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Aug. 21, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:34
Republican Debate Week Begins!
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Well, we finally reached it.
It is debate week on Wednesday this week.
There will be a Republican debate.
Will the frontrunner be part of that Republican debate?
Absolutely not.
Donald Trump's like, no, not interested.
I'm leading by 80,000 points.
I don't need to be part of the debate.
And frankly, I totally get it.
I get it.
He did the same thing in 2016 after the Megyn Kelly debate where he didn't like the questions he was asked.
He simply left.
The next debate, he just absconded.
He was like, I'm not going to be part of this.
It didn't hurt him in any way, shape, or form.
On a logical level, it makes perfect sense for him not to take part in the Republican debate.
On a sort of principled level, he certainly should because there are serious questions to be asked about whether he should be the nominee or not.
This is true for anybody who's running for the nomination.
Joe Biden should be debating Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for sure.
And people who are voting for Trump in the primaries should remember this tactic because I promise you, promise you, promise you, one year from now, When Joe Biden is the nominee, if Donald Trump is the nominee, Joe Biden will not debate Donald Trump.
Get ready for it.
It ain't gonna happen.
Joe Biden will make any excuse.
He's not gonna get on a stage with him.
And Donald Trump's people will say, well, he's afraid.
And at that point, every Democrat and every member of the media will come back and say, well, Donald Trump didn't debate any of the Republicans.
Why exactly should Joe Biden debate Donald Trump?
Biden's excuse will be something about Trump being an insurrectionary, or Trump being a criminal indictee, or whatever it is.
And the media will side with Joe Biden, and there will be no debate.
So if you are nominating Donald Trump because you think he's going to debate Joe Biden, just get ready, Joe Biden is not going to debate Donald Trump.
But, put that aside, there's a perfectly logical reason for Donald Trump not to debate the rest of the Republican field.
Namely, he is leading them by leaps and bounds.
There's a brand new CBS poll, and what it shows is Trump way out in front, at 62% of the vote.
62% of the vote for Donald Trump.
That is a massive number for Donald Trump.
Now, one of the theories about Trump had been that he was going to hover around in the 30s, maybe in the 40s.
If he was lucky, he would break 50.
Him at 62% is not challengeable.
Because what that means at 62%, obviously, is that no consolidation of the field is likely to matter.
Now, it's obviously super early.
A lot can happen between now and January, including possible actual court time for the former president of the United States.
However, a huge percentage of Trump's base is very locked in on Donald Trump, which man,
you buy the ticket, you're going to take the ride.
Whatever it's going to be, it's going to be.
I'm just going to say every tautology I know right now, because the reality is that everyone
knows Donald Trump's flaws as a candidate.
Every single person in the United States has an opinion on Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is baked into the cake.
You're taking an awful big bet, Vader.
This had better work.
I mean, if Donald Trump is the nominee, you're running directly against four separate indictments that are coming down in the first half of next year.
You're running directly against the generalized American perception that Donald Trump was not a good actor between November 4th of 2020 and January 6th of 2021.
That's just what it is.
Okay, if you look at the polling on the general election data right now, general election data says that Donald Trump is competitive with Joe Biden, but Donald Trump is not breaking 45, 46% in any poll.
Those are the upper end polls for him in the general election cycle.
Now, you may think that's going to change because the economy is going to collapse.
You may think that's going to change because Joe Biden has health problems.
You may think that's going to change because of all of the Hunter Biden of it.
All of that may well happen.
Right?
Whoever is the nominee of a major American party has a shot at becoming president of the United States, as we learned in 2016, when the New York Times had Donald Trump as a 1% possibility of becoming president.
And then, by the end of the night, on election night, he was the president of the United States.
So, if he is the nominee, sure, there's a good shot he could become president.
By good, I mean like, if you're trying to ballpark this thing out, a 1 in 3 shot of him being president of the United States because he lost all the states he would need to win next time.
He would need to win Georgia.
He would need to win Arizona.
That would not even be sufficient.
He would then have to win one of the following three.
Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania, right?
And right now, in the state polling, he is losing in all of those places, right?
The only place where he may be competitive among those states right now is Georgia.
That is largely because of the presence of Brian Kemp in the state of Georgia, who remains a popular figure.
But there are going to be a lot of states that are up for play in 2024 if Donald Trump is the nominee.
And it's not just the ones I mentioned.
North Carolina is going to be up for play.
I know a lot of people are sleeping on Texas.
I don't want to be alarmist here, but Ted Cruz is going to run a rough race in the Senate in Texas, especially because Greg Abbott, who is a popular governor of Texas, is not going to be top of the ballot.
Last time Cruz ran, you have to remember that Greg Abbott was also running.
Greg Abbott was a popular governor, this is in 2018, and Ted Cruz ended up winning over Beto O'Rourke by a couple hundred thousand votes out of about eight million votes cast.
Well, that race could be really, really tight this time because Greg Abbott is not at the top of the ticket, and that could be a real problem for Donald Trump, yes, believe it or not, in Texas.
That's not necessarily going to happen, but do Democrats see that as a state that is in play if Donald Trump is on the ballot?
They do.
So, again, Donald Trump, right now, leading in the Republican field by leaps and bounds.
Also, in terms of a general election, If you are, that is at best a 50-50 bet.
Now, is it possible that that's better than any of the other Republicans?
I tend to doubt it, but certainly it's possible.
Anything is possible at this point, but do I think, in my heart of hearts, that Donald Trump is as likely to win the presidency if he is the nominee as pretty much any of the other Republican candidates who don't have the same baked-in negatives as Donald Trump?
I think that Trump has some very, very big problems that face him.
So you can hope that Joe Biden is just really, really bad and that anyone can sneak in, but that's not really an argument for Trump.
That's an argument that pretty much anybody can sneak in if Joe Biden is the candidate, which requires you to ask the question as to whether then Trump should be the nominee.
Anyway, none of this matters in terms of the actual data today.
The actual data today, whatever I say, Donald Trump is winning the nomination by leaps and bounds.
