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Aug. 23, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

49:09

It’s FIGHT NIGHT!

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	It is tonight, the fight for second place in the Republican primaries.
	Big Republican nomination battle tonight, except that Donald Trump is not on the stage.
	Is that going to hurt him in any real way?
	Well, I mean, certainly not going to hurt him in the polls, given the fact that he is currently leading the race by some 40 points over the rest of the field combined.
	The current polling status right now, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, has Donald Trump at 55%, it has Ron DeSantis at 14%, Vivek Ramaswamy at 7.2%, Mike Pence at 4, Nikki Haley at 3, Tim Scott at 3, Christy at 3, and then everyone else, including the inevitable Doug Burgum.
	The absolutely unstoppable force that is Doug Burgum at below 1%.
	So what does this mean?
	Well, it means that pretty much everybody on the stage tonight is going to be attacking Ron DeSantis.
	And that includes the Trump campaign.
	The Trump campaign already today put out A placard, a bingo card for Ron DeSanctimonious and Marjorie Taylor Greene put out this DeSanctimonious debate night bingo.
	It just shows you who Team Trump fears because really they look at that field and they say there's really only one candidate there who could theoretically threaten Donald Trump.
	That's true in the early states, by the way.
	In the current Iowa polling, he is within shouting distance of Donald Trump and it is still very early.
	Remember, it is still August.
	The first caucuses are not until January.
	A lot can happen.
	A lot does happen on a daily basis in politics.
	A lot can happen between late August and late January, which is when those first Iowa caucuses are.
	So Trump is basically trying to take out DeSantis early.
	He's putting all of his focus on DeSantis, none on any of the other candidates.
	So Marjorie Taylor Greene put out a bingo card for debate night.
	It is entirely about DeSantis.
	It's entirely about DeSantis.
	And it shows you the nature of the attacks on DeSantis by Team Trump.
	There's not a single attack on a single Ron DeSantis policy.
	Not one.
	Now, as a conservative voter, I find this sort of thing insulting.
	If you're going to attack other conservatives on stage, you should probably do it over their policies.
	So if Ron DeSantis were to make a Trump debate night bingo, if Trump were to take part in the debate, it would say things like gave a medal to Anthony Fauci, did not call in the National Guard during mass rioting in 2020, spent $7 trillion his last year in office, right?
	There's like a bunch of stuff that he could get.
	The biggest one, of course, would be lost to Joe Biden in 2020, which we'll get to in just a second.
	But if you look at the bingo card that Trump put out about DeSantis, I understand that a lot of Trump supporters find this sort of thing charming, and they think that this sort of kitchen sink attack tells against Democrats and Republicans.
	It told against Hillary Clinton because Hillary Clinton was already deeply unpopular with the American people.
	We'll see if it works.
	But here is kind of the bingo card.
	Here are some of the things.
	First of all, it parrots left-wing lies.
	It says things like, Ron defends slavery.
	That is a left-wing lie.
	Ron DeSantis has never defended slavery.
	It is just a lie.
	It says things like, Nervous laugh.
	Wipes snot.
	Gaslight COVID record.
	Okay, he has not gaslit his COVID record.
	Ron DeSantis had the strongest COVID record of any governor in America.
	Things like Ron backs down.
	Saved by Fox News.
	Dismisses poll.
	End of the day.
	Okay, like, the whole thing is just designed to kind of sneer at DeSantis, which is Trump's utter strategy, right?
	He has a 7th grade strategy when it comes to going after his opponents.
	By the way, it worked in 7th grade, and it worked in 2016, so there's no reason to think it couldn't work now.
	He used a very similar strategy with regard to Jeb Bush, he used a very similar strategy with regard to Little Marco, he used a very similar strategy with regard to Lion Ted, right?
	So, him doing it to run DeSantis is not exactly a shock, but it shows you where Trump's focus is.
	Trump's the frontrunner.
	This battle still, believe it or not, is a two-man race, even though DeSantis' campaign has not caught fire in any way, shape, or form as of yet.
	Well, the debate tonight is going to be odd because Trump is not on stage, which means, as we say, someone else is going to try to take down DeSantis and try to supplant DeSantis as the other possibility in the Republican primaries.
	Because again, 45% of the vote is still up for grabs, even at least, at least, right?
	And it's early.
	So theoretically, it could be above 50.
	The debate stage is filled with people who should not be on the debate stage.
	That includes people, again, including Asa Hutchinson.
	The way that Hutchinson got on the stage, no one cares about Asa Hutchinson.
	Donald Trump is certainly right about that when he says, Ada Hutchinson.
	That's true.
	Asa Hutchinson has no place on the debate stage.
	He is polling below cancer right now in the Republican primaries,
	but he was able to qualify for the debate by essentially going to people
	and asking them to work around the rules because one of the requirements of getting on stage
	is that you have to have 40,000 donors.
	So what did he do?
	Well, he got hundreds of college students to donate $1 and then they were given $20 a pop
	for every family member, friend, or acquaintance could persuade to donate one dollar to Hutchinson and the
	Summers.
	So he got a bunch of big donors to give him some money, and then he took that money and he plowed it into giving it away to people to donate back to him $1.
	So he could get to that $40,000 mark.
	There were other campaigns that did something similar.
	This is ridiculous.
	Okay, again, the people on the debate stage The truth is that there are approximately six serious people on the debate stage.
	Maybe?
	Maybe?
	It's really more like five.
	And that debate stage is filled with no-names who should not be on the stage.
	I mean, Doug Burgum on the stage is like, give me a break.
	We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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	Okay, so what exactly do the candidates on stage have to do?
	Well, so we're going to go through each candidate and we are going to establish their goals for tonight.
	Now, as I say, the entire debate is going to be about attacking DeSantis.
