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Aug. 24, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:03:59

WHO WON FIGHT NIGHT #1?

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	Whenever there's a big debate, the big question that people have is who won and who lost.
	But to understand who won and who lost, you first have to discuss what the metrics are for winning and losing.
	Because you can win a debate, and it can mean very little.
	Or, you can lose a debate, and it can end your campaign.
	So, the question for each of the candidates on the stage in last night's first Republican debate was, what is the goal?
	In order to understand what the goal was for each candidate, and then we can grade them in terms of how they achieved their goals, we can also grade them in terms of what we personally thought of them in terms of truth, honesty, policy.
	In order to grade them on that basis, we first have to kind of assess the state of the race going into the debate.
	And to understand where the race was going into the debate, you first have to understand that the Republican Party is not actually a cohesive thing.
	The conservative movement at this point is not a cohesive movement.
	There's an anti-left umbrella.
	Under the anti-left umbrella, there are several groups inside the Republican Party.
	I've seen people divide these groups six ways.
	If you're Nate Cohen of the New York Times, I've seen them divided a couple of ways.
	They're not divided, however, into two groups.
	One of the core assumptions going into the Republican primaries by a lot of politicos is that there are basically two groups.
	The pro-Trumps and the anti-Trumps.
	Maybe three.
	The pro-Trumps, the anti-Trumps, and the lukewarm Trumps.
	That's not really accurate.
	In reality, in this Republican primary, I believe that there are four lanes right now.
	There are four lanes.
	And the question is, can you occupy multiple of those lanes and be the top person at multiple of those lanes?
	You're going to have to do that in order to challenge President Trump, who's running away with the primaries right now by 40 points nationally.
	And he is winning.
	Yes, still in Iowa.
	He's winning in New Hampshire and every other state.
	So, in order to understand where the race stood and what people were trying to accomplish on the stage last night, we first have to look at where people stand in the race right now.
	So I put together this chart to sort of explain the various lanes and where the candidates stood before last night's debate.
	So, there are basically four lanes in this Republican primary.
	Lane number one are the people who absolutely love President Trump.
	The Trumpers.
	That's like 35% of the Republican Party.
	They love him.
	It's ride or die.
	He's their guy.
	You got 25% of the GOP.
	That'd be like the traditional GOP base.
	Like the Reagan conservatives.
	People who believe in the three-legged stool of conservatism, social conservatism, fiscal conservatism, meaning small government, free trade, and foreign policy hawkishness.
	That'd be like the traditional GOP.
	Third group would be the liberal wing.
	This would be like the never-Trumpers.
	The Chris Christie wing.
	And then finally you have the Trump adjacent.
	These are people like 20% of the party who like Trump, Like, they like him, they liked his policies, they thought he was a good president, but they understand there are serious concerns about his presidential run.
	Whether it's the indictments, whether it's his bizarre habits on Truth Social, whether it's his commentary, whether it's the toxicity he has with Suburban, whatever it is.
	These are people who like a lot of what Trump did, who may even like him personally, but they also are not totally sold that Trump is the guy for 2024.
	That's like 20% of the party.
	So, let's go through each of these candidates and where they stood going into the debate.
	Last night's debate.
	So, Ron DeSantis is currently in second place in the national polling.
	With the Trumpers, he earns like a B. Okay, so the way that I weighted this sort of stuff is everybody's on an A to F scale.
	Trump gets an A plus in the Trump category because he's Trump and it's the Trump category.
	So he gets an A plus.
	He's the only person who gets an A plus in any category.
	Okay, but everybody else is on an A to F scale.
	An A is worth four, a B is worth three, a C is worth two, a D is worth one, and an F is worth zero.
	And then we weighted it out according to the size of these particular groups.
	So, Ron DeSantis, among Trumpers, going into the debate, he's at like a B. They like the guy.
	They think he's fine.
	He's solid.
	But he's not Trump.
	Among traditional GOP types, DeSantis is currently at a B.
	Among members of the so-called liberal wing, the sort of never Trump side,
	DeSantis is at like a D.
	And among the Trump adjacent crowd, he's at like a B.
	Those are the people who love Trump, but you know, they could see somebody else.
	Which means that he's at a B in three categories and a D in one other.
	Vivek Ramaswamy has an A with Trumpers.
	Now, that is great for him in the sense that, like, the Trump people really, really like him.
	I mean, a lot for him being vice president or a cabinet secretary, but he ain't gonna beat Trump among the Trumpers.
	He's got an A among the Trumpers.
	He's got a D among the traditional GOP because he takes a lot of heterodox positions and seems to shift with the wind based on who's asking him questions, whether it is 9-11 conspiracies or whether it is Ukraine.
	Or whether it's climate change.
	You got the liberal wing, which hates Vivek.
	The never-Trump wing, he's got an F with them.
	And then among the Trump-adjacent, he's got an A right now.
	This is where momentum has been flowing from DeSantis to Vivek, is that in the Trump-adjacent wing, the people who like Trump, but they could see somebody else, Vivek has been doing well with those people.
	He's got an A with those people.
	That means he's got an A with the Trumpers and the Trump-adjacent, and he's failing with the traditional GOP and the left wing of the party.
	Mike Pence has an F in two categories, the Trump and the Trump-adjacent.
	They hate him.
	And among the traditional GOP, he's got a B because, again, the traditional GOP kind of likes Trump.
	And so if Trump rips on Pence, he's got a B. And among the never-Trumpers, they actually don't like Pence on policy, but they like that Trump hates him.
	And so he's got a B with them.
	Nikki Haley, among those four groups, she's got, like, a D with the Trumpers.
	They don't like her because she's running against Trump.
	Among the traditional GOP, she does well.
	She's got an A going in, probably.
	Among the never-Trump wing of the party, she's got a B. They kind of like her.
	They don't love her, but they kind of like her.
	And among the Trump adjacent, she has a D. They're also not super fond of Nikki Haley.
	They think that she is, quote-unquote, a neocon and all the rest of it.
	Okay, Tim Scott is basically in the race for no reason.
	Tim Scott, very nice guy.
	No magnetism, no momentum, no nothing.
	Among Trumpers, he's a C or a D. Among traditional GOP, he's a C. Liberal wing, he's a C. Trump adjacent, he's a C. Like, basically, we all like Tim.
	He's fine.
	Eh.
	And then Chris Christie, he is an F among Trumpers.
	He's got a D among the traditional GOP who don't like him because of the way that he treated Barack Obama and all the rest.
	He's got an F with the Trump adjacent because they hate his guts.
	And among the number of Trumpers, he's got an A. So he's got like one lane.
	And then you got Trump.
	Trump himself, As an A-plus with the Trumpers, he's got an A with the Trump adjacent, and he's got a B with the traditional GOP.
	It's only the never-Trumpers who hate him.
	Everybody else either loves the guy or likes the guy to varying degrees.
	In order for any candidate to defeat Donald Trump, in order for that to happen, The only way that that is going to happen is if they consolidate the other three non-Trump wings of the party.
	So let's say that you're a candidate and you want to beat Donald Trump.
