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March 22, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:21
The Battle Royale Begins: Ron vs. Don
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Well, last night, the big news was that there's an interview between Ron DeSantis and Piers Morgan.
It is supposed to air on Thursday.
There is a sit-down interview between Piers Morgan and DeSantis.
It is unclear when exactly this was filmed.
And that's a little bit important, simply because DeSantis opens up on some of his critiques of Donald Trump.
If this was filmed, for example, after Trump had made clear that he thinks he's going to be arrested this week, and this is a major tactical blunder by DeSantis.
It was filmed before he'd sort of understand what he is doing.
In any case, we're going to go through the politics of this.
Here is what DeSantis actually has to say.
So, Piers Morgan asked DeSantis about the fact that Trump has been nicknaming him and calling him Miranda Sanctimonious and all the rest of this kind of stuff.
And here was DeSantis' good answer.
What is your favorite nickname that Trump's given you so far?
Is it Ron DeSanctimonious or Meatball Ron?
Even he went off Meatball Ron.
I don't know how to spell DeSanctimonious.
I don't really know what it means, but I kind of like it.
It's long.
It's got a lot of vowels.
I mean, so we'll go with that.
That's fine.
You can call me whatever you want.
I mean, just as long as you also call me a winner.
And it's that last line that DeSantis is going to run on, that he is, in fact, a winner.
And as we'll get to in just a second, when it comes to the politics of the primary, there are really three issues at play.
And the first one is, who do you think is more of a winner, DeSantis or Trump?
Because I effectively think that at this point, this is a two-man race.
He also got into some of his deeper critiques of Trump as president.
He said, I also just think in terms of my approach to leadership, I get personnel in the government who have the agenda of the people and share our agenda.
Which, of course, is correct.
I mean, one of the big problems for Trump is that he was constantly staffing around him people who did not share his agenda, including, by the way, Michael Cohen.
Michael Cohen was his personal lawyer for years, and it is Michael Cohen's testimony upon which this Manhattan DA is now going to bring this flimsy indictment against Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has surrounded himself his entire career with not the best people.
As it turns out, he was constantly firing people inside his administration.
He had an incredibly leaky administration.
He didn't fire all the people in the deep state who were targeting him, for example.
And that was one of the things that DeSantis pointed out about, for example, Anthony Fauci.
He suggested that it was a mistake for Trump not to fire Anthony Fauci, considering he was the president of the United States, which, of course, is correct.
DeSantis said, we really focus on knocking out victories day after day.
If I get involved in all the undertow, I would not be able to be an effective governor.
He says, you know, with regard to Fauci, he suggested that Fauci probably should have been fired by Trump and that there was really no reason for Trump not to fire him.
That his leadership style in Florida was very different by nature, which of course is in fact true.
Again, all those critiques are well taken.
All those critiques are very real.
Unlike the Trump critiques of DeSantis, which are basically calling him fat by calling him Meatball Ron, or suggesting that he is holier than thou with Ron DeSanctimonious, or tweeting out random accusations about him supposedly harassing underage girls or maybe boys, literally a thing that Donald Trump tweeted over the weekend, everything that DeSantis says is substantive.
But that's not really the question here.
The real question here is a strategic one.
Because this primary is going to be about three main issues, I think.
The first one, as I mentioned, is who is more of a winner?
So here you have the evidence of your eyes and then you have the evidence of your heart.
And these two things are going to be in a battle for Republican voters.
The evidence of your eyes that Ron DeSantis is more of a winner than Donald Trump, at least over the past four years.
Because if you look at the last election cycle, every major Senate candidate that Trump endorsed lost.
Hershel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona, Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, Don Balduck in New Hampshire.
All of them lost.
A bunch of congressional candidates that Trump liked didn't do particularly well in the last election cycle.
And that was following a 2021 election cycle in which Donald Trump was almost solely responsible for the loss of two Georgia Senate seats, which resulted in the biggest spending binge in American history under Joe Biden.
Because if Republicans even hold one of those seats, then none of that spending gets passed.
So Donald Trump's record since 2016 has been one of unbridled failure in terms of elections.
Not in terms of policy, he did a lot of wonderful things as president.
But in 2018, he got his clock clean.
In 2020, he lost to Biden and Republicans outperformed him along nearly every other line.
In 2021, he lost two Georgia Senate seats by single-handedly intervening in those Georgia Senate races.
And in 2022, all of his handpicked candidates in a very competitive Senate Run for a Republican Party, lost.
So that is a bad record.
Meanwhile, DeSantis in 2018 got elected by the thinnest of margins, by 0.4% in the state of Florida, and he turned that into a 20-point victory in Florida, and he picked up congressional seats, and he won a supermajority in the legislature.
There was a wave, a red wave, in 2022, but it was relegated to the Sunshine State.
That was the only red wave in America was happening in Florida.
So in terms of just the pure Evidence of your eyes, when you look at who is more of a winner, at least in the foreseeable past, what you see is that DeSantis is more of a winner.
However, that's at war with the battle inside the Republican heart, because there is this myth of Trump that's been built since 2016.
And the myth of Trump goes something like this.
No one could have beat Hillary Clinton except for Trump.
No one.
Hillary Clinton was a juggernaut.
And Trump came along, came out of nowhere, put down everything he was doing, came down that escalator, faced all the slings and arrows up to and including the p-word tape and all the rest of it.
And just kept walking and ended up defeating Hillary Clinton.
And it was a miracle.
It was a miracle because, again, that relies on another piece of mythos, the 2012 mythos, which is that Democrats were never going to lose another election.
After 2012, Democrats bought into the idea that they had created a durable minority-majority coalition, along with college-educated white ladies, and that that coalition would be unbreakable for the rest of time after Barack Obama won re-election in 2012, beating Mitt Romney despite losing something like 3 million votes from 2008 to 2012.
Normally that doesn't happen.
If you're an incumbent, you usually gain votes.