Again, the CBS poll has him up over the nearest competitor.
By 46 points.
By 46 points.
And again, that is not because it was split in the field.
That is because he is at 62% of the vote.
So, the CBS poll going into the debate week.
It's pretty fascinating, because it shows how the Republican electorate is thinking about Donald Trump.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, so back to the CBS poll.
Voters who were likely GOP primary voters were asked, which concerns you more about the latest Trump indictments?
Whether it's politically motivated, whether Trump tried to overturn the presidential election, or both.
77% say the indictment is politically motivated, which of course is true.
As far as top reasons for considering Trump, 99% Among those who are or might be considering voting for Trump, 99% say things were better under Trump, which is true.
95% fights for people like me, 76% know him better than other candidates, and 74% always been a supporter.
Can you remember?
That is like 74% of people who say they've always been a supporter of Trump
who are in that 62%, which is still above 50% or just below 50% by the calculation.
As far as whether you're supporting Trump because of his legal indictments,
73% of Trump's voters, 73% say that you are voting for him because you are showing support
for him during the legal indictments.
That is what the CBS polling says now.
I have.
a pretty serious sort of intellectual problem with this, which is you don't nominate a candidate
because you wish to show support for them on an ancillary issue. You nominate a candidate
because you wish for them to win. So over the weekend I asked people like, let's assume for
a second that these two things are in conflict. Supporting Donald Trump in terms of giving your
money to him and your nomination to him and winning the general election.
Which one is more important?
Like supporting him in the trials by giving him the nomination?
Or winning the election if those two things are in opposition?
And virtually everybody said that they were very much interested in winning the election.
But what's gonna have to happen for people to actually realize that is for people to actually start thinking of those two things in opposition.
It may be too early for that because again, the polling numbers for Joe Biden are so low at this point that Trump looks competitive even with the indictments.
Meanwhile, this is pretty amazing.
Among those who say that honesty is very important in the GOP nomination, 61% say That the most honest candidate, the candidate who they choose, if honesty is a top priority for them, 61% say Trump, 17% say DeSantis.
Now, I understand that when people answer this question, they're not using truth to mean truth.
They're using truth as a proxy for says the things he feels like saying at any given moment.
They're using truth as a proxy for authenticity, which again, I have an intellectual problem with.
Truth is not authenticity.
I know an awful lot of authentic people who lie on the regular.
I know an awful lot of authentic people who are really quite terrible.
Because authenticity is not a moral quality.
Authenticity is you having no actual brain-to-mouth filter.
It turns out that many of the most considerate, best people you know are inauthentic in the sense that if you consider authenticity to be whatever your instinct is that day, then you actually have to sit there and be like, okay, I'm not going to be authentic when I tell my wife she looks fat in that dress.
That'd be a stupid thing to do.
Or when I tell my neighbor that he's a jerk.
Would it make you more authentic to say that?
Sure!
You'd be like Jim Carrey in Liar Liar, and that would make you authentic.
Would it make you, like, particularly a good person?
Would it make you somebody who speaks the truth?
Very often, the thing that you say that's authentic is not true.
Because you're defending yourself.
My seven-year-old son, constantly, when he gets in trouble, he, very authentically, will tell me that it is not his fault, and it is 100% his fault.
This sort of stuff happens all the time with kids.
However, Again, my opinion on this doesn't matter, the GOP voters' opinion matters.
61% of all GOP voters in the primary say that Donald Trump is their candidate if honesty is very important to them.
Not only that, among Trump voters, 71% of Trump voters say, they were given options as to what they feel, they were given a bunch of sources, and they were asked, okay, of these sources, who do you trust most to tell you what is true?
This is a pretty amazing stat.
So Trump voters were asses.
Of those Trump voters, 42% said they trust their religious leaders to tell them true things.
Which is, like, astonishing.
That's an astonishingly low number.
42% trust their religious leaders to tell them true things.
56% say conservative media figures.
63% say friends and family.
And 71% say Trump.
Which means that of Trump voters, they actually trust Donald Trump to say true things to them.
More than they trust their friends and family, conservative media figures, or their own religious leaders.
Well, I mean, bottom line is that on a utilitarian level, you can't break that stranglehold.
How exactly do you break that stranglehold?
How do you say that Donald Trump is not telling you the truth when he is not telling you the truth when you trust Trump more than you trust the person who's saying that Trump is not telling you the truth?
There's no way to break that stranglehold, per se.
Which is why, really, the only attack line that ever was going to get any traction with regard to a huge percentage of primary voters was the Donald Trump is not the most likely candidate to win this election.
Which, again, I think that's true, but Donald Trump is saying the opposite, and a lot of these people trust Donald Trump to say the true thing.
So when Donald Trump says, I'm going to win, and I'm winning big in all the polls, and there are no polls showing him winning big against Joe Biden, doesn't matter.
They trust him more than they trust the polls.
They trust him more than they trust friends and family.
Donald Trump has forged a connection with the people who support him stronger than any political figure of my lifetime.
That is just a fact.
Whether I like it or not.
Whether you like it or not.
And that connection means that it doesn't matter what the facts are or what the data are or any of the rest of this.
It means that if he says that he is going to win, people trust him that he's going to win.
If he said that he did win, people trust him that he did win.
If he says the polls show that he's winning by leaps and bounds, people trust.
He can shift his position on a dime and people still trust him because he has become a source of all of enormous truth.
Again, more than religious leaders and friends and family for a lot of Republican voters.
Now, with all of that said, there are a few downsides in this poll for Donald Trump.
50% of people in this poll, likely GOP primary voters, say that the campaign has been too much about Trump.
31% say about the right amount.
19% say not enough about Trump.
So it's split about 50-50.
Too much about Trump, not enough about Trump.
As far as who people think would beat Biden, again, these are the stats that start to border on what I think is the unfactual.
61% of Republican voters say that Donald Trump is the candidate most likely to beat Joe Biden.
61%.
