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Aug. 16, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:07
They’re Treating Trump Like A Mobster
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Alrighty, so this RICO prosecution in Georgia is, of course, the headline of the moment.
It is also the largest legal barrier that Donald Trump faces going forward because it is a state-level case, which means that if he is convicted in the state of Georgia, he cannot pardon himself even were he to be elected President of the United States or even were a fellow Republican to be elected President of the United States.
The current governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, does not have the power to unilaterally pardon Donald Trump on a state charge that has to go in front of some sort of pardon review board.
So the bottom line is that Donald Trump is going to be slugging it out in court with Fannie Willis.
He's going to be joined by 18 alleged co-conspirators.
And so today we're going to go through in detail.
The indictment against Donald Trump and what it actually means.
So as the Wall Street Journal points out, the indictment in Georgia against Trump for racketeering and a dozen other alleged offenses represents the most ambitious and sweeping case brought up against the former president and is likely to pose unprecedented legal challenges both for Trump but also for the prosecutors.
The case, brought by Fannie Willis, centers on allegations that Trump, along with 18 others, participated in a criminal enterprise to change the 2020 presidential election in his favor in violation of the state's anti-racketeering law.
That Georgia law is modeled on the 1970 RICO Act, that's the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was really designed to go after the mafia.
Georgia's law is, in some respects, broader than the federal version.
Georgia's RICO statute allows the prosecutor to tell a lot of the story, apparently, according to, for example, Gwen Keyes Fleming, former DeKalb County District Attorney, who's now at the law firm DLA Piper, which is a major law firm.
Willis' indictment is this long, sprawling thing that encompasses Donald Trump's activities with relation to legislators in Pennsylvania, with relation to various members of his own administration, with members of the DOJ, with his lawyers.
The 98-page indictment is basically just an entire narrative story about Donald Trump's attempts to intervene in the 2020 election.
But it doesn't answer the key question, which is whether Donald Trump actually engaged in what would be a criminal enterprise, and that has an actual legal definition, is whether this was a criminal enterprise or not.
Now, as we say, Willis also faces some challenges here.
She says she wants a trial date within the next six months.
That is very unlikely to happen.
Jury selection could drag on for months.
This is likely to go way past the election.
More than that, Trump could also seek to move the case to federal court.
In fact, Mark Meadows is a co-conspirator, alleged co-conspirator in this particular case.
He is already attempting to remove this thing to federal court, basically saying this is a federal charge.
Why are you charging this on the state level?
Now, Trump did try to do that with his New York prosecution.
That was rejected on the grounds that Trump wasn't carrying out his presidential duties with regard to alleged hush money schemes.
But, this is much more directly tied to his presidency and his unwillingness to leave it.
So, could this thing be removed to a federal court?
It certainly could be.
And if that happens, that would be a big win for Trump because that would mean that he can select from a broader jury pool.
One of the things that Fannie Willis is counting on here is that the judge presumably won't kick out her charges.
We'll talk about whether that will happen or not in just a moment.
Also, she's counting on this being a Fulton County jury as opposed to being a broader pool of counties that are included in the jury pool.
Okay, so let's talk about the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act.
So, it was really designed to go after the mafia, as I say.
It was designed for criminal enterprises.
Now, one of the reasons I think that Fannie Willis is charging this, as opposed to, say, just the crime of conspiracy, Conspiracy is an actual crime.
You can charge somebody with conspiracy to commit a crime.
So if you and I, we make a plan to go rob a bank, we don't have to get charged under RICO.
We could just be charged with a normal conspiracy statute.
That is a criminal conspiracy because you and I are getting together to pursue a crime.
RICO was written for the shadowy gray area.
Where they know that we're kind of hanging out together, but they're not really sure that I gave you an order or that I made an actual organized plan to go rob the bank.
They just know a lot of banks are getting robbed, and I'm benefiting in some way, and you're benefiting in some way, and some orders were given at some level.
This was always the trouble for the mafia, was the plausible deniability.
It was the ability for the person at the top of the food chain to say,
I never knew what that hit man was doing.
I never told the hit man what to do.
It just kind of got done.
So how could you go after that guy?
Well, they wrote the RICO Act in order to go after that guy.
The way they did that is that they said that you are not responsible only for crimes
in which you are directly implicated, in which there's a direct conspiracy.
You know, you and I getting together with a map, with a gun, and deciding to rob the bank down the street.
Right?
That's not the only kind of crime you can be charged with now.
Now you can be charged with the crime of anybody who's within your criminal enterprise.
So what exactly is a criminal enterprise?
How is that defined?
That is an enterprise designed to do crime.
It's an enterprise, a group of people who have basically created bonds with one another.
That's what an enterprise is.
And they do a wide variety of crimes.
Criminal pursuits is their business.
So when you charge a mafioso with the RICO violation, you're not charging him with this specific murder.
You're charging him with being part of a giant organization that is responsible for a wide variety of crimes up to and including murder, for example.
And then by proxy, he's also included in those charges.
Well, what does this mean?
Why exactly is Fannie Willis doing this?
Why isn't she just charging conspiracy?
Well, the reason is twofold.
One, it is not particularly clear that Fannie Willis actually has the hard evidence that Donald Trump told people, I want you to overturn the election knowing that it's false.
You actually have to prove intent.
If it's a conspiracy to commit a crime, you have to have intent to do these sorts of crimes.
You have to do the crimes willingly.