You don't lose votes and still retain the presidency.
But that's exactly what Barack Obama did.
And so a theory went out from the Democrats that Democrats would never lose again.
And that was the theory that a lot of Republicans bought into after 2012 as well.
And then along comes Trump and he breaks that myth, right?
The myth is now that Donald Trump is a unique character who is able to defeat all the forces of political gravity.
They just don't apply to him.
They don't apply to him.
And when Presented with the evidence of your eyes, right, which is that he lost in 2018, lost in 2020, 2021, 2022.
When presented with that evidence, people go with the evidence of their heart very often.
They'll say, well, he didn't lose.
He didn't lose.
You know, all Republican presidents are going to lose the midterms.
People usually lose the midterms.
And then in 2020, when Trump claims that fraud happened and that he lost fraudulently, a lot of people like, well, he is a miracle man from 2016.
So if he lost in 2020, it must have been because the only way you can defeat a miracle man is to cheat.
So it must have been that the left cheated.
Not by setting the rules differently.
I agree.
That was a cheat.
Not by using the media as the baton.
I agree that's a cheat.
But by actively changing the nature of vote outcomes in states, as Donald Trump suggested, without evidence that they had.
And then refused to give him the presidency along Donald Trump's lines by certifying elections that were illegitimate and all of that kind of stuff.
So that's the mythos.
It's the head versus the heart when it comes to DeSantis versus Trump in terms of who is more likely to be a winner, which is a big issue in a Republican primary.
In a second, we'll get to all the other issues in the Republican primary now that the battle has been joined, apparently, between Trump and DeSantis.
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Okay, so, question number one for Republican primary voters is going to be who's more of a winner, DeSantis or Trump?
As we say, that is a battle of head versus heart.
Head, DeSantis.
Heart for a lot of Republicans, Trump.
Hey, the second question is going to be who will govern better?
And this is sort of taking a backseat at this point, because frankly, I don't think that many Republican primary voters even think about governance.
But this is a clear win for DeSantis.
If you're talking about who is going to govern better, Donald Trump did some good things as president, and he was largely thwarted by his own team or his own inability to actually pull the levers on the system.
He was constantly being checked and balanced by people inside his own administration.
He was constantly being destroyed from within by people working in the deep state.
DeSantis, by contrast, came into the governorship of Florida.
He fired everyone who was going to impede his agenda.
He stacked the executive branch with people who were loyal to him.
And then he proceeded to ram through an extremely conservative agenda.
An agenda that was popular, by the way, with the voters of Florida because he's smart and meticulous in how he governs.
In terms of who would be, just forget all the other questions.
Who would be better at running the executive office of the presidency?
I don't think there's any question that DeSantis would be better at that.
But that's a secondary issue.
The primary issue is going to be who is more of a winner.
And that is connected to this tertiary issue, this third issue.
And this is the one that's going to be really hard for DeSantis to thread the needle on.
And this is why I think it was a tactical blunder for him to do this interview with Morgan, where he actually opened up the guns.
And this is why I really, really suspect this interview with Piers Morgan was done before all the chaos of the last weekend.
Remember, it's only Wednesday right now.
It takes a while in post-production to actually put this stuff together.
They're using it as a preview for the interview tomorrow night.
So my guess is, again, that this interview with DeSantis was done probably Thursday or Friday before all the chaos of the weekend in which it became clear that Trump is likely going to be indicted sometime this week.
That third question, that tertiary question, is the question of loyalty to Trump.
So let's just get this straight.
If the 2024 primaries are going to be a loyalty test to Trump, Trump wins.
I mean, it's just that simple.
Because there is no one more loyal to Donald Trump than Donald Trump.
I mean, end of story.
If the question is, which candidate is going to show the most loyalty to Trump, Trump wins.
We played this game in 2016, by the way.
You'll recall that Ted Cruz in 2016 basically tried to ride Trump's coattails all the way, never saying a bad word about Donald Trump the entire race, and then hoping that Trump was going to fall over and Ted Cruz was going to take the nomination.
And it turns out that that was a horrible strategy because he rode Donald Trump's coattails all the way to second place until Donald Trump turned around and just clocked him directly in the face by calling his wife ugly and his dad the murderer of JFK.
And Cruz took it.
And then he had to go to the primary, and then he went to the convention.
And you'll remember that he tried to have the baby.
And listen, I know Ted, I really like Ted.
This is a tactical blunder of extreme proportions.
Ted said, you'll remember at the RNC convention in 2016, follow your heart, which all the Trump, he thought he was going to split the baby.
He thought he was going to be saying to the Trump voters, vote for Trump.
And to the not Trump voters, don't vote for Trump.
And everybody took it the opposite way.
All the not Trump voters were like, oh, we can see what you're doing.
You kind of want us to vote for Trump.
And all the Trump voters were like, you want us not to vote for Trump.
So he ended up with no friends, right?
You can't play that game.
If the game is loyalty to Trump, no one beats Trump.
End of story.
Done.
The primaries are already over.
I don't think it's quite about that.
I don't think the primaries are quite over.
I think that the Republican feeling about Trump is not that you can't criticize Trump.
I think the Republican feeling about Trump is generally you cannot give ammunition to people who spend their lives criticizing Trump.
You cannot give the left the fodder to go after a fellow Republican.
Now, the hard part of this for other Republican candidates is Trump does this all day long to them.
Trump does not abide by this rule.
Trump is undeterred by Reagan's 11th commandment.
He spends all day, every day attacking other Republicans.
It's been true since the beginning of his 2015 presidential run when he attacked John McCain.
He's been doing this the entire time.
It's a great success.
Because he's operating essentially as a rogue political actor.
He expects everybody else in the Republican Party never to say a bad word about him.
Like literally any bad word about him.
Which a lot of his supporters make it appear that he has a glass jaw this way.
Because if you say the mildest word of reproach about Trump, a lot of people get very, very angry very, very quickly.