	Which means that basically Ron DeSantis' first kind of task here is survive.
	He has to make sure that he is not the person who is the subject of all the headlines tomorrow for all the attacks against him.
	I mean, as we are seeing in the polling data, DeSantis has been experiencing a rather marked decline in the polling data.
	So I said a few weeks ago that he was basically stagnant since June.
	But the reality is that in that RealClearPolitics polling average, he has lost momentum.
	If you look at that Republican nomination RealClearPolitics polling average, it shows that in April, he was at 24%.
	He basically maintained that all the way through June.
	And then since June, he's dropped in the RealClearPolitics polling average from about 24% all the way down to about 14%, which is a significant drop.
	By the way, that support largely went to Donald Trump.
	Some of it went to other candidates, a lot of it went to Donald Trump.
	Which means that he has to do a couple of things.
	He has to fend off all the people who are going to be attacking him tonight, trying to kind of finish his campaign, and he has to regain his mojo.
	The only way to do that, truly, is that he has to make the case that Republicans have failed to make, which is why Donald Trump is leading in the polling by leaps and bounds.
	He has to make the case that he should be the nominee and not Trump.
	Okay, not Trump is part of that case.
	The notion that you could kind of sit aside and say, I should be the nominee and never discuss Trump, that's obviously not the case.
	Trump is cruising right now.
	So somebody's going to have to make the case as to why it shouldn't be Trump.
	It seems there are really only two attack lines as to why it shouldn't be Trump.
	Attack line number one is that Trump was not as great a president as people want him to have been.
	Trump did a lot of good things that we like.
	He appointed good conservative justices.
	Race showed me I didn't think he was going to do that, and he did that, which is certainly true.
	He moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
	He created peace deals in the Middle East.
	He had a booming economy, but he also did not build the border wall despite all of his promises to do so.
	He did not do anything about the mass rioting in America's major cities throughout 2020.
	He empowered Anthony Fauci to basically run his COVID policy and put out a completely confused and discombobulated policy with regard to COVID in which he was both ripping Brian Kemp for reopening Georgia and then ripping states like Michigan for not reopening.
	Donald Trump spent more money in the last years of his administration than any president in history by leaps and bounds.
	All of those things would be the case that you could make against Trump if you say, I'll be a better president than Trump will be.
	The problem is that's having really no impact on the Republican voting base.
	The Republican voting base in the primaries seems not to care very much about what people do.
	It cares much more about what people say, and even more importantly, about the attitudinal orientation toward the left.
	So whoever is seen as sort of the most provocative, the person who's seen as the hardest puncher is the person the Republican base wants.
	And the Republican base seems to equate saying things with doing things, which is why you're seeing Vivek rise and DeSantis decline.
	DeSantis has done all the things that Vivek talks about doing in Florida, but it doesn't seem like that's having like a market impact on the race in favor of DeSantis.
	DeSantis will pass a bill Fighting woke in the state of Florida.
	Vivek will write a book about fighting woke.
	And the base treats those two things as exactly equivalent.
	So, kind of point number one, which is, I should be the guy and not Trump because Trump underperformed as president, particularly in his last year.
	The Republican base doesn't seem to want that one.
	Which leaves you with the electability argument.
	Now the electability argument, under normal circumstances for DeSantis, would be a pretty easy argument.
	After all, if you look at Ron DeSantis's electability numbers, that dude won the state of Florida, which used to be a purple state, by 20 points.
	If you take a look at Florida voters' registration, in December of 2018, Democrats had a voter registration edge of 257,000.
	By August of 2023, the Republicans had a voter registration edge in the state of Florida by 568,000.
	That is an 822,000 voter registration swing.
	That's a massive, massive shift created by DeSantis and by the Republican Party of Florida.
	And so you could look at that, and then you could look at Trump, and you could say, listen, Trump does not poll well.
	He's polling at best at even with Joe Biden.
	That is not a great number, considering that Joe Biden is a very unpopular president.
	I'm not blowing Biden out of the water, but that's because nobody knows my name yet.
	I haven't actually run a general election campaign yet.
	Now, here's the thing.
	In order for DeSantis to make this case, he has to say the thing that many Republicans have feared to say.
	Because Trump has been lying since November of 2020, when he said that he actually won the election.
	He did not actually win the election.
	There is no metric by which he actually won the election.
	In fact, DeSantis could theoretically make a two-part case.
	One, I won my governor's race by 20 points.
	Donald Trump, we don't know whether I would beat Joe Biden.
	What we do know is that Joe Biden beat Donald Trump.
	He'd actually have to say that because there's no other way around this.
	I mean, that's just the reality.
	If you don't want Trump to be the nominee, you can't say that he beat Biden already.
	If you say that he beat Biden already, then why wouldn't you nominate Donald Trump on the electability argument?
	The electability argument has zero legs unless you make the case that Trump is not electable and that we have proof that he's not electable because not only did he underperform in 2018 with congressional candidates, but he actively lost to the man who's currently running for president on the other side in 2020.
	And you can point out all of the flaws in the election, all the voting procedures, all the mailing, all that stuff is true.
	But Donald Trump did lose to Joe Biden in 2020.
	Do you want to rerun that race?
	Furthermore, if you believe, as Donald Trump says, that he was jobbed out of it, Donald Trump has provided no plan to actually win in 2024.
	So if he says the election was stolen, even if you grant that, what is his plan to unsteal the election of 2024?
	He was president in 2020.
	He ain't president now.
	Which means he has no control over the levers of power, so much so that he's being currently indicted in four separate jurisdictions.
	That's the case that DeSantis could make.
	Now, is that going to be a case that the Republican Party base is going to take up?
	Well, if it's not, then DeSantis has no shot.
	And no one else does either.
