Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.
I know it's early, I know it's the day after the Iowa caucuses, but let's face facts here, folks.
Donald Trump is so far out ahead of the rest of the field that no one else has a plausible shot at the nomination that was confirmed last night in the Iowa caucuses when Donald Trump broke 50% and none of the other candidates was able to break 22%.
That is an insurmountable lead for Donald Trump in these primaries.
So, last night, the Iowa caucuses opened at 7 p.m.
local time, and by 7.30, every major outlet was calling the Iowa caucuses for Donald Trump.
Now, it's pretty controversial.
It's controversial because there were still people who not only hadn't voted, they hadn't even started the speech-making process the way the caucuses work on the Republican side, is that people show up in these local locations, and all various candidates have their surrogates who come and make speeches, and then everybody votes.
The reason that all of these outlets were able to make this call so early is because, of course, the polling data in terms of entrance polling showed Trump so far out ahead that there was no plausible challenger.
Not a lot of questions as to whether these outlets should have done that because, after all, Literally zero votes had been counted at the point at which all of these projections were made.
And there was a lot of question from the DeSantis camp and from the Haley camp about whether that affected what was going on inside the actual caucus halls.
That there were people who were checking their phones, seeing that Fox News, for example, had called the race and simply decided, okay, well, I'm here anyway.
I may as well just vote for the guy who won.
I may as well vote for Trump.
Here's what it sounded like when all of these various outlets called the race extremely early.
CNN projects that Donald Trump will win the Iowa caucuses.
CNN can make this projection based on his overwhelming lead in our entrance poll of Iowa caucus goers and some initial votes that are coming in.
The former president pulling off a huge early victory in his bid to return to the White House.
I'm going to interrupt myself because NBC News can now project at this hour At 8.33 p.m.
7.33 Central Time, 8.33 in the East Coast, 7.33 Central Time, that former President Donald J. Trump will be the projected winner in the Iowa caucuses for the 2024 presidential election.
So based on the first results and our Fox News voter analysis, the Fox News Decision Desk can now project that former President Donald Trump will win the Iowa caucuses.
He will take the lion's share of the state's 40 delegates.
This result really solidifies his place as the current frontrunner for the nomination.
Now again, many of the other candidates were crying foul at this point, not because Trump wasn't going to win, he was, but because they said that this may have shifted the margin of victory.
The Associated Press, for example, has a policy that they will not call the winner of a race before all the polls in a jurisdiction are scheduled to close.
Pretty much all of them called, not only before the polls were scheduled to close, but before some of the polls had even opened.
Was that going to change the trajectory or the shape of this race?
I have very serious doubts that that is the case.
The final results in Iowa, again, Donald Trump 51%, followed by Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, the guy I would have voted for in the primaries, at 21%, followed by former South Carolina Governor and U.N.
Ambassador Nikki Haley at 19%.
So maybe it would have shifted things at the margins, a couple of percentage points either way.
It was not going to detract from Donald Trump's massive blowout victory.
The reason for Donald Trump's massive blowout victory It's pretty simple.
Republican voters see Donald Trump as the incumbent.
It is that simple.
He's being treated as the incumbent, and he performed like an incumbent would in an Iowa caucus.
If Joe Biden were actually running in an Iowa caucus this year, if there were some sort of caucus process in Iowa this year, you would expect that Joe Biden would receive somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the vote, and that a couple challengers might peel off 10 percent here and there.
That is essentially how the polls have been playing for Donald Trump in Iowa, basically since July of this year.
The truth is that whatever vulnerability Donald Trump had as a candidate, it began in January of 2023 and it ended by basically March of 2023.
In January 2023, Donald Trump was widely perceived by the Republican base as a person who caused Republicans to lose.
Because the 2022 elections went really poorly.
And so what you saw is that if you go all the way back to the beginning of the year, what you see is that Donald Trump had an advantage over Ron DeSantis, but not much of one nationally speaking.
DeSantis was perceived as a winner because he had a blowout victory here in Florida, and Donald Trump was perceived as a person who caused other candidates to lose because he had had a bunch of Senate candidates who lost going all the way back to 2020 when he promoted the loss of two separate Republican senators in Georgia.
But DeSantis didn't jump in fast enough.
No one redefined Trump as a loser.
And so what Trump did, smart politics, he kept claiming that he was the actual winner of the 2020 election.
By exit polling in, Republicans believe him.
The people who voted in the Iowa caucuses, 70% believe that he actually won the 2020 election.
Whether or not that is true, they believe that.
And if you're that voter, and you think he won twice, why would you not vote for him?
The chief argument against Donald Trump all along was electability.
It was never character, because if character had mattered, then it would have mattered a lot earlier.
And it wasn't performance, because most Republicans, by and large, were fairly happy with Donald Trump's policy performance as President of the United States, despite the fact that the 2020 year was really bad for Donald Trump.
The real knock on Trump was that he was not electable.
Which means that there are two assets that Donald Trump had.
One was that people in the Republican Party still really love Donald Trump.
That's just the simple fact of the matter.
He has an enormous amount of loyalty among Republican voters.
People personally like him.
What the exit and entrance polls show is that people who believe that The candidate caring about people like them matters.
They voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.
That is number one.
Number two, Donald Trump is extremely lucky in his opponents.
Joe Biden is a dead man.
I mean, I don't mean that he's like physically dead, although he kind of is.
I mean that Joe Biden is a terrible president.
who happens to be running at 33% in the approval ratings, and that means that anyone, including sliced bread, looks electable against Joe Biden.
So the entire argument that was being made by Donald Trump's opponents that he was unelectable, which was probably true in January of 2023, is no longer true in January of 2024, when Donald Trump, in nearly every poll, is leading Joe Biden.