	And Donald Trump, right now, has the Trumpers locked up.
	It's 35% of the party.
	And you need to get...
	Let's say in a two-person race, which it is not, which is part of the problem.
	Let's say you wanted to consolidate.
	So you figure, okay, 65% of the party is up for grabs.
	Well, you'd certainly need to pick up the never-Trump wing.
	That'd be like 20% of the party.
	And then you'd need to win probably 80% of the traditional GOP.
	You need to get a lot of those people to believe that Donald Trump is not the guy, which means you need to win them over with sort of traditional GOP positions, record, all the rest.
	And then you would still have to win half of the Trump adjacent.
	You'd have to take all of the Never Trump wing, that's 20%.
	You have to take 20 of the 25% from the traditional GOP and you'd still have to win half of the Trump adjacent.
	That is a very uphill road.
	Now the only candidate who is scoring at all among all three of those groups, the only candidates who are scoring at all among those three groups, the Trump adjacent, the liberal wing and the traditional GOP, are Haley and DeSantis.
	The others are doing well in, like, one of the categories.
	DeSantis' campaign initially seemed fairly well-positioned for this possible challenge, right?
	He seemed like he might be getting an A with the traditional GOP.
	Among NeverTrumpers, he was at, like, a B. And among the Trump-adjacent, he was at, like, an A. So there was a possibility he might have been able to consolidate the anti-Trump forces.
	That really has not happened, which is why he's been losing momentum.
	Because right now, he seems like he's the second choice for everybody.
	Among traditional GOP-ers, He is a B-Rater, as opposed to Nikki Haley, who's like an A. Among the Trump-adjacent, he's at a B, as opposed to Vivek, who's at an A. And among the never-Trump-ling, he ranks behind, right now, Christie and Haley and Pence, probably.
	So when you look at the initial GPAs of these candidates going into the race, what you see is Donald Trump way out in front with like a 3.3 when you give like a weighted average here.
	And when you look at Ron DeSantis, he's at, when you give a weighted aggregate rather, you get 3.3 for Trump.
	When you look at DeSantis, he's at 2.6.
	Vivek just trailing him at 2.45.
	You have Nikki Haley at 2.15, you have Scott at 1.65, Pence at 1.35, Christie at 1.05.
	That doesn't explain the entire dynamic of the race because momentum, as we'll discuss, is really about can you win one of these lanes.
	One of the ways you generate momentum is by winning one of the lanes and then building on that.
	So right now, Vivek is doing really well with the Trump adjacent, which is why he's building on that and seems to have momentum.
	Christie seems to have momentum because he has some momentum with the never-trumpling of the party.
	Haley had to use this debate to gain momentum.
	But this defines where the candidates are.
	So going into the race, DeSantis basically just wants to hold steady.
	That's his goal.
	Hold steady.
	As we look at that chart, by the way, I'm going to explain in just a second what everybody's goal is going into the debate by looking at that chart.
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	Okay, so to go back to this chart, in order to understand what everybody's goals for debate number one are.
	If you look at this chart, what you see, again, DeSantis is in second place, but he's kind of stagnant with all of these groups, right?
	He's in second place in all of these groups.
	In three groups, he's got a B, and among the Never Trumpers, he's got a D. His original plan was he was going to score like a B with the Trumpers, and then he was going to score an A with pretty much everybody else.
	That was gonna be the idea.
	That has not happened.
	Right now, because DeSantis was in a slide, his goal for this debate, and because he's in second place, was just to avoid the spotlight, actually.
	His goal was to live another day.
	He did not want last night to be a red wedding.
	The time when he just completely collapsed on the stage.
	As we'll see, I think that he largely accomplished that.
	Vivek's goal is to continue to gain attention, to be a lightning rod.
	That was his goal on the stage.
	He's doing really well with the Trump adjacent.
	He knows he's going to do nothing with the Never Trumpers.
	And he knows he's not going to do anything with traditional GOP, which again is why he's not really running for president.
	He's running for Donald Trump's vice president or for a cabinet position or for a Senate position.
	He knows he's not taking it away from Trump.
	And that wasn't his goal last night.
	His goal last night was to basically degrade DeSantis with the Trump adjacent by gaining momentum with those people.
	And he may have accomplished that goal last night.
	For Mike Pence, Pence really knows that he doesn't have a shot at the presidency, but he feels that he has to run because he has to preserve his legacy as a person who stood up to the predations of Donald Trump between November and January, and as a sort of traditional old-line Republican politician.
	How'd he do last night?
	He basically achieved his goal.
	Nikki Haley, her goal was, I need a lane and I need to actually show some momentum in a lane.
	Nikki Haley, as we'll see, actually outperformed last night and she actually achieved her goal.
	Tim Scott is a quixotic figure.
	I'm not sure why he's in the race.
	This is not his moment.
	I'm not sure he has a moment.
	He's incredibly soft-spoken.
	He's not aggressive.
	He seems like a very nice person, but he does not have any teeth.
	And so there was no goal for him to achieve.
	And so he succeeded in not achieving a goal, I suppose.
	But I feel like Tim Scott is going to be one of the first people out of the race.
	And for Chris Christie, the entire goal last night was to, like Vivek, lock down one lane.
	Lock down that never Trump lane.
	And I think Christie may have achieved that goal last night.
	Meanwhile, Trump achieved his goal, which was stay away.
	Goal achieved.
	So last night, I think actually everybody kind of achieved their goal,
	but the effects in terms of momentum are going to be the question.
	So we're gonna get to that in just one second.
	The effect, like what actually happened via the momentum in order to explore that question
	as to who has momentum coming out of the debate.
	We're gonna have to actually jump into the debate itself.
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	OK, so as we jump into the actual debate.
	I'm gonna explain to you how I analyze this debate.
	So the way that I analyze this particular debate is going to be my own subjective belief, because every debate is like Rashomon, the old Kurosawa film.
	There's a thousand perspectives on what somebody says.
	So, Vivek might say something and I might think, man, he is being wildly dishonest.
	And then there might be people who's like, yeah, but he's punching somebody.
	So again, every debate is a matter of perspective.
	I'm going to critique debate participants Through a couple of different prisms that I think should still be important, even if they seem increasingly non-important in everyday political life.
	Okay, so I'm going to grade them based on like, is what they're saying true?
	Are they being like a decent person?
	So one of my grades of decency, generally, is I don't like attacks that are false.
	I don't like them.
	I think if you're going to attack somebody, you should attack somebody based on what they have done.
	I don't think you should just launch specious attacks on people as a general rule.
	I understand that we live in a very aggressive time, and so a lot of people take aggression on stage, performative aggression, as, well, if he's doing it there, then he'll definitely do it to Joe Biden.
	Does that make you like a good person?
	I feel like you could actually, you know, launch well-timed and well-calibrated attacks on people and still take on Joe Biden.
	Maybe I'm just shooting in the dark here, but that's how I grade people.
	But again, I understand that my perspective is not the only perspective, which is why as we go on here, I'm going to explain how each lane is grading people in this actual debate.
	I'm also going to grade people based on their actual policy performance, which means inherent advantage to people who actually have governed a state or done a thing as opposed to just said a thing.