	If the Republican Party base believes that Donald Trump clearly and convincingly won in 2020, the electability argument does not exist.
	And as far as the, I'd be a better president than Trump, the Republican Party base ain't buying that one either.
	So then there's no argument against Trump.
	So DeSantis is going to have to make at least that latter case that he is more electable than Donald Trump.
	The big obstacle tonight for DeSantis is that DeSantis does not have a history of being amazing at debate.
	He's actually pretty good one-on-one with members of the media when he gets combative.
	But in his debates with Andrew Gillum, he wasn't like a stellar debater by any stretch of the imagination here in the state of Florida.
	The rap on DeSantis, and you can see Team Trump, I will say this about Trump, you know, the seventh grade insults, he's very good at them, but It's not just that he's good at them.
	Have you ever argued with a seventh grader?
	They have, like, extraordinary ability.
	They have, like, an X-Men-like ability to target your weakest and most vulnerable spot and then say it.
	This is the thing that they always do, right?
	They pick, like, the thing about you.
	Oh, you have a bald spot.
	Oh, you have a little bit of fat around your belt.
	Like, things that are irrefutable, irrelevant, and stupid, but irrefutable.
	The media are picking up on this.
	So the rap on DeSantis tonight is gonna be, no personality, which is Trump's rap on him.
	Are you sweaty?
	Eating pudding with his fingers and all the rest of it?
	This is Mika Brzezinski's thing.
	Now, I should point out here, the media have a heavy rooting interest in Donald Trump.
	And so tonight, the media coverage, almost regardless of what happens, is going to be about how terrible DeSantis was.
	That's just the prediction, right now.
	But here's Mika Brzezinski laying out their personality-laden case against DeSantis.
	I mean, he's gonna have to, I don't know, between now and tomorrow night, get a personality.
	I'm serious.
	Well, I mean, you know, there's a lot to be said about... I'm not joking at all.
	...blocking and tackling.
	I would say... He's kind of rude.
	I'd say actually talk about issues that actually matter to mainstream Republicans.
	Be kind?
	Yeah.
	Try not to... Try not to yell at people and be rude.
	Try not to focus on these really, really, really wedge issues in the state of Florida that don't mean anything to the rest of the country.
	Again, like this kind of stuff from Mika Brzezinski, she doesn't care about any of that.
	What the media have an interest in doing right now is ensuring that Trump is the nominee, as we'll discuss in just one second.
	There is a reason every major journalist is being wooed and dined by Team Trump in Wisconsin before this debate.
	We'll get to that momentarily first.
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	Okay, so.
	Let's take a look at some of the other candidates in the race.
	So some of the other candidates in the race include Vivek Ramaswamy.
	So Vivek has made what they would call a dramatic polling rise.
	A dramatic polling rise, in the case of everybody who is not Trump, involves moving from basically 0% to approximately 7%, which is movement for Vivek, no question.
	Now, Vivek is going to be an attack dog on the stage because he really has nothing to lose.
	Trump is leaving him absolutely alone.
	Trump does not care about Ramaswamy.
	Trump is perfectly happy to see Ramaswamy rise.
	He knows that Ramaswamy is not only not a threat to him, he refuses to cross him.
	There's a pretty good video going around yesterday showing how Vivek has changed his position multiple times on whether Trump should debate.
	It went from, Trump is definitely going to debate because he's brave, to, well, Trump should debate, to, well, I don't care if Trump debates.
	Pretty quickly.
	Now, this is going to be the wrap on Vivek, right?
	Vivek's incoming.
	He has two tasks.
	His task tonight is to allow DeSantis to be the target.
	So he's not the target.
	And really, again, he has nothing to lose because he's not a politician.
	It's not like he has a political office to defend.
	It's not as though he is running a simultaneous race.
	It's not as though he's expected to even be in the race at this point.
	Vivek is having the most fun of anybody on the campaign trail.
	I mean, the dude's releasing, like, shirtless videos of himself playing tennis and saying this is his debate prep and all the rest.
	The rap that he's going to take tonight is that he switched his positions a lot.
	And then he goes on the media and then he denies that he ever took that position.
	There's something Brett Baier was pointing out last night.
	Here's Brett Baier on Fox News talking about Ramaswamy denying something that he pretty clearly said.
	And one of the things that I'm going to do as the next president of the United States is restore truth in government.
	So first time candidate, political outsider, and now he has climbed in the polls a bit and he's taken a lot of incoming.
	Yeah, and his message, and he's come back to it again and again, is that we can handle the truth.
	The government should be more truthful for us, with us.
	I think in some of these interviews he got caught up, and the 9-11 detour, he explained it today, but, you know.
	He said that wasn't the quote that he said and then you played the quote from Atlantic.
	I think that he's very smooth.
	We'll see how that translates on stage and interacting with other candidates who may be trying to go after him as he climbs in the polls.
	Right, that's gonna be the incoming for Vivek.
	It's gonna be his inconsistency, his switching of positions, and all the rest.
	But all he really has to do is survive and hope that DeSantis takes on the incoming.
	Meanwhile, the pure aggression machine on the stage is Chris Christie.
	And Chris Christie, right now, is pulling shockingly well in New Hampshire.
	The latest poll from Emerson has him in second place in New Hampshire at 14%.
	He doesn't really bear any chances in Iowa, but if he can compete in New Hampshire, his hope is that that will knock down Trump.
	So maybe somebody else wins Iowa, he wins New Hampshire, and then by the time you get to South Carolina, maybe it's a more open race.
	Now, I don't think that's the way this race shapes up.
	I think that unless one candidate wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump wipes clean the table.
	Come South Carolina and the rest of the race.