Well, that's always been the big question for Trump.
As I've been saying, you know, as long as he's been under the legal gun, establishing intent for Trump is a very difficult business, legally speaking.
Because, presumably, you actually have to find some sort of through-line.
You have to believe that he doesn't believe the things he's saying, that he's actually lying about those things.
And that's hard.
Plausible deniability does exist for Donald Trump.
So what is she doing?
She's charging him with a RICO violation.
Why?
Because in a RICO violation, the mafioso doesn't have to have specific intent to commit the crime.
He gets implicated just by being part of the generalized criminal organization.
So for example, the DOJ has a rundown on what exactly RICO does.
Here's what they say.
The government need not prove the defendant agreed with every other conspirator, knew all of the other conspirators, or had full knowledge of all the details of the conspiracy.
All that must be shown is that the defendant agreed to commit the substantive racketeering offense through agreeing to participate in racketeering acts, that he knew the general status of the conspiracy, and that he knew the conspiracy extended beyond his individual role.
So that means that Donald Trump would not have had to have specific intent to corruptly overturn the election, knowing full well that the election had been decided against him.
That actually goes away.
As long as somebody in his orbit knew, as long as Rudy Giuliani knew, as long as Sidney Powell knew, as long as one of the co-conspirators knew that Donald Trump had lost and then was pursuing this legal strategy, if you consider it a criminal enterprise, as a criminal enterprise, then Donald Trump could be implicated in those crimes without actually having to express the intent.
This is how Fannie Willis is attempting to end around the general requirements of criminal law, like you have to have intent to commit a crime in order to be held responsible for that crime.
Now, there's another problem for her which we'll get to in just one second.
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OK, so.
Fannie Willis can't really claim that he's part of a criminal enterprise like a mafia.
Like, is this group of people like a mafia family that's just there to commit crimes?
Like, racketeering is an ongoing series of crimes, typically, over a long period of time.
That's typically what you're talking about, right?
If you're talking about Al Capone, you're talking about he's bootlegging over many, many years, and that involves shaking people down.
It involves corruptly sending alcohol over state lines and over federal lines.
It involves not paying your taxes.
It involves a wide variety of offenses because it's a criminal enterprise.
Is Donald Trump and Sidney Powell a criminal enterprise, or should that theoretically really be charged under conspiracy to commit a criminal act, but then that raises the question of what exactly is the criminal act?
Because Donald Trump can say it's not a criminal act for me to pursue a specious legal strategy.
A specious legal strategy is not a criminal act, that's free speech.
And this is why Fannie Willis is charging it under RICO and not under conspiracy.
Again, if the scheme was formulated in order to keep him in office.
If the scheme itself was a crime, she would be charging conspiracy, but she knows the scheme itself isn't a crime.
So instead, she's trying to charge it under RICO, claiming the entire kit and caboodle is a criminal enterprise.
So she's sort of doing the in-between.
She doesn't have to justify that crime actually was intended, and she actually doesn't even have to establish that there is a criminal enterprise if she gets away with all of this.
It's a real mischarge, or at the very least, it's a big stretch.
Now, the thing about a stretch charge like this against a president of the United States is that once you break the glass, the glass is now broken.
Now, let's be real about this.
I'm not against the idea that presidents, ex-presidents, pretty much anybody should be held, should not be held accountable for violation of the law.
The thing that I really am against is the belief that a partisan prosecutor gets to decide who goes and who stays.
One of the big problems that we have in this country is that the only way that somebody gets indicted is if that person is the political enemy of the people in power.
And this goes all the way back to, for example, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.
So, I said this about Donald Trump with regard to the classified documents.
Two things can be true at once.
Donald Trump pretty obviously violated classified document statutes.
They have him basically dead to write on those charges.
I mean, he literally said on tape, Folks, legal advice, never do the criming on tape.
He literally said on a tape, here are classified documents, I could have unclassified them, I didn't declassify them, you should look at them, right?
I mean, that is doing the crime on the tape.
So, should he be prosecuted or not?
Well, in any normal circumstance, the answer would be yes, sure, why not?
Of course, if you commit a crime, you should be prosecuted for the crime.
The problem is, once James Comey let Hillary Clinton off the hook for crimes, at that point, the answer becomes no.
And the answer becomes no, because if only one side has to play by the rules, then the rules are not rules, they are just a double standard.
They are just a weapon.
And the same thing is happening right here.
So, back in 2014, I actually advocated for a full-scale Use of RICO to go after politicians.
Because I said, listen, what I would like is actually widespread use of RICO to go after various criminal enterprises run by politicians.
I wrote an entire book called The People versus Barack Obama, in which I suggested that Barack Obama had very likely engaged in, by Fannie Willis's definition, RICO violations.
Take, for example, the IRS scandal.
The IRS scandal, Barack Obama and his minions went out in public and repeatedly said that it would be amazing if the IRS audited and removed the tax exemption for pretty much every conservative group in America leading up to the 2010 election.
And then they actually went and they did it.
Then the IRS went and did it.
And he said, well, I never meant for them to do it.
Well, I mean, again, that looks very much like the sort of mafioso activity Rico was meant to stop in the first place.
Now, when I made this argument back in 2014, the entire press that reviewed the book said, this is crazy.
You could never do this.
How could you possibly suggest something like this?
And my answer was, you know what, maybe if we finally started holding politicians accountable for their various criminal enterprises, they would stop doing the criming.