The electability argument completely disappeared, and with that argument went most of the opposition to Donald Trump in the Republican Party.
So Donald Trump was basically in control of the Iowa caucuses by the polling data, By essentially June.
If you look all the way back at the beginnings of polling in the Iowa caucuses, you're looking at May of 2023.
That's about when DeSantis entered the race.
And that was DeSantis' high watermark in Iowa.
He was at 28% and Trump was at 40%.
And DeSantis then proceeded to drop About 10%, from about 30% all the way down to about 20% in the final tally here.
Trump, for his part, rose from about 40% to about 50%, and that was baked into the cake as early as July.
As mid-July, Donald Trump was already up 30 points on the field, and that's where he ended up in this race.
Nikki Haley picked up some of the support that early on might have been going to some of the other candidates, the Chris Christies of the world, for example, and she consolidated enough support to finish a close third to Ron DeSantis in Iowa.
But again, they are so far behind that none of that really matters.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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And so now the question becomes, what comes next?
What happens next in the primaries?
Well, if you look at the New Hampshire Republican primary, which is the next one up, DeSantis has effectively no support in New Hampshire.
It is not his state.
It's a very moderate state.
Tends to be kind of Mitt Romney-esque kind of state with a libertarian bent, which is why Ron Paul tended to outperform over in New Hampshire, historically speaking.
Right now in the RealPolitics polling average, Donald Trump has 43.5%, Nikki Haley is at 29.3%, Chris Christie, who only recently dropped out of the race, was polling 11, 12%.
DeSantis was down at seven.
And Ramaswamy was down at five.
So as we'll discuss in a second, Ramaswamy is now out officially.
I mean, he was effectively out a few weeks ago because again, his polling data were not sufficient to keep him going in the race.
But Ramaswamy officially dropped out last night.
So his 5% will go to Trump, you would imagine, which brings Trump up to 48.5%.
DeSantis' percentage is probably going to remain stable.
Maybe it drops a little bit.
So maybe that boosts Trump above 50% and then Christie's percentage points are going to go to Haley.
So you'd imagine that Haley is going to be about 40% and Trump is going to be up around 50%.
That would be my predicted final result in New Hampshire, especially given the blowout victory for Donald Trump here.
Well, if Trump wins Iowa and he wins New Hampshire, he's not losing a primary the rest of the season.
And we are now done.
And everybody can kind of feel it.
Nikki Haley, if she had really wanted to have a serious challenge here, needed to come in second here.
By coming in third to DeSantis, her momentum was somewhat blunted.
DeSantis for his part is not formally dropping out at this point.
DeSantis is not dropping out because presumably he is thinking that maybe something wild happens in New Hampshire.
Perhaps something strange happens in South Carolina.
Perhaps there's a health problem with Donald Trump or something and he is still sort of the nearest competitor in terms of people who are still in the race who mirror Donald Trump's policy preferences.
That may or may not be true.
Bottom line here is, again, I don't see the math.
There is no math for anyone else to win this nomination except for Donald Trump.
Now, it's worth exploring here what exactly happened in Iowa and the breakdown of the demographics in Iowa.
Number one, no one voted.
Again, this was basically treated like an incumbent election.
In 2016, there were about 180,000 people who voted in the Iowa caucuses.
Last night, 110,000 people participated.
That is really, really low.
That's a very low number.
Why?
Because everybody basically assumed that Donald Trump was going to win.
And that's... they were right, obviously.
As the Wall Street Journal says, in the end, there was only one lane to victory in Iowa and Donald Trump had it all to himself.
The candidates challenging the former president had hoped to find enough dissatisfaction with him to build their own voter coalition.
Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, had shown signs in polling of consolidating college-educated Republicans, such as those in the suburbs or college towns of Iowa, as well as voters less committed to conservative causes.
Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, had moved aggressively to win voters who fear a liberal takeover of schools, businesses, and academia, but Trump carried those groups, winning some handily.
He won 32% of college graduates to Nikki Haley's 30%.
He dominated among those without a four-year college degree.
Look at the Wall Street Journal exit polling and what you find is that among those with a college degree, Donald Trump won 35%, Nikki Haley won 31%, and DeRon DeSantis won 22%.
Among those with no college degree, Donald Trump won 63% of the vote, compared to 13% for both Haley and DeSantis.
This, of course, has been Trump's pitch since 2016, is this sort of idea of a broad, working-class coalition that was going to vote Republican.
And a lot of people have tried to create an economic Philosophy about why that is.
I think that has much less to do with economics and much more to do with the fact that Donald Trump, of all the candidates in American history, really does not look down on blue-collar working people.
The Democratic Party does.
This is why they've embraced the intersectional ideology and Donald Trump rejects that wholesale and he tends to talk like a blue-collar working guy even though he clearly is not.
And that translates.
Among urban voters, Donald Trump won 54%.
Suburban voters, which would be where Nikki Haley would do the best, he won 37%, compared with Nikki Haley's 27%.
And in small towns, rural areas, he dominated again, 59%.
59% of people, by the way, who said that Trump's rule in January 6th is illegal, voted for Nikki Haley, but that is not a lot of people.
Very few people in the Republican coalition actually believe that.
And again, these are mirrored, those results from the Wall Street Journal are mirrored in the Washington Post entrance polls.
Donald Trump dominated pretty much every group.
There's only one group that Donald Trump didn't actually win, and that was voters 17 through 29.
That's about 9% of voters in Iowa.
Among that group, Ron DeSantis actually won that group. 30%.
Again, mirroring what happened in 2016.
In 2016, you'll recall that Ted Cruz actually outperformed among young Republicans.
It was older, boomer Republicans who tended to vote very heavily for Donald Trump.
