows a relatively lackluster midterm election performance for Republicans, despite the fact the GOP had six million more votes than Democrats did in the House races.
	While the signs point to the GOP taking the House, Democrats maintain a slim majority in the Senate.
	Some Republicans are demanding change moving forward.
	And Zeldin, I think, would be a good candidate for this.
	He's sort of a consensus pick.
	He's somebody who overperformed in a very blue state.
	He's not considered extreme.
	He's sort of a moderate Republican being from a blue state.
	But he does have good conservative principles and he's able to negotiate, again, a lot of the difficult pathways inside a very fractured Republican party.
	Meanwhile, there's been some talk in the Senate about what happens with Mitch McConnell.
	So there's been a bit of a revolt inside the Republican caucus over having a very quick sort of vote for Mitch McConnell for minority leader.
	Reality, again, very unlikely that McConnell is ousted as minority leader.
	The truth is that on an obstructive level, he has done a pretty good job obstructing Joe Biden's agenda and before that, Barack Obama's agenda.
	McConnell as majority leader, I think, was far less successful than McConnell as minority leader in the Senate.
	With that said, there are a bunch of Republicans, a bunch of people I respect and like, people like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, who are calling for delay in the actual senatorial election process for McConnell as minority leader.
	One of the big complaints that I'm hearing from the inside, from a bunch of different Republicans in the Senate, is that McConnell has a bad habit of preventing any amendments to bills that he brings up.
	Basically, he brings up the bill and forces people to vote up or down on it, and a lot of the Republicans in the Senate don't particularly like that.
	On a strategic level, McConnell does that because, again, the Senate is a bunch of people who want to run for president, and so all of them are constantly adding amendments and holding up bills.
	But that said, when you're the leader of the Republican caucus, you do sort of have a duty, as McConnell has sort of avoided, of allowing members of your caucus to actually add amendments to bills and change the bills and propose legislation themselves.
	McConnell has run that place like a dictatorship, again, in the minority that matters a lot less than it would in the majority.
	The minority basically are just there to unify and vote no on things.
	When you're in the majority, it changes rather radically.
	However, Should the vote be put off on McConnell?
	I don't see why it should happen right away.
	Seems to me that McConnell waiting for a couple of weeks until we actually know what happened in Georgia isn't the worst idea in the entire world.
	Now, all of this, all of this sort of hubbub that's been occurring obscures the bigger question of what exactly is going to happen in the House once Republicans do take over.
	So there's been a lot of talk from the Republican base about investigate, investigate, investigate.
	So here is the thing, guys.
	Investigate the things that need investigating.
	Sure, Hunter Biden's business contacts and whether those actually tie to Joe.
	Not just to go after Hunter Biden, because that doesn't matter.
	The question is whether Joe Biden was benefiting from Hunter's business contacts and from the giant grab bags of cash that Hunter was picking up in China and Ukraine.
	That is worthy of an investigation.
	But all the people who are calling for, for example, Joe Biden to be impeached, good luck with that.
	First of all, you're not going to have even the votes inside the Republican caucus to do that.
	Second of all, even if you do, you then run headlong into a Democrat Senate.
	What exactly would be the purpose of something like that?
	The truth is that Republicans' job in the House of Representatives is going to be to propose regular order when it comes to budgets.
	It's going to be to stymie Joe Biden's worst legislation to prevent him from getting a lot of his agenda across the finish line.
	One of the newly elected GOP representatives in New York, his name is George Santos.
	He says, listen, I want to focus less on the investigations and more on actually just obstructing Joe Biden's legislative agenda.
	Hunter Biden, Mar-a-Lago raid, DOJ school board memo, the border crisis.
	Where do you stand on pushing for these investigations, noting that you just said inflation was priority for your voters?
	You know, my constituents didn't send me here to waste time.
	They sent me here to work.
	Although, if parts of our party want to go into these investigations, that's their prerogative.
	I'm here to deliver results.
	I'm here to deliver prosperity.
	I'm here to defend the American dream.
	And that's making Americans' life easier.
	Again, this would be the way the Republicans are actually gonna win back seats.
