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Nov. 16, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
43:03
Trump’s In | Ep. 1612
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Donald Trump announces his third presidential campaign, pledging to make America great and glorious again.
Joe Biden starts his own 2024 campaign in response, and NATO puzzles over a missile strike on Polish territory.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Well, we're in it now.
So, President Trump announced last night, as predicted, that he was going to run for President of the United States.
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Well, we're in it now.
So President Trump announced last night, as predicted, that he was going to run for president of the United States.
Now he had predicted it would be the most important speech in American history.
It wasn't, but it is important.
I mean, when the former president of the United States announces a new presidential campaign, his third presidential campaign, that is a rather large announcement.
The timing of it is really curious.
It's strategically strange.
Let's put it that way.
Because if you are Donald Trump, what you really want to do is clear the field, right?
But if you do it too early, and there are more than 700 days until the next election, This gives people a lot of time to get very tired.
And this is the real enemy for Trump.
The real enemy for Trump is that people become exhausted.
This has always been the big problem for Trump.
In 2016, people were not exhausted.
It was a great act.
In 2017, people were like, okay, well, he's president.
This is kind of fascinating.
In 2018, didn't work out well in Congress, but his administration was doing a bunch of really, really good stuff.
People are like, okay, I'll give him credit for that.
And sure, there's some bad tweets and, and yeah, the media hate his guts.
I'll give him more of a chance.
And then 2019, More of that.
And then 2020 in the pandemic, I think people got exhausted with Trump.
And that is one of the rationales for why he didn't do as well in the election as he should have.
And that's why he did not win when running against a person who's actually comatose.
Because Joe Biden was more tired than Trump, but he was less tiring than Trump for a lot of Americans.
In 2020, Donald Trump exhausted a lot of people because he was on the TV every day.
Talking about COVID because he seemed to be sort of all over the place in his approach to that because every day was revolving around him.
And so the election was a referendum on him.
And meanwhile, Joe Biden went back to his coffin in the evenings and during most of the day, and he just slept there.
And every so often they would take him out and they would spoon feed him some oatmeal just to give him the nutrients.
And then they would trot him out like directly outside of his house in Delaware.
They would train a camera on him, and he would go, democracy!
And then the media would cheer, and then he'd go back down into the basement.
And so he wasn't exhausting in the same way that Trump was.
So the problem for Trump has always been Trump.
I mean, the draw of Trump is Trump, and the problem for Trump is Trump.
It's nobody else.
And the obstacles that Donald Trump makes for himself are the biggest obstacles that he faces, not the obstacles made by other candidates about him.
Hillary Clinton tried to make him the object of ire in 2016, and it failed.
Donald Trump made himself the object of ire in 2020, and it succeeded.
Well, the problem is that if you launch this quickly, I mean, this is this is unprecedented.
I'm not aware of any other presidential campaign, certainly not by a major figure like the former president of the United States launched about a week after the midterm elections.
This is super early.
And it's a it's a weird strategy, because if you really are that intimidating, why don't you slow play this thing?
If you really believe that simply having your name out there is going to prevent people from jumping in, which, by the way, it might, then why would you launch this quickly?
What it sort of betrays is that Trump, his campaign, is very concerned with the possibility of other people getting in.
If you watch his Truth Social feed, you see a lot of this, right?
Donald Trump is attacking candidates who have not yet announced and may never announce.
I'm not aware that Glenn Youngkin is going to run for President of the United States.
I'm not sure what Glenn Youngkin's support base would be.
He's a very moderate Republican in Virginia.
Ron DeSantis, bit of a different story.
And a lot of speculation that he's going to run specifically because he's termed out, right?
Glenn Youngkin is in his first term.
Ron DeSantis is in his second term.
So that means that no matter what, he's leaving office in 2026 as governor of Florida.
So if he's going to go, he sort of has to go, but he's not jumping in right now.
And so the question, if you are Donald Trump, is if I jump in yesterday, November 15, 2022, and Ron DeSantis doesn't jump in until the after the end of the first legislative session, meaning in like June of 2023, That gives you, by my count, and I'm no expert, but I know how a calendar works, that gives you eight months to simply be out there saying things.
And that's very tiring.
It means you're the only person at issue.
I mean, if Ron DeSantis just goes about governing and doesn't pay any attention to the stuff that you're saying, and you're spending every day on Truth Social ripping into him, is that good strategy?
And do you really think that Trump has the discipline not to do that?
Now, if Trump spends the next eight months ripping into Biden, Then that would be a durable campaign.
But do you think he's going to do that?