But the problem is this.
They ignored Barack Obama.
And then they ignored Hillary Clinton.
And they're currently ignoring Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.
By the way, very solid case that the sort of RICO violations that we are currently talking about with regards to Donald Trump and election of 2020, Those far better fit the criminal violations committed by Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.
You want to talk about a criminal enterprise?
You want to talk about like a RICO criminal enterprise?
Like a fam- Let's say that you had a family.
Like an actual, honest-to-God family.
Not like a mafia family, a family family.
Now the mafia family started off as families.
Let's say you had a family family.
And that family sent a bag man to foreign countries to pick up cash on behalf of every relative of the Vice President of the United States while the Vice President was presiding over foreign policy in those countries.
I mean, does the plausible deniability there sound sort of like a mafia situation?
When Joe Biden was literally calling into Hunter Biden's business meetings and saying, how is the weather over there?
Doesn't that sound exactly like what a mafioso would do?
You get the Don on the line and tell the local bartender, how's the weather down there?
And then everybody knows pretty clearly that if the bartender doesn't pay off the mafioso, then the place goes up in flames.
I mean, that looks a lot like a RICO violation.
I mean, if you're going to talk about RICO violations, you can find RICO violations pretty much anywhere.
And you know what?
I'd be kind of okay with that if this were even remotely evenly applied.
But it is not remotely evenly applied.
It is only applied to Donald Trump.
Only, only, only.
So again, if you want to have a set of rules that applies to everybody evenly, I'm totally for it.
But if the rules only apply to Donald Trump, we can all see what you're doing.
Well, they're going to get their wish.
The rules will be applied to everyone, but not evenly in fully partisan fashion.
There's a clip going around of me in 2014 talking about the book that I mentioned, The People vs. Barack Obama.
Here's what I had to say at the time about the use of Rico to go after politicians.
I'm not sure we could indict Washington, but I think that certainly— I'm sure something was done.
Washington was relatively clean.
But if you look at, you know, George W. Bush, or if you looked at Bill Clinton, or if you looked at Ronald Reagan, sure.
I mean, the answer would be that you could.
And people should be wary.
I mean, this is sort of the case that I'm making, is that we've become so comfortable with the executive branch of the government abusing its citizens and violating our rights, and violating what they're structured to do under the law, that we've just become used to it.
And if we start treating them as criminals, maybe they'll think twice before they act so criminally in the future.
Okay, notice what I say in that clip.
In that clip, I say that you could theoretically apply these sorts of legal violations to any president, right?
I'm talking about George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, both Republicans, and Bill Clinton, a Democrat, right?
I'm talking about pretty much every president back in 2014, including Barack Obama.
And the point that I'm making is if you evenly apply the law, okay.
But guess what's happened?
No remote even application of the law.
And herein lies the problem, folks.
If you're going to use RICO to go after Donald Trump, you better damn well use it to go after Hillary Clinton and the Hillary Clinton Foundation.
You better damn well use it to go after Barack Obama and Barack Obama's involvement in a wide variety of scandals under his tenure.
You better damn well use it to go after Hunter and Joe Biden, which looks more like a RICO violation than anything that Donald Trump has done here.
That's the point.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay.
Absolutely uneven status of these sorts of prosecutions.
It will not stand.
What will end up happening is there will be motivated Republican prosecutors who do bring recall violations against Joe and Hunter Biden, for example.
All there needs to be is a prosecutor with courage in a local jurisdiction to do this.
That's all that really needs to happen here.
And a friendly jury.
And now we can play this game all day long because they broke the glass.
The case that they were making against me, and I'll admit that it was at least a case, is once you break the glass then everyone will be prosecuted.
The case I was making is fine.
Let's do it.
But here's the problem.
Once you've done it, get ready.
Get ready because this is where we're going to be.
And there will be a downside effect here because it is not, in fact, a nonpartisan DOJ even handedly applying the law.
We now have a bunch of local DAs all over the country deciding that they want to get their name on the paper.
And that's why you got Fannie Willis in Georgia doing this.
And this is why you got The prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, up in Manhattan doing this.
People want their name in the paper.
You can expect this on all sides.
One of the predictable results of this is that people who have families, people who have a sense of shame, people who do not wish to see their lives dug through, are simply going to stay away from politics.
That's the actual natural effect of all of this, is that the best will not go into politics anymore.
It'll be people who are pretty much willing to slug it out in court every single day because that's what it's going to take from here on in.
So I'm not sure the Democrats understand the They've been saying for a long time that Donald Trump, he's not normal.
It's just not normal that he was president of the United States and his behavior is not normal.
And I won't be the first to admit that I think that Donald Trump has behaved in ways that are not typically associated with the word presidential.
But in terms of the behavior that he's currently being indicted for, the notion that it is unprecedented for a president of the United States to engage in borderline criminal activity in RICO-violating ways, that obviously is not true.
And Donald Trump is not an exception in this way, and he will not be treated as one for very long if Republicans have their wits about them.
And it may be that we've now entered the era of mutually assured destruction.
The only way to go back to something resembling normal is to absolutely go up against, for example, Hunter and Joe Biden, and not just pursue something like impeachment, but pursue criminal indictment in some sort of state law against Hunter and Joe Biden in exactly the same way that a local Georgia RICO violation is being pursued.
I promise you there is something there with regard to the Bidens that looks a lot more like a mafioso family than anything that Donald Trump did with Rudy Giuliani at the Four Seasons Gardening store or something.