	I know that we've all forgotten about the baseline, you have to govern.
	The baseline of, why don't you focus on the agenda?
	But all of the use of the institution of Congress in order to make headlines for yourself, it turns out that's a really, really negative thing.
	Whether you're a Democrat or whether you're a Republican, this is not what we demand from our plumbers.
	This is not what we demand from our accountants.
	This is not what we demand from our lawyers or our doctors.
	What we demand from them is to do a job.
	Only in Congress do we demand that members of Congress, senators and Congress people do my job, okay?
	My job is not their job.
	I spoke to the House Republican caucus a couple of years ago and I literally said this to them.
	I said, your job is to go out and it is to govern and it is to represent principle as best you can while also making the compromises necessary in order to incrementally forward the agenda.
	It's my job to talk about the principles.
	We don't have the same job.
	In other words, if you want to go into the commentary business, go into the commentary business.
	If you should be in government, be in government.
	But because so many members of both parties now wish to be in commentary and not in government, I'm talking about like the AOCs of the world on the left side of the aisle.
	And I'm talking on the right side of the aisle about people like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
	Governing is not quite the same thing as speaking out publicly.
	And when you look to your political leadership, As sort of the prophets who are going to stand for principle.
	I've always been bewildered by this.
	They are people who delegate power to do a job.
	That's it.
	That is what a representative democracy is about.
	These are not people who you elect because they are supposed to be the people who are your moral leaders.
	That is a form of idolatry.
	That's building a golden calf and worshiping it.
	You literally vote for the people who you then suggest are going to lead you morally.
	That's weird.
	That's not where I get my moral leadership.
	That's not where you should get your moral leadership either.
	I get moral leadership from my parents.
	From great thinkers of the past, from religious leaders of all stripes.
	That's where I get my moral leadership.
	I don't get my moral leadership from a bunch of schmucks who were a used car salesman five seconds ago, and now they're representing me in Congress.
	A weird, weird thing.
	So when you look to Congress to sort of act as a cathartic moral agent for you, you're looking to the wrong place.
	That is not their job.
	And most people are not into that.
	Most people are not particularly interested in that.
	Well, meanwhile, the other big electoral story of the night last night is that Carrie Lake was declared the loser over in Arizona.
	The late votes broke not enough for Carrie Lake, coming from Maricopa County.
	Now, again, I think that all the people who have doubts about the election, I get it.
	I totally do.
	Doubts are not the same thing as proof.
	I keep saying this.
	Doubts are not evidence.
	With that said, when it takes a week to count all of the votes, and when Carrie Lake leads for like 75% of the time, and then as the votes come in from Maricopa County, suddenly Katie Hobbs jumps into the lead, and then Carrie Lake never catches up, I don't understand why there are not penalties attached to secretaries of state across the country who cannot get the voting procedures done the night that the votes come in.
	Change your voting procedures now.
	It is not good.
	It undermines the American people's trust in the voting procedures.
	And that's of all stripes.
	If you're a Democrat and had gone the other way, I assume you would feel the same way.
	According to the Washington Post, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs was projected on Monday to win the race for Arizona governor, narrowly defeating Republican Carrie Lake.
	Hobbs pitched herself as a moderate alternative to an extreme candidate who she argued could sow chaos if elected.
	The Democrat oversaw the 2020 election in Arizona, defended it against the claims of malfeasance that Lake made central to her campaign.
	Lake appeared not to accept the defeat.
	Instead, she tweeted out, Arizonans know BS when they see it.
	Now, she could theoretically call for a recount.
	The chances that that recount are going to result in Carrie Lake being the actual governor of Arizona are incredibly low.
	The current vote count right now has Katie Hobbs up about 20,000 votes.
	I've never seen a recount shift more than about 500 votes across the course of a state.
	So, very, very unlikely that Carrie Lake would ever be able to actually take the seat.
	With that said, the amazing sort of Ridiculous sickening for the vote counting process that you're seeing from the mainstream media.
	It's absurd.
	Like people having questions about the vote counting process in Arizona when it takes this long, when nobody knows how it's done.