That was mirrored last night in the results, although Donald Trump did sweep every age group outside of the 17 to 29s.
17 to 29, Donald Trump actually finished third.
It went to Santas, 30.
Haley, 25.
Trump, 22.
Ramaswamy, 21.
But among every other age group he dominated, particularly those who are above the age of 65, 58% of people above the age of 55 supported Donald Trump.
Only 16% supported Ron DeSantis.
21% supported Nikki Haley.
And again, when it comes to the educational breakdown, 67% of people who had some college or less voted for Donald Trump.
Among college graduates, though, he also won 37 to 28 over Nikki Haley, 26% for Ron DeSantis.
So, yeah, this is a sweeping victory for Donald Trump.
And as you move forward to New Hampshire, it is hard to see exactly how anyone else has a serious shot at the Republican nomination.
We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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All right, so last night, Donald Trump comes out triumphantly.
He's obviously much more relaxed.
He wanted to surpass 50%.
It was a very clear priority for him because that was considered a dominant victory.
So those couple of last percentage points make a bit of a perceptual difference.
Now, realistically speaking, if he won 48 to 21 or something, that's still a dominant victory.
51 looks more dominant because it means that he got a sheer majority of the votes in Iowa, meaning no one could have taken him.
Here is Donald Trump ironically congratulating some of his opponents by being passive-aggressive.
I want to thank you very much.
I want to congratulate Ron and Nikki for having a good time together.
We're all having a good time together.
And I think they both actually did very well.
I really do.
I think they both did very well.
We don't even know what the outcome of second place is.
And I see Gary Lake.
Congratulations, Gary.
Very good.
I spotted her, I have to announce, because she's terrific.
Gonna be a senator, a great senator, I predict, right?
Gonna be a great senator.
And I also want to congratulate Vivek, because he did a hell of a job.
He came from zero, and he's got a big percent, probably 8%, almost 8%, and that's an amazing job.
They all did.
They're all very smart, very smart people, very capable people.
Now, this is the speech of a man who knows he's won the nomination.
If Donald Trump actually thought that any of these other candidates were a threat to him, do you think he'd be speaking about them in that way?
Vivek dropped out of the campaign.
Now, factually speaking, as I say, he should have dropped out of the campaign earlier.
And that's basically what Trump said to him.
So here's Vivek last night dropping out of the campaign and endorsing Donald Trump.
And I wanted to make a couple of announcements tonight to get the business out of the way.
And then I want to tell you where we're going.
As of this moment, we are going to suspend this presidential campaign.
And this is going to have to be, there is no path for me to be the next president absent things that we don't want to see happen in this country.
And I think that I am very worried for our country.
I think we are skating on thin ice as a nation.
We have done everything in our part to make and done.
Every one of us in this room has done our part to save this country.
And I am so proud of every one of you who have lifted us up.
But we're a campaign founded on the truth.
And so that's why we've made that decision today.
And I'm also making the decision that this has to be an America first candidate in that White House.
As I've said since the beginning, there are two America first candidates in this race.
And earlier tonight, I called Donald Trump to tell him that I congratulated him on his victory.
And now going forward, he will have my full endorsement for the presidency.
And I think we're going to do the right thing for this country.
Again, unsurprising news.
And Vivek doing the right thing.
Obviously, he has no chance in the race.
There's no reason for him to stay in.
So, good on Vivek for not sticking around just for kind of the attention seeking of it.
Meanwhile, the other two candidates, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, are technically still in the race.
DeSantis is trying to take solace in the fact that he beat out Nikki Haley in Iowa.
Now, just to be completely fair, Again, Ron DeSantis, phenomenal governor of Florida, a person I would have voted for were I a voter in the Iowa caucuses.
But when your expectations are, I just beat Nikki Haley.
That is a very lowered expectation from where Ron DeSantis' expectations were when he entered the race and went to Iowa and visited all 99 counties.
Ron DeSantis, again, does not have a shot in New Hampshire.
He's not even going to try in New Hampshire.
Presumably he's going to move his campaign to South Carolina, but I don't see a path forward for Ron DeSantis that is a very serious path forward, just electorally speaking.
And again, this is from somebody who's a big supporter of Ron DeSantis ideologically.
Here is Ron DeSantis saying that he's still in, although realistically speaking, again, Donald Trump just blew away the field in Iowa.
We love you too.
They threw everything but the kitchen sink at us.
They spent almost $50 million attacking us.
No one's faced that much all the way just through Iowa.
The media was against us.
They were writing our obituary months ago.
They even called the election before people even got a chance to vote.
But they were just so excited about the fact that they were predicting that we wouldn't be able to get our ticket punched here out of Iowa.
But I can tell you, because of your support, in spite of all of that that they threw at us, everyone against us, we've got our ticket punched out of Iowa!
Okay, now again, ticket punched out of Iowa, that is a fairly low bar for a presidential candidate.
I mean, and again, it just shows you exactly how much of a lead Trump has.
If you say a candidate has his ticket punched out of Iowa, like, I would expect that your campaign, if it's a durable campaign, would have its ticket punched out of Iowa.
So the standards have been completely lowered.
Same thing with regard to Nikki Haley.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, so Nikki Haley, who finishes a close third.
She's beat out by Rhonda Sands by a couple thousand votes for third place.
She's trying to claim that she has Nikki-mentum going forward into New Hampshire.
Again, very hard to see her winning a victory in New Hampshire, even with all of the anti-Trump support consolidating.
Trump has the numbers in New Hampshire to win a sheer majority in New Hampshire again.
I mean, assume that the vague support is going to go directly to Trump.
Assume that some of DeSantis' support is going to bleed over to Trump.