Okay, meanwhile, Donald Trump is responding to all of this, pledging that he is going to give an irrefutable report on Georgia election fraud.
Now, I assume that the reason that he's doing this In terms of law, now, I don't know that he's listening to his lawyers.
Donald Trump's not famous for listening to his lawyers.
He tends to buck them pretty often.
As I've said before, one of the hardest jobs in America is being Donald Trump's lawyer.
But I assume one of the reasons that Trump is doing this is to reestablish that he legitimately believes that he won the 2020 election and that Georgia was stolen from him.
Because if he can establish that he didn't have intent to commit a crime, he just had an intent to, for example, actually uphold his rights, that takes away the intent part of the crime.
Now as I mentioned before, Fannie Willis may be intending to kind of go around that by charging him with a RICO violation.
With that said, Trump's best defense here in terms of the actual crime of all of this is to say, I never had the requisite intent.
This is just me pursuing a legal strategy, all you think is specious, but I thought was worthwhile because it was apparent to me that I was being jobbed.
So he put out a truth.
in which he said, quote, a large, complex, detailed, but irrefutable report on the presidential election fraud,
which took place in Georgia, is almost complete and will be presented by me at a major news conference at 11 a.m. on
Monday of next week in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Based on the results of this conclusive report, all charges should be dropped against me and others. There will be a
complete exoneration. They never went after those that rigged the election.
They only went after those that fought to find the riggers.
So, again, as I say, I actually think this is smart in terms of just pure legal strategy.
I think there's a reason that Donald Trump is doing that.
Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia, he immediately responded by saying, yeah, this is bullcrap.
He immediately said the 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen.
For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward under oath and prove anything in a court of law.
He says, our elections in Georgia are secure.
Accessible and fair and will continue to be as long as I'm governor.
The future of our country is at stake in 2024 and that must be our focus.
Again, what Trump is doing here I think has very little to do with whether or not there was fraud in Georgia and a lot to do with establishing that he didn't have intent to violate the law.
He had intent to uphold his rights under the law.
Okay, in just one second we'll get to the actual formatics of Trump's arrest.
There's question as to whether he'll even get bail at this point.
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Okay, so...
The formatics of this situation for Trump are really troubling, obviously.
There's serious question now as to whether Donald Trump is actually going to get bail.
According to certain attorneys, Georgia's legal provision on bail could actually pose a dilemma for the judge because Georgia basically says that you are not allowed to release somebody on bail who may then pose a risk of intimidating witnesses or otherwise obstructing the administration of justice.
So if a judge were to find that Donald Trump could theoretically tamper with witnesses, Or that he'd call up his co-conspirators, or anything like that.
Or if a judge finds that him tweeting things out, in sort of coded messages to witnesses, could amount to some form of witness tampering.
There's a possibility that some state judge who wants to get his name on the map, or her name on the map, could theoretically deny bail to Trump.
Which would be utterly insane.
I mean, totally cra- I can't imagine that's how this is gonna go.
But, I mean, we are in an unimaginable place right now.
Meanwhile, they've already announced in the courthouse in Fulton County that Donald Trump is going to end up having to do a mugshot, which is pretty absurd because typically a mugshot is done in order to establish the identity of the criminal.
I think people know who Trump is.
I just have a feeling there are a few people who understand.
He's only been the most famous person on planet Earth for like my entire lifetime.
Here's Trump's attorney lamenting this.
So we understand he's got to surrender by the 25th.
The debate's on the 23rd.
What's the plan?
To surrender.
He will surrender.
Obviously, you see that there's a bit of an ego trip happening in Georgia where they're saying that they're going to force him to have a mugshot.
The purpose of a mugshot is when you don't recognize someone, you think there's a flight risk.
This man is the most famous person in the world, the leading candidate right now.
She's right about that, obviously.
But, you know, everything has gone sideways so many times here that it's hard to tell what's going to happen next.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is still out there making the rounds.
Doesn't matter that the Hillary Clinton Foundation was a complete sham.
Does not matter that Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton probably got away with taking bribes in order to pay off pardons so that Hillary could win her Senate race in New York in 2000.
Doesn't matter that Hillary engaged in full-scale destruction of classified information.
None of that matters.
She's out there still laughing.
And this is the reason why the indictments against Trump Could both be somewhat well predicated, particularly in the classified documents scandal, and also are completely removed from the reality of our modern day politics in which Democrats apparently get off scot-free while Republicans are the only ones who find themselves prosecuted.
Here's Hillary laughing about all of this.
All over the country right now, people are wondering what Hillary Rodham Clinton is thinking watching things unfold in Georgia.
She's the former Democratic presidential nominee, U.S.
Senator from New York, and Secretary of State.
I should tell you, she has a new essay out in The Atlantic on the well-being of Americans and our democracy.
It's called The Weaponization of Loneliness.
Madam Secretary, fancy meeting you here.
Oh, I can't believe this.
Yeah, this is not the circumstances in which I expected to be talking to you.
Nor me, Rachel.
It's always good to talk to you, but honestly, I didn't think that it would be under these circumstances.
Yet another set of indictments.
Oh man, could she possibly be any happier about this?
Obviously very sad for the country.
She's obviously very deeply disturbed and saddened by what's happening, or she's just chortling at you and at the rest of America because she got away with it.
She's the one who got away with it.