	Same thing in Nevada where they're talking about curing votes.
	Whenever this sort of stuff comes up and people are like, I don't really trust this process because the outside indicators appear that there's a lot of room for error.
	And then the media are like, this is the cleanest election ever run.
	Okay, if Kerry Lake won, I really doubt that Andrea Mitchell would be saying this.
	Here's Andrea Mitchell saying, Maricopa County is doing it absolutely right.
	It's the best way, is to take a couple of years to count all the votes.
	The most likely result here is that Republicans end up with somewhere along around 219, 220, or 221 seats, which is pretty astonishing considering that Republicans are currently on track to win about 4% more votes than Democrats nationally.
	Despite all of what has been said by Donald Trump and other election deniers, and now beginning to be also Kelly Ward, who's falling behind, about Katie Bob, Hobbs, but for the governor's race, Maricopa County had some of the best vote counting processes because of past problems.
	Yeah, Andrea, they have a whole lot of practice, and we have a whole lot of practice watching the Arizona returns.
	We saw this in 2018, we saw it in 2020, and we're seeing it again in 2022.
	Amazing job.
	Amazing job.
	It only took you a week to count all the votes.
	Okay, meanwhile.
	As far as the notion that Carrie Lake was an outstanding candidate in Arizona, Carrie Lake is extraordinarily telegenic.
	She knows how to handle herself on TV.
	Also, she dramatically underperformed the House Republicans in Arizona.
	I mean, this is just the fact of the matter.
	As Esoteric CD points out on Twitter, the generic House Republican vote in Arizona was crushing this year.
	The GOP will likely hold six of the nine congressional districts throughout the state when it's all done.
	Carrie Lake ran six percent behind the generic congressional vote in Arizona.
	Blake Masters ran even further behind that.
	So this was an underperformance by Carrie Lake in a state that Doug Ducey was the governor of for a couple of terms.
	And we should all remember, by the way, that it was the sort of Arizona Republican Party that prevented Ducey from running for the open Senate seat against Mark Kelly.
	It should have been Doug Ducey running in that seat and not Blake Masters.
	And Ducey was convinced not to do so by the Arizona Republican Party, who had gotten very, very Trumpy.
	We'll get to more on all this in just a moment.
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	Which does lead to the question of exactly how Donald Trump did across the board.
	Now the reason that this comes up is because when you look at what's about to happen tonight, which presumably will be Donald Trump declaring for the presidency, one of the things he's claimed is that he's done an amazing job picking candidates across the board.
	Now listen.
	There are a lot of things that can be said for Donald Trump as a candidate.
	The man generates electricity.
	He generates headlines.
	People either love him or hate him.
	In a primary, that's really good, because people really, really love you.
	And not a lot of people in the primary hate him.
	Maybe people are annoyed with him.
	Maybe people are tired of him.
	Not a lot of Republicans despise Trump.
	That's not really a thing.
	The people who despise Trump all became Democrats a couple of years ago.
	There are a lot of Republicans who are uncomfortable with Trump, who don't like him so much, but that's not the same thing as despise him.
	So Trump has a lot of the base locked up.
	But one of the things that he has claimed is that he has done really well in the selection cycle and that just isn't factually true.
	So you've seen him tweet out things suggesting that he endorsed 230 candidates and like 212 of them won.
	Yeah, but he endorsed a bunch of very red candidates in a bunch of very red districts.
	That's not particularly hard.
	The real question is how you did in the swing states.
	So I'm going to give you a quick rundown of how exactly Donald Trump did in the swing states.
	You know, the states that actually matter.
	We're going to go by candidacy.
	Governor, Senate, Secretary of State.
	Okay, so for the governors, Kerry Lake, lost.
	Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, lost.
	Michels in Wisconsin, lost.
	Tudor Dixon in Michigan, lost.
	David Perdue in Georgia, lost to Brian Kemp, who then went on to win a stunning victory.
	The only Republican who was endorsed by Trump was Lombardo over in Nevada, who won.
	That's the only one.
	In the Senate, he endorsed Blake Masters in the primary, lost.