Or do you think that he's going to be so irritated with the fact that other people are very likely to jump in halfway through next year that he's going to preemptively try to launch strikes against them?
And they're meanwhile just going to be going about their business and governing and doing their stuff.
Trump runs the real danger of looking petty.
The first real damage that Trump has done himself in terms of his 2024 presidential campaign, aside from all the January 6th stuff, Aside from sort of the oddities of what he says on Truth Social, the really big damage that he did to himself over the course of the last several months, besides picking not great candidates and not spending money on those candidates, was really over the last week when he decided that just before the election, he was going to attack DeSantis.
And then after the election, he decided he was going to attack DeSantis and Junkin.
And Republicans looked at him and they said, wait, dude, who are you attacking?
What are you doing?
So as a matter of strategy, What this feels like very much is not like Trump is holding a pair of aces.
If Trump felt like he were holding a pair of aces, then presumably he would wait to see the flop.
And he'd wait to see some other cards on the table.
Because he could afford to.
He could take his time.
He could see what the political circumstances are like in six months.
What this feels like is Donald Trump is trying to buy the pot with a pair of sixes.
And basically, you got a pair of sixes?
Not an amazing, like a small pocket pair?
And he's scared of the flop because on the flop, you could get a seven and somebody else could have two sevens or on the flop could be a king and somebody else just has one king.
And so what he's going to do right now is try to buy the pot by going all in with a pair of sixes.
We're going to buy the pot.
We're going to buy the blinds.
We're going to knock everybody out of the game.
I don't think that strategically speaking, it's going to work, but it's an interesting strategy.
It's certainly never been tried before.
And there's a lot of time, a lot of time before the 2024 elections.
I mean, the first primaries don't even happen until early 2024.
We're talking about 14 months until the January primaries, the Iowa caucuses in 2024.
So this is super early as a strategic matter.
OK, so then Trump decided that he was going to launch this thing at Mar-a-Lago.
Which again is an interesting move.
It's not a pizzazz move.
You remember that when he originally launched in 2015, it was a fascinating thing.
He launched in June of 2015, by the way.
Which is a lot later.
That would be like launching in June of 2023.
Which he's not.
He's launching way earlier.
And he launched with a 47 minute speech.
And it was fascinating because it was all new.
Trump's speech last night was very long.
Like extremely long.
Like so long that Fox News actually cut out of it about halfway through.
Because the speech went, I believe, 64 minutes, which is, by any standard, a very, very long speech.
And it read, in some ways, almost like a State of the Union address.
It had its high points, it had its low points.
We're going to go through what the president said in relaunching his 2024 campaign.
But the optics of it were a little bit strange, mainly because when he did it in 2015, and there was no base of support, and he came down the escalator, and it was like, wow, I can't tell whether this is cheesy or whether this is brilliant.
It turns out that it was quite brilliant optically.
Doing it at Mar-a-Lago looks like he's sort of holed up in his house, right?
I mean, that's where he lives.
It's sort of like me going to my living room to announce that I'm running for president of the United States.
Mar-a-Lago, everybody knows that's Trump's area.
If you were going to launch a popular movement, what you'd really want to do is do like a giant rally, right?
You announce this in advance, like I'm going to announce and we're not going to have a thousand people in the room.
We're going to have 20,000 people in the room, right?
We're going to show the power of the Trump train.
This train is going, it has no brakes, as they say.
And we have 20, 30,000, like, we'll fill a stadium with people who love Donald Trump.
And we'll scare the living bejesus out of everybody.
Because we'll be out there with a giant crowd.
Instead, he launched it at Mar-a-Lago, essentially in his backyard, in a ballroom, with like a thousand people, all of whom were sort of hand-picked friends, including people like Roger Stone, which, again, if you're going to have your campaign supporters, you probably should not try to stack people who are, actually have been indicted for crimes, like as a general matter.
You actually want kind of the best and the brightest.
Roger Stone is not the best and the brightest when it comes to like the people you want in your front row.
So there's some optical issues here too.
And what it really speaks to is that I got to say, just as an optical matter, this did not feel like it had the same sort of extraordinary impact as it did when Trump ran in 2015.
When Trump ran in 2015, it was like a bomb went off.
Like this was wild.
Nobody's ever seen anything like this.
Trump's been president.
And so your campaign as a former president versus your campaign as a real estate guru who's very famous for being on The Apprentice in 2015, that's a totally different thing.
And if you're running a very similar campaign to 2015 in 2022 or 2023, it doesn't feel the same.
And he has the gravitas of having been president behind him.
Which means he should be doing the Obama thing, right?
When Obama ran for re-election in 2012, he was doing it in, like, giant stadiums, Greek pantheon kind of stuff, fog machines, right?