And he's above 50 percent pretty easily.
So again, Nikki Haley is claiming that this is now a two person race.
Let's be frank about this.
This is now a one person race.
Again, people are going to say that I'm early on this, but I'm sorry, this is what the numbers
say.
This is what the numbers are.
But here is Nikki Haley.
I can safely say tonight I will make this Republican primary a two person race.
I mean, again, let's be real about this.
This is not a two-person race.
Donald Trump is way the hell ahead of everybody.
I was going to hold my judgment on that until we saw some actual results from some actual caucuses.
But even if Nikki Haley were to pull a close second in New Hampshire, hell, even if Nikki Haley were to win New Hampshire, it is hard to see her going down south to South Carolina and then somehow pulling a miracle out and beating Trump.
That's really the only path that Nikki Haley has forward.
So just giving you the pure honest analysis here, Donald Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024.
And maybe this is always how it's going to be.
Again, if Republicans saw him as an incumbent president, which many Republicans see him as, that meant he was going to win.
Not just that.
There's a principle in drama and fiction writing called Chekhov's gun, named after the writer Anton Chekhov.
So Chekhov famously suggested that if you put a gun over the mantle in the first act of a play, by the end of act two, that gun has to be fired.
You don't put the gun over the mantle unless the gun is going to be fired.
And I've said this to my business partner, Jeremy Boring, many, many times.
Chekhov's guns principle is not actually an imperative.
It's descriptive, meaning that is how the human brain works.
That is how people act.
They act as though if the thing is there, it is going to be used.
The idea that there was going to be a 2024 election absent Donald Trump, that Donald Trump was not going to be a part of this story in what is now Season 9 of Trump.
I mean, his name's the show, right?
I mean, we're all living in the Trump show since 2015.
It's now 2024.
Season 9 of Trump got greenlit.
And it got greenlit during, like, season 6.
So the fact that Donald Trump has stuck around this long, it is an amazing, durable story.
I mean, it's the most amazing political comeback story, in a sense, since Richard Nixon, right?
Richard Nixon ran as vice president with Dwight Eisenhower.
And then in 1960, he ran for president.
He lost very narrowly to JFK.
And then he went out into the wilderness.
And then he came back in 1968 and he won a sweeping victory against Hubert Humphrey.
That looked a lot closer than it actually was in the end.
This is that.
I mean, this is what that looks like.
The fact that Donald Trump won in 2016, lost fairly narrowly in the Electoral College in 2020, and now has come back and has stuck around, he really never went away, in 2024 is, just on any level, an amazing story.
And the American people do love an amazing story, and they kind of want to see the end of this movie.
They want to see the end of what is the end of the Trump movie.
How does season nine of Trump end?
Right?
That is, I think, what's in a lot of Americans' mind.
Right, left, and center.
And the story gets a lot less interesting when Trump isn't a part of it.
You can start to see the consolidation of the Republican field already, right?
Nikki Haley, who's the person who would have the clearest alternative path if there were such a path that I don't think actually exists.
Even she was asked about, would you support Donald Trump over Joe Biden?
And she's like, of course.
I mean, like, yes.
The coming home effect inside the Republican Party is on.
Everybody is going to flow behind Trump.
Yeah, that's the way this is going to go.
But you support that view, if it isn't you, it doesn't work out, and it's Donald Trump, that they're gonna go elsewhere?
I mean, look, I would take Donald Trump over Joe Biden any day of the week, but I'm gonna make sure we don't have that option.
Everything we've done to get to this point.
I mean, keep in mind, people have been saying things for months.
Back when we were, there were 14 in the race and we were 2%.
Now we are solid second in Iowa, second in New Hampshire, second in South Carolina.
We got one more fella to catch up to and we're gonna get it done.
Meanwhile, Kim Reynolds, who endorsed Ron DeSantis, she was asked about Trump as the nominee, and she said, yeah, despite the fact that Trump says mean things about me, I mean, Joe Biden's on the other side, of course I'll support him.
If it comes down to Donald Trump as the nominee, I'll support him.
I'll support whoever our nominee is.
Do you share that view?
Does the governor, Governor DeSantis, share that view?
Well, you'll have to ask Governor DeSantis that, but I've made it clear that I will.
I'm a Republican and, you know, all of the candidates running are going to be better than what we have.
And after all the stuff he's said about you?
Yeah, well, because, you know, we've got to put, we've got to win.
I mean, we're a resilient people.
This country is in trouble.
Look at the Southern Florida.
I talked to a lot of people at that diner, Governor, and said, no, this isn't worth it.
To go to Trump?
No.
Yeah, well, I mean, people are going to make... I just think, too, when you look at the direction of the country, I mean, I believe it's going to be wrong.
So I believe ours is our best shot.
But if it weren't Trump and Biden, you, the governor of Iowa, a very popular governor, would go.
Yes, I'm on record saying that and consistently saying that.
I'm a Republican, and we need to not... we need to make sure that we don't re-elect President Biden for another four years.
Okay, so, with all eyes turning toward the general this early, the question becomes, what are the strategic and tactical factors in play in Trump versus Biden?
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Check them out, blinds.com, and tell them you heard about them from The Ben Shapiro Show.
So when we look at the polling right now, Trump versus Biden, Trump in the betting averages is way ahead of Joe Biden at this point.
When it comes to general election matchups, right now, Trump has about a 1.1 percentage point lead against Joe Biden.
With regard to the RealClearPolitics poll average.
He is ahead, according to Rasmussen Reports, by 8.
He's ahead, according to CBS News, by 2.
And these are all in the CBS News poll is within the margin of error.
Erasmuson is way outside the margin of error.
Economist YouGov has them tied at 43.