	Dr. Oz, lost.
	Ron Johnson, who was the incumbent, who won.
	The only one of these who was an incumbent, by the way.
	Laxalt in Nevada, lost.
	Hershel Walker going to a runoff in a state that he should have won.
	And Don Balduck, who lost dramatically in New Hampshire.
	For Secretary of State, he endorsed four Secretaries of State in the swing states, all of them lost.
	So what does that suggest?
	Well, it suggests that Trump's endorsement can get you across the finish line in the primary, but it can't get you across the line in the general, which should make a bit of a difference if you're talking about, can Republicans win in 2024?
	And the question is whether Republicans are going to continue to find it so cathartic to vote for Trump that they actually don't mind if they lose in 2024.
	And what the polls show is that Trump is not going to perform well in a general election in 2024.
	And before everybody starts shouting about how the polls were wrong, the polls actually were not very wrong this year.
	They were actually pretty good this year.
	I know everybody is out there saying the polls were, were, were terribly, they were not terribly wrong this year.
	People were misreading the polls, but all the polls within margin of error and pretty much all the races finished within margin of error.
	The only ones that were wrong were wrong in the direction of Republicans, like New Hampshire, where people thought that was going to be close and it turned out to be a complete blowout in favor of Maggie Hassan.
	All the others, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, like all these polls ended up being fairly correct.
	So when we cite poll data for 2024, always take poll data with a grain of salt because it's also about a snapshot of now.
	It's not a snapshot of two years from now.
	We don't know what's going to happen over the course of the next year and a half, but that does make a difference if you would like to win.
	And so this becomes the question moving forward for Donald Trump.
	So Donald Trump is supposed to announce tonight.
	He has made a big deal out of this in his emails.
	He is going to he's going to make what he calls the most historic speech, maybe in the history of the United States, which is a heavy lift.
	And there have been some historic speeches in the history of the United States, ranging from Lincoln's House divided speech to to the Gettysburg Address.
	To Franklin Delano Roosevelt announcing World War II had begun.
	To Martin Luther King on the Washington Mall.
	But you know, that's Trumpian bloviation.
	You know, you get used to it.
	Trump, his announcement tonight is going to be extremely early.
	And so this raises some strategic questions as to why he's announcing so early.
	It's sort of a weird move.
	If you are the biggest gorilla in the room, usually announcing late is what you want to do, because you wait for everybody else to jump in, and then you jump in the pool, and then the tide of you jumping in the pool, it's like the fat kid jumping in the pool, boom, all the other kids just get washed out of the pool.
	You wait for everybody else to jump in, and you wait for them to kind of spend all of their money, and you wait for them to establish themselves, and then you just wipe them out.
	That's what Trump did last time.
	If you recall, back in 2015, 2016, Trump was actually not the first candidate to announce.
	Ted Cruz was the first candidate to announce back in 2015.
	Trump didn't announce until let me actually check the date.
	Trump announced in June of 2015.
	That was after Ted Cruz had announced.
	And now he's the incumbent president, right?
	I mean, he's already been president once.
	He could wait until the day before the election and announce and probably clean up.
	I think what Trump doesn't understand is that the less the public sees of him, the more the public likes him.
	The dirty little secret of Trump's 2020 campaign is that if he had followed Joe Biden's strategy, he might still be president.
	If he'd actually just gone to the basement for the entirety of the election, and the election had been about Joe Biden, Trump might still be president.
	But he insisted on being the center of attention, and he's doing the same thing now, which is poor strategy.
	It also seems insecure.
	The reason it seems insecure is because, again, to use the poker analogy I used the other day, if you are dealt a pocket pair of twos, It's like an okay hand, but not a great hand.
	It's a tricky hand because basically anything on the flop, anybody who gets a pair now has more than your pocket pair of twos.
	Before the flop, during the blinds, you go all in just to push everybody else out.
	That's what it feels like with Trump.
	He's not sitting there with a pair of aces.
	If you're sitting there with a pair of aces in his campaign, he'd want to play this thing out.
	He'd wait.
	He'd slow play this thing.