Hey, but Trump can say whatever he wants about other candidates.
He can attack candidates' wives.
He can suggest that Ron DeSantis is grooming young girls and or is gay.
He can do whatever he wants, Donald Trump.
And there's no expectation of good behavior from Trump.
And there's kind of a soft bigotry of low expectations for Trump because Trump is being Trump and Trump gets to be Trump and no one else gets to be Trump.
OK, fine.
What this means, though, is that if you are going to critique Trump, I think that first of all, I think most Trump supporters are OK with hearing critiques of Trump.
If they hadn't been, they wouldn't listen to this program.
I try to be honest about my critiques of Donald Trump.
I have been all the way along.
With that said, I think that what people really don't want is for you to give fodder to the other side.
If we are in a binary political situation in which reactionary politics is the order of the day, and in which attacks on Trump are expected to be met with fury by virtually all Republicans, if you don't show the proper anger at the attackers, not in defense of Trump, but at the attackers, then people are going to start to get angry.
And so as a tactical blunder in the middle of what appears to be just a frivolous and empty indictment by a Manhattan DA against Trump, For there to be an interview with DeSantis in which he criticizes Trump at the same time.
Now, again, that's a really tough needle to thread because the media is always attacking Trump.
The media, they're always looking to facilitate conflict between Trump and other candidates.
They're always looking to find whatever brick they can throw at Trump.
And so if the rule is I can't say anything that the media are going to use against Trump, you literally can never say anything about Trump ever because the media will use anything they can get their hands on to attack Trump for a couple of purposes.
One, they like to elevate Trump.
It's great for their ratings.
And two, they like to elevate Trump because they think he's more beatable than DeSantis.
If you ask in the halls of media, I know a lot of people in the legacy media, I can tell you, they all are more scared of Ron DeSantis winning than of Donald Trump.
They believe, and I think the data back them, that if Trump runs against Biden, there's a very solid shot that Trump loses to Biden.
The reason being that in 2020, he lost by 7 million popular votes to Joe Biden, and it's hard to imagine that even a malicious targeting of Donald Trump is going to switch a lot of independence over to Trump.
You're not going to see a lot of people who voted against Trump who are like, well, now that he's being indicted on campaign finance charges frivolously, I guess I'm going to vote for him.
And who are those voters?
I'm not sure they exist.
It's going to get Republicans very passionate to go to the polls.
Get it.
I'm in.
But is it going to get independents?
Suburban women?
Are suburban women who didn't vote for Trump by droves in the last election going to turn around and be like, well, I mean, he did pay off a porn star and that was and now he's being maliciously targeted by a prosecutor for all of that.
You know, I probably am going to vote for him.
Who are those people?
But again, that's a very difficult needle to thread because in the era of reactionary politics, any criticism of Trump is going to be used by the media.
And so this means it's very hard for a Republican candidate to give a good criticism of Trump.
And that means that timing matters a lot.
And so the timing that you saw right here, I agree with all the critiques that DeSantis is making of Trump.
I think that he did a terrible job in terms of who he hired and who he fired inside the executive branch.
I think he should have cleaned out the deep state right away.
I think that Donald Trump's governance on COVID was a mess, frankly.
And I think it hurt him pretty bad in 2020.
It was Donald Trump who was criticizing Brian Kemp for opening up Georgia and criticizing Ron DeSantis for opening up the beaches.
It was Donald Trump who was following Anthony Fauci and all the rest.
OK, so that was a mess.
And so DeSantis' critiques of Trump along those lines are well taken.
But the question is when you give the critiques, when is the time to do that?
How do you do that?
That is a real tactical question.
Because again, if the three questions of the primary are one, who's more of a winner?
We don't know, right?
I would say DeSantis.
Many people would say Trump.
Two, who will govern better?
I think that's a clear DeSantis win, but a secondary issue.
And three, are you going to give fodder to people who attack Republicans?
And that rule does not apply to Trump.
That imbalance is the hardest thing for any other Republican to navigate.
There are no rules for Trump.
Trump gets to do whatever he wants.
And if you're another Republican candidate, you are expected by the Republican base to kind of Attack Trump in Marcus of Queensberry fashion so that you don't give ammo to the people who hate Trump.
That's a very difficult needle to thread.
In just a second, we'll get to that frivolous indictment of Donald Trump because it is indeed quite frivolous.
It looks like the indictment may in fact come down today.
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Okay, so the Trump indictment is expected to come down probably sometime today.
According to the UK Daily Mail, Trump will likely be indicted on Wednesday.
He wouldn't appear before a judge in New York until next week.
Now again, on a political level, very good for Donald Trump because the more Trump is attacked, as I've said for years, he's like the doomsday monster.
The more electricity is sent his way, the more he ingests the electricity and grows.
So the more he is attacked, the more everybody else in the Republican field is expected to recede and sort of grant him the limelight.
And there is a feeling of, you know, my friend Jeremy Boring and I, we have we have another friend, Alan Estrin, who is a producer on Dennis Prager's program.
And Alan has said that he believes that Trump will likely win the nomination because this is Donald Trump's story and we're all just living in it.
And it does tend to feel like that a lot.
It feels like the black hole of political gravity In the universe right now is Trump.
And so everything revolves around Trump.
So when he gets indicted, all the attention snaps right back to Trump, like right away.
And so for him on a political level, that's a very good thing because all the Republicans come to his defense.
And if you are not sufficiently, if you're not sufficiently angry, or if you are, if you're not If you level any critique of Trump at this time, then you will be looked at askance by many members.
I get it.
Listen, I totally get it because when the guy's under attack, you don't want to be attacking him.
Totally understand.
OK, anyway, Trump is currently in Florida.
He's expected to be formally charged tomorrow, after which the Manhattan District Attorney's Office will reach out to Trump and his Secret Service detail to make arrangements for his surrender, according to the insider.