	Now, again, I'm not sure this matters in a Republican primary anymore.
	It certainly has not mattered since President Trump.
	I mean, when President Trump became the nominee, he literally had no governing record.
	He'd not been in politics at all.
	So again, I'm using metrics that may be outdated, but again, I get to do it.
	It's my show.
	So my metrics are generally, is what they're saying true?
	Are they being like a decent person?
	Is what they're saying a reflection of actual policy wins on the ground?
	So for example, I'm going to grade people better if they do something anti-woke as opposed to just saying something anti-woke.
	I'm also going to grade people based on the actual policy conservatism of what they are saying.
	Like, do I think that they're actually right or not?
	Okay, so that is how I typically grade these things.
	Now, does that mean that my grades are going to somehow going to be reflective of like the momentum in the race?
	I think absolutely not.
	Again, if I were going to place myself on this chart of like Trumpers, traditional GOP, liberal wing, Trump adjacent, I'm somewhere between Trump-adjacent and traditional GOP, probably.
	I'm certainly not in the never-Trump-Chris Christie liberal wing of the party.
	And I'm certainly not in the, I will vote for Trump, I walk over broken glass to vote for Trump.
	I'm like the people who think Trump did a pretty good job overall.
	I thought that the first three years of his presidency, we got some big policy wins, but I was also very, very uncomfortable, as you all know, with a lot of his rhetoric, many of the things that he said, his habit of tweeting that I think was counterproductive to his own presidency, his activities between November and January of 2021.
	All that, his behavior since, like, all that stuff makes me uncomfortable with many of the things Trump did, but also warm toward his performance in the first three years of his presidency.
	Again, I said the first three years, the last year, I think, was rather disastrous on all fronts.
	I think COVID was a disaster.
	I think his handling of BLM was really bad.
	I think that we blew out the budget.
	Like, there were a lot of problems.
	Even amongst those problems, there were wins.
	Like, for example, the Abraham Accords.
	Again, I want to make my own perspective clear, my own biases clear, so you know how to analyze what I'm saying as well.
	I'm going to be upfront and honest with you on that sort of stuff.
	A lot of people won't.
	So, we're going to go through the debate in detail right now.
	I do want to thank Fox News.
	They backed off their position yesterday that they had expressed clearly to us that they were not going to allow shows like ours to actually cover the debate by playing more than three combined minutes of the debate.
	I was rather livid about it yesterday.
	Fox News did get in touch with us.
	They did let us know that it was okay if we played as many clips as we wanted from the debate.
	It's fair use, actually, but good for them.
	So we want to give them credit for that.
	Okay, let's jump into the debate.
	Okay, so the debate opens and everybody sort of gives their little intro.
	Ron DeSantis, who is the, going into this, the front runner of the second tier, right?
	There's only one person in the top tier, right?
	And that's Trump, who wasn't there.
	So the person who's in the second tier leading this thing was DeSantis.
	DeSantis' goal, as I say, was basically emerge alive.
	So did DeSantis emerge alive?
	Yeah, I mean, he did that really easily, actually.
	So here was Ron DeSantis' intro.
	Joe Biden back to his basement and reverse American decline.
	And it starts with understanding we must reverse Bidenomics so that middle class families have a chance to succeed again.
	We cannot succeed as a country if you are working hard and you can't afford groceries, a car, or a new home while Hunter Biden can make hundreds of thousands of dollars on lousy paintings.
	That is wrong.
	This is fine, right down the line, solid stuff from Ron DeSantis.
	And that would describe his performance like last night.
	I mean, fine, solid, right?
	Those are adjectives that come to mind.
	Then when you have Vivek, right?
	Vivek has momentum because in that Trump adjacent lane, which is not a huge lane, but it's there, he's doing really well.
	He's outperforming because he's going everywhere.
	He's saying anything.
	He's flipping his positions in order to say anything.
	Here was Vivek's intro and very energetic.
	As we'll see, he's going to get knocked by Chris Christie for cribbing from Obama.
	There is something to the idea here that Vivek is a very studied person.
	I mean, he's a very smart guy.
	And Vivek basically has taken in political information over the course of the last 15 years, and he is now kind of rechurning it in Vivek form.
	And so what you get sometimes is lines that come out of Vivek that obviously are from somebody else.
	So here's Vivek in his intro.
	So first, let me just address a question that is on everybody's mind at home tonight.
	Who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny last name and what the heck is he doing in the middle of this debate stage?
	I'll tell you, I'm not a politician, Brett.
	You're right about that.
	I'm an entrepreneur.
	My parents came to this country with no money 40 years ago.
	I have gone on to found multi-billion dollar companies.
	I did it while marrying my wife, Apoorva, raising our two sons, following our faith in God.
	That is the American dream.
	And I am genuinely worried that that American dream will not exist for our two sons and their generation unless we do something about it.
	And I do think Brett is going to take an outsider, because for a long time we have professional politicians in the Republican Party who have been running from something.
	Now is our moment to start running to something.
	Okay, so I look at this sort of stuff, and I think this is really platitudinous, but I also understand that it's very energetic.
	Right, Vivek was extremely energetic on the stage last night, and he's made for the internet.
	I mean, he knows how to speak internet.
	On the internet, the sort of emotive, big hand motions, excitement, He was all energy last night, which made him a lightning rod, as we will see.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	Okay, so DeSantis introduced himself, Vivek introduced himself, and then Nikki Haley introduces herself.
	And again, I think that Nikki outperformed last night.
	She was kind of a surprise.
	Here she was last night.
	Well, I don't care about polls.
	What I care about the fact is that no one is telling the American people the truth.
	The truth is that Biden didn't do this to us.
	Our Republicans did this to us, too.
	When they passed that $2.2 trillion COVID stimulus bill, they left us with 90 million people on Medicaid, 42 million people on food stamps.
	No one has told you how to fix it.
	I'll tell you how to fix it.
	They need to stop the spending.
	They need to stop the borrowing.
	Okay, points for truth here.
	I understand that the new Republican Party says we should never talk about entitlement programs ever again.
	Reality.
	Those entitlement programs are gonna bankrupt us.
	Those are real.
	And so when Nikki Haley says that, it may be unpopular, it also happens to be right.
	So in my book, saying things that are unpopular but true, tends to win you points from me. So Nikki Haley, I think,
	did well last night. Meanwhile, Mike Pence had a hard task last night. He had to simultaneously brag
	about his record as part of the Trump-Pence administration, and then, as we'll see, defend his behavior
	on January 6th. Here was last night.
	I'm incredibly proud of the record of the Trump-Pence administration.
	I mean, in four short years, we rebuild our military.
	We revived our economy.
	We unleashed American energy.
	And we appointed three conservatives to the Supreme Court that gave the American people a new beginning for the right to life.
	Okay, so all of that, as you can see from the crowd, all of that is perfectly fine.
	Okay, then the real debate broke out.
	So the real debate was that a lot of people on stage were annoyed with Vivek.
	The reason a lot of people on stage were annoyed with Vivek, there's a pretty good reason.
	He's obviously not running for president.