	He doesn't have a pair of aces.
	He has a pair of twos.
	He knows that.
	He knows he's in a particularly weak position right now, and so that's why he's eager to jump into the race, even before, presumably, Herschel Walker has his election.
	All of his advisors, by the way, have been telling Trump not to do this, but apparently he's going to go ahead and do this anyway.
	According to the Washington Post, a trio of longtime Republican operatives will lead Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, which the former president is set to announce Tuesday evening in the ballroom of his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, according to five people familiar with the staffing decisions.
	There are expected to be notable differences from his 2020 campaign.
	His nascent presidential bid is not currently expected to have a traditional campaign manager.
	With multiple advisors and top roles, according to some of the people familiar with the situation, Trump is famous for firing his campaign managers.
	The 2024 bid is expected to have a smaller staff and budget compared with 2020.
	Trump has complained his failed 2020 campaign had too many people and spent too much money.
	Some of the people who are crucial to his 2020 campaign presumably are not going to be part of the 2024 campaign.
	Jared and Ivanka were considered very crucial to both his 2016 and his 2020 campaign.
	There's very little indication that they're going to be deeply involved in this particular campaign, at least at this point, maybe later.
	Now the question as to who exactly the campaign is, is it Kellyanne Conway?
	Who's going to come back in?
	That's an open question, but a lot of those people seem to have very little taste for jumping back in.
	Top advisors include Chrysalis Sevidya, a longtime Republican strategist directing a Super PAC tied to Trump, and Susie Wiles, a Florida-based political consultant who helped Trump win the state his previous two presidential bids and has led his political operation for the last 18 months.
	A group of top advisors also includes Brian Jack, who served as the senior political aide in the White House and has advised both Trump and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy since 2021.
	Taylor Budowich, Trump's current spokesperson, will move to leading an outside Super PAC, Make America Great Again, Inc.
	So he is obviously eager to jump back in.
	There's some polling data to suggest that he still has the upper hand in the Republican Party, which of course is not a shock.
	Again, he was the sitting president of the United States.
	According to Politico, a new political morning consul poll shows 47% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they would back Trump if the Republican presidential primary were held today.
	About 33% said they would back Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
	No other prospective candidate received about 5% in the poll, except for former Vice President Mike Pence, who stood at 5%.
	But if the poll says Politico shows a clear path forward for Trump as he readies his third White House run since 2016, it also exhibits the peril ahead.
	Among all voters surveyed, 65% said Trump should probably or definitely not run again, with 53% in the definite camp, which is, that's not a good number.
	When two-thirds of the American public say you should not run again, and you're not actually, I mean, the same numbers say, by the way, that Joe Biden shouldn't run again.
	The difference is that Joe Biden is the current president of the United States.
	Donald Trump is not.
	Trump's standing has not dropped significantly since pre-election.
	He stood at 48% in the most recent morning consult poll, but DeSantis' star has risen.
	He continues to gain in the polls against Trump.
	So you're not seeing a lot of the Trump fans drop off from Trump, but you are seeing more support that was sort of uncommitted come off the sidelines, not in favor of Trump, but in favor of DeSantis.
	Now, here's the thing.
	DeSantis ain't gonna declare.
	He's not gonna declare for a long time, even if he does declare.
	It'll probably be close to a year before Ron DeSantis declares.
	And in fact, there's some other polling data that sort of suggests the opposite.
	There are some new polls that have been coming out.
	According to Mediaite, the Club for Growth has done some state-level polls.
	They show that in the Iowa caucuses, DeSantis currently leads Trump 48 to 37, 52 to 37 in New Hampshire, 56 to 30 in Florida, 55 to 35 in Georgia.
	Now, again, DeSantis has the hot hand right now.
	He's obviously the hottest name in Republican politics right now, given the fact that he just won what used to be a swing state by 20 points.
	Trump, however, still has the weight of his former presidency on hand.
	The question is going to be this.
	Trump jumps in.
	He then spends the next six months not attacking Democrats, but attacking all of the people who have not yet declared, because he spent the last two weeks doing this.