Reuters Ipsos has them tied at 48.
Morning Consult has Biden at 43 and Trump at 42.
So at the very least, this is a dead heat or Trump is ahead.
That is where things stand.
And when you look at the state by state, When you look at the state-by-state polling data, what you see is that Donald Trump is incredibly competitive in all of these states.
The latest polling out of Michigan has Donald Trump up, in the RealClearPolitics polling average, 5.3%, including a poll from the Detroit News with Trump up 8.
If Trump wins Michigan, he's going to win the election.
In Pennsylvania, it's basically dead even.
And, by the way, one of the reasons it's dead even is because Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor, is posing as a moderate.
Same thing with John Fetterman, the senator.
But, if the mood of the country is pro-Trump, he's gonna win Pennsylvania.
If you take a look at Wisconsin, the polls there are tied, but the latest one from Bloomberg Morning Consult has Trump up four in Wisconsin.
And if you take a look at some of the other battleground states that Trump lost last time, he's way ahead.
If you look at Arizona, he is ahead very solidly.
If you look at Georgia, he's ahead very solidly.
So the polling factor, Trump is ahead.
When you look at the actual factors in the campaign, Trump is also ahead.
Why?
Joe Biden can't talk.
The fact that Joe Biden can't talk, the fact that Joe Biden is going to run a basement campaign while he is president is a serious problem for him.
Running the basement campaign when the other guy is president is actually the right strategy because you want the focus on the other guy.
Ironically, Donald Trump is likely to run what will amount to a basement campaign.
Because there will be no debate.
Biden is not going to debate Trump.
It's not going to happen for everybody who's like hot and bothered about that.
It ain't going to happen.
Biden is not getting on stage with Donald Trump.
Beyond that, Donald Trump did something, ironically, I was thinking about this yesterday.
I visited the White House in January of 2018, and I was talking with a very, very high-ranking member of the White House staff, of Trump's staff, and they said, what should we do?
And I said, you should build a fake Twitter app, and you should put it on Trump's phone, and it should let Trump tweet into the app, and he would get back a bunch of warm messages, and he would be super happy on the inside, and no one else would ever see what exactly he was tweeting.
And then ironically, this actually happened.
He got banned from Twitter and he created TruthSocial and he's still on TruthSocial and his exposure on TruthSocial is like one one thousandth of what it would be if he were on X right now.
So ironically, he actually is doing the thing that is likely to make him successful by accident.
Donald Trump is going to go out there.
He's going to do rallies.
He'll do occasional interviews.
And meanwhile, the center of focus right now will be on the President of the United States.
It's very difficult to avoid being the center of focus.
And all the indictment talk, I know there's a lot of talk about the indictments coming this year, but many of the factors have already shifted in those indictments.
So, for example, In the Fannie Willis Rico case in Georgia.
The story there is shifting because allegedly Fannie Willis was basically using that case to pay her boyfriend so they could take cruises around the world together.
She may end up in jail, allegedly, over what she was doing in that case.
The Alvin Bragg case in Manhattan.
That looks like that is going nowhere fast.
Even if Trump were to be convicted in that case, no one is going to think that that is a legitimate case.
The Jack Smith case in Washington, D.C.
Is that even going to come to trial before the election?
Or the Florida classified documents case.
Is that going to come to trial?
Democrats, people who are using legal maneuvering against Trump to get him off the ballot.
I am not sure that that actually is hurting Trump because they went overkill.
If it were one, let's say it were only the Jack Smith Washington, D.C.
charges, all focus would be on that trial.
The problem is when you use a shotgun legal approach with Trump, it looks like an overwhelming tsunami legal assault on Trump, which it is.
Is any of that going to hurt Donald Trump or is it all baked into the cake at this point?
Meanwhile, you got a president who literally cannot talk.
Here was Joe Biden yesterday.
He's holding up a bag of apples and smiling weirdly.
I mean, honestly, you'd feel bad for the guy.
He's just not with it.
He's asking somebody, how old are you?
And she's 11.
He says, wow.
Wow.
God, just grandpa at the grocery.
I mean, oh my goodness.
I mean, he can barely move.
I mean, it's just, it's, he, this is what it is.
Okay.
Joe Biden is not, when you talk about him as a candidate, I mean, that guy should not have a license to drive.
That's where we are in this race right now.
And meanwhile, his backup, Kamala Harris, is somehow even worse at this.
Here was Kamala Harris yesterday trying to gin up enthusiasm.
I mean, I swear to God, she may be the first AI human.
She's absolutely an inhabitant of the uncanny valley.
She has set up housing in the uncanny valley with electricity and plumbing.
Because she's like, if she were to ever become president of the United States, they wouldn't need to build an animatronic of her at Walt Disney's Hall of Presidents.
They would just import her.
Here she is yesterday.
Oh, my God.
She's unwatchable.
She's unwatchable.
I see our college students up there.
And let me just tell you, I love Gen Z. I don't know.
So, okay.
For the older adult, this is going to be a humbling thing I'm about to share with you.
If someone is 18 years old today, they were born in 2005.
in 2005. Wow. Wow.
So yeah, this is this is your vice presidential candidate who will be president, by the way, because Joe Biden is not going to last another four years in this office.
All this is leaving people who oppose Trump with very few options.
And that's why things are likely to get very scary and spicy this year on pretty much every front.
Well, folks, this year is going to be one for the history books.
No one can actually predict what's going to happen.
I mean, there will be an election this year.
Somebody's going to win, but could be actual war, full-blown war in China, in the Middle East.
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Okay, meanwhile...
So with Donald Trump as the presumptive 2024 nominee and Joe Biden ailing and Kamala Harris being the backup, whoo, is that a stinker of a decision by Joe Biden?