That's what Trump really should have done last night in re-announcing that he was launching.
Instead, he did it in what felt like sort of the safest and most cautious way.
And he read from a teleprompter, which, of course, you would imagine he should do.
And it gave everybody who's a big Trump fan the opportunity to say, this is the moment Trump finally became president.
Listen, when he was president, I thought that best Trump was teleprompter Trump.
Whenever Trump was reading off the teleprompter, I was like, oh, thank God, he's going to say a bunch of useful things.
And then when you get off teleprompter, you're like, uh-oh, where is this going?
I have no idea.
Trump got off teleprompter a few times last night.
It was mostly funny.
But it didn't feel like top tier Trump.
It just didn't.
His energy level was fairly low last night.
He was not out there kind of roaring and growling the way that he typically does.
Now, does this mean that he can't win?
Of course not.
It's just a launch speech.
We have a long way to go.
And that's the whole point.
I think people who are jumping to, he's in, that means he's the nominee, which means he will be the president.
That is a lot of steps between here and there, my friends.
That's a lot of steps.
He's jumping in November.
There will be other people who jump in.
Does he have the upper hand?
Of course.
He has 30% of the base that loves the guy and will walk through fire for him.
That gives you a really strong base.
And in a divided primary, that could be well enough to just walk right through.
That's exactly what happened in 2015, 2016.
In the 2016 campaign, it wasn't like Trump was walking away with 70% of the vote.
He wasn't.
He was winning the early primaries with 25, 30% of the vote.
It was only at the very end, when the field had basically winnowed down to two, that he started winning 50% of the vote.
But that's enough.
It doesn't matter how you win, as long as you win.
So Trump does have a solid percentage of the base locked up, for sure.
But that doesn't mean there won't be other candidates.
There will be other candidates.
It's very early.
And then, if he gets the nomination, Number one, we don't know whether Biden's even going to be alive by that point.
But number two, even if Biden is alive, it's not clear where the economy is going to be.
One thing that is clear about Donald Trump as a candidate, one, he's extremely volatile.
We all know this.
We can keep kind of breezing past this, but it happens to be the chief characteristic of the man is that he's extraordinarily volatile, which means he's unpredictable.
It has its benefits.
It also has its major and severe drawbacks in a campaign, as we saw in 2020.
In 2016, it had great benefits.
It would say stuff nobody else would say.
In 2020, it had severe drawbacks.
It would say stuff nobody else would say as president.
It also shifts the focus back to Trump.
Because if every election is a question as to who the referendum is on, right?
Who are the people actually voting for or against?
They don't vote for two candidates.
They vote against one.
So the question in 2024 will be, are you voting based on Joe Biden or are you voting based on Donald Trump?
And again, Joe Biden is a nothing.
Joe Biden is a non-entity.
Joe Biden is an empty vessel.
And that means that he has a bit of an upper hand when it comes to Donald Trump.
There's not a person, ask any person in the United States their opinion on Donald Trump and they will give it to you.
Every single person.
And people don't change their minds.
If you think that a bunch of people who voted against Donald Trump in 2020 are going to vote for him in 2024, I challenge you to name who those people are.
By the way, same thing for Democrats.
If people voted for Trump in 2020 and you think they're going to vote for you in 2024, that's also not going to happen.
But Trump has to win more votes.
Biden does not have to win more votes.
So that's sort of where things stand.
So Trump doesn't come down an escalator this time.
Instead, Trump enters the room at Mar-a-Lago and he announces that America's comeback begins right now.
You and all of those watching are the heart and soul of this incredible movement and the greatest country in the history of the world.
It's very simple.
There has never been anything like it, this great movement of ours.
Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, and my fellow citizens, America's comeback starts right now.
Okay, so I mean that I think was the best line of his speech was the very opener and that was in 9.04 p.m.
This thing continued until 10.04 p.m.
It just kept kind of going.
That was the best part of his speech.
Now, again, the speech kind of separates into a few different categories.
If we're going to go through the thing.
So first, there was the actual sort of pitch for Trump.
Things were excellent when I was president.
Things suck under Joe Biden.
He tried to spin the 2022 election as victory for him.
That, as we'll talk about, is not particularly accurate, but he has to do it, obviously.
Yes, that's kind of section one, is why I should be president.
Then he got to the Festivus section of the speech, which we'll get to in a bit.
The Festivus section is where he went into his grievances.
And honestly, the question is where the grievances are going to play.
The part about whether Donald Trump was a good president, I think that most people agree that Donald Trump did good things while he was president of the United States.
His post-presidency is another question.