	If you want to tick off your own fans, the way to do that, if Trump wants to run a smart campaign here, Put aside whether you like, dislike, just as a political matter of strategy.
	If Trump wants to run a smart campaign, he has to be the leader of the Republican Party, not the leader of the Trump Party.
	And what that means is that he actually has to focus all of his ire and all of his anger against Biden and the Biden agenda.
	He can't be focusing it on people that the Republican base actually likes, like Glenn Youngkin over in Virginia.
	He can't be focusing it on losing senatorial candidates like Don Balda, who he endorsed in New Hampshire.
	He can't be focusing it on Mitch McConnell's wife, which is what he's been doing over on Truth Social.
	He can't be focusing on Ron DeSantis and calling him Ron DeSanctimonious.
	This does not play well.
	Because all these other candidates, by the way, have to do is just sit there and let Trump punch himself out.
	All they have to do is use the George Foreman versus Muhammad Ali rope-a-dope strategy.
	They just have to play dead.
	They just sit there in the corner.
	They let Trump exhaust himself, throwing punches, throw all of the throw everything but the kitchen sink.
	They haven't even declared.
	If Trump blows all of his ammo now, whatever ammo there is, I don't think he has tons of ammo against Junkin or DeSantis by the look of it.
	But if he blows all of his sort of anger and ire right now at a bunch of people who aren't firing at him, he looks petty and he looks demagogic.
	And I don't think that the Republican voting base likes that very much.
	And again, what Trump needs to convince the American people of are two things, particularly Republican voters.
	He needs to convince Republican voters of two things.
	He needs to convince them, one, that he's a winner, not a loser.
	And two, he needs to convince them that he actually stands for their interests, not his own.
	Those are the two things that are the obstacles to Trump winning the nomination in 2024.
	Is he a winner, not a loser?
	Okay, so he won in 2016, and then Republicans got their butts kicked in 2018.
	In 2020, Trump lost.
	In 2021, he lost two Senate seats in Georgia after telling people not to vote.
	And in 2022, his candidates dramatically underperformed.
	So he's got to try to spin this into I'm actually the only person who can win, which there's still a base in the Republican Party who's going to believe that, but it's like 30% of the Republicans.
	It is not 70% of the Republicans, particularly after the terrible 2022 performance.
	OK, so that that is an uphill climb.
	And then the other question is an even more of an uphill climb for Trump, which is he actually has to use some discipline.
	He would actually have to say, listen, Same thing I said in 2016.
	I'm standing here taking the bullet for you.
	Not you need to take the bullet for me by claiming that election 2020 was stolen and that's the key issue and that's the only thing that matters in the universe.
	I'm going to take the bullet for you.
	I'm going to go out there again.
	I'm going to take the hits.
	I'm going to go after Biden.
	I'm going to go after his agenda.
	I'm going to oppose every element of his agenda.
	Have you heard Donald Trump really speak about Joe Biden's agenda at all?
	Except to say that inflation is bad?
	What's the last agenda item that Joe Biden actually pushed that Trump spoke about?
	I can't remember.
	That's not because I have bad memory.
	It's because Trump isn't doing much of that.
	So if Trump wishes to convince the Republican Party base that he's the best guy to go up against Biden, he actually has to run against Joe Biden.
	That will require him to let go of all of his animus against the possibility of anyone else even running.
	It's kind of amazing.
	And no one has even declared yet.
	And the animus is already ramping into high gear.
	He's already angry at people who haven't even declared yet.
	That seems like a misplaced emotion at best.
	And meanwhile, by the way, Federal agents are now announcing what was obvious in the first place, which is why Donald Trump was refusing to give documents back from Mar-a-Lago.
	Remember, there's all this legal peril still following Trump around.
	The sort of typical explanation here electorally is that the more Trump is targeted legally, the more his base rallies to his defense.
	That's only true when people think that he is being targeted legally to prevent him from running for president.
	If they think that he is being targeted legally just because he made mistakes, that's not quite the same thing.
	When he was president and people were doing the Russian collusion stuff, And trying to impeach him is very obvious why they were going after him.