	So if there's a split between Iowa and New Hampshire, then basically this thing looks like it goes the way that 2016 did, when Cruz won Iowa, Trump won New Hampshire, but not by like leaps and bounds and then he wiped the floor with everybody else.
	I think that you'll see something like that.
	Christie has a history of just being basically a suicide bomber on the stage.
	He did it to Marco Rubio.
	He'll be the one who says the meanest things, he'll be the one who says the meanest things about Trump.
	Now, that will give both Trump, that'll both give DeSantis and Vivek
	the ability to go after Christie.
	Christie will take incoming on the basis that he's the dude who was hugging Obama,
	that he was the guy who was basically fetching water for Donald Trump up until the point
	where he decided that he didn't like Donald Trump anymore, that he's a person who's willing to do anything
	and say anything in order to get his time on MSNBC and all the rest.
	So he'll be taking some incoming as well.
	This leaves two other candidates on the stage, Both of whom are well qualified and polling at near nothing.
	They're both polling at three.
	There's three other candidates.
	There's Pence, who has no shot at the nomination because the Republican base does not like Pence because Trump decided that Pence was a traitor for no apparent reason.
	Because he was fibbing about Pence's ability to overthrow the election.
	Pence will be on the stage.
	He'll be taking the sort of classier Christie position, which is Donald Trump shouldn't be president because of his positions on the election and because of the things that he has said.
	It's not going to be particularly popular, but I also think that Pence is not going to be the one taking incoming.
	Haley and Scott are the other two on the stage.
	We'll get to Haley and Scott in just one second.
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	The last two candidates on the stage are Haley and Scott.
	I'm not speaking about Pence very much here because I don't think that Pence really has a role on stage except to make the former case that DeSantis can't make, which is that Trump shouldn't be president of the United States because of his moral shortcomings.
	Again, that one is not going to be popular with the Republican base at all, which means that Pence is theoretically going to take incoming from people who are defending Trump on the stage.
	Now listen, you're not gonna make a lot of headway with the Trump base by defending Trump on the stage.
	It's a great thing for Vivek to do.
	Vivek can do that if he's running for vice president or something.
	Nikki Haley and Tim Scott are both on the stage.
	Both of them are basically stuck in their lane.
	So Nikki Haley is stuck in the traditional Republican lane.
	That traditional Republican lane is basically fragmenting in a large number of ways.
	It's being broken up between Scott and Pence and Haley and some DeSantis, a little bit of Chris Christie.
	And that is why she's currently polling in the 3% range.
	The reality is that the case that Haley and Scott need to make is going to be a case against DeSantis.
	Because for Haley and Scott, if they bumper car each other, and if they bumper car DeSantis, Trump's the nominee.
	So right now, the field is not consolidating.
	If the field stays not consolidated, Trump walks with 35% of the vote.
	So the case that Haley and Scott are going to need to make is why they should be on the stage and the other one should not.
	So I would be surprised to see Nikki Haley and Tim Scott go at it a little bit tonight in this particular debate.
	Meanwhile, Trump is just avoiding the whole thing, which, as I say, he should debate just on principle, but Is it a smart thing to avoid?
	Sure, why not?
	I mean, he's leading by 40 points.
	He's also whining and dining all the journalists.
	So again, one of the great lies about the Trump era is that the media and Trump were in a complete hate-hate relationship.
	It is not true.
	It's a love-hate relationship.
	So yes, the media hate Trump.
	Trump hates the media also.
	Every so often they have a passionate fling.
	Those passionate flings tend to happen directly around election time.
	In the Republican primaries.
	Not in the general.
	In the primaries.
	That's about the time the media fall back in love with covering Trump because he's ratings.
	The dude is ratings gold.
	He knows he's ratings gold.
	They know he's ratings gold.
	Which is why...
	According to Politico, Team Trump is whining and dining a number of top reporters at a steakhouse called Rare and passing out pudding snack packs.
	Again, this is like the Pureisle attacks on DeSantis based on an unsubstantiated story about DeSantis once eating pudding with his fingers or something.
	Who was there?
	Here's a list of the reporters who were there.
	You ready?
	Dana Bash, Shane Goldmacher, Kristen Welker, Bob Costa, Finn Gomez, Dasha Burns, Rachel Scott, Rick Klein, Josh Dowsey, Rob Crilley, Mario Parker, and David Chalayan.
	Along with a bunch of campaign surrogates like Chris Levita, Lassa Vita, and Jason Miller.
	So, yeah, you can see Team Trump whining and diding the same media that they say are the enemy.
	Pretty obvious what's happening right now.
	Also, they're still attempting to get their surrogates into the spin room so that they can just crap all over the candidates despite the fact that their candidate didn't even show up.
	Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is the paramour of Donald Trump Jr., Unless she is going to show up and she says, let them try to stop me from coming to the debate.
	Well, I mean, she can come to the debate, but whether she is let into the spin room is really up to Fox News channel.
	We'll see how Fox News runs this debate with regard to Trump.
	It'll be kind of fascinating to watch those dynamics.
	In fact, so Fox News actually sent out, believe it or not, a debate guide for the media to cover this thing.
	They're out of their minds.
	They're out of their minds.
	I got to point this out.
	Okay, so here is what they say.
	This is nuts.
	They say that during the seven day period described during the time below, meaning seven days from the date of the debate and on, no media outlet can air more than a total of three minutes of excerpts from the debate in any one program including video and audio.
	They're out of their minds.
	That's totally crazy.
	They're treating this like a football game or like a baseball game, which is nuts.
	OK, that's nuts.
	This is newsworthy material involving the presidential candidates, the people who are going to represent you at the top levels of American government.
	And Fox News is saying that you're not allowed to hear from them unless you watch the debate live or unless you're watching Fox News.
	That's totally crazy.
	That's totally crazy.