This is the lady who, after Trump got indicted on the classified documents stuff, put out a tweet of herself wearing a hat that said, but her emails.
This is who Hillary Clinton is.
And then you wonder why Republicans are so all-fire pissed about the double standard.
You wonder why so many Republicans, including people like me, who want even-handed administration of justice, look at something like this and we say, this is not even-handed administration of justice or anything remotely like it.
Meanwhile, you have legal experts on MSNBC.
Claiming that race is going to be a central component in Trump's trial, which is just insane to say.
I mean, by the way, that's totally crazy.
This is supposed to be about whether Donald Trump attempted to deny people the right to vote or some such.
What in the world does this have to do with race?
But here's a Georgia State University professor named Eric Segal explaining that actually race is going to be the central component here.
With that many defendants, do you think that everyone on that list is going to want to play hardball with prosecutors?
Or how likely is it that someone would want to cut a deal?
I think it's extremely likely that there's going to be a deal cut.
And I want to make one more point, if I may.
Unlike the other cases, race is going to play a central role in this case, in all kinds of ways.
We all know Donald Trump is probably a little more sensitive to Race is going to be a central component.
My God, just saying the quiet part out loud right there.
Jerry Poole is going to be largely African-American if it stays here.
So I do think there's an undercurrent of race in this case, especially given that it's Georgia,
that's going to make it a little bit different than the other three cases.
I do expect some of those witnesses to turn and to testify against the president.
Race is going to be a central component.
My God, just saying the quiet part out loud right there.
My goodness.
This, again, it's so much of this is politics.
Now, speaking of politics, one of the big questions here is whether Republicans are going to nominate Trump in the middle of all this.
Again, I understand the emotional knee-jerk reaction, which is nominate him just to say, screw you to these people.
But you may be giving them exactly what they want if Joe Biden gets reelected.
I said on yesterday's show, I don't see one iota of data that President Trump's legal troubles are hurting him in a primary or that they are helping him in a general.
And that seems to be what the data show right now.
Trump has a record high lead in the GOP primary polls.
According to FiveThirtyEight's national polling average of the primary, Trump has a near record high advantage of 38.7% over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
That is up from a lead of 15 to 20 points in late March.
But his favorability rating has been falling steadily after his second indictment.
In terms of favorability rating, after the indictment on the hush money charges, according to FiveThirtyEight, Trump's net favorability, which is his favorability rating minus his unfavorability rating, rose 0.7 percentage points among Republicans in the next couple of weeks.
His June indictment was a different story.
In the two weeks after that, his net favorability rating fell from 57.1% positive to 55.3% positive.
And his net favorability rating among all adults fell from 11.9 percentage points negative back down to almost 15 percentage points negative.
So it may be worse when it comes to the general election.
Imagine an entire election cycle run entirely on Donald Trump.
It'll allow Joe Biden to run the campaign he wants.
He can go back to that basement in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
He can just sit there.
By the way, if you think that Joe Biden is going to debate Donald Trump, you got another thing coming.
It's never going to happen.
It's never ever going to happen.
Number one, he has the precedent of Trump not debating inside the Republican Party.
Number two, he's just going to say, I don't debate people who are under criminal indictment.
That's all he's going to say.
And the media are going to go right along with it.
That's how that's gonna work.
He's just gonna say, I'm not gonna debate somebody who's an insurrectionist against the country.
Now, you and I will know that's a bunch of crap, but will the American people know that?
And if there's no debate, then how exactly does Donald Trump slap Joe Biden particularly hard?
This is a serious problem.
What this really amounts to, I would bet dollars to donuts, what you're going to see actually here, is, aside from Trump strengthening in the primaries, in the 2024 race, you're going to see more support going to third-party candidates like RFK Jr.
So RFK Jr.
so far has run a pretty smart race, honestly.
Like, he's going to alternative media, he is saying things that nobody else will say, not just about the vaccine.
There's been, of course, all sorts of coverage of his vaccine comments and what he says about COVID and all the rest.
But RFK Jr.
has taken pretty heterodox positions on a wide variety of issues.
And he's been going after Joe Biden on inflation.
Now, let's be real about this.
The vast majority of Americans care much more about their pocketbooks and about the fact they're paying hundreds of dollars more per month every month now, thanks to Joe Biden, than they do about any of the legal foibles that are currently taking place in Fulton County.
Trump isn't talking about that stuff because he can't.
How could he?
You understand it.
I mean, he's being indicted.
Every county in the United States apparently going to bring an indictment against Trump.
But meanwhile, RFK Jr.
is going after Biden on inflation, which is what normal candidates would be doing these days.
So there's no money for poor Americans and the people that I see are living because of the inflation and because of what's happening at this with this desperation.
The average wage in this country is now $5,000 less than the cost of basic goods of food, transportation and housing.
So half of Americans are Making up that gap by putting it on their credit card bills.
And this week, we passed 1.1 trillion dollars in credit card debt.
That's the first time in history most of that, or 330 billion of that, has been in the Biden and Trump administrations.
Two men were saying, you know, I'm helping America.
The trillion dollar in credit card debt, and those people are paying 22% interest.
If the mafia did that, it would be called loan sharking.
He is totally right about this.
But what's more important is he's talking about an issue that when's the last time you heard a candidate talk about inflation?
Joe Biden isn't going to talk about it because he's doing it.
But Donald Trump isn't talking about it because he's busy.
And Ron DeSantis hasn't really been talking about it.