	When he's not the president, and when he is, in fact, in an undeclared dogfight with other Republicans for the nomination, it's not quite as clear-cut as people attack him legally, and this is going to immediately redound to his benefit electorally.
	I'm not sure that the correlation is quite as quick there.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
	Folks, last year we launched our daily news podcast, Morning Wire.
	In this short period of time, it's become one of the top news podcasts in America.
	It's great.
	15 minutes or less, you can get all the news you need to know without the liberal slant of NPR.
	New episodes are available every morning, seven days a week.
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	So, check out Morning Wire on Daily Wire, plus Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
	Okay, so we do have an update on the Trump-Mar-a-Lago investigation.
	You remember that the FBI Quote-unquote, raided the place.
	I say quote-unquote because they didn't go in like guns blazing, but they actually did go to Mar-a-Lago and search and ransack his house and all this kind of stuff for these supposedly very important documents.
	And remember, there's all the speculation from the left, as always.
	The story with Donald Trump is always the simplest.
	It's always the simplest.
	It's never the conspiratorial stuff that all the left thinks it is.
	So the left was like, well, he's probably using, he's going to sell the nuclear codes to the Chinese.
	Maybe to the Russians.
	What kind of secret materials is he hiding?
	Is it the cover-up of a map of January 6th?
	With the hand drawn in sharpie markers showing, here's Mike Pence's office, go here.
	Red X. Is that what he was covering up?
	No, as it turns out...
	As I said, from literally day one, the entire story of Trump keeping documents in Mar-a-Lago and not handing them over to the National Archives was, I like papers.
	I like boxes.
	They're mine.
	That's the whole story.
	And now federal investigators, after spending months and months and months investigating, came to the most obvious conclusion, which is that Trump likes stuff until he doesn't.
	Which, duh.
	I mean, sorry to break it to the multi-million dollar federal investigation, but we all knew this within 20 seconds of this story breaking.
	According to the Washington Post, federal agents and prosecutors have come to believe former President Donald Trump's motive for allegedly taking and keeping classified documents was largely his ego and a desire to hold on to the materials as trophies or mementos, according to people familiar with the matter.
	No, no, no, Donald Trump.
	Ego and keep it?
	No.
	You shock me, sir!
	As part of the investigation, federal authorities reviewed the classified documents that were recovered from Trump's Mar-a-Lago home and private club, looking to see if the types of information contained in them pointed to any kind of pattern or similarities.
	According to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, that review has not found any apparent business advantage to the types of classified information in Trump's possession.
	In other words, it wasn't like a systematic pattern of the papers he was picking.
	He was basically, I like this one.
	It has Kim Jong-Un's perfume on it.
	I like this one.
	This one has a pretty, I like this one.
	This one has, has words.
	Like, that's pretty much what it was.
	Like, I like this document.
	I like this document.
	I'm keeping them.
	So we have a national scandal over this.
	Well done, everybody.
	FBI interviews witnesses so far.
	Do not point to any nefarious effort by Trump to leverage, sell, or use the government secrets.
	Instead, the former president seemed motivated by a more basic desire not to give up what he previously believed was his property, these people said.
	Now, by the way, the question that you have to ask whenever you see a story like this is this is being leaked from inside the FBI.
	And these are the only people who know this.
	So it's either the DOJ or the FBI.
	What does this lead you to believe?
	When a leak like this happens, doesn't this suggest that the FBI and the DOJ may be on the verge of dropping the case?
	And maybe they actually do not want to prosecute Donald Trump.
	Now, I know that Andy McCarthy over at National Review, he suggests an indictment is on its way because now that Trump has declared and now that he's not sort of the foregone conclusory winner of the primaries, because who the hell knows what's going to happen, that the DOJ is going to file charges against him.
	But when you leak stuff like this that undermines any case for the possibility of motive and puts Donald Trump squarely in the same basket as Hillary Clinton, right?
	Hillary Clinton, the entire case that James Comey made in not prosecuting her was she had no intent to Disseminate the information to America's enemies.
	Now you're leaking that!
	So this suggests is maybe the prosecution from the DOJ doesn't go forward.