I think most people agree that Joe Biden is a crappy president.
The real question is whether Trump is going to be able to channel his grievances into grievances on behalf of everybody else.
That was section two, was the Festivus section of the speech.
And then there was the State of the Union section of the speech where he just started kind of throwing out policy ideas.
So we begin with the actual core of the speech, which is, America is great under me and it sucks under Joe Biden.
And fair enough, here was Donald Trump talking about how the world was at peace when he was president.
My opponents made me out to be a warmonger.
And just a terrible person who would immediately go into war.
They said during the 2016 campaign that if he becomes president, there will never be a war within weeks.
And we will have wars like you've never seen before.
It will happen immediately.
And yet, I've gone decades, decades, without a war, the first president to do it for that long a period.
The world was at peace, America was prospering, and our country was on track for an amazing future.
Because I made big promises to the American people, and unlike other presidents, I kept my promises.
Okay, all of that is his best pitch, right?
Except for the part where there hasn't been war for decades.
I don't know what that part is about.
That's not true.
But what he's saying there, that the world was at peace, that we were set for a great economic recovery, that the economy was excellent under Donald.
I mean, all of that is true.
I wish that had been the campaign of 2020.
That would have been amazing.
Right?
If the campaign of 2020 had been, look at all these amazing things I'm doing.
Also, we're going to work hard to reopen the economy.
We've got the vaccines on track.
So guys, stick with me.
We have a plan.
And that'd been the entire campaign.
I think he would still be president of the United States right now.
So rerunning that campaign in 2024 is what he has to do.
He also went out of his way to make jokes about Joe Biden.
And listen, I appreciate a good joke about Joe Biden.
Here is Donald Trump pointing out that he's alive while Joe Biden is falling asleep at global conferences.
People are going absolutely wild and crazy, and they're not happy.
They're very, very angry.
Now we have a president who falls asleep at global conferences.
Was held in contempt by the British Parliament over Afghanistan.
They're going wild and crazy!
Okay, this is best Trump, right?
Best Trump is where he's like slapping at Joe Biden for being narcoleptic.
I will admit, very, very funny.
I enjoy that.
And then Trump got to the section where he sort of had to, I would say, recapitulate the 2022 election.
He has sort of recast it as a win for himself.
Because the problem for Trump in the 2022 election is that in the swing states, he endorsed in primaries a lot of candidates who then went on to lose.
And he didn't give them a lot of money.
And virtually all of the candidates who are in sort of the most contested areas and Trump got behind did really, really poorly.
So his record in the midterms was not good.
He has to recapitulate that as a big win for Republicans driven by him.
Now, good luck with that.
I don't think that that dog hunts.
I think most Americans, most, most Republicans are still extraordinarily disappointed about the results of last week's election because that was supposed to be a wave election.
And instead it was barely a trickle.
Republicans are going to take the house by like two seats.
That is not a good result, and they lost the Senate.
So again, Trump has to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse here, so he does his best.
Exactly one week ago, our citizens voted in the important midterm elections.
And despite a ridiculously long and unnecessary period of waiting, far longer in fact than any third world country, just a short time ago, the Republicans won back control of the House of Representatives.
And it was with a great Trump-endorsed candidate, Congressman-elect Kevin Kiley, who is a fantastic person.
Okay, and then he made his final point here, which is that Nancy Pelosi is fired, so that means it's a big win.
Okay, well, getting rid of Nancy Pelosi was sort of a given.
Let's be real about this.
The baseline was that Republicans were going to take the house.
There's almost no way for them not to take the house, and they almost blew it anyway.
Here's Trump trying to play that as victory.
Again, he has to, politically speaking.
I don't blame him for that.
It's what he has to do.
He has to.
Trump's brand is built on winning.
The problem for him is that he didn't win in 2020.
He lost two Senate seats in Georgia in 2021, and his candidates lost a bevy of races in 2022 in the greatest single first-term underperformance by an opposing party in modern American history.
So he has to somehow come up with a victory.
So what he's going to come up with is Nancy Pelosi as Speaker.
Yeah, that's a victory.
It just wasn't the baseline of what we were looking for.
And it's going to be a very hard, it's going to be a rather unworkable majority to have a majority of like two votes in the House.
But with all that said, again, he's got to do what he's got to do.
Here's Trump.
Breaking the radical Democrats grip on Congress was crucial.
So in other words, because of our great congressmen and all of our great congressmen and congresswomen We have taken over Congress.
Nancy Pelosi has been fired.
Okay, that's not because of him.
I mean, the reality is that it was a bunch of moderate Republicans in New York who put Republicans over the top in the House, and virtually all of them don't even want him to run.