35% say DeSantis, 20% Scott, 18% Vivek, 14% Haley, 14% Pence.
As far as DeSantis, would he beat Biden?
got 18% Vivek, 14% Haley, 14% Pence.
As far as DeSantis, would he be Biden?
Right now, only 35% of Republican voters say that DeSantis would definitely be Biden,
as opposed to 50% in June.
47% say that he might, and 18% say that he'd be a long shot.
So one of the things that is happening here is also that Again, that generalized perception that the best candidate to beat Biden would be Trump is being bolstered by two separate perceptions.
One is in DeSantis' control and one is not.
One is that Joe Biden is so weak in the polling that there's a perception that anyone, including Trump, can beat him.
And the other is that DeSantis himself has not run any good campaigns at this point.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Okay, so.
All of this brings this to the debate itself.
As you say, Donald Trump, right now, he's got a lock on two-thirds of the Republican base, or at least half of the Republican base.
And, you know, again, any consolidation of the field right now does not look sufficient to overcome it.
This is why he's not going to participate in the debate and is going to undermine the debate itself, right?
He's doing a pre-taped interview with Tucker Carlson, which makes perfect sense.
It allows him to slap directly against Fox News the way that going on Tucker does, since Fox News fired Tucker.
And meanwhile, he'll get big numbers on Twitter now.
Those numbers are not comparable to actual cable news numbers.
Numbers on Twitter, if you hover over a tweet for more than a second or two, it counts as a view.
But those will be people who engage at a very high level with that.
And it doesn't matter, he doesn't have to out-compete it.
He just has to degrade the debate itself.
And by the way, he'll be the subject of the debate anyway.
No matter what happens, the guy who's leading by 40 points not being on the stage, A lot of questions are going to be about Trump in that debate.
And Ronna Romney McDaniel, understanding that very likely Trump is the nominee, she's basically acquiescing to all of his requests about the debate, even while he's undercutting the debate.
So she's kind of begging him to be part of the debate.
Of course, he's not going to do that, but she's then allowing all of his surrogates into the spin room to spin for him.
She's allowing Kerry Lake and Matt Gaetz and and Byron Donald and all these people who are like Trump's surrogates in the room.
Their man is ditching the debate and she Who has been, I gotta say, the most incompetent RNC director of my lifetime.
The only one who's a challenger is Michael Steele.
She's the... I mean, it's insane that this lady's retained her job.
I said this when she was up for the re-elect for RNC.
Full disclosure, I'm friendly with Harmeet Dhillon.
She represented us with regard to our case against the federal government to stop the OSHA VAX mandate under Joe Biden.
I said at the time, I don't understand how you get your ass kicked in 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022 and you keep your job.
Which speaks to, in general, the state of the Republican Party, which has basically become a non-profit for losers.
It's a bunch of people who can't win an election, and then they're like, we couldn't win the election because of this extraneous factor, give us more money.
And feel bad for us.
How this lady has retained her job is beyond me.
She's running a party That has lost several elections running has underperformed in all the elections where it should be overperforming is running up into a 2024 election cycle where Republicans should retake the Senate and now are very easily on the verge of continuing to lose the Senate and maybe the presidency again.
And she's holding a debate among Republican candidates sponsored by the Republican Party and basically declaring her own party irrelevant.
Because her role is irrelevant.
Well, what exactly does the RNC stand for if the guy says, screw you and your debate, I'm going on Tucker.
And she's like, well, why don't you bring all your surrogates in here, in the spin room, so they can rip all the candidates on stage that your candidate didn't have the balls to come and actually speak to.
Here's Ronna Romney McDaniel.
So let's take a look at the lineup there.
I think that President Trump will not be there on the debate night.
What are your thoughts on that?
And who did make the debate stage?
Well, I'm still holding out hope that President Trump will come.
I think it's so important that the American people hear from all the candidates.
But there's a lot of candidates that have qualified.
We're at seven right now that have officially qualified with the small dollar donations, with the polling threshold and the pledge.
And then we've got some that are on the cusp.
So we're going to be looking at polls the next few days.
There are three or four that are waiting for one percent and one more national poll to make that debate stage.
OK, so that is exciting stuff.
So she's she's obviously not going to get Trump to participate.
You imagine the punishment would be, OK, well, your surrogates can't be in the room ripping on the other candidates.
Nope.
Nope.
I mean, I don't even know what to say about Romney McDaniel, who, by the way, remember, the reason she originally ended up in this position is because she was related to Mitt Romney.
Donald Trump didn't like Mitt Romney, so she literally dropped Romney from her name.
That's pretty wild.
Pretty wild.
OK, meanwhile, the DeSantis campaign obviously has been running really rough in the launch with Elon Musk.
I think that DeSantis thought when he jumped into the race, he was going to be seen as Trump without all of the baggage.
And instead, he is sort of seen as Trump without the charm because the baggage on Trump doesn't wear.
I mean, the reality is the Republican base, the more baggage you pile on Trump, the more the Republican base sees Trump as some heroic ox who can actually hold all the baggage, right?
The more stuff you pile on him, the more like, man, that guy's got broad shoulders.
Look at all the baggage he can carry.
And so DeSantis has been struggling for a line of attack.
Again, his original line of attack was electability.
The bad poll numbers for Biden combined with the fact that he has not run away in those polls against Biden,
basically have taken away the electability argument from him.
And so he has to recapitulate his, he has to recast it.
And so he's relaunching his campaign again.
That started really last week.
The original relaunch is now being essentially undercut by both the media and Team Trump.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Okay, so...
There have been several systemic struggles for the DeSantis campaign.
I think they made several core assumptions when they jumped into the race, and none of those have come true.
So, core assumption number one, governance matters.
Nope!
Not one iota.
Not in the Republican primaries it don't.
And a simple fact of the matter is that Ron DeSantis passing a bill to stop critical race theory in the state of Florida has been treated by Republican primary voters the same as Vivek Ramaswamy saying things about critical race theory.
Saying things and doing things in a Republican primary, there is no actual distinction.