So all of that talk, by the way, about how Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, is supposed to stand in the way of an extradition, that was never an issue, as I mentioned yesterday on the show.
Number one, doesn't have the constitutional power to actually stop an extradition.
Two, Trump's people aren't requesting that he stop the extradition.
They want to go to New York and they want to do this quietly and they want to do this in the most legal possible fashion because the last thing that they want is the chaotic scene of some federal agent running into Mar-a-Lago and frog marching Donald Trump out in handcuffs after he loses some sort of extradition hearing.
They don't want that.
They want this to be done in sort of the most In sort of the nicest way.
They don't want a lot of pictures.
Like yesterday on Twitter, there are a lot of fake pictures of Donald Trump being arrested, resisting arrest.
Like that's what the resistance wants.
That's what the left wants.
That's what Trump does not want to give them.
So the New York Police Department, Metro Police Department, apparently, they're all expected to be in uniform as of Wednesday, ready for anything in the wake of a potential indictment.
An NYPD internal memo obtained by CNN shows officers are to be in uniform and prepared for deployment as of yesterday.
So presumably, they'll be getting ready all this week.
What happens next?
Well, we'll get into the actual rundown on the potential Trump indictment in just one second.
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Ready?
How's this indictment actually going to go down?
Politico has a pretty good rundown on this.
Basically, the idea is that the grand jury is going to vote.
All that is required is 12 out of 23 people to vote yes on an indictment.
So that's very likely to happen.
I mean, you're in New York.
The chances you can't find 12 New Yorkers to vote to indict a paper bag, really, really low.
If that happens, the vote will be recorded on a form and signed and taken by someone from the DA's office to either the clerk's office or to the office of the judge.
It'll be then placed in an envelope, sealed and stamped by the clerk.
Once the indictment is stamped, the DA's office will notify an attorney for Trump he has been indicted.
At that point, Trump is free to make that information public.
So the grand total delay between the grand jury voting and Trump revealing how they voted on Truth Social, That's gonna be like, I don't know, 13.2 seconds.
And we're gonna know real fast when Trump is indicted.
Because this case happens to be white collar and it's not like a violent crime or something, the DA's office will then ask Trump's attorney when he plans to come to New York to be arraigned.
The law does not require the defendant to turn himself in within a specific time frame, so there is some negotiation that could happen.
Whenever he comes to New York, he and his attorney will report to the DA's office where Trump will be arrested and booked.
That means that he will be fingerprinted.
He'll have his mug shot taken.
He might also get a DNA swab.
It's unclear exactly how Secret Service protection is going to affect all of this.
He then is taken to a judge.
The DA's office will ask for the indictment to be unsealed.
It's possible he would be handcuffed when he's transported from the DA's attorney office to court.
It is a short walk away within the same building, but presumably there will be photographers on hand and all the people on the left get their jollies that day because there's a picture of Trump in handcuffs.
At this point, he's arraigned.
That means he has to answer a plea of guilty or not guilty, and then he will be released because the charges that he is likely to face are non-bailable.
So all of those weird dreams that the left was having about, they're going to deny him bail.
They're going to keep him in jail.
No, that's not going to happen.
And he'll be released just like Steve Bannon was released like these people are not held.
It's a white collar crime that's being alleged.
It's a weak white collar crime at that.
Naturally, you can see that the sort of more passionate members of the resistance are very, very excited.
That would include, of course, Stormy Daniels, who seems more excited about the prospect of Donald Trump going to jail than she was allegedly to have sex with him.
So that, according to Stormy Daniels, didn't stop her, by the way.
This, according to her, she said, had so many orders come in today.
Thank you for the support.
I'm not even mad about having to go to the post office twice.
Only 24 more hours left to get this free gift.
With your order.
The order is porn with her in it.
So, only the classiest names.
Only the classiest names for the president.
So, Tiny paid me to frame himself?
You sound even dumber than he does during his illiterate ramblings.
I won't walk, I'll dance down the street when he is selected to go to jail.
Um, yeah.
Talk about a lady who's just, I mean, she's making a bank off that.
Not the way she thought she was.
She never made it on The Apprentice, but she's doing well.
Wow, it's a beautiful morning, she tweeted out.
It's always been my dream to sip coffee on my farm porch and watch my gorgeous horse graze.
Anything exciting going on today?
It's just so obnoxious.
It's so obnoxious.
Again, you know what would have prevented all this?
If the president in 2006 had not been allegedly having sex with Stormy Daniels at a weird golf event.
Or with Karen McDoodle or with any of these other folks.
But, you know, again, that does not mean that what's happening to Trump is fair, because it isn't.
Trump's lawyer for his party says this will be an all out war.
If he's indicted, things could get really hairy really quickly.
Here is Donald Trump's lawyer.
Theoretically speaking, though, if there's an indictment, if there's an arrest warrant, would you ask to have it done, you know, virtually?
And what do you expect?
What does that process look like?
They do what they want.
At that point, this is an all-out war.
An all-out war.
Donald Trump is the toughest human being I've ever met.
Most people are going to crumble under allegations like this and with the pressure he's under from political opponents weaponizing the justice system.
Donald Trump is not going to ask for anything from them.
Okay, so that's Joe Tacopina with Kimberly Guilfoyle, who of course is married to Donald Trump Jr.
So, what happens next?
I mean, nothing great.
Nothing great for the country.
That's why this indictment is a really bad idea.
And this is why I give some credit to CNN's Van Jones.
So, Van Jones and I disagree on pretty much everything.
I happen to know Van.
I think that he's a very nice person.
And he was like, yeah, this is a terrible idea.
Like, let's stand down on this.
He happens to be correct for the good of the country.
He happens to be correct.
There are not enough people on the left who actually care about the good of the country to recognize that this is correct.
You know, I was thinking the other day about the 2020 election.
You'll recall that Bernie Sanders, during the primaries, was in the early going up against Joe Biden.