So on a factual level, what he's saying is not true, that he was like the guy who put Republicans over the top.
Factually speaking, he was the guy who kind of nearly prevented Republicans from going over the top in the House and did prevent them from going over the top in the Senate.
But again, he's running for president.
So of course he's going to play this in the most positive possible light.
I just think that most Republicans are not on board for that.
We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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Okay, finally, he gets to his announcement of the candidacy.
It took him a while to get here.
So, finally, he said he was going to announce his candidacy for president, and in the process, he expanded MAGA.
He's not just going to make America great again.
He's going to go even further.
America won't just be great.
America will also be glorious.
There is the president.
In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.
Together we will be taking on the most corrupt forces and entrenched interests imaginable.
Our country is in a Horrible state.
We're in grave trouble.
This is not a task for a politician or a conventional candidate.
This is a task for a great movement that embodies the courage, confidence and the spirit of the American people.
So there are a couple of things that he says there.
One is that apparently MAGA has now been expanded.
We're going to make America great and glorious, spectacular and gorgeous, tremendous and groovy and grand.
We will call it the MAGAGA SAGA TAGAGA movement.
MAGAGA SAGA TAGAGA movement will be- Okay, so.
Is it MAGAGA?
I think it's just MAGAGA.
I think he went off script there to make America glorious as well as great.
But he then goes out of his way to kind of subtly sideswipe all of the other candidates.
That it won't take a conventional po- You were president, dude.
Let's be real about this.
He's campaigning as an anti-establishment non-politician.
He was the president.
He's running the same campaign playbook he did in 2015.
That's not the right playbook.
Again, he has a lot to brag about.
He was the president of the United States.
The first part of his speech was the part that actually matters.
But then he's running as You're not an outsider.
You are the president of the United States.
You're the titular leader of the Republican Party, like right now.
You are the establishment in many ways.
Nobody in the kind of formal Republican Party has gone up against Trump.
And they're all afraid of him.
So this notion that he's sort of running as an outsider, I don't think that it has the same sort of appeal because he's in control of the levers.
And he has been in control of the levers since 2016 when he won the nomination.
So it's kind of a weird take.
And the notion, again, that he is separate from the conventional politicians.
Presumably what he means here is Ron Desangimonious.
Ron, the good old Ron.
By the way, I don't think that nickname is going to stick.
I think pretty soon you're going to see Trump go after his height, right?
It'll be little Ron, small Ron, short Ron.
Short round run!
That's where this is going.
We all know where it's going.
But the fact that Trump is trying to distinguish himself, that's why he launched early.
The reason he launched early, he's not in the same position that he was in 2015 when he came in like Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball.
Right now, he is an established politician, was the President of the United States, and who has run two presidential campaigns.
And running as an outsider is a strange take that I don't think is going to play again.
Instead, it seems like what he's trying to do is suggest that it's about, quote-unquote, the movement.
So he says, it's not just a campaign, it's a quest to save the country.
It's bigger than me.
Okay, again, it's a pitch, it's a pitch.
I think it's sort of undercut by the Festivus section of the speech, but this is pitch.
We need everyone involved.
We need everyone's help.
We need to look out for one another.
We need to be friends.
And we need every patriot on board.
Because this is not just a campaign.
This is a quest to save our country.
Talking about saving our country.
Okay, so that's the pitch.
That was the original pitch, is I was a good president, Joe Biden was a bad president, we don't need a conventional politician, we need an outsider, even though I'm pretty establishment at this point.
Again, when you control the leaves of power, you're no longer the anti-establishment candidate.
You are the establishment candidate, just formally speaking.
That's the pitch.
And then we get to the Festivus section.
The Festivus section is where Trump sort of plays himself as a victim of nefarious forces.
This is the part that his crowd actually wants from him.
So the original part of the speech, that's for like everybody.
And then there's the part that's just for sort of the Trump crowd, the people who love Trump.
Because Trump's entire pitch has been, I take bullets for you.
And so this is the part where he is both great MAGA warrior or MAGAGA SAGA TAGA warrior, but also the most victimized man in America.
And again, there's truth to the idea that people despise him on the left and have used nefarious means in order to take him down.
This is certainly true during his presidency.
This is the dirty secret of the campaign, is that the more fire he draws, the stronger Trump becomes.
This has always been true of Trump.
Trump is like Doomsday in DC Comics.
The more energy you expend attacking him, the more he grows.
Which is why, again, if you're a rival of Donald Trump, the best thing that you can do is not engage.
You should stay far, far away.
You should let him sort of punch himself out.