	It means that when people like me recap the debate and explain to you what happened in the debate last night, Fox News is now threatening to sue people like me if I play you four minutes of the debate tomorrow, despite the fact that my show would bring them an extraordinary number of people who are viewers and listeners to them to take a look at their next debate.
	Like, how the hell is anybody supposed to actually figure out what happened in the debate unless they watched the thing live?
	I understand they're now trying to telescope all viewership on Fox News to the debate itself, but good luck with this.
	I mean, just, really.
	Ridiculous, ridiculous stuff.
	They say that you can only use the debate or excerpts thereof on the internet by way of the embed video function at foxnews.com video.
	So, um, this is, that's totally wild stuff.
	Between the RNC's handling of this debate and Fox News' handling of this debate, I gotta tell ya, I'm just... I'm dumbfounded.
	You wish to actively...
	Let people know that your debate is important and you're doing so by blacking it out, essentially, from any place that is not Fox News Live.
	That is a wild thing to do.
	Truly wild.
	What Fox is doing right now actually helps Trump and it helps Tucker, ironically, because by restricting the ability of other people to engage with the newsmaking that they are doing in this debate, this gives a leg up to Trump and Tucker who are putting all their stuff out for free on X.
	All this stuff is now available to everyone, which gives Trump a leg up in terms of viewership and Fox News a leg down.
	I understand that Fox is trying to grip harder and harder to its declining user base, but I gotta say, this should be relevant information, like fair use, like classic fair use kind of stuff, for conservatives all over the country.
	For Fox to restrict access to your ability to listen to clips of the debate with commentary, which is the normal way that fair use works.
	Threatening litigation against everybody else is pretty insane.
	Okay, meanwhile, we will see whether Trump's ditching of the debate has any impact on him in places like Iowa.
	Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, who's been a target of Trump's ire, she says that voters do expect Trump to show up and actually be there.
	Are Iowans kind of giving him a pass from some of those rules?
	No, I think they still, they expect him to be here.
	They want to interact.
	They want to interact with all of the candidates.
	We've had, we had great turnout at the fair side chats.
	I had a lot of Iowans and people outside of the state come up and just say, thank you for doing that.
	It was a great opportunity to hear from the candidates.
	And so, you know, Iowans take it very seriously.
	They're very knowledgeable and they want to interact with the candidates.
	Okay, we will find out whether that is true or not.
	Meanwhile, Donald Trump is going to counter-program the debate with a pre-taped interview with Tucker Carlson on Twitter.
	Again, I think we've seen interviews with Donald Trump and Tucker before, so, you know, I don't think it'll be particularly illuminating or fascinating in any way, but it's smart of Tucker and smart of Trump.
	You gotta give credit where credit is due in terms of the media business.
	And then meanwhile, he's going to counter-program the aftermath of the debate by getting arrested in Georgia.
	So he has to turn himself into arrest in Georgia.
	He had up until the 25th to do it.
	He's deciding to do it on the 24th, I would assume, in order to counter-program the debate fallout from tonight.
	Rudy Giuliani was arrested today in Georgia.
	Rudy, of course, was his lawyer, one of his lawyers, throughout the election debacle and post-election, in which Rudy was making claims about voting machines being hacked and all the rest of this sort of stuff, making accusations about particular Fulton County employees, who he then had to retract those comments so that he wouldn't be sued into the ground.
	So here is Rudy's Comments upon being arrested.
	Now, should Rudy be arrested for his failed legal stratagems?
	It seems to me that many of those failed legal stratagems fall squarely in the realm of free speech.
	Here was Giuliani.
	To Georgia, and I'm feeling very, very good about it because I feel like I'm defending the rights of all Americans, as I did so many times as a United States attorney.
	People like to say I'm different.
	I'm the same Rudy Giuliani that took down the mafia, that made New York City the safest city in America.
	Okay, whether or not that is true, the fact is that the counter-programming here is going to be Republicans feeling that Team Trump is victimized.
	That is the entire shtick here.
	And it's kind of true.
	But this is why, again, the case that's going to have to be made on stage by somebody is that Trump is not going to beat Biden.
	That's the only case any other candidate can make.
	Now, again, That 2016 says that you don't know.
	And that's true, you don't know.
	However, if you're making the case against Donald Trump being electable, Donald Trump losing in 2020 plus four indictments doesn't seem, like, I don't see how Donald Trump electoral results 2020 plus four indictments means that Trump performs wildly better than he did in 2020.
	You just have to assume that Joe Biden would perform markedly worse than he did in 2020.
	Okay, well, meanwhile, Trump, as we say, he is going to be showing up for arrest
	tomorrow.
	Apparently there's an open betting pool on how much Trump is going to weigh in at.
	So people are trying to figure out how much Trump weighs.
	I guess the over-under is in the 270s.
	I think that's high.
	I think he's probably in the 240s or 250s.
	But in any case, Trump is facing some additional legal challenges.
	According to new filings from special counsel Jack Smith, this will be in the Washington, D.C.
	case, which, again, is a mischarge.
	One of Trump's employees, Amara Lago, has now flipped and apparently is testifying against the former president.
	According to Ryan Sevadra at Daily Wire, the employee identified in court documents as Trump Employee 4 quickly changed his grand jury testimony after meeting with a lawyer from the Federal Defender's Office in Washington, D.C.
	He said he no longer wanted to be represented by Trump's Political Action Committee, a person who was recommended to him by Trump's lawyer.
	The revelation was made in a court filing from Smith's team in response to U.S.
	District Court Judge Eileen Cannon, that is the federal judge overseeing the case.
	So actually, this is not in the D.C.
	case.
	This is the Florida classified documents case, which, again, is a political prosecution, but also is better founded legally than any of the other prosecutions.