And it's hard for a lot of people who are in politics to understand, but it is the reality.
Because politicians make, I get it, politicians make promises all the time.
And so, you tend to believe those promises in a primary, if you have no reason not to believe the promises in a primary.
Which is why Donald Trump could make promises in 2016 on all sides of a particular issue, and people are like, okay, well I either trust the guy or I don't trust the guy.
DeSantis is like, you should trust me because I did these things in Florida.
And the Republican voters are like, well, I mean, but I could trust Vivek.
Maybe he'll do those things when he's... Sure, I mean, I have no reason to believe he won't do those things.
So, doing things and saying things in a Republican primary turned out to be almost the exact same thing.
So DeSantis has focused a lot on governance in Florida, but the governance that he's focused on in the campaign has been all the same stuff that Vivek just says.
And so he hasn't actually won any advantage over somebody like Vivek by passing a law banning critical race theory in the classroom over Vivek saying he would do that if he were president of the United States.
So that distinction, which I think DeSantis thought was going to be very telling for him, hasn't had any impact on the race.
Second, as I mentioned, the electability argument for DeSantis was rooted in the idea that Trump would probably pull low and DeSantis would pull better against Biden, and that hasn't happened.
Largely because everyone pulls well against Biden, or at least half-decently against Biden, because Biden's a really crappy president, as we'll get to in just a little while.
So that's hurt him.
And then on top of that, I think that DeSantis truly believed that because he had some capital in the bank, not just money, but like actual political capital in the bank, that he could then not go into unfriendly areas and reiterate to the American public why he was popular in the first place.
So Ron DeSantis is not just popular because of his COVID policy.
Ron DeSantis was popular in the state of Florida because the media made him enemy number one, and then he went into their spaces and he wrecked them.
DeSantis, as I've said over and over, needs to be doing this.
I don't understand for the life of me why he has not thus far.
He's basically shielded himself from opposing media.
I get it on a personal level, it's not fun to do that sort of stuff, but you know who does opposing media fairly frequently is Vivek.
You know who does opposing media fairly frequently, or at least did during the 2016, he doesn't do it now, but during 2016, Donald Trump did opposing media fairly frequently.
If you want to show the Republican base that you are a fighter, DeSantis thinks you do that by actually doing things as governor, as I mentioned.
Nope.
The only way people think that you're a fighter in the Republican base right now is you go on media and you go to a member of the media and you wreck them to their face.
That is the way that you show them that you are a fighter.
DeSantis has not done this in that campaign so far.
So he's not really dropped in the polls.
He's stuck still in that 15 to 18 percent range, but he's not bust out in any serious way.
OK, so over the weekend, he He basically was lied about.
He made a comment while he was being interviewed by Wilwitt that seems to me inarguable in context.
In context, I do not think this statement is in any way arguable.
It was then immediately taken out of context by pretty much all of his political opponents, which is the way that it works in a campaign, and used as a club to hit him.
So here was DeSantis with Wilwitt over the weekend.
These guys have records of principle fighting the swamp that are second to none and yet they will be attacked by some of these people and called rhinos.
So it's just been totally detached from any type of substance and ultimately a movement can't be about the personality of one individual.
The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people, and that's got to be based in principle.
Because if you're not rooted in principle, if all we are is listless vessels that are just supposed to follow whatever happens to come down the pike on truth social every morning, that's not going to be a durable movement.
Okay, so, the beginning of this statement, in which he literally calls out people like Elise Stefanik, right?
He's talking about left-wing, or people who are left-leaning Republicans, who have allied with Trump and then suddenly become not-RINOs.
And then Chip Roy of Texas, who's very, very conservative, and suddenly becomes a RINO when he supports DeSantis.
What DeSantis is saying is that congressional supporters who suddenly become not-RINOs because they support Trump, even though they're left-wing on policy, Or people who simply will do whatever Trump wants on any given day as opposed to, I like Trump for principled reasons.
There are a lot of people who do.
Or I like what Trump did as president.
A lot of people do.
That's not what he's talking about.
He's talking about people who shift their position on any given day based on what Donald Trump's preferences are.
He's saying that any movement that roots itself in follow the leader is not going to be a successful movement.
That does not seem particularly arguable to me in that context.
So immediately gets taken out of context.
And now the idea is that it's a basket of deplorables moment, like when Hillary Clinton suggested that Trump supporters were a basket of all white supremacists, terrible people, etc.
So the suggestion is that what DeSantis was saying there is that everyone who supports Trump is a listless vessel, which is clearly not what he is saying there, right?
In context, he clearly is not.
It doesn't matter.
You've got the Trump campaign, which again, there's great irony to the fact that Donald Trump can attack anybody from any angle at any time using any tool at his disposal, and everybody just kind of shrugs.
DeSantis says something that really is not an insult, and Trump's campaign immediately takes offense.
So, MAGA put out a, MAGA Inc.
put out a statement saying, So, again, the idea is that he's insulting you.
If you support Trump, he's insulting you.
That's not what he's saying.
That's clearly not what he said.
insult to Trump supporters.
Ron DeSantis should stop hiding behind spokespeople and address this himself.
Every hour that passes further underscores the contempt DeSantis has for the voters who
made him governor.
Perhaps he's waiting for another membo from Never Back Down to tell him what to do.
So again, the idea is that he's insulting you.
If you support Trump, he's insulting you.
That's not what he's saying.
That's clearly not what he said.
We played the clip.
Vivek Ramaswamy, in very cynical fashions, did the same thing.
Thank you.
He tweeted out, which is, I gotta say, Vivek, that's pretty disgusting.
Okay, Ron DeSantis has been the best governor in the country over the last four years.
Suggesting that Ron DeSantis is a listless vessel following a super PAC is patently absurd.
It's patently absurd.
The idea that candidates will say anything or do anything or switch any position to get ahead with no consequence.
That sounds more like a listless vessel kind of talk.
But it's a campaign.
Campaigns are ugly.