George Foreman sticking against Muhammad Ali style, just strategically speaking.
So this is the thing that I think a lot of people love about him, is the fact that he is actually the complaints.
Like all the things the left hates about him the most, which is that he's constantly complaining about how he's victimized and all this.
People on the right feel as though they have been victimized by the left.
They feel as though they've been targeted by the government.
They feel as though the cultural forces are arrayed against them.
And so when he complains about this stuff, they feel solidarity with Trump.
People see this as a weakness of Trump.
It actually isn't a weakness of Trump.
It's a strength of Trump, at least with his base.
Now, do I think that runs broad spectrum?
I don't think the American people are truly invested in candidates who treat themselves as victims.
I think that's off-putting to the American people.
But to the base, Many of whom understand that the forces of culture and the forces of government and the forces of academia and the forces of federal law enforcement, like there are a lot of things.
The educational system are arrayed against their interests.
Him complaining about it actually isn't a bug, it's a feature.
So he did a lot of that last night.
Trump, near the very beginning of the speech actually, implied that China had stolen the 2020 election, which is a new theory I hadn't heard before.
No president had ever sought or received one dollar for our country from China until I came along and we were getting hundreds of billions of dollars.
Many people think that because of this, China played a very active role in the 2020 election.
Just saying.
Just saying.
Election.
OK, so there's there's a new theory of interference in the 2020.
First, it was that the votes were faked.
Including the raid of a very beautiful house that sits right here.
The raid of Mar-a-Lago, think of it.
And I say, why didn't you raid Bush's place?
in 2020. OK, fine. And then he goes on to talk about the raid on Mar-a-Lago. And this is like well into the speech. This is 50 minutes into the speech. A lot of people are already asleep at this point. But here here's Trump, including the raid of a very beautiful house that sits right here. The raid of Mar-a-Lago. Think of it.
And I say, why didn't you raid Bush's place? Why didn't you raid Clinton? Thirty two thousand emails.
Why didn't you raid Clinton's place?
Why didn't you do Obama, who took a lot of things with him?
Well, I mean, not to get technical, but the reason is because the National Archives approached Trump about 27 times and asked him for the documents and he didn't turn them over.
Again, do I think that means that the FBI should have gone into his house searching for these crucial, vital documents?
No.
Do I think that Trump should be prosecuted over this nonsense?
No.
I think it's very difficult to hold that standard about the mishandling of classified information when Hillary Clinton had it on an internet server, which James Comey admitted could have been hacked and probably was hacked by foreign adversaries, while Trump had printed out documents in a box in the back room.
My one boy.
Now the FBI is admitting that he did it not because he was going to sell it to the Russians or the Chinese, but because he just likes documents.
And Trump was like, I like that document.
It has Kim Jong-un's signature on it.
I will keep it forever.
Like that.
That's not a good reason to prosecute Donald Trump.
So I get it.
I get it.
He continued along these lines.
He suggested that his son Eric was being put upon in the manner of Al Capone, which is a strange comparison because Al Capone was an actual criminal.
I assume Eric is not.
My one boy stand up, Eric.
I think he got more subpoenas than any man in the history of our country.
So unfair.
Al Capone, you all heard of the great gangster?
Al Capone got far less.
Billy the Kid got almost none.
Jesse James, no.
Eric Trump got more subpoenas.
He's a PhD in subpoenas.
They come from Congress.
I will say, I love Trump's frames of reference.
They're great.
I mean, like, his criminal frame of reference ends about 1950.
Like, all the criminals he's naming are, like, Billy the Kid, who I believe was killed in the 1890s.
Jesse James.
I don't know if he was watching the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford, but what exactly happened here?
Al Capone is just watching the end.
I was watching The Untouchables.
Al Capone, very victimized man.
All he wanted was to give the people a little bit of...
It's entertaining.
It is definitely.
OK.
And then Trump got to the sort of State of the Union section.
It's a very, very long speech.
This is the part.
The question is, when he dropped the bomb and he's going to run again, does that have impact?
The length of the speech weighs against that.
He got into the State of the Union section of the speech by talking about all the magical things that he wants.
Some are good.
Some are strange.
He said, for example, he wants to abolish all the Biden COVID mandates.
Good.
I mean, yes, that would be good.
I assume that will be a predicate for literally any Republican campaign, but okay.
As commander-in-chief, I will get Biden's radical left ideology out of our military.
And I did.
I did.
And in the first day, they put it back.
They signed an executive order and they put it back.
It was gone.
We will abolish every Biden COVID mandate and rehire every patriot who was fired from our military with an apology and full back pay.
Okay, I mean, that's good.