	I mean, he's not.
	He's running to replace the guy he says is the best president we'll see of the 21st century.
	He is running without criticizing that person.
	He is running by attacking literally everyone else on the stage.
	And he's saying things very, very confidently that he was saying the opposite of five minutes ago.
	Now, does any of that really matter in terms of momentum in particular lanes?
	No.
	And maybe the way that you grade Vivek is that dude's really aggressive.
	I get it.
	I totally understand.
	He's really energetic.
	He's magnetic on the screen.
	I mean, he passes what Roger, the Roger Ailes test.
	Roger Ailes, when he would watch TV and determine whether somebody was good on TV, the way he would do it is he put on the mute button.
	And if you watched last night, there's no question that if you turned on the mute button, Vivek was the center of attention.
	There's just no question about it.
	He also drew all the fire because all of the people on the stage who've actually spent their life doing politics are annoyed that a 38-year-old guy with no political record and a long history of comments that actually contravene his own comments today is showing up and calling them names.
	They weren't real fond of that last night.
	And Vivek played right into it, right?
	I mean, Vivek really went for it.
	This is the part where, again, I think there's going to be a gap between some of the stuff that I think about what Vivek said and maybe what the crowd thinks about what Vivek said.
	So, clip 8.
	This is the one where Ramaswamy really decides, Vivek really, again, I know Vivek, I like Vivek, I consider myself friends with Vivek.
	I think these attacks are pretty dishonest.
	So here is, um, here is Vivek basically just attacking everybody on stage with a hatchet.
	I just want to respond to Mike for one second, because he invoked me back.
	Listen, now that everybody's gotten their memorized, pre-prepared slogans out of the way, we can actually have a real discussion now.
	The reality and the fact of the matter is... Was that one of yours?
	Not really, Mike, actually.
	We're just going to have some fun tonight.
	And the reality is, you have a bunch of people, professional politicians, super PAC puppets, following slogans handed over to them by their 400-page super PACs last week.
	The real choice we face in this primary is this.
	Do you want a super PAC puppet, or do you want a patriot who speaks the truth?
	Do you want incremental reform, which is what you're hearing about, or do you want revolution?
	Okay, so again, this is the part where my skin starts to, you know, rise a little bit because I don't know what he's talking about.
	I, honest to God, don't know what he's talking about.
	When he says, Super PAC puppet, I assume that what he's talking about is the fact that Ron DeSantis' Super PAC accidentally released some sort of debate plan.
	That's not how Super PACs work.
	Super PACs don't control the candidate.
	The question is why the candidate controls the Super PAC.
	This is like, when he says, everyone else on this stage is a puppet, it's like, well, What?
	That's so deeply... When I get to the decency point, this is it.
	Just because people disagree with you and are on the same stage does not mean that they are corrupt or evil.
	And I don't like that line of attack.
	On a personal level, I don't like that line.
	Now, is it an effective line of attack?
	Sure, it can be an effective line of attack.
	But it seems to me that if you call somebody corrupt, if you suggest that their super PAC owns them, if you suggest that they are pre-produced while you, you're doing this all spontaneously, which is not true, okay?
	Let's just be real about this.
	When Pence says to Vivek right there, is that a pre-planned line?
	The answer is yes, of course it's a pre-planned line.
	Like clearly it's a pre-planned line.
	If you think that Vivek didn't prep for the debate, you're idiotic.
	I mean, like everyone preps for debate.
	Of course, because it's a debate in front of a national audience.
	And he just woke up in the morning, rolled out of bed and is like, I'm going to just figure this thing out on the... Of course not.
	OK, but in any case.
	That sort of attack that Vivek launched then prompted everybody to fire on him in response.
	And so the rest of the night was essentially just Vivek taking an incoming.
	Now, that's Vivek's idea, right?
	He wants that.
	A lot of people coming out of the debate were like, well, he took a lot of incoming fire right there.
	That must have hurt him.
	With whom?
	The question is, with whom?
	So, he launches this, and then, just to make sure that everybody gets the message that he wants to fight, he does it again.
	So, clip 10.
	He then suggests that every single person on the stage is bought and paid for.
	Let us be honest as Republicans.
	I'm the only person on the stage who isn't bought and paid for so I can say this.
	The climate change agenda is a hoax.
	The climate change agenda is a hoax.
	He got a little bit of booze from the audience there, but again, everybody on this stage is bought and paid for except for you.
	It's just, it's so tiresome.
	It really is.
	Like, I really disliked it on a moral level.
	I didn't like it when Trump did it in 2015, 2016.
	I don't like when Ramaswamy's doing it in 2023.
	It's just not my bag.
	It's not my bag.
	I know there's some people who love this sort of thing.
	I don't like it.
	I don't think it's moral to assume that everybody who disagrees with you is doing so because they have been bought and paid for.
	I think it's ugly.
	Does it achieve the purpose?
	Sure.
	By the way, there are politicians who are bought and paid for.
	Joe Biden is a politician who, when he was the Senator of Delaware, was bought and paid for by MBNA.
	Okay, I can name the people who bought and paid for him.
	Here's my thing.
	If you're gonna say somebody's bought and paid for, you then have to explain who bought them and paid for them.
	I'm also confused by this particular line of attack on climate change.
	Just for a second.
	Who bought and paid for, like, Ron DeSantis on climate change?
	Was it the Sierra Club?
	What the hell is he talking about?
	If you're gonna pick and, like, the rap on Republicans is that they're supposedly, this is what the left says, bought and paid for by, like, the Kochs to be pro-fracking.
	And they're being bought and paid for by the oil industry.
	Who buys and pays for Republicans on climate change?
	It is also worth noting here that, like, five months ago, Vivek was asked about climate change, and he said, uh, actually, actually, climate change is man-made.
	So the rest of the people, but again, this is him trolling.
	And I understand internet culture because I do it like every day.
	And this dude is an expert in internet culture.
	This is the thing.
	You can admire what he's doing on sort of a political level at the same time that you're looking at this and going like, I'm not sure it is moral to simply suggest without any evidence whatsoever that everyone who disagrees with you is some sort of corrupt tool of the shadowy establishment without defining corruption, tool, or establishment.
	But as you see, he got what he wanted, which is to be the lightning rod.
	So Chris Christie, who can't help himself, and if there is a pie to be thrown, Chris Christie will forego even eating it in order to throw it.
	Christie then went after Vivek.
	And I will say that Chris Christie does have a particular set of skills.
	When it comes to wrecking people on stages, that dude eats pizzas and he wrecks people on stage, and he was out of pizza last night.
	And so his hit on Ramaswami here, Actually is pretty well, well based.
	I've had enough already tonight of a guy who sounds like Chat GPT standing up here.
	And the last person in one of these debates, Brett, who stood in the middle of the stage and said, what's a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here was Barack Obama.
	And I'm afraid we're dealing with the same type of amateur standing stage tonight.
	Give me a hug just like you did to Obama.
	Same time, amateur.
	OK, so then the big smacks, Christie back.
	So this this debate I'm up for, right?
	This kind of smacking I like.