And a lot of people on the right side of the aisle were like, yeah, we should back Bernie because Bernie is more likely to lose to Trump.
And I said at the time, I would much rather have Joe Biden as the nominee.
I didn't realize how crazy Joe Biden was going to be.
But even Joe Biden is not as crazy as Bernie.
Bernie's a full on Jeremy Corbyn, Noam Chomsky nutcase.
I said I'd rather have Joe Biden with what I said was a 40 to 45 percent shot at victory than Bernie Sanders with a 35 percent shot at victory because Bernie is more dangerous to the country than Biden.
That was not underestimating the danger of Biden.
That was saying the danger of Bernie was far greater.
These are decisions that you have to make in politics.
Credit to Van Jones here who's saying like, listen, you think Van Jones doesn't want Trump to go to jail?
I'm sure he does.
But Van Jones is like, this is a very bad idea, guys.
The Trump camp has said that Bragg is, quote, racist.
They have called this un-American.
I want to get your reaction to that.
Well, that's not fair.
I mean, listen, you can disagree with his decision to charge or to not charge, and people will disagree no matter what he does.
But the idea that he's a racist, frankly, there's a lot of white progressive voters in New York City that have been pushing him to do this.
Are they racist as well?
I just think that the reality is he's got to make a sober decision now.
I agree with David.
A charge like this, a porn star payoff seven years ago, somehow tied to the election but not really, it doesn't seem like the right way to go when you look at the history.
It's not going to judge Donald Trump based on Stormy Daniels.
That is correct.
Man Jones is totally correct.
So good for him for at least recognizing the reality of all that.
Meanwhile, Alvin Bragg is posturing as you would expect him to.
So the House of Representatives has said that they would like to investigate Alan Bragg over his decision to indict Donald Trump, saying like, this thing was dead.
Where is this coming from?
And this led Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA, who has not prosecuted pretty much any crime in the city of New York.
Short of murder, apparently.
Again, the reactionary nature of our politics is really bad for the country.
It's really ugly.
This idea that anybody who indicts Trump must be just glorious or that Trump's indictment means that Trump himself is spotless on every count.
And the lack of nuance is really quite striking.
But you know who gains from all of this?
The person who's actually gaining.
So there's a lot of talk about Trump gaining in the primaries.
That's true.
I mean, look at the polling data.
Trump is doing much better in the primaries than he was even a couple of months ago because whenever Trump is perceived by the Republican base as being the target and victim, people rush to his defense.
Understandably.
But the person who's actually thriving right now, if you look at the polling data, is one Joseph R. Biden, who is an incompetent, drooling old fool.
Joe Biden has been terrible on every aspect of his administration, from the transing of the children, to the equity agenda injected to every aspect of his administration, to a foreign policy that has now solidified the alliance between Russia and China, and given China a green light in the Middle East.
To undermining the Abraham Accords, to the pullout from Afghanistan, to a cratering economy with bank failures.
This guy has been a failure.
He is the reverse Midas of politics.
Everything he touches is just crap.
It just turns to crap.
But it doesn't matter.
He's gaining right now because the more attention is on the Republicans, the more people are like, well, well, I mean, he is dead.
There is that like the drawback of Joe Biden being a corpse actually becomes the benefit.
It's the same thing as 2020.
In 2020, the idea was there's so much chaos over here.
And then over here is a corpse.
Over here is a walking corpse.
Who do you want, the walking corpse or the chaos?
And a lot of Americans are like, oh, maybe we'll take the walking corpse because after all, he is dead.
What kind of damage can you do now?
Now we know what kind of damage he can do.
But the problem is he's still dead.
And so he doesn't appear threatening.
He doesn't appear chaotic.
Corpses are not chaotic.
He could be moldering and putrefying and he could be spreading disease everywhere because of all of that.
But that doesn't matter.
He still looks like he's dead and it doesn't feel chaotic, even if it is chaotic and even if it is terrible.
And if you look at Joe Biden's job approval right now, his job approval is at 46 percent.
His negative job approval is at 49%.
That is a slow and steady gain for Joe Biden.
These are some of the best ratings that he has had in terms of his approval and disapproval since probably March of 2022.
And not just that, if you look at the polls in terms of presidential matchups, right now, he stands to, according to the polls, defeat all Republican comers, according to Morning Consult.
The same poll that has Trump up on DeSantis, like 54 to 26 in the Republican primaries, Also shows Joe Biden with a three-point percentage lead over Trump and a two-point lead over DeSantis.
Now, it is true, obviously, there's more upside for DeSantis than for Trump.
Trump has a ceiling.
But it doesn't matter.
Joe Biden, anybody who believes that Joe Biden is easy to beat just because he stinks at his job, has not been watching politics lately.
Stinking at your job is obviously not a prereq to winning, to losing an election.
If you stink at your job, you can very easily retain your slot in politics.
People tend to fail up in politics, which is why Kamala Harris is the Vice President of the United States.
We'll get to Joe Biden in just one moment, because just every day is Joe Biden battling with the English language.
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So Joe Biden is doing better in the polls because anytime the focus is on Republicans, he does better in the polls.
Let us not forget that Joe Biden is a terrible president.
Terrible.
Now again, his sort of actual drawback as president, which is that he is dead, masks for another much more serious drawback, which is that he is radical.
There's a lot of focus on the fact that he's dead.
So yesterday, for example, he was out there abachin' the poetry.
I mean, first of all, this is not the person who you would choose to read you poetry.
And it's time for our latest episode of Fight Night, Joe Biden versus the teleprompter.
Let's do this thing!
Fight!
True international suffrage oppression!
Engineer, poet, Cuban-American.
Richard Blanco returned to a poem he wrote from the second inaugural Barack in Maine, a poem won today.
It says, and always one moon like a silent drum tapping at every rooftop and every window of every country.
Let me start this over again.
I'm getting so intimidated by it.