The panic has set in on the Democratic side of the aisle, like full scale panic.
And this, by the way, is also an ally of Trump, because the more you keep telling us, That Trump is Mussolini, that he's Hitler, that the world's going to end if he's elected president.
The more everybody looks at you like you're crazy, because you are.
Here is the thing.
No matter what you think of Donald Trump, the notion that Donald Trump is in the same league as Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini is an absurdity.
He was already president once.
And you know what happened?
Some tax cuts, some Supreme Court appointments, pretty good foreign policy, a good economy, some bad governance during COVID.
And then he said a bunch of dumb stuff between November 4th and January 6th.
And a few hundred people walked into the Capitol building, some of whom were riding, some of whom just walked in, and then within three hours, they were cleared, and then he wasn't president anymore.
That's the story!
Does that sound like Mussolini or Hitler to you?
Was that the march on Rome?
Was that Hitler's Reichstag fire?
Like, what, what, what, where is the comp?
I need the comp in order to really understand the claim that you are making.
By the way, a point that I've been making recently to some of my Democratic friends who are saying that, well, if Donald Trump were to win, it would end democracy, there'd be no more elections.
Quick point for you.
Point of order.
Donald Trump will have served two terms at that point.
He will no longer be eligible for president.
He will not be allowed to be on ballots across the United States.
So actually, if you want Donald Trump not to screw with the elections anymore, and you think he's really going to screw with the elections, you ought to vote for Donald Trump.
And then he'll be in for another term, and then he'll be done.
And then he'll go around talking about how he won three terms as president and all the rest of it.
In any case, Rachel Maddow is leading it off.
They're turning it up to Spinal Tap 11.
Guys, here's the thing.
When you keep turning the volume all the way up, everyone goes deaf.
And you spent nine years with the volume at Spinal Tap 11.
No one has cochlea anymore.
We can't hear you because you went nuts too many times too often.
Big picture takeaway from that, and I don't mean to be, again, too dark as you said on this, but it is not, if we are worried about the rise of authoritarianism in this country, we are worried about potential rise of fascism in this country.
We're worried about our democracy falling to an authoritarian and potentially fascist form of government.
The leader who is trying to do that is part of that equation.
But people wanting that is a much bigger part of that equation.
And the American electorate is made up of two major parties.
One of those parties has been flirting with extremism on the ultra-right for a very long
time.
They've brought them in in a way that they haven't been central to Republican electoral
politics ever before.
And I know because I've been studying this.
But once you have radicalized one major party so that those are the preferences of the people
who adhere to your party, the leader is interchangeable.
And yes, Trumpism is sometimes what we call it.
MAGA movement is probably a better way to do it.
But there is an authoritarian movement inside Republican politics that isn't being bamboozled
by Trump.
They are pushing Trump to get more and more extreme.
Because the more extreme things he says, the more they adhere to him.
And that is coming from a very large proportion of the American right that adheres to the Republican Party.
And that's why this is a Republican Party problem more than it is the problem of one man and his leader.
By the way, notice what she's doing here.
She's not saying that Donald Trump is a fascist.
She's saying you're a fascist if you voted for Donald Trump or would vote for Donald Trump against Joe Biden.
Because, let's say for example, an analogy that I've been using recently with regard to Donald Trump.
The checks and balances of the office prevent him from doing many of the things that maybe he even has an inclination to do.
The checks and the balances have been working actually less well with Joe Biden.
Donald Trump surrounded himself with professionals.
Those professionals very often told him, don't do this thing, it's illegal.
That happened a lot during Donald Trump's administration.
Joe Biden does illegal things on the regular and his people are like, okay, I'll do it.
So when you assess the presidential candidates, one of the things that we all do, we all do this, is we assume that there is a filter.
That filter is the filter of governance reality.
It's like a coffee filter.
So you pour the water on the coffee grounds, and the filter prevents the actual coffee grounds from getting in your coffee.
A lot of the stuff that Trump says is the coffee grounds.
And a lot of the worse stuff doesn't get through the coffee filter.
With Joe Biden, the grains are too small.
They're too fine.
They get right through the coffee filter.
And so what you get on the other end is actually worse coffee with Joe Biden than you would with Donald Trump.
That is the case to be made.
But the Democrats are already turning it up to, it's not just Trump, it's everyone.
If you vote for Trump against Joe Biden, it's because you're an authoritarian wannabe.
You want the federal government weaponized against you.
Now, part of the problem here is that the only candidate in this race who has actively weaponized the federal government against its citizens is Joe Biden.
It is Joe Biden who tried to use the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, an administrative agency, to cram down a vaccine on 80 million people.
And we here at The Daily Wire, we sued him to stop that from happening.
It is Joe Biden who has suggested he can unilaterally not enforce immigration law, change all of our immigration laws, and let 5, 6, 7 million people into the country illegally.
That's Joe Biden who's doing that.
So all of your talk of Donald Trump being a threat to the country, we can all see what's happening here.
We can all see it.
It's not just Rachel Maddow, it's of course Joy Reid on that same terrible panel.
I mean, MSNBC, the level of ideological diversity there ranging all the way from Jen Psaki on the right to Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid on the left is pretty astonishing.
And I think to the point that you made, Steph, I mean, it's the elephant in the room.
She's still a brown lady.
That's got to try to win in a party that is deeply anti-immigrant and which accepts the notion that you can say immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.
She's getting, you know, birthered by Donald Trump.
And I don't care how much the Democrats like her, which will ramp up a lot, the better she does in New Hampshire.
So it's still a challenge.
I don't see how she becomes the nominee of that party with Donald Trump still around.
I can't picture it happening.
Maybe it could happen.