Or if he has, it's been obscured by the fact that Donald Trump has been indicted.
So the entire conversation for the two main parties is not about the thing that most Americans care about, which means there actually is a lane, not for RFK Jr.
to become president, but for RFK Jr.
to take away a pretty significant percentage of the vote.
A solid third-party candidate right now could easily take 10% of the vote.
I don't think a third-party candidate could win.
I don't think you're going to see a third-party candidate take 30% of the vote.
But could you see a third-party candidate draw like 3% of Republicans, 3% of Democrats, and 4% in the middle?
I don't see why not.
And then this election really is up in the air, despite everything else that is going on.
Again, RFK is the only person who's talking about issues right now.
That I think most Americans are concerned about.
I think they should be concerned about the weaponization of the justice system, but I also think that Donald Trump is the most politicized figure of our lifetime, bar none.
So most Americans, again, and I think rightly, are concerned more about how they put dinner on the table than they are concerned about Fannie Willis and the details of the RICO Act.
Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the fact that credit card delinquencies are jumping.
First, let's talk about the fact that as the economy begins to waver, as the Chinese economy prepares to go down, central banks in countries like China, India, and Australia are transitioning to digital currency and the Federal Reserve is contemplating the same for the United States.
With a digital currency, the government can track every single purchase you make.
Officials could even prohibit you from purchasing certain products or easily freeze or seize part or all of your money.
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Also, Whether it's trying to change the definition of words or trying to convince you that 2 plus 2 equals 5, well it sometimes feels like the culture is doing its best to make you stupid.
You know who isn't?
Dennis Prager.
So Dennis Prager has the answers in his Daily Wire Plus series, PragerU Master's Program.
In Master's Program, Dennis has gathered 40 years worth of wisdom and is sharing it on a number of wide-ranging subjects.
Dennis offers useful advice on marriage, happiness, and how to be a good person, plus so much more.
He dares to explain the differences between men and women in a world that wants to make you woke.
Dennis wants to make you wise.
All episodes available right now only for DailyWirePlus members.
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Meanwhile, credit card delinquencies have begun to jump according to Axios.
More Americans are falling behind on their credit card payments.
So get ready, folks.
What goes up must come down.
Simple, basic rules of life.
The new The rate of new credit card delinquencies has surpassed its pre-COVID level, clocking in at 7.2% in the second quarter per report out this month from the New York Fed.
Auto loan delinquencies were at 7.3% in Q2, also higher than pre-pandemic levels.
Mortgage delinquencies remain low at this point, but that's largely because mortgages were put off for a couple of years, so people saved some money on that one.
Even as inflation declines, Americans are increasingly relying on credit cards to make their budget work.
Again, we are going to see the effects of easy money petering out pretty quickly here.
And it's going to be a problem that's going to be exacerbated by China's economy, which is actually in really bad shape, but they're hiding it by lying about the stats.
According to the Wall Street Journal, China's authorities responded to another burst of dire news on the economy with a well-honed playbook.
They cut interest rates and withheld some potentially embarrassing economic data.
The trouble, say investors and economists, is that lower borrowing costs and greater opacity aren't what China needs to reignite growth and restore vanishing confidence in their economy.
China's economy is staggering under an array of challenges including a drawn-out real estate crunch, worsening relations with the U.S.-led West, and difficulties in nurturing a consumer-led expansion while the usual growth engines of investments and exports misfire.
Well, if China's economy goes down, we are fairly well intertwined with them.
You're going to see the price of goods go up again.
You're going to see the supply of goods go down again.
This is going to be a bit of a problem for consumers who are already getting smacked by inflation.
As those costs go up, some bills are going to go unpaid.
When those bills go unpaid, then some debts are going to go bad.
When the debts go bad, that could lead to things like foreclosures.
It leads to job loss.
It leads to serious economic problems.
Joe Biden's been whistling past the graveyard on the economy for quite a while.
I'm not sure that that's going to last all that much longer.
Meanwhile, in Hunter Biden news, the lawyer representing Hunter Biden in plea negotiations to end a five-year DOJ investigation into taxing gun offenses stepped down early on Tuesday, saying he intends to testify as a witness on behalf of the president's son.
The decision by the lawyer, Christopher Clark, is the latest development in the long-running negotiation between the DOJ and Biden.
The department has said a substantial part of the plea agreement no longer stands and they've suggested in court documents they could indict Biden.
Clark is now contending that Biden will need him as a witness to prove the department is seeking to back out of a legally binding deal.
So he's stepping down so he can be a witness and say that Joe Biden's DOJ lied.
Now again, to review briefly, Joe Biden's DOJ cut a sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden's attorney.
That sweetheart deal basically wiped away all future charges against Hunter Biden in exchange for a slap on the wrist.
A judge found out about it, and then the DOJ lied and said they never cut the deal in the first place.
Now, Hunter Biden's lawyer is coming out and he's saying, I may have to testify in court that the deal was already cut.
This week, Abby Lowell, a veteran lawyer in Washington who has represented a wide range of clients, according to the New York Times, filed court documents indicating he now represented Hunter Biden in the case.
Again, this is just another sign that this case is going south very quickly for Hunter Biden, but will they continue to try to push a cover up?
I would be shocked if they did not.
Now, speaking of avoiding the law, I have to say it is pretty impressive how the Biden administration is just spitting directly in the face of the Supreme Court of the United States.
So you'll recall that the Supreme Court banned affirmative action policies to any sort of institution that gets federal money.