	Apparently, during the investigations, the government gathered evidence that Trump employee Carlos de Oliveira tried to enlist the director of information technology for Mar-a-Lago to delete Mar-a-Lago security footage after the grand jury in the D.C.
	had issued a subpoena for the footage.
	The U.S.
	government approached Stanley Woodward, the lawyer representing Trump Employee No.
	4, to notify him he had a potential conflict by representing both him and Walt Nauda, that is, the Trump aide accused of obstructing the grand jury investigation.
	Mr. Woodward responded he'd not have a reason to believe his concurrent representation of Trump Employee 4 and Nauda raised a conflict of interest.
	When Trump Employee 4 testified before the grand jury in D.C.
	in March 2023, he repeatedly denied or claimed not to recall any contacts or conversations about security footage.
	Apparently, the government's evidence indicated that this testimony was false.
	Prosecutors informed Trump employee he was the target of the grand jury investigation.
	This guy apparently didn't want to go to jail and so now he is flipping lawyers and he is going to testify that people at Trump's direction were destroying security footage.
	So again, the most serious case that Trump faces on a legal level is not the George case, it's not the DC case, it's not the New York case, it's actually that Florida case.
	Meanwhile, Trump's legal team is experiencing a number of setbacks.
	David Schaffer, former chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, one of the 19 defendants in the Georgia election interference case, is now claiming in court filings he and other Republican electors who tried to certify Trump as the winner in Georgia were acting directly at Trump's behest.
	So this may signal that, again, more people who are in Trump's orbit are ready to flip on him legally to avoid jail time themselves.
	Which is one of the things that comes into play when Donald Trump does not pay your legal bills.
	It turns out that there are a bunch of people, up to and including Jenna Ellis, whose legal bills are not being paid by the former president of the United States.
	That is a major danger for the former president of the United States.
	Okay, meanwhile, speaking of legal troubles, Hunter Biden continues to get himself in legal trouble.
	We'll bring you the latest on that first.
	You know, everything is very chaotic lately, and this is why you need to commune with the Almighty.
	It's something that we, in the Jewish faith, we are enjoined to do at least three times a day.
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	We all need a little more peace in our lives.
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	It's very important stuff.
	I take time out of my day.
	Honestly, if I didn't, I think I might go nuts.
	It's very important for you to do it too.
	If you're looking to deepen your relationship with God and improve your mental and emotional well-being, try Halo for three months free at Halo.com slash Shapiro.
	That's Halo.com slash Shapiro.
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	Well, meanwhile, as pretty much the entire world is focused in on the Republicans, the Democrats are doing a terrible job.
	I mean, Joe Biden is doing a truly awful job, and obviously he's still embroiled with all of the Hunter questions.
	So over his trip to Maui, the media tried their best to do cleanup.
	CNN's Bill Weir was Big Biden fan.
	He suggested that Joe Biden was empathizer in chief, which is weird because typically when I do empathy, I don't go to a place where people watch their relatives burn to death and then talk about that one time there was a kitchen fire in my kitchen.
	But apparently, according to Bill Weir, Joe Biden is just amazing at this.
	Locals here, working class native Hawaiians and multi-generational locals are worried of disaster capitalism.
	People moving in to exploit this and buy up as much land as they can in this paradise and rebuild it for their interests as well.
	The president says, promises that that won't happen.
	It remains to be seen.
	There's a lot of forces at play here right now.
	He did serve as empathizer-in-chief after five days of being mostly silent on the issue publicly, but the governor said he was working behind the scenes to assure first responders that the feds had their back on this.
	Old Man Who Can Barely Walk serves as empathizer in chief while telling people about that one time
	there was a kitchen fire that was put out in 20 minutes.
	Also, big controversy of the day is whether Joe Biden actually fell asleep at the Maui Wildfire
	Memorial Service. This would not be the first time that he appeared to nod off in the middle of a
	service. The media were doing their best to spin this as, no, he was just being solemn. Yeah, I
	don't know, man. I don't know.
	We are a community that relies on family, on on Ohana, whether by blood or by friendship.
	And he wakes himself up.
	That is sleep breathing.
	I mean, you can see his chest moving up and down, by the way.
	That is the deep breathing that you get right when you're in the middle of a REM cycle right
	there.
	So, yeah, the chances that Joe Biden was just super solemn right there, as opposed to he
	briefly nodded off because he's an 80 year old man and he hasn't had his early bird dinner
	yet and he just took a flight.
	That don't worry, guys.
	He's as virile and wonderful and empathetic as ever.
	He's not the kind of guy who would check his watch repeatedly during a service for fallen Marines or something.
	He did that when they brought the bodies back from Afghanistan.
	Meanwhile, the Hunter Biden stuff is not going away.
	It's going to get worse because Joe Biden has spent literally his entire career enriching his family on the back of his political power.
	It's a thing he has done his entire career.
	I'm working on an entire compendium of this stuff right now.
	It's taking me a long time.
	I mean, everyone around Joe Biden is richer because Joe Biden was in politics and because, presumably, he was offering favors on their behalf, pretty obviously.
	That includes his brothers, Frank and Jim.
	That includes his sister Val.
	It includes his sons, Hunter and Beau.
	All of these people have benefited by their very close proximity to the Senator and then VP and then President of the United States.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S.
	relations with China were steady in December 2013, when then-Vice President Joe Biden stepped off Air Force Two in Beijing with the seemingly unremarkable companion, his son Hunter.
	Days later, Shanghai authorities approved the formation of an investment boutique underwritten by the Chinese government that named Hunter Biden as a director, and later cut him an ownership share at a discounted price.
	Roughly four months afterward, he began earning up to $1 million annually for sitting on the Burisma board.