DeSantis camp fired back at all of this.
They put out a statement via press secretary Brian Griffin saying,
quote, the dishonest media refuses to report the facts.
Donald Trump and some congressional endorsers are listless vessels.
Why?
Because Trump and DC insiders feel he is entitled to your vote.
Ron DeSantis believes your trust should be earned and has the vision, plan,
and record to beat Joe Biden and reverse the decline of our country.
And then he said that's why Ron DeSantis will be showing up Wednesday night to debate,
and Donald Trump will not.
Hey, well, again, we will see if anybody else, including DeSantis, is able to gain any points during the debate.
It seems to me the dynamic of the debate with Trump absent is going to be all about Trump.
It seems like everybody's going to train their incoming fire on DeSantis, particularly Chris Christie, who is just a suicide bomber in these debates.
He was in 2016 when he committed one of the world's most obvious acts of murder-suicide against Marco Rubio, killed him in a New Hampshire debate, and then proceeded to implode himself.
So, yeah, I...
A lot of people are looking for something sort of dispositive from this debate.
I don't think that that is, uh, I don't think that's probably right.
I think that this debate is probably going to be everybody holding their ground, because what ground is there to hold?
I mean, they're fighting over 35% of the Republican base at this point.
Trump's got the other two-thirds locked up.
So, yeah, it's going to be hard to see how anybody breaks loose from that pack, as I suggested last week.
I think this debate looks more like a lobster pot than anything else.
Or a crab pot.
Everybody pulling each other down as they try to escape the pot.
Meanwhile, Trump is sitting over there with Tucker Carlson enjoying himself.
Now, the other candidates, for what it's worth, are having their own struggles.
Everybody's focused on DeSantis' struggles, because he's widely assumed in my polling is the second most prominent candidate in the field, even if he's trailing by 40 points.
But the other candidates are having their own troubles.
So, Vivek Ramaswamy, for all the talk, is still six, seven percent.
That is outperforming for sure.
Vivek is very aggressive.
He's out on the campaign trail all the time.
He goes into opposing media spaces.
He's very clever.
All of those things are in Vivek's favor.
Is he actually going to be the nominee?
Almost undoubtedly not.
It doesn't matter.
He's making a name for himself, which, you know, again, is part of what Republican politics has become for a while, is very often people running for office for ancillary reasons.
Meanwhile, Nikki Haley is still running.
She's earning three, four percent of the vote.
She's, at least to her credit, trying to make a case as to why people should move beyond Trump, which I assume that somebody has to make if they don't want Trump to be the nominee.
Here's Nikki Haley the other day trying to explain why Trump should not be the nominee.
I think that President Trump was the right president at the right time.
I agree with so many of his policies.
But at the end of the day, we have to win in November.
And it is time to put that negativity and drama behind us.
We can't keep talking about the past.
We have got to talk about how we are going to take America to a new future that is full of peace and law and order and opportunities for our children.
That's a case.
Is it going to have any weight?
I have some doubts.
Meanwhile, the person who actually has the strongest case to make against Trump on the merits is Mike Pence, who's vice president, who Donald Trump lied about for three months, suggesting that he had the unilateral power to overturn the 2020 election by denying state-certified results.
Pence was asked specifically about whether Trump actually declassified materials that he then, you know, had on his property at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend, and Pence was like, well, I mean, I didn't see any evidence he declassified them.
We are learning that Meadows has told investigators that he knew of no such broad declassification order from Donald Trump.
What about you?
Had you heard anything to suggest that the president had issued an order, even a standing order, declassifying documents like that?
Well, first off, the handling of classified materials is enormously serious in the life of the nation.
I can't really comment on your reporting, but in my case, I was never made aware of any broad-based effort to declassify documents.
There is a process that the White House goes through to declassify materials.
I'm aware of that occurring on several occasions over the course of our four years.
I don't have any knowledge of any broad-based directive from the president.
Okay, again, Teflon Don, none of this is gonna make any difference. The indictments are a reason
for his supporters to vote for him, according to CBS News polling. So, again, there are a lot of
Republicans in waiting, and there is only one guy who's leading the race by 46 points right now.
We'll get to more on Joe Biden on the other side of the ticket, because again, it's Joe Biden's weakness that's really helping Trump.
And we'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, meanwhile, we speak about Joe Biden's weakness.
Joe Biden is an unbelievably weak candidate.
Chuck Todd and Jonathan Martin, even they, over the weekend, were recognizing that there are massive issues clouding the Biden campaign.
Here they were discussing it on Meet the Press.
I think Biden has basically got three issues where he's not figured out what to say, okay?
One is obviously the questions about Hunter Biden, his son.
The other is what to say about the investigations into Donald Trump.
And the third is about his age.
Those are three massive issues that are sort of clouding his reelection campaign, and he's not figured out what to say about it.
That, of course, is true.
And even other members of the media are noticing that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden are liars.
So, for example, Jake Tapper on CNN, he was like, you remember that time when Joe Biden said that Hunter did not receive Chinese money?
That was not true.
Tesla wrote, Hunter Biden reported nearly $2.4 million in income in 2017 and $2.2 million in income in 2018, most of which came from Chinese or Ukrainian interests.
And this directly goes against what Joe Biden said in the debate in 2020 with Donald Trump.
Take a listen.
My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about, China.
None of that is true.
He made a fortune in Ukraine, in China, in Moscow, and various other places.
That is simply not true.
So it's from two different debates, but, I mean, Trump was right.
I mean, he did make a fortune from China, and Joe Biden was wrong.
Now normally you would call that Joe Biden being a vicious liar.
He is a penny anti-criminal.
He has been a penny anti-criminal his entire political career.
Like his entire career is just littered with him obtaining goodies for members of his family.
We're talking about everybody ranging Herman's sister, to his brothers Frank and Jim, to his sons
Bo and Hunter.
Everyone around Joe Biden has become richer because Joe Biden was in the United States Senate.
There's just no question about this.