	So the smack I don't like is where he calls everybody on the stage.
	A corrupt icon.
	The thing I do like is Christie says something true about Ramaswamy.
	Like this kind of dissing I'm OK with.
	Here's where Christy says something true about Ramaswamy, which is basically, you sound as though you just took a bunch of slogans, you threw them into a chat GPT, and what came out was Vivek.
	And then Vivek comes back, and by the way, you are ripping people off, which is true.
	Okay, when Vivek says, what's a skinny guy with a weird last name doing up here, that is literally a quote from Barack Obama in 2004.
	That is literally a line from Barack Obama.
	So he's not wrong.
	I will say that Christy does have a long institutional memory.
	And he is a weaponized insult machine.
	So, that was correct.
	But I will say Ramaswamy's response is just as correct.
	Right, which is, if you're going to invoke Barack Obama, it was you who was hugging him coming off the plane during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and you were helping him out in the national election.
	So this kind of made him up for it, actually.
	These fisticuffs, fine.
	Okay, meanwhile, Tim Scott was trying to calm everybody down.
	Again, this is why Scott has no juice.
	If you're the guy in the room who's like, guys, can't we all just be friends?
	Well, over in the corner, people are just pummeling the crap out of each other.
	That guy ain't going nowhere.
	Here was Tim Scott.
	Are you bought and paid for?
	I'm sorry?
	Are you bought and paid for?
	Absolutely not.
	I mean, here's what the American people deserve.
	It's a debate about the issues that affect their lives.
	Going back and forth and being childish is not helpful to the American people to decide on the next leader of our country.
	Okay, so.
	Meh.
	Me.
	And that was sort of the reaction to Scott last night.
	It was like, he kind of disappeared into the wallpaper.
	He just, he wasn't much of a factor in the debate at all.
	Okay, in just one second, we'll get to some actual clarifying questions on policy.
	I know there were a couple of them last night.
	It wasn't all fisticuffs.
	We'll get to that momentarily first.
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	Also, Candace Owens just wrapped the 10-part series, Convicting a Murderer.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	It's one of our most ambitious projects yet.
	It looks absolutely fascinating.
	You might think you're familiar with the Stephen Avery case and everything that happened in Manitowoc County.
	That's especially true if you watch Making a Murderer on Netflix.
	But it turns out that that Docu-series was, uh, not really super true.
	Coming soon, Candace is going to blow it up.
	I'm excited to present the Convicting a Murderer trailer.
	Check it out.
	This is a collect call from... Uh, Steve.
	An inmate at the Calumet County Jail.
	The man served 18 years in prison until DNA evidence cleared his name.
	The Two Rivers man was convicted of sexual assault in 1985, but exonerated with DNA evidence in 2003.
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	The most egregious manipulation from the movie.
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	How could they claim to care about the truth?
	They all know that Stephen Avery committed this crime.
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	Trust me, you're not going to want to miss it.
	Okay, so the debate continued.
	There were a couple of issues that came up.
	So there were a couple of issues that Fox absolutely did not cover.
	They did not cover, like, the giant gender issue.
	They didn't cover that, like, at all.
	They did not cover critical race theory in any real serious way.
	They kind of touched on immigration, but they made it secondary to things like climate change, which was very odd.
	But they did get to abortion.
	There were some, honest to God, interesting debates about abortion.
	Doug Burgum, and that's going to be the only mention you hear of Doug Burgum all day today.
	Doug Burgum, who is the governor of North Dakota, I believe?
	Yes, North Dakota, Doug Burgum, famous for his eyebrows and being a man named Doug Burgum.
	He made the bizarre statement that when it comes to abortion law, the 10th Amendment prevails.
	And a lot of people kind of knocked him around for that.
	There's an interesting debate, however, between Nikki Haley and Mike Pence, particularly on abortion.
	Here's Nikki Haley pointing out quite rationally, and I think with an eye toward the general election, that when it comes to national abortion law, you actually have to pass things before you sign them.
	Let's be honest with the American people and say it will take 60 Senate votes.
	It will take a majority of the House.
	So in order to do that, let's find consensus.
	Can't we all agree that we should ban late-term abortions?
	Can't we all agree that we should encourage adoptions?
	Can't we all agree that doctors and nurses who don't believe in abortions shouldn't have to perform them?
	Again, this is a perfectly fine general election take.
	Mike Pence took the strongest line with regard to abortion.
	Here he was last night.
	After I gave my life to Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, I opened up the book and I read, Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.
	And see, I set before you life and death, blessings and curses, now choose life.
	And I knew from that moment on, the cause of life had to be my cause.
	And I've been a champion for life in the Congress, a champion for life as governor and as vice president.
	And to be honest with you, Nikki, you're my friend, but consensus is the opposite of leadership.
	And that's an interesting sort of debate.
	Consensus is the opposite of leadership.
	I don't think it's particularly true.
	I mean, sometimes consensus is actually built through leadership.
	However, with that said, it's an interesting and fascinating.
	It completely went unnoticed, right?
	The sideshow then continued.
	What's interesting is then we got into the section of the debate where everybody sort of tried to lock down their positions.
	So now the first hour of the debate is about establishing your position.
	The position established by the various candidates in the first hour of the debate was, as we suggest, in their lanes and basically in orientation toward particular goals.
	For DeSantis, it was maintain your presence, don't lose ground, stay where you are.
	For Vivek, it was become a lightning rod and own that Trump-adjacent lane that we talked about.
	For Nikki Haley, it was own the traditional GOP lane.
	And that was the dynamic that sort of permeated the rest of the debate.
	So, for example, Ron DeSantis on crime, his entire campaign, and this is why I give DeSantis additional credit, I don't give people for just saying things, because I live in Florida, I've watched him do it.
	DeSantis' entire campaign is, you want a thing done, I did it in Florida, maybe I should do it nationally.
	That's his entire campaign.
	It may not be enough, because we live in a period where a lot of people don't seem to care what people actually do in terms of governing, when, I mean, people could say, they could just say things, and that would be amazing.
	Here was Ron DeSantis talking about crime.
	There's one guy in this entire country that's ever done anything about that.
	Me.
	When we had two of these district attorneys in Florida elected with Soros funding who said they wouldn't do their job, I removed them from their posts.
	They are gone.
	And as president, As president, we are going to go after all of these people because they are hurting the quality of life and they are victimizing innocent people in every corner of this country and it will stop when I get into office.
	So again, his entire campaign last night was, I'm the best governor in America, I'll do it nationally.
	That's fine.
	Did it mean momentum?
	As we'll discuss in a second, maybe not.
	Okay, meanwhile.
	We got into the most polarizing questions of the night.
	These all surrounded Trump.
	And you can very clearly see who's aiming for which lane.
	And so there was a question that was asked as to who would support Trump even if he ended up being convicted in court.
	And it was a pretty awkward moment because the only person, Vivek was like, The kid in school who had the answer before anyone else.
	He's in the front row.
	I mean, this is sort of Vivek's personality also, because he's a super smart guy.
	But Vivek's entire personality is basically the kid in Model UN that you might not want to hang out with, but you know that he's a smart guy.