	Merrick Garland is trying to soften the ground for that, which is really, really interesting stuff.
	And it does raise the question of if people on my side of the aisle think Merrick Garland is so politically motivated, why do you think Merrick Garland would drop a prosecution that has Donald Trump in its crosshairs?
	What would be the rationale?
	Is it because Merrick Garland is a super honest, non-cynical player?
	Or is it maybe because there are a lot of Democrats who actually want Trump to run?
	Because it's pretty obvious there are a lot of Democrats who want Trump to run.
	But for good or ill, I mean, they made the same mistake in 2015.
	This doesn't mean they're right.
	I mean, they could want Trump to run.
	They could lose.
	But is it pretty obvious that Democrats would prefer Trump to another Republican candidate in 2024?
	I think it's pretty obvious from the statements that they are making.
	Several Trump advisors said each time he was asked to give documents or materials back, his stance hardened, and he gravitated toward lawyers and advisors who indulged his more pugilistic desires.
	Trump repeatedly said the materials were his, not the government's, often in profane terms, two of those people said.
	The people familiar with the matter cautioned the investigation is ongoing, no final determination has been made, and it is possible additional information could emerge that changes investigators' understanding of Trump's motivations, but they said the evidence collected over a period of months indicates the primary explanation for potentially criminal conduct was Trump's ego and intransigence.
	Again, list that one in the how is this possibly a shock to anyone category.
	Why are we supposed to be surprised about all of this?
	Now, meanwhile, if Trump were to be the nominee, or whoever the Republican nominee is going to be, that Republican nominee is going to have somewhat of a tailwind.
	Now, tailwind doesn't do everything.
	This is what we found out in 2022.
	We thought a tailwind could elect Don Baldwin to the Senate.
	Nope.
	Turns out that if you have some real bad candidates, they're not getting elected to the Senate.
	I was asked the other day, you know, you keep talking about candidate quality on the show.
	What about the fact that John Fetterman, who is not with us, was elected to the Senate?
	And the answer is Democrats don't have to have good candidates.
	They can give you free stuff.
	Democrats' entire platform is, here is a bunch of goodies.
	That's a pretty good pitch.
	That's a pretty good pitch.
	They're more registered Democrats than Republicans in virtually all of the purple states.
	This is why Florida is no longer a purple state.
	They're more registered Republicans than Democrats.
	But in Pennsylvania, they're way more registered Democrats than Republicans.
	So they have a built-in advantage, which means the Republicans do have to run excellent candidates in order to win, and Democrats can run people who literally do not have functional brains.
	And they can win.
	So yeah, I'm sorry that life isn't fair, but life isn't fair.
	With that said, the tailwind that Republicans are going to have in 2024 is that Democrats are going to keep doubling down and they're going to keep suggesting that America is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad place.
	Michelle Obama leading that chart.
	So Michelle Obama has a new book coming out, which just sounds awful.
	We've talked about it a little bit before, the Michelle Obama next book.
	She's transformed herself into this Kind of fake Oprah figure.
	I say fake because she's a real political radical and always was.
	And now we've tried to make her over as a sort of new agey, inspirational figure.
	She has another memoir called The Light We Carry, which, uh, The Light We Carry.
	Vomitricious stuff here.
	So Michelle Obama, some audio was released of her book talking about how Barack couldn't fix the country.
	He tried his best, but even Messiah couldn't fix the country.
	It shook me profoundly to hear the man who'd replaced my husband as president openly and unapologetically using ethnic slurs, making selfishness and hate somehow acceptable, refusing to condemn white supremacists or to support people demonstrating for racial justice.
	Running behind all this was a demoralizing string of thoughts.
	It had not been enough.
	We ourselves were not enough.
	The problems were too big.
	The holes were too giant.
	Impossible to fill.
	So, Republicans do get to run against that kind of garbage.
	I guess that will provide them some sort of tailwind.
	Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We'll be getting into U.S.
	soccer, which is promoting the rainbow flag rather than the American flag at the World Cup.
	Plus, Disney, they have a new movie out, and you guessed it, it has a gay relationship.

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