Well, now it seems that things may get ugly for Joe, not because of the stuff that he did for
Hunter, but because of the one time he couldn't pull it off for Hunter.
According to Politico, Hunter Biden's lawyer is now threatening to put Joe Biden on the stand.
It was Halloween of 2022 and Hunter Biden's lawyer, Chris Clark, didn't sound happy.
Just three weeks earlier, news had leaked that federal agents believed they had enough evidence to charge his client with illegally buying a gun as a drug user.
The leak was illegal, the lawyer wrote to the U.S.
attorney overseeing the probe.
The prosecution, he argued, would be seen as purely political.
It might even violate the Second Amendment.
Then he issued a warning.
If the Justice Department charged the president's son, his lawyers would put the president on the witness stand.
President Biden now unquestionably would be a fact witness for the defense in any criminal trial, Clark wrote in a 32-page letter reviewed by Politico.
That letter, along with more than 300 pages of previously unreported emails and documents exchanged between Hunter Biden's legal team and prosecutors, sheds new light on the fraught negotiations that nearly produced a broad plea deal.
That deal would have resolved Biden's most pressing legal issues, the gun purchase and his failure to pay taxes for several years.
And it also could have helped insulate Biden from future prosecution by a Republican-led DOJ.
The documents show how the deal collapsed, a sudden turnabout that occurred after Republicans bashed it and a judge raised questions about it.
The collapse renewed the prospect Biden will head to trial as his father ramps up his 2024 election bid.
So what exactly happened here?
Well, apparently the documents provide a detailed behind-the-scenes look at how the two sides came to the brink of a plea deal.
It was a sweetheart deal, no question.
It blew up when the judge saw the sweetheart deal and said, I've never seen anything remotely like this.
It was very obvious that David Weiss and the DOJ were cramming down a sweetheart deal.
Hunter Biden was going to take that sweetheart deal, and they were doing all of this in order to protect Joe Biden from having to take the stand or be involved.
But it was Joe Biden's DOJ who was overseeing all of this, obviously.
According to the documents, By April 26, 2022.
As Hunter Biden's lawyers convened with prosecutors, they had one big concern.
Taxes.
Specifically, whether prosecutors were going to charge him with failing to lawfully pay those taxes from 2014 to 2019.
Charges related to anything else didn't seem remotely imminent.
Speaking to lawyers from the DOJ, Biden's attorneys opened their argument with Trump.
In light of Trump's ceaseless demands for an investigation of Hunter, charging the younger Biden with tax crimes would be devastating to the reputation of the DOJ, according to Hunter's lawyers.
It would look like the department had acquiesced to Trump's political pressure campaign.
So, the argument that Hunter's lawyers made to the DOJ, which the DOJ then took up, remember, this is also under Donald Trump, was, if you intervene right now and you actually prosecute Hunter, it might hurt Joe, and that would look bad for Trump, which is an insane reason not to bring charges.
Biden's lawyers argued the political pressure was itself a compelling reason not to bring any charges.
Later in 2022, the DOJ confirmed to Biden's lawyers their client could also face federal charges for a gun crime.
Clark argued the same political pressure meant bringing gun charges would be scandalous.
On October 31, 2022, he wrote directly to David Weiss, the U.S.
Attorney for Delaware, overseeing the probe.
Weiss had been appointed by Trump.
He'd been allowed to stay on during Biden's administration to continue the investigation.
Merrick Garland, the AG, had pledged to give Weiss full independence.
But he wasn't given full independence.
He had to work with other DAs across the country to charge in various jurisdictions because he didn't have special counsel status.
Clark argued in his letter to Weiss that charging Hunter Biden with a gun crime would torpedo public trust in the DOJ.
The document included color photos of two former heads of Trump's DOJ, Matt Whitaker and Bill Barr, talking about Biden business deals on cable news.
Then Clark invoked another controversial federal investigation, he said, was seen by the public as a political hatchet job, the failed prosecution of prominent Democratic lawyer Michael Sussman.
Sussman, of course, was involved in the Steele dossier and all the rest of it.
Clark laid out what could have been seen as a promise, a warning, or some very zealous lawyering, he said.
Joe Biden would undoubtedly be a witness at trial because of leaks about the probe.
He wrote that just a few weeks before sending the letter there had been two back-to-back leaks related to Hunter Biden and the gun issue.
Clark said the leaks prompted the president to address his son's legal woes the next day on CNN.
And he then described it in a nearly unthinkable scenario, actually calling Joe Biden as a witness.
And at that point, the DOJ basically said, fine, let's do a sweetheart plea deal.
Which is incredible.
So basically, Hunter Biden's lawyers pressured the Biden DOJ into giving him a sweetheart deal with the threat that Joe Biden might have to testify for the defense.
Totally insane.
Then the whistleblowers came forward, they said, oh yeah, by the way, this was a sweetheart deal.
And they prevented us from investigating fully.
And that is when, only then, after that, and after the collapse of the plea deal, that is when the DOJ decided to make David Weiss a special counsel to investigate presumably partially himself.
By the way, worth noting here, who exactly is David Weiss?
Well, it turns out that David Weiss worked for years with Beau Biden because he's from Delaware.
Delaware is a very small state.
Everybody knows each other.
Weiss worked with Beau to hash out prosecution strategies.
Although Democrats point to Weiss's appointment by Donald Trump as evidence of his independence, the full story of his career is more nuanced.
He spent two years as acting U.S.
attorney under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and then remained as top deputy for the remainder of their term.
So the notion that it was like Trump's decision to appoint Weiss, and he could have fired him presumably, but very often what happens, you think the president knew who David Weiss was?
Of course not.
He got a recommendation from people in Delaware, David Weiss is a good guy, so he just reappointed him.
The White House declined to comment, noting that Weiss is conducting an independent investigation, presumably into himself, considering the fact that Weiss is the person who negotiated the sweetheart deal in the first place.
This is going to get very, very ugly very quickly for Hunter, for Joe, for everybody else involved.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to be the world's most terrible president.