	So here is Vivek, who like jumps out of his seat, basically runs around the room with his hand up, screaming.
	Everybody else a little bit slower on the gun here.
	Here is the question.
	You all signed a pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee.
	If former President Trump is convicted in a court of law, would you still support him as your party's choice?
	Please raise your hand if you would.
	And then Vivek just, I'm gonna leave my hand up here all day long.
	If you go back to that clip, it's actually fascinating to see the order in which people
	raise their hands.
	There's something to this.
	Right?
	And frankly, I'm kind of shocked that some of the candidates hadn't thought about this question being asked beforehand, because we all know they're going to support Trump if he's the nominee, obviously.
	Except for Asa Hutchinson, who no one cares about.
	But if you look at the order the hands go up in, so Vivek, as I say, is like super fast off the gun.
	Dude is like Wyatt Earp on the trigger here.
	The next couple of hands that go up are Haley and Scott and Burgum.
	DeSantis sort of reluctantly raises his hand, so does Pence.
	And then, and then Christie is kind of shaking his head.
	So why is Christie shaking his head?
	Here was Christie locking down the Never Trump lane.
	Someone's got to stop normalizing this conduct.
	Okay?
	Now, and now whether or not Whether or not you believe that the criminal charges are right or wrong, the conduct is beneath the office of President of the United States.
	And, you know, this is the great thing about this country.
	Booing is allowed, but it doesn't change the truth.
	Let's just speak the truth, okay?
	that never Trump lane right again there are the four lanes there the Trumpers
	traditional GOP Trump adjacent never Trumpers that is that is Christie
	locking down you never Trump lane here's a vague trying to lock down the Trump
	adjacent lane by being slavishly sycophantic to President Trump right
	here let's just speak the truth okay President Trump I believe was the best
	president of the 21st century It's a fact.
	And Chris Christie, honest to God, your claim that Donald Trump is motivated by vengeance and grievance would be a lot more credible if your entire campaign were not based on vengeance and grievance against one man.
	And if people at home want to see a bunch of people blindly bashing Donald Trump without an iota of vision for this country, they could just change the channel to MSNBC right now.
	But I'm not running for president of MSNBC.
	I am running for president of the United States.
	Okay, so there's, again, he's locking down that Trump adjacent lane, but he's not running for president, because here's the thing.
	If you believe that Donald Trump is, like, the greatest president in human history, first of all, I will say, again, Vivek, super smart guy, when he says greatest presidents of the 21st century, that's a real short list, guys.
	There have only been three of them, okay?
	And two of them, not so great.
	It was George W. Bush, followed by Barack Obama, followed by Donald Trump, and then the next one is Biden.
	So that's an amazing list that you have to top right there.
	If you are that into Trump, you could not run.
	I mean, Trump has said he wants the field clear.
	I've noticed, by the way, that in reaction to this debate and everything else, Trump just praises Ramaswamy, which is Donald Trump.
	If you see somebody as a threat, you think he praises them.
	Donald Trump has never praised anyone he has ever perceived as a threat.
	This is why there are a lot of people in Republican Party politics right now who are like, you're just a stalking horse for that.
	Like, that's why you're in the race.
	Does that mean that Vivek isn't going to lock down that Trump adjacent lane?
	Nope.
	He could easily lock down that Trump adjacent lane.
	And, um, you know, he continued to do this.
	He made a commitment on the stage that day one he would pardon Donald Trump.
	Then we got to, I think, what was one of the most fascinating exchanges of the debate.
	And that was the exchange over Ukraine, because this goes to sort of the future of the Republican Party more broadly and where these various lanes stand on foreign policy.
	And this is a complete Rorschach test, because if you are in the sort of more isolationist wing of the Republican Party, The sort of Tucker Carlson wing on foreign policy.
	You loved what Vivek had to say.
	If you're in the more traditional wing of the Republican Party, you think Vivek got his ass handed to him.
	So again, every element here is based on which lane are you a part of.
	Okay, then we get to the foreign policy debate.
	And here, once again, this is Vivek locking down the Trump adjacent vote.
	People who love Trump on policy but, you know, have some problems maybe with Trump personality-wise.
	The way he does this is by Being the only person on stage who basically says right away that he would withdraw all military aid to Ukraine.
	And this turns into a pretty fiery debate.
	This is why you watch the debates, so you can actually watch spirited conversations about issues.
	So I actually enjoyed this part of the debate the best.
	Here was Vivek.
	And I think that this is disastrous that we are protecting against an invasion across somebody else's border when we should use those same military resources to prevent across the invasion of our own southern border here in the United States of America.
	We are driving Russia further into China's hands.
	The Russia-China alliance is the single greatest threat we face, and I find it offensive That we have professional politicians on the stage that will make a pilgrimage to Kiev to their Pope, Zelensky, without doing the same thing for people in Maui or the south side of Chicago.
	And so, although I will say that I don't think that, you know, the sort of anti-Catholic slap there like Pope Zelensky is particularly helpful to Vivek, he's the only one on the stage who's drawing a contrast with regard to Ukraine.
	And he was forcibly Smacked around by both Mike Pence and Nikki Haley.
	So here is Mike Pence going after Vivek and Vivek actually striking back with, once again, a quote from Obama.
	This is why I say that because Vivek is so studied and because he understands what successful politicians have done in the past, sometimes he just ends up cribbing off of them.
	Vivek, if we do the giveaway that you want to give to Putin to give him his land, it's not going to be too long before he rolls across a NATO border and frankly our men and women of our armed forces are going to have to go and fight him.
	I want to let the Ukrainians fight and drive Putin and the Russians back out into Russia.
	I have a news flash.
	The USSR does not exist anymore.
	It fell back in 1990.
	I have a news flash. The USSR does not exist anymore. It fell back in 1990.
	The real threat. You're talking about the communists.
	Right, so that's enough of that.
	Right there, that's where he quotes Obama, right?
	That's Obama against Mitt Romney, 2012.
	The 1980s called and they want their foreign policy back, right?
	I mean, that's all that is.
	Then Vivek gets into it with Nikki Haley.
	And this was Nikki's best moment of the debate, because she made a pretty cogent case as to why the United States ought to be involved in the war in Ukraine.
	Again, this is a very split question inside the Republican Party, so this is kind of a fascinating part of the debate.
	The reality is that today, today, Ukraine is not a priority for the United States of America.
	And I think that the same people who took us into the Iraq War, the same people who took us into the Vietnam War, you cannot end it, you cannot start another no-win war.
	And I do not want to get to the point where we're sending our military resources abroad when we could be better using them here at home to protect our own borders, protect the homeland.
	That will be my top priority in foreign policy.
	So I do want to get to some other people because everybody, we respect everybody's time here.
	So, Governor Haley, you did not raise your hand, meaning that you would support more funding for the Ukraine war.
	You have said of Governor DeSantis that you didn't appreciate it when he initially called it a territorial dispute.
	Why?
	First of all, the American president needs to have moral clarity.
	They need to know the difference between right and wrong.
	They need to know the difference between good and evil.
	When you look at the situation with Russia and Ukraine, here you have a pro-American country that was invaded by a thug.