I wish you hadn't put Anthony Fauci in charge of the entire country's COVID policy.
That would have been better.
You were president during the beginning of COVID, and I think a lot of people are going to remember that.
He also pledged to plant a flag on the surface of Mars.
I like when presidents make promises that they don't actually have any way to achieve.
It's like when Joe Biden's like, I'm gonna cure cancer, all we need to do, if we take a fire hose of money, and we shoot it at cancer, a man dressed in a cancer outfit, we shoot him with a fire hose of money, like a shotgun, bang, bang, twice in the air, with a fire hose of money, and cancer will go away, we'll cure it, by some ball, cancer.
That's not actually how you solve scientific problems.
But here's President Trump pledging that he's gonna put a flag on the surface of Mars.
We'll explore new universes!
Space is the final frontier!
We will defend life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We will expand the frontiers of human knowledge and extend the horizons of human achievement.
And we will plant our beautiful American flag very soon on the surface of Mars, which I got started.
We will there's we will seek out new life, new civilizations.
We will boldly go where no man.
I mean, honestly, I'm kind of into it.
I like Space Force.
I'm into Space Force.
He also said he wants congressional term limits.
And this is really funny because a lot of people on the right are like, that's amazing!
I would also love congressional term limits.
Yeah, try getting it through a Democratic Senate.
Also, why is that Senate Democratic right now?
You think the Democratic Senator is going to vote for term limits?
How do you think that's going to go exactly?
To further drain the swamp, I will push for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress.
It's time.
It's true.
And I will ask for a permanent ban on taxpayer funding of campaigns.
A lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress and cabinet members.
Yeah.
Bye.
OK, I mean, fine.
All right.
You got a Democratic Senate.
But all this is fine again.
So here is the final verdict on this.
It's fine.
He's allowed to run again.
Do I think that it has all of the electricity of 2015?
Not even close.
Do I think the presentation was lackluster?
I do.
Do I think it took way too long?
Yes.
Does he have the upper hand in the primaries?
Of course.
He's the former president of the United States, the built-in base of 30%.
So yes.
Is he going to recapture the excitement of the base?
After the debacle of 2020, 2021, and 2022, I have doubts.
The door is very much open on the nomination in 2024, and anybody who's trying to close that door is going to have a real hard time of it this early, when literally no one else is in the race or is going to get in the race for another eight months.
So it's something Trump had to do.
I don't know that he had to do it this early.
I think it's actually poor strategy to do it this early.
I think he would've been better off sitting it out.
Because then you force everybody else to basically make the calculation.
Do I want to get in and get clocked by this guy?
He hasn't even jumped in yet.
Now everybody gets to sit out and watch this thing play for eight months and see how, I mean, maybe Trump does amazing and he's consolidating the base and 75% of Republicans are into him.
Or maybe he exhausts everybody.
And the polls keep coming out showing independents don't like him.
And it becomes clear to people that he's not going to win re-election.
There's a lot of time and time is not Donald Trump's friend here.
Time is Donald Trump's enemy.
Launching this early is, I think, a strategic error by the former president.
Now, it doesn't mean, again, it doesn't mean he can't win.
He certainly can.
He's a very powerful figure.
He's a unique figure in American politics.
The easiest way for him to win is something that the media are doing literally right now.
We'll get into that in one second.
Well, folks, here at The Daily Wire, we're doing everything we can to loosen the left's grip on culture.
We have been fighting them on every available front.
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Our investigations in Loudoun County leading to the Democratic gubernatorial candidate losing.
We fought back against OSHA.
We actually sued the Biden administration to prevent the OSHA vaccine mandate from going forward.
All this is a lot of work.
There's still a long way to go, but you can help in two simple steps.
One, stop shaving with your woke razor.
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That's jeremysrazors.com today.
Okay, so.
The easiest path for Donald Trump to regain the nomination and then the presidency is, as I say, for people to attack him with alacrity.
Just go after him.
Particularly the left.
The left or anybody who's seen as sort of establishment Republican.
National Review put out a piece today titled No.
That was literally the name of the piece, just No.
That's exactly what Trump wants.
I mean, strategically speaking, what Trump wants is an opposition to run against.
He needs it.
He needs the pressure.
The worst thing for Trump is he jumps in, cannonball in the pool, and no one else in the pool, and they're all like, okay, I guess someone jumped in the pool.
If that's what happens to Trump, then he hasn't generated the attention he needs.
Trump thrives on opposition.
He loves it.
He's a street fighter, he's a pugilist, and this is what he needs, this is what he wants.
He's oppositional.
That is his attitude toward life, it is his attitude toward politics.