	The younger Biden's business activities loom larger than ever a decade after that trip, with President Biden seeking reelection as a grinding DOJ investigation and a determined probe by congressional Republicans scrutinized where Hunter Biden made money overseas and what exactly he got paid to do.
	Now, what's funny is that they say things like, no evidence has emerged to show President Biden benefited from his son's international commercial endeavors.
	Now, I just, I'm wondering why you would say that.
	Again, if I do you a favor, and then your favor back to me, is that you give my kids a crap load of money, I benefited.
	It's my kids.
	I'm so confused as to the idea that, like, Joe Biden has to personally cash the check in order to benefit from this sort of thing.
	It's sort of bizarre.
	Now, Hunter Biden, between 2014 and 2019, companies associated with Hunter Biden cleared $20 million.
	Hunter Biden personally may have cleared up to $7 million during that time.
	He is a drug-addicted derelict, one of the worst people in American public life, and he's pulling down Buku Bucks because of his last name.
	And again, everybody knows this.
	That's the part that's truly astonishing about this.
	It's not as though this is a giant secret.
	Everybody knows this, including members of his own family.
	I mean, literally, Hunter said that his last name was Gold to foreign investors, admitting that his father's job, quote, opened doors that would not be opened up to other people.
	Jim used to tell potential business partners, quote, we've got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.
	Frank, Joe's other brother, called the Biden name a tremendous asset for business.
	Val says, quote, I had a better seat at the table because my brother is at the head of the table.
	Like he is a he is a penny ante racketeer.
	Joe Biden for his family has always been this ever since he was in Delaware, which, again, is a small business run state.
	Meanwhile, we are learning now, thanks to an investigation by Luke Rosiak over at Daily Wire, that Hunter Biden's business partner used the federal position he was handed during the Obama administration to court an Eastern European company whose board Hunter was eager to join, according to a batch of emails obtained by the Daily Wire through a FOIA request.
	Eric Schwerin was appointed to the Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad by Barack Obama in March 2015.
	That appointment gave Schwerin, who is managing director of Hunter's now-dissolved firm, the ability to present himself as U.S.
	official, negotiate with Eastern European countries about the preservation of Holocaust-era cemeteries, and bring money to the table to fund those preservation projects raised from private businesses and individuals.
	And he attempted to get a Latvian bank acknowledged on a plaque on a commissioned project.
	During the same month, Hunter was seeking a board seat at that exact same company.
	Good stuff, as always, from the Joe Biden and Hunter Biden team-up.
	It's all going just amazing.
	Meanwhile, the economy continues to be down in the dumps.
	As I've said before, what goes up must come down.
	Things are coming down.
	Both Dick's Sporting Goods and Macy's are flashing warning signs on consumer spending.
	Basically, consumer spending is the only thing that's been holding up the American economy.
	A little bit later on in the show, we're going to talk with Mark Skousen, who is an economist who is the creator of a metric known as gross output, which is a much better measure of the economy than gross domestic product.
	GDP is the thing we always use.
	GDP is basically just consumption economy.
	It's like what you buy at the store or what the government spends money on, but it doesn't include business-to-business transactions or business investment, gross output measures, those things.
	According to Skousen's gross output stat, we've been in negative territory for the last two quarters straight.
	That stuff is starting to hit home right now.
	The business investors, they're not investing.
	They can see that the consumption-led economy is going to start to drop down.
	Both Dick's Sporting Goods and Macy's shares traded sharply lower on Tuesday after the retailers posted weaker quarterly earnings and provided tepid forecasts for the remainder of the year, signals that the recent strength in consumer spending has its limits.
	The sporting goods chain slashed its profit targets for the year after missing Wall Street forecasts for the second quarter.
	Macy's also reported declining sales in the June quarter as well.
	According to Macy's chief executive Jeff Gannett, we expect the pressures consumers are under
	continue through the balance of the year. Sales at Macy's were down 8% to $5 billion
	from one year earlier. Again, this is not a rarity.
	There are other chains that are experiencing significant difficulties.
	Walmart is still doing okay.
	Amazon is still doing okay, but Target is getting whomped.
	Home Depot is getting whomped.
	Again, a lot of these sort of retail places where you're not buying online, those places are getting hit hardest because people are spending less money.
	Meanwhile, they're also having to face down the fact that in major cities, they're getting routinely robbed.
	According to Axios, retailers are already grappling with an uncertain economy, a shift towards spending on services and rising labor costs.
	The last thing they need is another threat to the bottom line.
	Two major chains reported on Tuesday their earnings are suffering from consumers not ponying up.
	Dick's Sporting Goods said that elevated inventory shrink, meaning theft, is an increasingly serious issue impacting many retailers.
	Also, Macy's says there are a giant number of delinquencies on their bills.
	A lot of retailers are now acknowledging that giant amounts of theft are impacting that bottom line.
	Joe Biden's economy, going strong.
	It's all going great.
	It's all going great.
	Meanwhile, on foreign policy, it is worthwhile noting the war in Ukraine has utterly bogged down, which it was bound to do because nobody has an incentive, given the current incentive structure, to actually figure out a deal.
	According to the New York Times, a big fan of the war, Ukraine's grinding counteroffensive is struggling to break through entrenched Russian defenses in large part because it has too many troops, including some of its best combat units in the wrong places, according to both American and other Western officials.
	More Ukrainian forces are near Bakhmut and other cities in the east than they are near Melitopol and Berdyansk in the south.
	Both far strategically significant fronts.
	Officials say.
	So all of these things are bogging down right now.
	This thing is likely now to go on for years.
	The West has provided no incentive structure for Zelensky to cut a deal.
	And they've provided no off-ramp for Putin to cut a deal.
	Meanwhile, US-China tensions are increasing.
	As the Chinese economy begins to sink, the consumer economy is going to sink as well.
	So once again, Joe Biden doing just a spectacular job.