Ron DeSantis's only argument for staying in it is he's the white guy that he can still make the appeal
to white Americans.
Again, it's just amazing to watch the left talk about how all of the voters for Donald Trump
are actually just racist against Nikki Haley.
By the way, if Nikki Haley were the nominee, they'd be saying all the same crap about Nikki Haley
because this is what they do.
Meanwhile, David French, again, somebody I consider a friend,
but David is so wildly off the reservation on this particular, so David is now calling.
I know he's anti-Trump, he's been anti-Trump since 2016, and then he remained anti-Trump,
But now he writes for The New York Times being anti-Trump.
He literally put out a piece yesterday, as Donald Trump was emerging victorious from the Iowa caucuses, called Disqualify Trump or Else.
So the idea here would be that the only way to save America is to literally take Donald Trump off the ballot in 2024.
You want actual armed conflict?
That's a great way to bring actual armed conflict, is to kick Donald Trump off the ballot entirely.
According to David French, Okay, I have a question.
How?
Literally how?
Trump off the ballot would send shockwaves through the American body politic.
But why would anyone believe that it's inherently less destabilizing if Trump runs?
We already know what he does when he loses.
For him, counting the votes is only the beginning of the battle.
If he loses, he'll challenge the results, conspire to overturn the election, and incite
political violence.
Okay, I have a question.
How?
Literally how?
He was president last time and he still couldn't do it.
Where are going to be the mechanisms for which Donald Trump is going to be able to do that?
How is that going to happen?
Like, I want people at some point, they say wild things like there will be an armed uprising.
Okay, like, I just want to know.
Spell it out, like step by step.
How do we get from point A to point B or are we just saying things now?
He says if he wins, you have an insurrectionist in command of the most powerful military in the world who's hellbent on seeking vengeance on his political enemies.
Does anything at all sound stabilizing about that?
Again, you think that Donald Trump is going to... I understand everybody is very hot about Donald Trump's gonna prosecute you.
No, he's not.
I'm just telling you right now, he's not going to.
Okay, like, if he does, let's put it this way, I'll be extremely shocked because he said the same thing about Hillary Clinton and then he didn't.
You know what's gonna happen if he wins?
He's gonna be super happy and he's gonna be in the White House all day doing what he did before, tweeting and let his aides make good policy.
That's what's actually gonna happen.
But David French is now making the case that we need to take Trump off the ballot to save the republic.
You want to get Trump elected, there's pretty much no better way to do it than say stuff like this.
Again, the reason the panic is setting in is because Joe Biden's policy is becoming clear to everyone.
Here is the biggest problem, by the way, for the world.
My prediction.
I said it yesterday.
I'm going to continue saying it.
If we get to June, July, August, and Donald Trump is up in the polls, the chances that China blockades Taiwan are extremely high.
They go from like 30% today to probably 60%.
Why?
Because they do not want Donald Trump to be president when they blockade Taiwan.
They figure that Joe Biden, if there's a blockade of Taiwan, will pressure Taiwan to make some sort of deal with China to stop the conflict and give them some sophisticated microchips in order to prevent him from losing the reelect effort.
See, in an election year, the incumbent president is very susceptible to foreign conflict.
This is why in 2012, you'll recall, in an act of collusion with the Russians, you'll remember that Barack Obama actually sat with Dmitry Medvedev, who was then the president of Russia.
He was sort of a stand-in.
He was a cutout for Vladimir Putin.
And he said, tell Vladimir I'll have more flexibility after the election.
In other words, please don't do anything bad that would hurt my reelect hopes.
And then I will help you guys after the election, which I did when Russia actually took control of both Syria as well as Crimea.
But the same thing is very much available this year for America's enemies.
This is a year to go, man.
This is a year to put pressure on Joe Biden.
This is a year where if you can create conflict, you believe that Joe Biden will simply give you a cookie to make you go away.
That's true for China.
It's true for Iran.
So remember, over the weekend, the United States, as well as some of its allies, launched a series of missile attacks on the Houthis in Yemen.
And when I say the Houthis, I mean some empty buildings that the Houthis run and own.
But they gave like a week of warnings so nobody was actually there.
A grand total of I think six Houthis killed in this massively expensive airstrike by the Americans and our allies.
Did that put off the Houthis?
Of course it didn't put off the Houthis.
Why would it?
All the Houthis have to do is survive and poke at the United States to claim victory.
See, this is the bizarre math of the Middle East.
The United States, Israel, Western countries are expected to completely devastate the opposition.
Completely devastate them.
And all the bad guys have to do is pop their head up after the entire city is laid waste and go, I'm still alive, you didn't get me, huh?
So that's what the Houthis are doing right now.
So according to The Guardian, the Iran-backed Houthi militia group has continued to attack commercial shipping, hitting an American-owned cargo ship with a ballistic missile in defiance of a wave of US and UK strikes on Yemen.
The strike against the Marshall Islands-flagged Gibraltar Eagle container ship representing a widening of the theater of war beyond the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden.
The strike hit the cargo hold of the ship.
While it's thought to have caused no major damage, it will add to fears that UK and US strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen have not degraded the Houthis' abilities to threaten commercial shipping.
Qatar became the latest major user of cargo ships to announce it will not send liquid gas through the Red Sea for the foreseeable future.
So everything's going to get more expensive.
And the hope on the part of these Houthi groups and the Iranians is that the United States will then pressure Israel into stopping the destruction of Hamas in order to reopen the shipping lanes, that basically they will concede to the ragtag pirates.
And Joe Biden may well do that, because again, Joe Biden is of the weird opinion that in the Middle East, concessions get you what you want.
In reality, in the Middle East, concessions generally get you killed.
And that is what is likely to happen over there.