It said it's a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, which it pretty clearly is.
Miguel Cardona, the Education Secretary, who—these are—remember, these are the rule of law people.
These are people who must establish rule of law, folks.
Rule of law.
Trust in our institutions.
Also, we don't like what the Supreme Court did, so we're just going to pretend they didn't do it.
Miguel Cardona said nothing in this court's decision denied the value of diversity in education.
Institutions can continue or start to do targeted outreach and recruitment in underserved communities, collect and consider demographic data, and run programs to consider the retention and success of students of diverse backgrounds.
I'm not sure how that isn't affirmative action.
Isn't that just making decisions on the basis of race?
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said, quote, colleges and universities can and should continue to ensure
their doors are open to those students of all backgrounds, including students of
color, who possess the characteristics necessary to succeed and
contribute on college campuses.
Described by officials from the Departments of Education and Justice as a guide to the
current legal framework of the use of racial diversity, the resources released on Monday
clarify and expand on the Biden administration's interpretation of the Supreme Court's decision.
They say, quote, institutions of higher education remain free to consider any
quality or characteristic of a student that bears on the institution's admission decision,
such as courage, motivation, or determination, even if the student's application ties that
characteristic to their lived experience with race.
So, basically, they're no longer going to be able to ask, are you black or white on the application?
They're just going to rely on you to write in your essay that you've had it really tough because you're black.
And then they're going to wink, and they're going to nod, and they're going to go ahead with exactly what they were doing before.
Now, again, is the Supreme Court going to let people get away with that?
I think it's going to be very difficult for them to get away with that.
If it turns out that black students are on average still getting into Ivy League universities with SAT scores two to three hundred points below those of Asian and white students, I do not see how the Supreme Court doesn't come back and slap down what the Biden administration is trying to do here.
But they're so invested in racial discrimination that they're spitting directly in the face of the Supreme Court.
The Education Department's guidance on Monday also encouraged colleges and universities to increase access for underserved populations and noted universities could re-examine whether policies for legacy admissions run counter to efforts to promote equal opportunity.
That's fine with me.
If you want to get rid of legacies, that's fine with me.
But can we stop pretending that you guys actually care about legacies?
What you actually care about is continued Racial discrimination.
Meanwhile, speaking of actual discrimination, real discrimination, the state of Massachusetts has now essentially barred anybody from adopting in their state if they have traditional values.
According to William McGurn, writing for the Wall Street Journal, The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families' decision to deny Michael and Kitty Burke's foster care application comes less than a decade after the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which, of course, suggested that same-sex marriage was enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.
In a dissent, you'll remember Justice Alito raised a red flag saying that, basically, this is going to be used to vilify all Americans who don't buy into the new orthodoxy.
He says, quote, in the course of its opinion, the majority compares traditional marriage laws to
laws that denied equal treatment for African-Americans and women. The implications of
this analogy will be exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.
The Berks are a loving couple who sought to adopt through the state's foster care program.
Berk, Mr. Berk, deployed to Iraq as a Marine.
Mrs. Berk is a former paraprofessional for kids with special needs.
This is like a pretty good background for kids, for parents who want foster care.
They're willing to accept children of any race, culture, or ethnicity, as well as some special needs.
They would even take siblings.
The state denied them.
Why?
Because it says that Kitty and Mike are devoutly Roman Catholic and not only attend church with regular frequency, they both work for local churches as musicians.
This meant that they could not be trusted with children.
The author of their license study said that they are lovely people, but she said their faith is not supportive, and neither are they with regard to LGBT issues.
Ultimately, the license review team concluded the Brooks quote, would not be affirming to a child who identified as LGBTQIA, and the Brooks were then rejected.
So, just to get this absolutely straight, if kids who've been abandoned by their families and are living in orphanages, and instead of giving them to a loving foster care family with a two-parent family, The father was a veteran, and the mother is a professional who deals with special needs kids.
You're gonna leave that special needs kid in the orphanage because the special needs kid might, in fact, be gay, and then the parents are gonna be mean.
That is what we are now saying in the state of Massachusetts.
And live and let live is a lie.
Somebody's standard has to apply here.
The notion that a full-scale liberalism, a morally relativistic liberalism, ends with everybody being treated equally is not true.
It is not true.
There has to be some common standard of good, particularly when it comes to kids.
Any state that says that the measure of good parenting is whether you believe the left's newest nonsense with regard to same-sex marriage, that is not a moral standard at all.
It's the reverse.
Basically, the state of Massachusetts says it is now better for a child to have no mother or father than it is to have a Roman Catholic couple adopt the kid.
That's what they're now saying.
So remember, in the state of Massachusetts, they basically had to shut down all Catholic adoption agencies in the state of Massachusetts because they weren't giving out kids to same-sex couples saying a child deserves a mother and a father.
Now we've come so far that a mother and father can't adopt a child if they say a child deserves a mother and a father.
This is how far we've gone in the state of Massachusetts.
Is that good for kids?
According to the left it is because it's much more important that kids be indoctrinated into the new cult of LGBTQIA plus minus divided by sign than that they have an actual stable family situation with a mom and a dad.
This is crazy.
So Beckett Law is now suing the state.
I assume the Brooks will win their case, but the chilling effects wouldn't be fully mitigated by the victory, said David Rivkin, a constitutional lawyer who has served in the DOJ and the White House Counsel's Office.