	Okay, meanwhile, the left's use of lawfare at this point is utterly out of control.
	I mean, completely out of control.
	Whether you're talking about the wild indictments being brought by like the Manhattan DA against Donald Trump, or whether you're talking about this latest insanity.
	The DC Attorney General is apparently now probing Leonard Leo.
	Okay, so full disclosure, We know Leonard Leo here at the Daily Wire.
	We think that he's done extraordinary work with regard to federalist society.
	It is Leonard Leo who is largely responsible for the cultivation of an originalist bench that has allowed for the selection of justices to the Supreme Court.
	So if you like what Donald Trump picked for the Supreme Court, that's Leonard Leo who actually did it.
	And well now, Washington D.C.
	Attorney General Brian Schwalbe is investigating judicial activist Leonard Leo and his network of non-profits, according to a person with direct knowledge of the probe.
	The scope of the investigation is unclear, but it comes after Politico reported in March that one of Leonard Leo's non-profits, registered as a charity, paid his for-profit company tens of millions of dollars in the two years since he joined the company.
	A few weeks later, a progressive watchdog group filed a complaint with the D.C.
	Attorney General and IRS, requesting a probe into what services were provided.
	Well, I mean, this sort of stuff actually does happen on a fairly regular basis.
	Of course, it's never applied to, say, the Hillary Clinton Foundation.
	Whenever you have a non-profit that pays private contractors, like, this happens all the time.
	Every time you go to a big non-profit event, the non-profit had to pay the caterer, for example.
	David Rivkin, an attorney for the parties in the investigation, said the complaint is sloppy, deceptive, legally flawed.
	We're addressing this fully with the D.C.
	Attorney General's Office.
	And what this really is about is trying to scare a bunch of conservatives from involving themselves in conservative politics.
	It's trying to get donors out of the business.
	Leo grounds few interviews according to Politico.
	He featured a two-part podcast with main wire conservative news organization.
	Leo cited his commitment to defend the Constitution as the as the reality of why people are going after him.
	This of course is largely correct.
	So now you have the D.C.
	Attorney General going after Leonard Leo.
	Politico reported a total of $43 million flowed to Leo's company over two years.
	The bulk of it came from the 85 Fund, a nonprofit run by his allies, which has spent tens of millions of dollars over the past decade to promote Trump's Supreme Court picks.
	It's now run by Kerry Severino, another friend of the show, attorney and former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas.
	So, things that I hate.
	So, the Anti-Defamation League is now defending Bradley Cooper's use of a prosthetic nose.
	because this really, really looks like going after political enemies by the D.C. Attorney General,
	which would not be a surprise at all.
	Okay, we're gonna skip some things I like and go straight to some things that I hate today.
	So, things that I hate.
	So, the Anti-Defamation League is now defending Bradley Cooper's use of a prosthetic nose,
	which in a portrayal of Leonard Bernstein.
	Of course it's acceptable.
	Why was this even a controversy?
	I'm so confused.
	Following the film's first trailer release on August 15th, according to the UK Independent, the 48-year-old actor, who is not of Jewish descent, caused a stir online as he was accused of fueling anti-Semitic stereotypes.
	The ADL, however, says, That seems like a reasonable response, shockingly, from the Anti-Defamation League.
	films and propaganda as evil caricatures with large hooked noses. This film, a biopic of
	Leonard Bernstein, is not that. That seems like a reasonable response, shockingly, from the
	Anti-Defamation League. Well, I mean, duh. He put on makeup to look like Leonard Bernstein.
	I'm confused.
	Does he look more like Leonard Bernstein or less like Leonard Bernstein?
	But apparently, we're supposed to, like... So, Bradley Cooper's supposed to look like Bradley Cooper, but we're supposed to believe that he's Leonard Bernstein.
	Okay, let me just put it this way.
	Leonard Bernstein and Bradley Cooper do not look alike unless Bradley Cooper wears a lot of makeup.
	They don't look virtually anything alike.
	Their noses, in particular, are wildly dissimilar.
	So, I'm... Bernstein's family, by the way, totally fine with it, as they should be.
	I'm super confused as to why this was ever an issue, except that we live in the stupidest time in which we are supposed to pretend offensive things that are inoffensive.
	So just to point out the same people, by the way, who I'm sure are very upset about Bradley Cooper in Jew Face are perfectly fine with the funding of Hamas to murder Jews in Israel.
	I think the Venn diagram there is just a circle.
	So being offended by things that are not anti-semitism in order to, at the same time, excuse things that are clearly anti-semitism seems to be one of the hot topics of the day.
	If you are deeply offended by Bradley Cooper wearing a prosthetic nose to play Leonard Bernstein to look more like Leonard Bernstein, I don't have to tell you, you're a dummy.
	Like, that's really stupid.
	It's really, really stupid.
	Again, but I will say, this should force the left into some sort of soul-searching, you would think.
	About what it means when people play people of other ethnicities but do so in a way that's meant to be flattering and not offensive.
	I know that we now live in a stupid world in which we are supposed to treat every form of dressing up as equivalent.
	Megyn Kelly was fired from CBS for the great crime of suggesting that dressing up for Michael Jackson for Halloween is not the same thing as wearing black lace in 1930 and doing an Amos and Andy routine.
	Which is clearly true.
	But the left will never acknowledge that.
	That if you dress up as somebody because you actually think that person is worthy of emulation, that is not the same thing as dressing up as Steppenfetchit.
	Again, very, very stupid time.
	Bradley Cooper, it's obviously acceptable.
	And by the way, Helen Mirren playing Golda Meir, also not offensive in any way, shape, or form.
	It's all stupid, man.
	Everything is stupid.
	We have to pretend offensive things that are clearly inoffensive.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
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