And always one moon like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop and every window of one country, county, county.
All of us facing the stars.
Hope, a new constellation waiting for us to map it, waiting for us to name it together.
Joe Biden reads poetry is maybe the worst show on television.
That is quite terrible.
I'm on a rooftop in the drowning of this baby seal.
Let me start over.
I'm just so intimidated by the Buddha.
Yeah, he's terrible at his job.
Also, he's a liar.
Joe Biden was asked about the fact that his son Hunter was picking up bags of cash pretty much everywhere and that other members of his family were benefiting from Hunter's bags of cash.
And he's like, no, no, no, no, no.
No one's ever.
No, I am clean as the driven snow, said the man from Credit Card County, Delaware.
Any reaction to House GOP's memo about your family dealing, sir?
Any reaction to House GOP's new memo about your family dealing, sir?
Yes, you're revealing that Hunter Biden's business associates sent over a million dollars to three of your family members.
Any reaction to that report?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
And he starts slowly backing away into the bush like Homer Simpson.
Meanwhile, his non-radical administration is getting ever more radical.
Karine Jean-Pierre, world's worst press secretary yesterday, she was asked a question about whether the Biden administration backs slavery reparations. I'd love to see them embrace this position in a general election. Here's Karine Jean-Pierre, this time not flanked by the members of the Ted Lasso cast who are significantly more serious as humans than she is.
What does this administration stand on reparations for slavery and segregation and similar historic wrongs specifically pertaining to black Americans?
So look, we understand that there's a legislation on the Hill currently on this, on the study of represent reparations, pardon me. And we think Congress is the, the appropriate venue for consideration, consideration on such action. And so we're going to leave it there for Congress to decide to let them go through their process.
So that's not a no on the slavery reparations.
Meanwhile, the head of the Health and Human Services Department, Xavier Becerra, he brags about how the Health and Human Services Department has now opened, I kid you not, in an office of environmental justice.
Now, I thought that he was the Health and Human Services Secretary, but now we have environmental justice.
It's all one big mishmash, meaning bigger government and more control of your life.
We know that lived experience is priceless in letting you connect with and encourage people to participate.
And so we're not going to wait for folks to come and say, I'd like to participate in your clinical trial for diabetes or for cancer.
We're going to go where you are to find out how we can be helpful.
I could go on and on.
We established a climate change and health equity office at the Department of Health and Human Services, not the EPA, at HHS.
We established an environmental justice office Not in the Department of Justice, but in HHS.
Because we know that the folks who are hit first and worst when it comes to climate degradation are in the minority communities, are in the low-income communities.
Climate equity, McEnvironment, it's all the same thing, right?
This is a very, very radical administration.
Also, it's a wildly incompetent administration.
So the biggest unnoticed story yesterday, it was noticed a little bit, people don't care about foreign policy, is the continued cementing of the relationship between Russia and China.
According to the Washington Post, Russian President Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping on Tuesday proclaimed their plans to deepen Sino-Russian political and economic cooperation for years to come, sending a strong message to the West about their determination to push back against the global domination of the United States.
One of the basic ideas of pushing back against Russia and Ukraine was the idea that it would warn China off of a close relationship with Russia.
Apparently, China has faith that whatever sort of strictness we are using with Russia will not apply to China.
As the leaders wrapped up two days of formal discussions in Moscow, there was no visible progress on China's ceasefire plan for Ukraine.
At an ornate meeting room in the Kremlin, Xi described his visit as a new chapter in strengthening relations between Beijing and Moscow.
Xi on Tuesday invited Putin to visit China this year, signaling the most assertive joint stand against the West was just getting started.
So this is all joined with the fact that the Middle East is now being surrendered to Chinese leadership.
As you'll recall, just last week, the Saudis and the Iranians signed some sort of deal brokered by China.
And that was almost solely due to the fact that the Americans decided they were going to alienate Saudi Arabia, allowing China to open up a rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and Iran.
And then Joe Biden is on the sidelines cheering it.
So at the same exact time that Joe Biden is saying, Russia's really bad, and China shouldn't be helping him out.
He's like, well, China should also be helping out with peace in the Middle East.
This is perfect Barack Obama lead from behind garbage.
Barack Obama did the exact same thing, you will recall.
Barack Obama, it was 2014.
And you'll recall that Russia actually invaded Crimea in 2014.
And Barack Obama was president.
And while he was saying it was really terrible for Russia to be doing that, he was also ceding territory in Syria to Russia so that they could lead the charge in the Middle East.
This is pure Obama leading from behind garbage.
It has real ramifications for literally hundreds of millions of people around the world, including Americans.
But we are told by this administration that Joe Biden is actually an expert on this sort of stuff.
John Kirby Who is the national security spokesperson for the president.
He says that Joe Biden has a great feel on foreign policy.
He was mixing up Joe Biden's feel on foreign policy with feeling up the heads of small children.
But here we go.
His fine feel and touch, particularly on issues of foreign policy and national security, is very, very distinct.
And he asks great questions.
There's not a single engagement that I've ever had with him where he wasn't pushing and pressing and wanting more detail and wanting a deeper level of context.
He thinks these things through carefully.
And I can tell you, this I know for sure, certainly, because of my job at the Pentagon, too, before I came here.
That when it comes to putting America's men and women in uniform in harm's way, you won't find another commander in chief who thinks more carefully, deliberately, and consciously about that than President Biden.
Well, I mean, except for, you know, the 13 American service members who were murdered at the end of his Afghanistan pullout and the hundreds of Americans who were left behind and all of that.
Sure.
Sure.
It's been going great under Joe Biden.
You know, one of the reasons it's been going so great, according to John Kirby, is because of our foreign policy priorities.
Now, you might think that America's foreign policy priorities are things like America's national interests.
What's good for Americans?
Securing global supply chains, for example, or pushing back against the predations of America's enemies, China and Russia, for example.