This is what's so bad about these policies.
So, you know, we kept hearing over and over again, over and over again.
How does a same-sex marriage affect you?
This is the answer.
When society changes its entire standard, that affects an enormous number of people, including of
course children.
Alrighty, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate. So Sage Steele,
who is just a wonderful person, I know Sage a little bit, and she's terrific. She really stands
up for her own viewpoint. She's now made a major announcement on social media. She settled her
lawsuit against ESPN and its owner Disney. She took to her ex account to tell fans her case is settled.
She said, quote, life update.
Having successfully settled my case with ESPN Disney, I decided to leave so I can exercise my First Amendment rights more freely.
I'm grateful for so many wonderful experiences over the past 16 years, and I'm excited for my next chapter.
You'll remember, she was suspended by the network in 2021 because she did not want to take the COVID back.
She was also admonished for talking about Barack Obama's lineage and for speaking out about how too many women dress in today's society on a podcast with Jay Cutler.
She suggested that her bosses were taking away high-profile assignments, that they were basically censoring her.
According to AJ Perez, ESPN offered Sage Steele a $500,000 payout to settle the lawsuit.
Steele's attorney, Brian Friedman, celebrated the victory.
He said, Disney and ESPN clearly admit their liability by offering to pay Sage more than
half a million dollars for taking away her right to free speech. The offer misses the point.
Disney can't purchase their employees' constitutional rights no matter how powerful
they think they are. That is correct. They've now parted ways, but Sage is going to be much
better off for this just as a human being because she's now going to be able to speak freely.
Good for Sage Steele, who's taken an enormous amount of crap, particularly for being a black woman who does not toe the traditional left-wing line.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Alright, so, article from CBS News Today.
No!
You don't say!
Really?
You mean the one we pulled out from a country and handed it over to a bunch of 7th century barbarians?
That they were actually going to mistreat women?
Whoa!
Mind blown!
I love when the media acts all shocked about things that are not only perfectly predictable, but are well within the absolute necessity of the situation.
According to CBS News, after two years of attempted talks with the Taliban aimed at lifting its bans on secondary and university education and work for women in Afghanistan, the UN is proposing a plan to pressure Afghanistan and incentivize the Taliban to reverse course.
Over 2.5 million girls and young women are denied secondary education.
That number is going to increase to 3 million in just a few months.
So apparently they are going to go to the ICC.
Wow!
The International Criminal Court.
That'll definitely fix the problem because the ICC has been so wildly effective throughout its long and storied history.
The ICC has done investigations into Vladimir Putin's war crimes.
Obviously that stopped Vladimir Putin from, you know, firing missiles into the middle of Ukrainian cities.
So clearly the ICC is the solution here.
You know, as it turns out, an international law ain't no substitute for the fist.
Diplomacy works as long as they're the threat of the fist.
Once you pull out, Diplomacy isn't going to work anymore.
Their five-point plan from the U.N.
is the mobilization of Education Cannot Wait, a U.N.
emergency education fund, which has launched a campaign called Afghan Girls Voices.
The plan also asks for visits by delegations from Muslim-majority countries to Kandahar and to offer the Taliban-led government funding to finance girls' return to school.
Yeah, I'm sure that that money is going to go right there and not to, you know, the Taliban.
That'll be a genius idea.
Really well done here.
All this gets obscured for years on end because, of course, it would be embarrassing to point out that Joe Biden committed one of the worst human rights violations in human history by pulling out of Afghanistan the way that he did.
But, you know, I'm glad that the media are noticing now that the Taliban are mean to the ladies.
Okay, meanwhile...
Nordstrom's got knocked over the other day in Los Angeles.
According to the Daily Wire, video captured dozens of masked and hooded suspects ransacking an LA Nordstrom department store on Saturday in a brazen smash-and-grab heist, stealing up to $100,000 in merchandise.
Between 30 and 50 people stormed out of Nordstrom at the Westfield Topanga Mall in Canoga Park around 4 p.m.
after taking clothes, handbags, and other expensive accessories, according to the LAPD.
Well, these sorts of organized shoplifting events I mean, it's truly an amazing thing when you now have giant gangs of people who are just going and committing massive crimes in these really quite beautiful malls.
By the way, we used to spend an awful lot of time at this particular Westfield Mall in Topanga Canyon because my wife did her residency at Kaiser Permanente in that particular area.
So I used to take the kids there all the time.
There are a lot of people who are at these places, obviously.
A security guard was sprayed with mace, pepper spray, or bear spray, likely by a suspect within the Mob of Thieves, who eventually escaped in several vehicles, including a Beamer and a Lexus.
So, you know, this stuff is worth money.
The good news is that all of these cities continue to elect left-wing DAs, and then they have to recall them, according to Politico.
The top prosecutor for a San Francisco Bay Area county was playing defense as she absorbed criticism from furious residents of its largest city, a tense meeting that felt like a proxy for a mounting recall fight.
People packed a church in an affluent Oakland neighborhood in late July to demand progressive Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price's answer for disturbingly pervasive carjacking and assaults, often shouting questions over her answers.
I voted for you, but I don't feel safe here, said a woman described as being pulled out of her car at gunpoint on a recent morning.
Well, yeah.
I mean, maybe you guys should stop electing attorneys who have been approved by George Soros.
Maybe that would be the way to do this, guys.
I mean, I'm amused that you vote these people in and then you are shocked when they do precisely the thing they said that they were going to do.
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