CENTCOM put out a statement on this yesterday.
Yesterday they said, quote, on January 15th at approximately 4pm SANA'A time, which is
Yemen, Iranian-backed Houthi militants fired an anti-ship ballistic missile from Houthi-controlled
areas of Yemen and struck the Gibraltar Eagle, a Marshall Islands-flagged, U.S.-owned and
operated container ship.
The ship has reported no injuries or significant damage and is continuing its journey.
Earlier in the day, at approximately 2 p.m., U.S.
forces detected an anti-ship ballistic missile fired toward the southern Red Sea commercial shipping lanes.
The missile failed in flight and impacted on land in Yemen.
There were no injuries or damage reported.
Meanwhile, the Iranians upping their game.
They struck an area near what they claimed was a U.S.
base in Iraq, in Erbil.
According to ABC News, several explosions were reported near the U.S.
consulate in Erbil, Iraq.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps directly took responsibility for the attacks.
They said they were targeting the, quote, headquarter of spies and anti-Iranian terrorist gatherings in parts of the region.
The Kurdistan Regional Security Council said four people were killed and six injured in the attack.
So, again, this is Iran directly taking a hand in Iraq.
Not a shock.
They've been active in Iraq for a very long time.
time here's some video of what that looked like.
So you can see the missiles hitting over there.
Yeah.
So, Iran, by the way, ended up attacking civilians as well.
The Iranian ballistic missile strike actually killed a prominent businessman in Iraqi Kurdistan, according to Forbes.
The target was not, as initially speculated, the large U.S.
consulate over there, or the American truce base in Erbil International Airport.
Instead, they actually decided they were going to hit a well-known local businessman, killing him and members of his family.
They claimed responsibility for the attack to the Iranians directly, as well as a simultaneous strike on Syria.
They struck the house of a Kurdish businessmen named Pesra Diyazayi, the owner of the autonomous region's Falcon Group, which is responsible for major projects such as the Empire World, which is a central business district known for high-rise apartment buildings.
So basically, they're using what's going on in the Middle East as an excuse to hit some of their enemies in Kurdistan, essentially.
So are things getting less crazy in the Middle East?
No, because it turns out that when the United States leaves a vacuum, Iran tends to fill that vacuum.
Meanwhile, Hamas continues along its merry way.
So last night, Hamas fired 50 separate rockets into Israel proper.
Again, this war has been going on for over 100 days.
And they're still firing rockets from the center of the Gaza Strip.
So while people are telling Israel to, you know, leave the Hamasniks alone, leave the poor Hamas, they're still firing rockets at civilians in Israel.
No sovereign state would be able to allow this.
So here is some of the video of what it looked like.
You can see, there we go, the Iron Dome is shooting down a bunch of these.
Israel allows some of those rockets to strike open areas.
Okay, would any state worth its salt allow its citizens to have to live like this?
At all?
Of course not.
So when Biden and the administration are putting pressure on Israel to stop what they're doing in Hamasistan, the Gaza Strip, they're out of their minds.
Meanwhile, Hamas literally released a clip yesterday of a female hostage talking about other hostages who had been killed.
And they made it like a perverse evil game show because this is what Hamas is.
They're a perverse evil group.
They took this female hostage and then they put out a tweet with pictures of two other hostages saying, are they dead or alive?
We will reveal the answer tomorrow.
This is how sick these people are.
Here's what that video looked like.
It's a question mark for those who can't see.
And it shows a picture of three hostages.
And the question is, what do you think?
Are they dead or are they alive?
One.
Option one, all killed.
This is like, it's so evil.
Option two, some killed, some injured.
Option three, still alive.
And the answer is the female is, um, alive.
And says, tonight we will inform you of their fate.
I mean, these are... Just the worst people in the entire world.
The worst people in the entire... And they're treating it like a bizarre YouTube video.
And meanwhile, the West is like, well, Israel is committing a genocide.
It's just, it's pathetic on its face.
Again, the only, the only currency in the Middle East is in fact the currency of sheer power.
And if Israel does not reestablish deterrence via the use of power in the Gaza Strip, that is going to be very harmful, not only for Israel, but for American interests in the Middle East.
I mean, it already is, considering that Houthis aren't even being deterred by, you know, F-22 strikes.
Complicit!
Meanwhile, the pro-Comas protesters in the West continue to do their merry work.
Given the fact that they are cancer, I can see why they were protesting an anti-cancer center.
They literally did this.
So they were marching in New York and they marched past Sloan Kettering,
which is a cancer treatment center.
And they started protesting the cancer treatment center, which makes sense.
Again, people who are an ideological cancer protesting against a cancer center
makes some level of sense, actually.
It's complicit that we will continue to march on a resolution.
Literally, they are standing outside Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
and protesting the hospital.
We talk about another complicit institution!
Oh, Sloan Kettering is complicit.
Sloan Kettering Center!
Make sure they hear you, they're in the windows.
Make sure they hear you, they're in the windows.
Oh, you mean the cancer patients?
You mean the families of the cancer patients?
Those are the people who need to be heard?
By the pro-chemosnics?
This is why when you hear Rachel Maddow... Shame on you!
Shame on you!
You have cancer!
Shame on you!
Unbelievable.
This, by the way, is why when you hear Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid talk about the extremism of the Republican Party.
Guys, these are yours.
The people who are protesting for Hamas, those are your people.
That's your crowd.
Maybe that's just one reason why a lot of Republicans are like, fine, give us Trump.
Alrighty, coming up, we'll get into what is still the worst failure of the Biden administration.
A story out of Afghanistan.
How are things going over there?
Well, it turns out that when you abandon the country and all of our military equipment to some of the worst people on earth, things are bad.
We'll get into that.
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