You might think that those would be actual priorities, but John Kirby is here to tell you that one of the top priorities is making sure that you can trans the kids in, like, Romania.
It's very, very important that LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign rights be advanced everywhere around the globe.
Now, I noticed that he's not saying that so much about, like, China.
And I noticed that he is not saying that so much about, like, the Middle East.
Like, while he's attempting a rapprochement with Iran, I've noticed that he's pretty selective in where he thinks LGBTQI-, like, how's it going in Afghanistan for the LGBTQs?
Going great over there, is it?
But apparently this is like the elite, this is the thing that the administration cares about.
When it comes to foreign policy, the thing that matters more than anything is not the American interest.
It is that we make sure that every person can live their best selves as the member of the opposite sex and or shtup, whomever they please.
This is not, I'm sorry, this is not an American foreign policy interest.
It just isn't.
You can say that you think that America, that people all over the world should have more sexual freedom.
That may be your moral priority.
That has nothing to do with America's generalized foreign policy interests, which have to do with America's national security, which have to do with America's economic growth.
Those are the foreign policy priorities of the United States.
Not flying the Pride progress flag outside the Vatican.
But here's John Kirby.
Here we go.
President Biden has been nothing but consistent about his uh... belief foundational belief in human rights and lgbtq plus rights are human rights uh... and uh... we again back to the earlier question never gonna shy away be bashful about speaking up for those rights and for uh... for individuals to live as they deem fit as they want to live that's something that's a core part of our foreign policy and it will remain so
By the way, good luck with wooing countries that do not agree with that as a matter of morality.
Seriously, you're trying to build alliances with various countries around the world that don't happen to share the Western European morality that suggests that sexual self-determination is the core of who we are.
And your pressing matter is going, wait, you know, the Prime Minister of Pakistan be like, guys, we really need to work on your queer outreach.
No, I'm sorry, that by no measure is that at the tip of the spear of the American foreign policy interest.
But remember, Joe Biden is amazing at this.
All of these issues should be at the core of any presidential conversation come 2024.
The question is whether Republicans are going to choose to put that stuff at the core.
Are they going to choose to put financial issues at the core?
All of these issues are on the table for Joe Biden.
Or at least they should be if the focus were on the current president, who is garbage at his job.
Speaking of finances and the Biden administration's handling, if you think that the financial crisis is anywhere close to over, wrong you are.
Your first indicator is when Janet Yellen is telling you everything is great.
There apparently is a site online that is called Reverse Jim Cramer.
And the basic idea is that Inverse Jim Cramer, it's an ETF, and it lets you actively bet against Jim Cramer of CNBC's picks.
And apparently it does, like, amazing business.
If you just do the precise opposite of Jim Cramer's picks, you apparently do, like, great.
And the same thing is true of Jenny Ellen.
When Jenny Ellen makes a prediction, you can guarantee that within six months she will be reversing that prediction.
So now she says the financial system remains sound.
Alrighty.
We announced a new facility to provide additional liquidity to the banking system.
The Fed's new lending facility, the Bank Term Funding Program, is designed to help banks meet the needs of all of their depositors.
The situation is stabilizing, and the U.S.
banking system remains sound.
Well, I mean, that's weird because you said in the same press conference that we might need additional banking resources and rescues in order to, you know, fill in gaps.
So it doesn't sound all that sound, actually.
We work with the Federal Reserve and FDIC to protect all depositors in the resolutions of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.
The steps we took were not focused on aiding specific banks or classes of banks.
Our intervention was necessary to protect the broader U.S.
banking system.
And similar actions could be warranted if smaller institutions suffered deposit runs that pose the risk of contagion.
That's odd.
You say there's further risk of contagion and you're going to stop it?
Well, I thought that the risk was over.
So lawmakers are apparently now attempting to raise the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's bank deposits backing.
Some members of Congress apparently are looking for ways to boost the $250,000 cap, which of course completely destroys all risk assessment for these banks.
When you keep filling in the depositors, what you are essentially doing is you are saying to bank managers that they can promise any level of return whatsoever to the depositors.
And no matter what happens, the FDIC is there to bail them out.
And that's going to be a problem.
You know what else is going to be a problem?
According to the Wall Street Journal, strains in the banking sector are roiling a roughly $8 trillion bond market, considered almost as safe as U.S.
government bonds.
So-called agency mortgage bonds are widely held by banks, insurers, and bond funds because they're backed by mortgage loans from government-owned lenders like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The bonds are far less likely to default than most debt.
They're easy to buy and sell quickly.
That is a crucial reason they were SVB's biggest investment before it foundered.
Agency mortgage-backed securities, like all long-term bonds, are vulnerable to rising interest rates, which pushed their prices down last year and saddled banks like SVB with unrealized losses.
Now that the FDIC has taken over SVB, investors expect the bonds to be sold off in the coming months, adding supply to the weakened market and pushing prices lower.
So in other words, if the big problem for SVB is that they had unrealized losses in the bond market and then there was a run on the bank and they had to liquidate those assets really fast and they didn't have enough money to liquidate the assets, You're about to see some more of that because the amount of agency mortgage debt in billions.
Charles Schwab right now is holding like $75 billion in agency mortgage debt.
SVB was only holding like $10 billion or something, $12 billion.
So the things could get much uglier, much more quickly again, because when you blow out the spending and then you have to reverse engineer a solution to inflation, this is exactly what happens.
Meanwhile, home prices are falling in February for the first time in 11 years.
So we're starting to see the economy cool down at the same time that the Federal Reserve is probably going to raise the interest rates again.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the first year-over-year drop in home prices in more than a decade and a dip in mortgage rates snapped a year-long streak of declining monthly home sales, showing the effects of the Federal Reserve's campaign to raise those interest rates.
Sales of previously owned homes, which make up most of the housing market, rose 14.5% in February from the prior month, but they were down 22.6% from a year earlier, so the economy is beginning to cool.