Over a thousand people are still missing two weeks after the wildfires in Maui.
That includes presumably hundreds of children.
We have no idea exactly how many people have died.
The good news is that Joe Biden went west for his second vacation of the month, which is really important.
They arrived in Nevada late Friday for more rest and relaxation.
They're renting a private home on Lake Tahoe.
He flew there from Camp David, where he hosted a summit Friday with the leaders of South Korea and Japan.
That home belongs to Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor.
You remember Steyer as the very, very ultra-wealthy Democratic donor who ran for president in 2020 and got zero votes.
The Bidens will then halt their vacation for one day on Monday to visit Maui.
They'll meet with survivors, first responders, and local officials while surveying the damage.
This is shortly after he said there was no comment on the number of dead in Maui.
He vacationed earlier this month in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he went on bike rides, visited beaches, and went for a date night with the First Lady to see Oppenheimer.
So, the good news is the old man is having himself a really nice summer.
The bad news is, of course, that if this were Donald Trump doing all of this in the middle of the Maui wildfire, then everybody would have lost their damn mind.
Everybody.
But, obviously, he's Joe Biden, so he gets away with it.
According to the Washington Post, ahead of Maui visit, Biden's governmental and personal response scrutinized.
Well, you think?
By whom?
Maybe you should just, instead of reporting it as like a third party, well, you know, it is being, maybe you should be doing the scrutiny.
More than 120 hours passed between when Joe Biden first spoke publicly about the devastating Maui fires on August 10th and his next substantive remarks about the tragedy the following week.
During that five-day stretch of presidential reticence, the full scope of the crisis in Hawaii came into clear view, says the Washington Post.
Behind the scenes, aides say, Biden was leading a robust, by-the-book federal response.
Oh yes, behind the scenes, aides say.
Weird, because he was saying no comment the entire time.
Very, very weird.
Meanwhile, FEMA, their spokesperson was out there saying, you know what, we're not in charge, the state is.
Which, by the way, is true, but that didn't cut it when a Republican was president.
Maui County has opened a distribution center at a shopping center just across the street.
FEMA is working closely with state emergency management and Maui County emergency management to make sure that those locations and shelters Don't run out of supplies.
So FEMA's not in charge, the state is in charge, Maui County is executing the emergency management response, and FEMA is coordinating across the entire federal government, bringing all federal resources to bear to help meet the needs that we hear about from the state.
Okay, so yeah, we trust you guys.
You're doing an amazing, amazing job.
Meanwhile, Rhonda Sanchez correctly pointed out that Joe Biden saying no comment would be a national scandal if you were a Republican.
You know, you have these horrible fires in Hawaii.
And my wife and I actually, we did our honeymoon in Maui way back in the day.
And so it's a great, great area.
Just utter devastation.
And Biden, what is he doing?
He ends up on the beach.
And then he's asked about it and he says, oh, no comment.
Now, look, if a Republican had tried to do that, What do you think the media would do?
They would go crazy.
In fact, they would blame the Republican for the fires happening in the first place.
We all know that that's the truth.
Okay, well that obviously is true.
Who is to blame, by the way?
Well, according to the New York Post, access to water should be predicated on conversations about equity, according to the Hawaii official under fire for delaying access to water during the Maui wildfires.
M. Kaleo Manuel, former deputy director of the Hawaii Commission on Water Resource Management, waited for more than five hours to release water during the wildfires that devastated Maui, according to the reports.
Manuel, in a livestream debate hosted by the University of Hawaii last year, described water as a sacred god.
He said, let water connect us and not divide us.
We can share it, but it requires true conversations about equity.
How do we coexist with the resources we have?
He's a former Obama Foundation leader.
So that's exciting stuff there from the equity crowd.
Excellent job in handling the wildfires over there.
Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom is declaring a state of emergency as Hurricane Hillary approaches California.
Well, here's the thing.
You know that Hurricane Hillary will not be visiting Wisconsin or Michigan.
So that is exciting stuff.
Meanwhile, apparently there's an earthquake overnight in California as well.
You know, a lot of people I know and love in Southern California, that is a little bit of scary stuff.
Palm Springs is largely underwater at this point.
Rain records have been smashed.
There's a 5.1 magnitude earthquake that rocked Ojai at the same exact time.
We haven't seen the damage numbers there yet.
So 25 million people right now are under flood warnings.
That's the real fear in California is that California is just not prepared for flood in any way shape or form.
Every time it rained in Southern California, I lived there for 35 years.
Every time it rained in Southern California, people had no idea what to do.
We're talking about like mild rain.
Heavy rain in Southern California is a full-scale disaster area.
So obviously we'll see how Gavin Newsom handles that on sort of the political level.
Meanwhile, nationally, Joe Biden, we've been talking about doing a really crappy job.
Well, the fact is that what we're about to watch is going to get a lot worse.
So China, its economy, as I mentioned last week, is going to drag down the rest of the world economy.
According to the Wall Street Journal, for decades, China powered its economy by investing in factories, skyscrapers, and roads.
The model sparked an extraordinary period of growth that lifted China out of poverty and turned it into a global giant whose export prowess washed across the globe.
Now the model is broken.
What worked when China was playing catch-up makes less sense now that the country is drowning in debt and running out of things to build.
Parts of China are saddled with underused bridges and airports.
Millions of apartments are unoccupied.
Returns on investment have sharply declined.
With private investment weakened, exports flagging, officials say they have little choice but to keep borrowing and building to stimulate their economies.
So Keynesianism working beautifully over in China.
The reality is that China's subsidization of particular industries is not what made China a world economic power.
What made China a world economic power was opening their population to capitalism to even the smallest extent.
The sort of fascist economic model of China, which is that you basically subsidize particular industries and you make those the industries.
You borrow money to make those the industries.
That actually ends up failing.
I say this because there are a lot of people in America who believe that it won't fail in America.
It has failed in America before.
It was called the 1960s and 70s in the United States.