If there's nothing for him to push against, that's a problem for him.
The media actually want him nominated because they think that he's very beatable.
And so they are eager.
I mean, first of all, they make tons of money off Donald Trump.
The Washington Post, the New York Times.
I mean, Washington Post literally put up a slogan, Democracy Dies in Darkness, after the 2016 election because they basically had declared themselves enemies of Donald Trump.
The New York Times blew up in terms of subscriber numbers when Donald Trump was president, and then it sort of flatlined after he wasn't president anymore.
CNN's ratings were so much better when Trump was president.
MSNBC was doing amazing when Trump was president.
In other words, the entire media infrastructure desperately wants Trump for two reasons.
One, they love the guy.
Their people despise Trump, and they want to talk about how much they despise Trump.
It makes them feel morally superior.
Two, so there's the money reason.
Two, they think Trump's going to lose.
They think he's going to lose because his approval ratings right now are 44% and in head-to-head matchups against Biden, he loses.
And so they think, okay, well, he underperformed in 2020 and 2021 and 2022.
Let's do it again.
Let's rerun this playbook.
Why do you think that Joe Biden was sending out fundraising emails literally in the middle of Trump's speech?
He literally was sending fundraising emails in the middle of the speech because he knows that he can raise tremendous money from Democrats simply by uttering Trump's name.
It's why Democrats ran against Trump in this election cycle.
They didn't run against Kevin McCarthy.
They didn't run against pretty much anybody else.
It was all Trump and quote-unquote the Trump candidates.
It was the mega-mega, saga-jaga Republicans.
The ultra-mega, super-duper, pooper-scooper Republicans.
And that's why Biden did that.
He sent out an email last night.
Tonight, Donald Trump announced he's running again.
I'm going to let you in on a secret.
He will fail.
In a moment, I'm going to tell you why.
But people like you stepping up will be a big part of how it's done.
Blue groups last night raised an enormous sum of cash.
They did great.
So they want Trump.
And so this allows them to play their favorite game, which is we will call Trump names.
Trump will then thrive on that because they know, the media know, whatever they say, Republicans will do the opposite.
Good, bad, or indifferent.
If Democrats declare that Donald Trump is the worst person in the world, Republicans will immediately reject the media and say, no, no, no, he's the greatest.
And it works like all the time.
Sometimes it works to their benefit, right?
Sometimes it works to the benefit of Republicans.
Media labeled Ron DeSantis the enemy of the people in 2020.
And now Ron DeSantis won Florida by 20 points.
Sometimes it's the media saying, Marjorie Taylor Greene is the danger to the Republican.
Suddenly Marjorie Taylor Greene is like doing photo ops with Trump because the base is like, well, if the left takes Marjorie Taylor Greene, she must be the greatest.
Not just like a Republican, the best Republican.
And so this is the game they're playing with Trump.
It's actually what he wants, which is why you are seeing the media do it in part.
And they get to win all and this is winning for the media involves making money and also achieving your political results.
And again, they may be cruising for a bruising.
They may get Trump nominated and then lose to him as they did in 2016.
Or maybe maybe they do what they actually did in a bunch of Republican primaries.
Democrats, remember, spent millions of dollars to put Trump backed candidates over the top in places like New Hampshire, specifically because they thought they were weak and they were right.
It was a great return on investment.
Where Democrats were able to get more MAGA candidates nominated in states during the 2022 election, those people generally lost.
It was really cynical and really ugly, and they did it.
And they're doing the same thing with Trump himself now.
This is why NPR runs headlines like this.
Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power, has filed to run for president again in 2024.
Why do you think NPR is running that headline?
Is that an objective headline?
Or is NPR attempting to tweak Trump?
And tweak his supporters?
So they're all like, you know what, screw you, I like the guy.
Washington Post, same thing.
Trump, who as president fomented an insurrection, says he is running again.
You think the Washington Post is doing that because they are following objective journalism?
I mean, I could just as easily run a headline about Joe Biden.
Joe Biden, about whom there are serious mental health questions, age questions, and corruption questions, and who has been credibly accused of forcible sexual assault.
Runs for president again.
I can do that too.
Anyone can play that game.
It's not hard to play that game.
The question is why they're playing the game.
And the answer is, one, they make tons of money off it.
And two, they achieve their political goals.
They please their base by attacking Trump.
Their base loves it.
And also, they cause Republicans to fall into the backing Trump category in opposition.
That's the game.
And that's the goal.
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 the media's attacks on Trump and what they are hoping to accomplish.
Plus, Matt Walsh stops by to talk about his marriage conversation with Joe Rogan.
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