But the Federal Reserve is going to have to keep the pedal to the metal, particularly because it is now at war with itself.
On the one hand, the Federal Reserve is injecting a ton of money into the system by backstopping the banks.
And on the other hand, they're trying to raise those interest rates to prevent an inflationary spiral.
So things are just going spectacularly, spectacularly well for the Biden administration, which is presumably why you'd want to keep the focus on the Republicans if you're a Republican or something.
OK, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So things that I like.
Richard Dawkins is a Militant atheist, obviously.
He and I disagree on very, very many things.
But, he is totally correct on the matter of the binary nature of sex.
So, the evolutionary biologist made the absolutely inarguable point that men and women exist as dichotomous parts of the human species.
Here he was with Piers Morgan.
Particularly when it comes to someone's sex.
I mean, it's incontrovertible.
There's no scientific doubt about this.
And yet a small group of people have been quite successful, actually, in reshaping vast swathes of the way society talks and is allowed to talk.
It's bullying.
And we've seen the way JK Rowling has been bullied, Katherine Stock has been bullied.
They've stood up to it, but it's very upsetting the way this tiny minority of people has managed to capture the discourse and to really talk arrogant nonsense.
What's the answer to it?
Science.
I mean, there are two sexes.
You could talk about gender if you wish, and that's a subjective... I'm not... But when people say there are a hundred genders, for example.
Yeah, I'm not interested in that.
As a biologist, there are two sexes.
And that's all there is to it.
Oh no, he said the truth out loud.
Good for Richard Dawkins, who is saying a true thing right there.
Meanwhile, people who are saying not true things include, of course, the estimably stupid AOC, she of the fresh and face.
So apparently, AOC has now said that not only women menstruate, she says trans men and non-binary people also menstruate.
That was responding to an earlier comment that she had made referring to menstruating people.
So apparently she had called women menstruating people while explaining the female body.
And then she said, not just women, trans men and non-binary people can also menstruate.
Some women don't menstruate for many reasons, including surviving cancer that requires a hysterectomy.
GOP mad at this are protecting the patriarchal idea that women are most valuable as uterus holders.
No, the GOP saying that only women menstruate are defending the idea that biology exists.
Only women menstruate.
Men do not menstruate.
There are some women who do not menstruate because there's a failure of biology in those cases.
That's tragic and sad.
Also, men don't menstruate.
End of story.
The fact that you cannot just say that part out loud demonstrates that you know nothing about anything and that your ideology has conquered all.
It's so absurd.
This is like saying, you know, somebody says, dogs have four legs.
Like, not all dogs.
Not all dogs.
And by the way, cats have four legs too.
So, stop pretending that dogs have four legs, because some cats have four legs, and some dogs have three legs because they were hit by a car.
That doesn't change the underlying fact that dogs have four legs.
You're making category errors deliberately.
That's the nature of the beast, is making category errors deliberately.
Okay, other things that I like today.
So, this is kind of amazing.
Apparently, a fan pooped in the aisle near Hillary and Chelsea Clinton at a Broadway show.
Page six here is that a serial pooper has been stalking the halls of the legendary Schubert Theater, and the last time they struck, a turd appeared in the aisle near Hillary and Chelsea Clinton at some like it hot.
A source close to the show insists it was a regrettable one-off incident.
There is a picture of Hillary and Chelsea at the show, and there is an older man standing just behind them and looking awkward.
I suspect him as the serial pooper.
Oh, sorry, no, it's Bill Clinton in the background, as it turns out, who is very unhappy to have been dragged to a Broadway show by Hillary and Chelsea.
But yeah, welcome to New York, where people just poop in the aisles.
Things are going amazing over there.
It's the greatest city on Earth, where people just take a dump directly in the aisles of major Broadway theaters.
Well, I mean, there are a lot of steaming piles of hot crap on Broadway, so I guess that makes some sense.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So there is a really good examination of the problem of learned helplessness by a substat called The Rabbit Hole.
This is from October 10th, 2022, talking about the fact that the left's focus on the supposed evils of American society have actually convinced an extraordinary number of Black Americans that Blacks don't get ahead because America is racist.
And it didn't used to be this way.
So, for example, there's polling showing that in 2020, in 2012, a majority of Blacks felt they had agency and could change their personal outcomes.
Only 30% felt discrimination was a primary impediment.
That is, as of 2012.
And then, things started to reverse themselves.
They used to say, again, in 1994, In 1994, the percentage of blacks who said that blacks were mostly responsible for their failure to get ahead, that was 34%.
Okay, and that rose all the way to 54% by 2012.
So, 20% increase, and the number of blacks who said, we can't get ahead because American society is discriminating, went from about 56% in 1994, all the way down to 30% in 2012.
And then, the Great Awokening happened, and everything just reversed itself.
So polls by 2021 showed only 25% of blacks viewed themselves as having agency for their own condition.
68% view discrimination as a primary detriment.
So thanks so much to all of those who say focusing on racism will make American society significantly better.
Well, actually, what you've done is you convinced a huge substratum of American society that they are not responsible for any of their own decision making and that society is inevitably going to get them.
Which is just terrible.
It's just.
Yeah, again, tell people that they don't have agency in their own lives and the consequences get really ugly really, really quickly.
And this is just a perfect example of that.
By the way, the Great Awakening is also responsible for a vast uptick in the number of murders of black Americans since 2020.
So, well done, all you folks who are like, what if we put our attention on the systemic evils of America?
That will make life better for black people.
Well, no, actually, it didn't.
It didn't because the message should be the same for all Americans.
It's a free country.
Go make responsible decisions.
You say that to literally every American and everyone's life gets better.
And if you say to particular Americans that no matter what you do, the system is out to get you, it makes life worse, particularly for those Americans.
It is enervating and it is bad for them.
And that is precisely what our media have been promoting for years at this point.
To the great detriment of American society.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
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