Economists now believe China is entering a year of much slower growth, made worse by unfavorable demographics and a widening divide with the United States and its allies that is jeopardizing foreign investment and trade as well it should.
You should check out our episode 2 over at YouTube for more on this.
I talk about the inevitable decline of China.
They got a serious problem on their hands demographically, economically speaking.
The IMF puts China's GDP growth below 4% in the coming years, less than half of its tally for most of the past four decades.
Capital Economics, a London-based research firm, figures China's trend growth has slowed to 3% and will fall to around 2% in 2030.
And so they're closing themselves off more from the world economy.
Stagnation is about to set in.
It's going to have some real dramatic effect on the world economy as well.
Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has completely stalled out.
Marcus Walker writing for the Wall Street Journal says Russia's war on Ukraine is in danger of becoming a perfracted struggle that lasts several more years.
The reason isn't just that frontline combat is a slow-moving slog, but that none of the main actors have political goals that are both clear and attainable.
Wait, who said this?
Who said this like a year ago?
Who said that after a couple months of war that either there needed to be a negotiation where everybody was looking for an off-ramp or all of the goals were misaligned?
That Russia was not going to give up Crimea and the Donbass?
That Ukraine had been told by the West that they could win back every inch of that and that Zelensky was going to lead the negotiations and these two goals were Incompatible in the extreme.
And so this was likely to just continue forever.
Like for a very, very, very, very, very long time.
And the only way this is going to end is for the West to actually play the role of bad guy.
Go to Putin and say, you're going to get part of the Donbass, you're going to retain Crimea.
Go to Zelensky and say, listen, that's the deal.
And if you don't like it, tough.
Zelensky gets to go back to his people and say, hey, guys, I wanted the whole thing.
The West wouldn't let me have it.
So he gets to retain his status with the Ukrainian people.
The Russians get to save some face and the war ends.
Otherwise, they're just going to continue.
Ukraine's Central War aim, restoring its territorial integrity, is the clearest, but appears a distant prospect given the limits of Western support.
Again, territorial integrity, like post-2022, is not territorial integrity post-2014.
As under Barack Obama, the Crimea was seized by the Russians and nobody did a damn thing about it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's declared aims are the most elastic, ranging from ambitious imperial schemes to more limited land grabs and shifting with Russia's military fortunes.
Well, that means that there's actual play in the joints there, but The fact that there has been no actual strategy here from the Biden administration is part of the problem.
I've been saying this for a year.
Again, there's no shock here.
They literally said, we want Ukraine to win.
And then they definitely did not define winning.
And they said, we will do endless support.
And they did not define endless because it's not true.
And then they're like, oh yeah, and by the way, we'll let Zelensky lead the negotiation.
I mean, you literally created a formula for endless war and then you're surprised when it arrives.
It's totally amazing to me.
Again, Joe Biden, a terrible, terrible president.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
I spent some time over the weekend reading a great book by a guy named Daniel Boorstein.
Boorstein was a rather famous historian.
Later in his life, he made a pretty famous turn toward political conservatism.
He started off as somebody who was sort of on the Communist Party side.
And by the end of his career, he was more on the conservative side of the political aisle.
He actually ended up, I believe, being given... He serves as the 12th Librarian of Congress under Ford, Carter, and President Reagan.
He has a great book called The Discoverers, a history of man's search to know his world and himself.
It really is sort of a fascinating take on history.
It's sort of a synthesis history in which He tries to cover as much ground as humanly possible.
I enjoy these as opposed to sort of granular level histories.
So the book starts, for example, with a history of how man perceives time.
Like we don't think very much about the fact that our days are dictated by the clock.
They're dictated by our watch.
But until about 1300, nobody even thought of 24 hours in a day.
You measured hours by hours of daylight.
Nobody actually had a working wristwatch.
Wristwatches only became popular in the West And all over the world, early 20th century, there were pocket watches.
Those really were only made available and popular in the 17th, 18th centuries.
So you're talking about most of human history.
Basically, it was either light or it was dark.
But now that human beings created time, that means that our days are governed by hours, minutes, and seconds.
It's that sort of stuff.
It covers all of that.
It covers exploration.
It covers religious history.
Really a good book.
Again, all about how human beings have transformed their perception of the world around them and then their world around them.
He's written a lot of great books.
He also wrote a three-part series on American history that's really worth reading.
So his stuff is, he's a terrific historian and his stuff is really worth the read.
This book is called The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstein.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So naturally, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, she is going on the socialist sympathy tour,
according to Mary Anastasia O'Grady, writing for the Wall Street Journal.
Since transnational criminal organizations are ravaging Latin America, economic growth in much
of the region is shaky. Corruption remains a perennial problem. Just when it looks as if
things couldn't get any worse, AOC went on a South American socialist sympathy tour.
For Americans, it's not what the congressman took to the, the congresswoman took to the region
that's disturbing, it's what you might bring back.
She said, we have a lot to learn from Brazil, Colombia, and Chile.
She went with 10 other congressional Democrats and staffers, including Senator Bernie Sanders' chief of staff.
So, Brazil is a disaster area right now, obviously.
Everybody is ignoring Lula da Silva's crackdown on the opposition.
The Supreme Court is going after free speech.
Meanwhile, they met with leftist politicians to offer their support for collectivist causes in the name of non-intervention.
In Chile, she's going after quote-unquote extractive U.S.
policies, which means copper mining, which is the engine of all of Chileans' economic growth for decades.
Meanwhile, they are going there and ripping on American Cold War policies, which, by the way, the most anti-capitalist countries in South America also happen to be the poorest countries in South America, like Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, where communism is actually taking hold.
In Brazil, the entourage met with foreign policy advisor, Chulula, and they discussed the climate.
The fact that, you know, Bernie Sanders is considered a wise old man of the Democratic Party after spending years standing for socialists, like actual socialists, is totally crazy.
That's why whenever he says, oh yeah, all I want is the Nordic model, I'm like, okay, then why were you so warm to, you know, Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez, I noticed.
AOC, same sort of nonsense.
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