	So when you want to talk about what has been given to Ukraine, less than three and a half percent of our defense budget has been given to Ukraine.
	If you look at the percentages per GDP, 11 of the European countries have given more than the U.S.
	But what's really important is go back to when China and Russia held hands, shook hands before the Olympics, and named themselves unlimited partners.
	A win for Russia is a win for China.
	We have to know that.
	Ukraine is the first line of defense for us.
	And the problem that Vivek doesn't understand is he wants to hand Ukraine to Russia.
	He wants to let China eat Taiwan.
	He wants to go and stop funding Israel.
	You don't do that to friends.
	What you do instead is you have the backs of your friends.
	Ukraine is the front line of defense.
	Putin has said if Russia, once Russia takes Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics are next.
	That's a world war.
	We're trying to prevent war.
	Look at what Putin did today.
	He killed Purgosin.
	When I was at the UN, the Russian ambassador suddenly died.
	This guy is a murderer.
	and you are choosing a murderer over a pro-American country.
	Thank you.
	Okay, let me address that.
	I'm glad you brought that up.
	I'm going to address each of those right now.
	He would make America less safe.
	Under your watch, you would make America less safe.
	You have no foreign policy experience and it shows.
	And you know what?
	The foreign policy experience that you all have shows in the pointless wars we've gotten into.
	Okay, so this was Haley's best moment of the debate by far.
	It was a very weak moment for Vivek.
	Okay, the reason is his comeback right there, right?
	Which is, I wish you well on your future career on the boards of Lockheed and Raytheon.
	Again, that appeals to that Trump-adjacent crowd who believes that all American foreign policy is run by the military-industrial complex, perhaps.
	But that is a really baseless insult.
	And again, I go back to, if you're going to hit somebody, hit somebody for what they're worth.
	So when he hits Christie and he says you were hugging Obama, true.
	If he's gonna hit somebody else on the stage for doing a thing they did, okay.
	But insulting all of your opponents as tools of the military-industrial complex, that any evidence to that effect is really, really absurd.
	And Nikki Haley, I think, handled herself really well right there.
	All right, so the rest of the debate was effectively more of the same.
	And so this brings us to sort of my personal grades, and then we'll see how people actually did.
	So let's start with who got the most speaking time.
	The problem is too many candidates on the stage.
	Definitely should not have been this many candidates on the stage.
	So, Burgum and Hutchinson took up 15 minutes of time.
	They shouldn't have been on the stage.
	Tim Scott was on stage for eight minutes, but really was absent.
	So now you're talking about like 23, 24 minutes of time that really was distributed poorly.
	The real people who should have been on the stage are the top five people in terms of time.
	Pence, Ramaswamy, Christie, DeSantis, Haley, right?
	Everybody else in the stage is basically an also-ran at this point.
	Now, we're ignoring the elephant outside the room, which of course is Trump, which may mean that all these people are also rams, but in terms of who got the most time, Pence got the most time, which makes some sense in that he is the person who has done presidential debates before, like the most of any of these people.
	Vivek, because he was a lightning rod, got the second most time, followed by Christie.
	Christie also wanted to do some lightning rod stuff.
	DeSantis got the fourth amount of time.
	Haley actually only got 8 minutes and 41 seconds, but she made him count.
	So, how does that stack up in terms of my personal grades?
	So, I thought DeSantis was fine.
	I thought he was solid.
	I thought that he basically laid out his record.
	He stayed out of scraps.
	I think that his answer on Ukraine was a little bit befuddled, but I think other than that, DeSantis did okay, right?
	It was fine.
	I would grade him at like a B.
	I'd give Nikki Haley an A. I think she accomplished her purposes.
	I think she did so in a very short amount of time.
	I think she really surpassed expectations for nearly everybody who watched the debate.
	Even if you don't like Nikki, you have to see that she actually did better than you expected her to do.
	I'd give Tim Scott a C. He was basically not present for any of this.
	For Pence, I'd say you'd probably give him a B, but for different reasons than DeSantis.
	A B because he's just in an unwinnable situation.
	He stood up for himself, I thought, actually rather well on January 6th.
	I thought that was worthwhile.
	He's not going to gain any momentum from it, and we'll get to that in a moment.
	And as for Christie, I would say that that was like a B Christie performance.
	In a Christie performance, he's always going to get the punches in, but he doesn't have any of the charm that he once had in like 2011.
	So now he's just a punching machine.
	So B is about the best he can do.
	As for Vivek, Vivek is very hard to grade.
	Because Vivek is the total Rashomon candidate.
	You look at Vivek on the stage, and for me, if I'm assessing how he did based on sort of, was he telling the truth?
	I thought a lot of the time not.
	Or based on, were his attacks on other candidates rooted in their actual record in what they did?
	No.
	Many times.
	Or if you're basing it on his policy, I think he's wrong on some of his policy prescriptions.
	I think some of the stuff he says about foreign policy in particular is just not True or within the realm of reality when he says I'll start withdrawing aid from Israel because I'm going to create peace in the Middle East between like Qatar and Oman and Israel like Qatar and Oman are pro-Iran like that that just betrays not a lot of knowledge about the Middle East.
	And on his record, right?
	But, but, if you are talking about like the internet culture, if you're talking about the meme culture, if you're talking about who had energy on the stage, if you're talking about the guy who was saying the things nobody else will say, which is one way that we have now learned to gauge politics, is will he say the thing no one else will?
	Now, I'm of the view, and I've always said this, there's a difference between being politically incorrect and saying the thing that must be said that no one else will say, and just saying the thing no one else will say.
	But that distinction has been completely obliterated over the course of the last 10 years, where if you just say a thing that is verboten, Then this means that you are brave.
	By that metric, Vivek kicked ass.
	By that metric, Vivek did great.
	And this is what you see reflected.
	Okay, so let's look at these debate results through that light.
	Who has momentum coming out of this debate?
	Because that's really all that matters, right?
	Three days from now, nobody's going to remember this debate.
	There's no lasting impact.
	But did anybody get momentum here?
	Did anybody get momentum?
	So, I graded people based on whether they had, like, strong upward momentum in each lane, some upward momentum, same downward momentum, or, like, really downward momentum.
	So, if you take a look at this chart, let's look at each of these candidates.
	So, Ron DeSantis, again, his goal here was survive, right?
	Which, as we, how this debate affects DeSantis is going to be really up to what DeSantis does next.
	I don't think he lost ground, I don't think he gained ground with any group.
	He was basically the same with every group going in as he was coming out.
	Does he have any momentum inside any lane?
	So one of the, there are two ways that you can gain momentum.
	There are two ways that you can gain momentum in a presidential race.
	One is you gain overall momentum, like national momentum, big national momentum,
	because you're doing great in like multiple groups.
	And then there is the, do you have momentum inside one lane?
	This can actually mean a lot.
	So you could actually not do great in a debate, but if you really lock up a lane, you have momentum in that lane.
	That lane is now going to start generating some uptick in national numbers.
	It may not be huge, but it'll be an uptick in national numbers you can build off of that.
	So lane momentum is something you want coming out of the debate.
	In at least one of the lanes, you want momentum.
	DeSantis, does he have any lane momentum?
	No.
	Coming out of this debate.
	Can he build it?
	Sure.
	So basically, it's status quo ante for DeSantis.
	It's as though the debate never happened for DeSantis.
	For Vivek, Vivek had some momentum among Trumpers.
	The thing about Vivek is that no one really has momentum among Trumpers because Trump has Trumpers, right?
	I mean, they're locked up.
	Among the traditional GOP, I would say that Vivek was kind of the same as before.
	The traditional GOP, not super fond of it.
	Maybe he has some negative momentum from it, but certainly he's not picking up ground among sort of the traditional GOP three-legged stool crowd.
	With the never-Trump wing of the party, he had serious negative momentum, but again, he was never going to win those people anyway.
	He was aiming for one lane and one lane only, that is that 15% who are Trump-adjacent.
	He has strong momentum among those people.
	So that means that his upward boundary, Vivek's upward boundary in this Republican primary is probably about 15%.
	He's chiseling that away from DeSantis, right?
	So he achieved his goal, which was strong upward momentum inside that one lane, which credit to him, he achieved that goal and he made himself more of a national name, which was his goal in this race in the first place, because once again, he is not running for president against Donald Trump.
	The way I know that is because Donald Trump knows he's not running for president against Donald Trump, which is why Donald Trump has not attacked him.
	Everyone who goes after Trump, who is perceived as a threat to Trump is attacked.
	There's only one candidate in this race who is a serious candidate, or proceeds as a serious candidate, who has not been attacked by Donald Trump, and that's Vivek.
	Okay, Mike Pence, he comes away with negative momentum from the Trumpers because, again, Trump doesn't like him.
	Among the traditional GOP, he came away with a little bit of upward momentum.
	He came away with some Liberal wing momentum, like some Never Trump momentum a little bit.
	But does he have like overall lane momentum?
	Like strong lane momentum?
	And the way I'm measuring lane momentum is basically, did you have a two in any category, right?
	Did you have strong momentum in any one lane?
	Not like minor momentum, like big momentum in any one lane.
	So no for Pence.
	He comes away basically the same as he was before.
	A person who I know, Mike Pence, I think he's an honorable human being.
	An honorable person who's not going anywhere in this race.
	Nikki Haley.
	She is basically where she was beforehand with Trumpers.
	In the traditional GOP lane, she has strong momentum.
	That debate was very good for Nikki Haley among the traditional GOP lane, and she could start locking up some donors.
	She could be seen as an alternative to Tim Scott.
	You could see a lot of people turning away from Scott and moving their money over to Nikki Haley, for example, or turning away from Mike Pence and moving over to Nikki Haley.
	I would not be surprised if Nikki Haley's campaign starts to move from 2% nationally toward that 7% or 8% nationally.
	If you look at Tim Scott again, I think he ended up basically where he was beforehand.
	Everybody kind of likes the guy, but nobody knows why he's here.
	And as for Chris Christie, he has some lane momentum with the Never Trump wing, which is strong in New Hampshire.
	So did everybody sort of achieve their goal?
	The answer is yes.
	Is this going to make like an overall difference against Trump?
	The answer is absolutely not.
	Because when you look at the overall The overall sort of takeaway from the race, Trump still has all the momentum with the people who love Trump.
	And the Trump adjacent wing, nobody is taking it away from him.
	In the Trump adjacent wing, if you wished, in order to beat Trump, assume he has 30% locked up, absolutely locked up.
	And assume there's another 40% that is playable.
	And right now that's splitting 20% Trump, 20% everybody else.
	And then there's another Trump wing that's like 20%.
	So this means that if you're going to stack up how to beat Trump right now, you have to assume Trump has 35% of the vote locked up.
	Then you have the traditional GOP wing, which is splitting like half with the rest of the party, which means that he's already at 47%.
	And that's leaving aside the 20% who are Trump-adjacent.
	So in order to beat Trump, you basically have to win all the never-Trump wing, you have to win all of the Trump-adjacent wing, And you have to split the Trump GOP vote.
	Or you have to take all of the traditional Trump GOP vote, and you have to take like 5% of the Trump-adjacent wing.
	Who can consolidate that?
	You can see why Trump has this very, very solid lead.
	Who exactly can consolidate that sort of math?
	Right now, all of these lanes are split.
	And Trump has a foot in at least three of them.
	Is there any other candidate who has a foot in three of these lanes?
	The answer is no.
	There's not a single candidate who has a foot in three of these lanes, except for DeSantis, which is why DeSantis is still the person who has the best shot of beating Trump in a primary, but he's going to have to show some momentum coming out of this debate.
	Because the math just doesn't work all that well for anybody who is not named Trump.
	Meanwhile, Donald Trump assessed this debate in his own way.
	As you would predict, he's a big fan of Ramaswamy, which demonstrates once again that he is not running against Ramaswamy, nor is Vivek running against him.
	He at one point tweeted out, this answer gave Vivek a big win in the debate
	because of a thing called truth.
	Thank you, Vivek.
	That would be with regard to Vivek explaining he was the best president of the 21st century.
	Of course, again, Trump, I think had a pretty good time probably watching the debate.
	Yeah, he was attacking Chris Christie.
	He was attacking Nikki Haley a little bit.
	He went after, for sure, DeSantis.
	But overall, nothing really happened in the debate that I think shook Trump's lead.
	Meanwhile, Trump's surrogates were complaining that they were blocked from the spin room, which they should be blocked from the spin room.
	If your candidate doesn't show up for the debate, you don't get to go to the spin room and then jabber about the other candidates.
	It's kind of ridiculous.
	But here was Don Jr.
	complaining about it last night.
	Right now, trying to ban people from actually having discourse about politics.
	How un-American.
	Probably shouldn't surprise any of us, but that's what it is.
	I've been told by others that I would be able to go in, so they said we were able to go in, then they said they were in now that we're here, and the candidate that... Who said you can't go in the spin room?
	They're telling me right now, Fox won't let me into the spin room.
	And that's what the American people should know, this is the kind of network they are.
	They're telling him, he works for security here, but they're telling him that I'm not allowed to go in there.
	Well, I mean, if your dad turned up to the debate, you could go.
	I don't understand.
	Okay, I'm sorry.
	This is silliness.
	This is silliness.
	If your candidate doesn't show up to the debate, you don't get to put your person in this bedroom.
	I mean, that seems like fairly fair on every level.
	Especially because Trump was getting plenty of attention of his own.
	He did an interview with Tucker Carlson on Twitter.
	X. Apparently, it has some 200 million views.
	Now, Worth explaining here that every time you scrolled past the video on Twitter and spent longer than two seconds on it, that counts as a view.
	So is that equivalent to actually watching a national televised debate?
	Those views are not in any way equivalent, but those are a big number nonetheless.
	And Trump, you know, had it easy.
	Tucker asked him zero hard questions.
	Tucker did not press him on pretty much anything.
	We'll get to that in the member block.
	But if you're not a member, you have to become a member and use code Shapiro checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

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